Talk Cocktail

Fifty four years ago JFK, at the height of the Cold War, set us on a path to the moon.

Today, absent the Cold War and in a world where a new photo or dating app becomes a billion dollar effort, it’s hard to think in terms of such massive, global and societal undertaking.

Yet one man does. Be it electric cars, solar powering the nation, or going to Mars, Elon Musk thinks differently than everyone else...but he does want all of us to join him in that effort. The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach has written the cover story for National Geographic's special Mars Issue

My conversation with Joel Achenbach:

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Back in 1992 the mantra of the Bill Clinton campaign was that “it's the economy stupid.” Surprising, since the majority of American campaigns for President have always been about the economy.

However since the 1970’s that economy has been changing dramatically and rapidly. It was only as far back as the Nixon administration that we were still on the gold standard. Things like derivatives didn’t exist. Subprime lending, globalization of money and creative destruction in the economy had not yet set up a paradigm for collapse.

Presiding over so much of this change, watching all of it and directing some of it, was Alan Greenspan.  Towering over the Federal Reserve for 18 years and serving five Presidents, no one knew more about the inner and outer working of the American economy than Greenspan.

Now we get the first full scale economic and person biography of Greenspan in Sebastian Mallaby's The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan.

My conversation with Sebastian Mallaby:

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Look around your home or office, or even your car. Everything there was designed. Albeit not always well. Sometimes with an eye towards function, sometimes looking at form and sometimes with thought into the human interface. Wouldn't it be great if everything was designed with equal parts engineering, aesthetics and a real understand of how human beings will interface with whatever it is?

That methodology, that combination of humanity and art and engineering is what’s now called Design Thinking. It’s an important part of Silicon Valley’s disruption and progress

But imagine if the same concepts could apply not just to computers or to a mouse or a phone, but to your entire life?

In many schools today these idea of Design Thinking are combining with project based curriculum and human centered collaborating and producing the future leaders of the 21st Century.

Two of the leader in all of this are Stanford’s Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. They are the authors of Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life.

My conversation with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans:

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Herbert Hoover said that “the business of America is business.” If he were around today, in the age of globalization, he might have referred to the business of the world.

Yet as our current election shows, as the recent Brexit votes showed, the connection between people and business has never been more tattered and frayed.

Globalization itself, disruption, dislocation, the obsession with short term profits and shareholder value, coupled with the free flow of goods and money and jobs around the world, has created a chasm between the world’s businesses and ordinary citizens.

At a time when technology has made it easier for citizens to actually come together and be engaged, business has too often retreated to its C Suites in the hopes that the storm would pass.

But the clouds are getting darker. With more automation and AI, now reaching virtually every sector of work.

With worker and public anger reaching toxic levels, business can no longer hide, it must be, in the words of former BP Chief Executive John Browne, more willing to Connect.

My conversation with Lord John Browne:

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Think about those things that are usually the most personal, the most intimate and complex.

A few of them are what goes on inside a marriage,

why and how people give away money (there is a reason many do it anonymously) and the degree to which the business of America is business. These are the elements that make up the story of Ray and Joan Kroc.

A story that is part Edward Albee, part Fortune magazine and part political, in the sense that the personal is indeed political.

Ray Kroc was the driving and force that made McDonald's bloom throughout the world and Joan Kroc was one of our most liberal and generous philanthropists of our times.

An unlikely combination, and an unlikely but compelling story told by Lisa Napoli in Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away.

My conversation with Lisa Napoli:

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It’s always so interesting all the assumptions we make about history. They tell us something about the assumptions we might be making about our divide today.

When we think about the Civil War era, for example, we think in clear lines...the North vs. the South. Yet in families, in communities and in the states themselves, many were conflicted. Then as now, there were personal and economic interests that crossed over both sides.

Nowhere was this more the case than in the city of New York. While seemingly a part of the North, its economic interests in cotton, shipping and even the slave trade made New York what it has always been. A capital of commerce, whose interests in the context of the war were conflicted. A cautionary tale about our divide today.

This is the story that my guest John Strausbaugh tells in City of Sedition: The History of New York City during the Civil War

My conversation with John Strausbaugh:

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It's hard to imagine today, but the East, what we refer to now as the Middle East, was once a pinnacle of civilization.  Like all great civilizations, it struggled with conflict between personal values and its laws, about succession and tribalism and security. It evolved a form of rule in the Islamic world that lasted for almost 1300 years..by any account a pretty good run.  



Today that rule, what was once called the Caliphate, has been morphed into something far removed from it’s original meaning. As such, it has become a word that embodies the worst, not the best of civilization.  Esteemed historian Hugh Kennedy puts all of this in perspective in Caliphate: The History of an Idea



My conversation with Hugh Kennedy:

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We are a nation of immigrants.  For 240 years we have opened our arms to those seeking to come to America and for many of those years New York has been ground zero.  But the immigrant story, even in, or especially in New York, has not been one of ease.  The process and pain of assimilation, the fear of the other, the competition for resources have always created wedges between immigrant groups and so called nativists.  



So why is it that these issues seem to repeat themselves over and over,  like a kind of Groundhog Day.  The issues are the same, only the ethnic roots change...yet we never seem to learn the lessons.



George Washington University historian Tyler Anbinder looks at this history in City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York



My conversation with Tyler Anbinder:

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Medicare has often been referred to as the third rail of American politics. Because it has become so woven into the fabric of American life, so necessary and vital for seniors, , both politicians and those that have legitimate interest in improving public policy, are afraid to touch it.  It’s as if the admonition to "do no harm" is first and foremost about medicare.





Yet it is a program that at fifty-one, is showing signs of old age.  It’s solvency in question, its operational model, post ACA, is in question and its relevance within the context of 21st century medicine and medical practice is in need of reassessment. 





Dr. Andy Lazris bravely goes wither few doctors are willing to go in Curing Medicare: A Doctor's View on How Our Health Care System Is Failing Older Americans and How We Can Fix It.





My conversation with Dr. Andy Lazris:

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How many times have we heard that this election is like no other? That this is an extinction level event, threatening the very fabric of the republic.   And yet history tells us that we’ve survived far worse.  Be it the civil war, McCarthyism, violent labor strife at the turn of the last century,  political assassination and of course, the chaos of the 1960’s



To try and put all of this in context, in the home stretch of this political season, I spoke with Julian Zelizer. He is a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton and the author, most recently of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.



My conversation with Professor Julian Zelizer:

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