Talk Cocktail

Sometimes the personal is professional. It’s not all that common when ones work and one's survival is linked so inexorably together. They are in the story Tom Patterson and Steffanie Strathdee.

Imagine, you're climbing a mountain, you slip and your spouse is the clinging to the rope above you and that’s the only thing keeping you alive. In the story of Tom and Steffanie, it was Steffanie clinging to science, history and medical bravery that Tom would have to hang on to.

They tell their remarkable story in The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir

My conversation with Tom Patterson & Steffanie Strathdee:

Old songs, like old memories, are the purveyors of a kind of double imagery. Triggers of thought that somehow short circuit time and make yesterday's events today's reality. So when we write or read about the past, particularly in novels or memoirs, what we are reading, or writing, is not necessarily factual, but represents our remembered past..almost a separate world unto itself.

Award winning novelist Siri Hustvedt looks at this in her latest novel, Memories of the Future

My conversation with Siri Hustvedt:

Think of the millions of hours we spend thinking and talking about technology. About the future, what it all means, and how it impacts us. But before any this happens, before robots or AI, or even making a phone call, someone had to sit down at a screen and create the code to make it possible.

A process that is not just about abstraction, but about both art and craft. Like Chomsky said of language itself, “it etches a groove through which thought flows.” It’s been said that when we study human language, we are approaching what some call the human essence. When we study code and those who create it, arguably we are getting to the singularity of man and machine. This is the state that NY Times journalist Clive Thompson takes us to in Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.

My conversation with Clive Thompson:

Several years ago, the tech company Cisco ran an ad campaign talking about the “human network.” It tried to humanize their networking products as more than just wires and routers but focused on the human beings at the other end of those wires, and the collective experience of connection.

Social connections that have been with us since man first stepped out of the cave and talked to his neighbor. All of that was before today’s social networks that have been like steroids to the idea of connection.

Today we are part of a networking feedback loop. Who we connect with impacts who we become and who we become impacts who we connect with.  If all of this sound is a bit abstract, Matthew Jackson puts it all into perspective in The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors.

My conversation with Matthew Jackson

It’s hard to believe today, but leaching was once considered a legitimate and effective medical practice. Years from now, we may look back upon chemotherapy and radiation treatment for cancer in much the same way we now look upon leaching.

In labs today, all across the world, new forms of treatment for cancer and many other diseases under the general heading of immunotherapy are being discovered. The magic of the body’s own immune system is being brought to the task. However, there is no one size fits all, no silver bullet and such treatments are not a free ride. Either with respect to costs or side effects.

Just as the discovery of penicillin and the class of antibiotics, saved millions and truly changed the world, immunotherapy is on the precipice of doing the same for the 21st century.

However, its complexity, its connection to virtually every other aspect of the human body makes its study and the ability to harness and manipulate it, the medical holy grail of our times. Helping us to understand this is Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Matt Richtel in Elegant Defense, An: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives.

My conversation with Matt Richtel:

In a world that is increasingly more authoritarian, in a political atmosphere that is more and more polarized and tribal everywhere, the threat of global hostage-taking has increased exponentially.

As the murder of Jamal Khashoggi illustrates, this threat has particularly increased for journalists, many of whom are on the front lines of reporting on repression and brutality. A record 262 journalists were jailed around the world at the end of 2018.

All of this raises the far larger question, one that journalists have to think about every day, of how should we deal, as a matter of public policy, with journalists or anyone other citizen that is taken, hostage.

The American policy has been that "we do not negotiate with hostage takers."  This policy is not universal. Many nations, including France, Spain, and others have taken a different view. The answer is not clear cut or obvious. What is clear is that sometimes playing mister tough guy is just plains stupid.

Joel Simon, a long time journalists in California and Latin America, is the Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalist.  His new work is We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages and Ransom.

My conversation with Joel Simon:

A couple of years ago, Senator Elizabeth Warren made headlines with the phrase “nevertheless she persisted.” Sheryl Sandberg told women they had to “lean in.” These approaches, while certainly valuable for dealing with the symptoms of the problems that many girls and women face, ignores the core of why these actions might, in fact, be necessary.

Men, for the most part, don't have to make the effort to persist or to lean in, because they are socialized from the beginning to do that. To be fearless, to be disruptive, to be brave.

Reshma Saujani, a graduate of Harvard and Yale law school and former NY City public advocate, is the founder of Girls Who Code. Her organization has made remarkable inroads in bringing more girls and women into STEM and technology.

But even more than just changing the gender make up of tech, she has seen coding as a kind of metaphor for teaching women to be brave.

Her Ted talk on the subject has gotten over 4 million views and now she’s expanded on it in her new book Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder

My conversation with Reshma Saujani:

When Hal asked Astronaut David Bowman to “open the pod bay doors,” it was as if our most primal fear of machines came rushing headlong into the 20th century. Today, in our 21st-century world, we understand the artificial intelligence behind HAL.

We see on display every day our reliance on automation and AI and algorithms in flying our planes and soon our self-driving cars.

It’s the full blossoming of the promised brave new world. But is there anything we should or could do about it? Is it out of our control, or do we just need to surrender?

Joining me to talk about this is Kartik Hosangar, the author of A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control.

My conversation with Kartik Hosangar:

When we talk about the broad swath of technology and its progenitors in Silicon Valley rarely are we talking about great breakthroughs. A new app for dating or dog walking, the one-hundredth messaging app or new forms of enterprise collaboration are hardly the stuff of Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates or Mitch Kapor or Robert Noyce or Bill Hewlett.

But every once in a while there is a new new thing that really matters. Like the PC or the smartphone or Microsoft Word and Excell.

For years, many thought something called Virtual Reality might be that thing. What was not know is that it would take a 19-year-old dreamer, one of odder character in a world that celebrates oddness, to make it a reality. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg the man that the European Union just called a “technology gangster,” would co-opt it and screw it up, only adds to an important chapter of legends of Silicon Valley.

Like other legends, this one is told by Blake Harris in The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality

My conversation with Blake Harris

How many times a day do you hear or read someone opining on what’s wrong with America and American politics? As is too often the case we love to look for the simple solution. The one answer that will explain it all. The unified field theory of American politics.

But unlike physics, the answer to understanding politics, the business and the interaction of people, is more nuanced, more complex and more like evolution than physics.

Layer upon layer of behavior, decisions, and leaders have lead us to where we are today. To a politics not just of polarization, but of pure primal tribalism

Longtime journalists and author Michael Tomasky tries to peel back these layer in is his new book If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved.

My conversation with Michael Tomasky: