Talk Cocktail

The great French novelist Andre Malraux once wrote that “man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.” Certainly the secrets we all keep as individuals and as families place a heavy burden on us. Too often we think we are keeping secrets, when all we really are doing is hiding truth them from ourselves.

For a long time this was Michael Hainey story, as he knew that someday he had to find out what really happened with respect to his fathers death. He was only six at the time, by years later he would know that something was not right about what he had been told. As he approached his fathers age, when he died, he would work hard to uncover that secret and in so doing free himself, his mother and his brother.He lays out his story in this memoir After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story.

My conversation with Michael Hainey:

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Back in the 1940’s theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the serenity prayer. You all know it. It tells us to accept those things that we can’t change and the courage to change those we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Over the years it’s been adopted by AA and various other groups. But it might also be the coda for Cheryl Strayed fantastically successful book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

The story of her trek on the Pacific Crest Trail, it’s also the story of coming of age and Cheryl's journey out of her own heart of darkness.

My conversation with Cheryl Strayed:

We are always talking about how some area of our lives has been changed by creative destruction. We know that it’s widespread and impactful. In fact, even dictators today have felt the results of this creative destruction.

It’s much harder and more complex to be a dictator today. Dictatorships have had to become more sophisticated and savvy. Brutal repression has been largely replaced with subtle coercion. But at the same time, the individuals challenging dictatorships have also evolved. And while popular movements may seem spontaneous and romantic, they are in reality very strategic and organized, sometimes for years before we pay any attention.

Journalist William Dobson, foreign affairs editor of Slate and a former editor at Foreign Affairs, Newsweek International and Foreign Policy, has been looking deeply into these changes. He argues in his book The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, that ultimately dictators cannot learn or adapt as quickly as the forces that oppose them.

My conversation with William J. Dobson:

Families are a little like snowflakes. No two are exactly alike. That’s why it often seems so ridiculous that so many people think they know what is best for families. The strict structure of the Chinese, the laissez faire of the French, the coolness of the British...all work and all don’t. It seems no one really has the magic formula. Therefore, maybe a little common sense is a good idea.

That's what best selling author Bruce Feiler set out to discover. He set out on a three-year journey to find the smartest ideas, cutting-edge research, and novel solutions to make his family happier. Instead of the usual psychologists and family “experts,” he sought out the most creative minds from Silicon Valley to top negotiators at Harvard. Feiler then tested these ideas with his own wife and kids and writes about it in The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More.

My conversation with Bruce Feiler:

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We’ve talked often about the obligations and responsibilities of memoir and the way in which our memory, more than our truth, shapes our past. Imagine if fiction took on this confusion. If even in the context of fiction, we would lose sight of the truth, in favor of memory, experience and peer pressure. That's some of the backdrop for a new novel,  The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, by Kristopher Jansma.

My conversation with Kristopher Jansma:

Why do certain products and ideas become so popular? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious than others, and what makes some online content go viral?

These are just a few of the questions that Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger takes up in his new book Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

Berger has spent 10 years studying social influence and according to Berger, the key to making things really popular happens long before it’s discussed at the water cooler, or “liked” online. It starts with the message.

My conversation with Jonah Berger:

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The song says "money can’t buy me love." But we know that’s not really true. The fact is, the same market forces that drive our economy, also drive our search for sex and love. Issues like abundance, scarcity, the price of commodities...like beer, all contribute to who we choose and the success and failure of those relationships.

In 2008 Marina Adshade launched an undergraduate course, at the University of British Columbia, titled Economics of Sex and Love, which invited her students to approach questions of sex and love through an economist's lens. The class was an immediate hit with students and, by the time the first term started, had generated international media attention. Now the book, Dollars and Sex.

My conversation with Marina Adshade:

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No one questions that we are going through a period of dramatic change. The world, the nature of work and relationships are changing faster than at any other time in human history. Succeeding and managing in this environment, will require a degree of nimbleness and creativity in order to sustain or create any economic value.

But how creative are we, and do the old paradigms of education, work and leisure allow us to foster and bring out that creativity? Bruce Nussbaum, a Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design in New York City, and a former Managing Editor at BusinessWeek thinks we have to reset our approach to creativity. He outlines it in Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire.

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My conversation with Bruce Nussbaum:

Forty plus years ago, in Vietnam, we saw how the best and the brightest could ignore history, ignore truths and facts and conduct one of our nation's most disastrous wars.

Ten years ago this month, we saw how lies, inept personnel and poor and corrupt execution destroyed any hope of success in Iraq. These decisions still plague us today.

Four years ago, back into 2009, we thought that the Obama administration was fighting "The Good War," when it decided to surge US troops and civilians in Afghanistan. Yet again, we ignored history, didn’t send the best personnel, engaged in bureaucratic infighting and thought money could buy our way out. It did not.

Why do we keep making these same mistakes? Is it that the fault is not in stars, but in ourselves? These are some of the issues examined by esteemed and award winning journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his book Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.

My conversation with Rajiv Chandrasekaran:

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All the talk about drones lately seems to miss the larger point. What compels us, what disturbs us, is the sanitized way in which we conduct warfare today. The disconnect from death, violence and the human suffering that is war.

Kurtz understood war by journeying into its Heart of Darkness. Today, it’s from 30,000 feet. It’s a different view of war. It’s also a metaphor for how we as Americans have witnessed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In neat, pre-packaged sound bites. Disconnected from combat, body counts and the horror.

Now, ten years after the start of these wars, were beginning to hear the real stories of what went on, from the men and women who were there.

Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton, two veterans of the wars, have written for and edited a new collection of stories entitled Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.

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My conversation with Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher: