Talk Cocktail

If I gave you all a quiz and asked you to name five tech visionaries and entrepreneurs in the US, you’d all pass.  If I asked you to name even one visionary entrepreneur in China, the world's largest market, you’d probably come up empty.  If you didn't, you’d probably name Jack Ma, the founder and leader of Alibaba.



The company recently went public in the largest IPO in history. It’s the largest virtual shopping mall in the world and it’s impact not just in China, but in the developing world, is profound and impactful both economically and politically.  



Longtime  businessman and journalist Duncan Clark takes us up close and person with Jack Ma in Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built



My conversation with Duncan Clark:

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It’s funny how history often pokes its head out in the framework of contemporary events.  Remember during the government shutdown a few years ago, commentators said that the radical elements of the GOP were acting like terrorists from the 60’s and 70’s?  We heard similar criticism of occupy Wall Street years ago. And who can forget the President being accused of paling  around with terrorist because of an acquaintance with  Bill Ayers.



That fact is that the idea of direct action, grassroots support and commitment to ideas of social change, no matter how flawed, were an essential part of America in the 70’s 



Inspired by the communist revolutions in Cuba and China and Vietnam, by the actions of the Nixon administration and the war in Vietnam,  a radical group of revolutionaries sought to launch what they believed to be a 2nd American Revolution.



Today, to look back upon it, is to be shocked by the level of violence that the public came of accept as commonplace and how the efforts of law enforcement to stop it, were almost keystone cops like.



Taking us back to this bizarre time in modern American history is award winning author and journalist Bryan Burrough, in his book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence



My conversation with Bryan Burrough:

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The debate that raged between Apple and the Federal Government was on the surface about security, privacy and encryption.  However, in a larger sense it’s about the balance between our liberty and right to privacy vs. what some perceive as the greater good of the nation.



When we put up with the indignities of the TSA, we are agreeing that the greater good of security, check makes certain individual liberties.  When we pass laws about personal vices, about speed limits or about guns or fundamental civil rights, the framework is the same.



In fact, when we look at the history of America, right on through our present day polarization, we see this struggle between individual liberty and the common good as a fundamental debate that links us directly with our founders.



This is the tension that Colin Woodard writes about in American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good.



My conversation with Colin Woodard:

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For most of us, the pressures of daily life in the 21st Century are intense.  Emails, calls, social media, commutes, every changing technology, all on 24/7.



Regardless of the economic and social discussion from all of this, there is the question of the impact it’s all having on our bodies and on our psyche.  Given how slow evolution moves, can human psychobiology cope with all of this?



That’s why some people practice things like meditation and mindfulness.  But how does that really help?  Dr. Andrew Newberg, has spent his career studying the impact of religion, spirituality and enlightenment on our physical and mental health.   In his latest work How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation,
 he looks at the power of what he defines as enlightenment to truly remodel who we are.



My conversation with Andrew Newberg:

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T.S. Eliot wrote, in 1934. “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” He might have written those words yesterday.



Certainly we’ve never had more knowledge, more information and seemingly less wisdom than we do today. What is the connection? How is it, that the more we know, the less we seem to understand and the less we seem to able to clearly and logically process it?



Does the fault lie in the technology, the speed at which information comes at us, or an evolutionary limitation to process information that has not yet caught up with technology? Or is it simply fear of the new, and fear of the future.



This is what Michael Patrick Lynch addresses in The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data



My conversation with Michael Patrick Lynch:

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When we examine the roots of today’s chaos in the Republican party, we see that much of it has been caused by the party using and manipulating social issues to hold together Red State voters, while ignoring and even acting counter to their real economic concerns. This was the premise of one of the seminal books of our modern political age, What’s the Matter with Kansas, by my guest Thomas Frank.



Today, Frank argues that the Democratic party is facing a similar situation and is ignoring a whole swath of it’s traditional working class base voters. 



He argues in his new book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
that the traditional working class Democratic voters, the ones  that drove the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson coalitions, have been ignored.  That the traditional Democratic Dunkin Donuts/ Walmart voter has been replaced by the Starbucks/Whole Foods voter.  And that o
once again, even in the Democratic party, social issues have been used to  transcended the real economic needs and distress of Americans.



To some extent this has given rise to the Bernie Sanders movement. But more specifically it’s left the door open for a populist demagogue like Donald Trump, to take advantage of this openings on both side of the political equation. 



My conversation with Thomas Frank:

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A popular desire for authoritarian rule in the face of a changing and sometimes shaky economy. A overheated sense of nationalism, to cover up uncertainty about the future. Scapegoating and military adventurism as a salve for a lack of purpose and policy, a dislike of outsiders and a desire to crackdown on journalists to cover up anger about the changing nature of employment.  Sounds like a certain candidate running for President of the US.  In fact, it is a picture of the rise of Vladimir Putin and Russia, as Russia still comes to grips with the change heralded by the Soviet collapse.



But to fully understand Putin and Russia, it's important to look beyond Moscow, just as it’s necessary to look past Manhattan or San Francisco to try and understand America.



Long time NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garrels has spent decades exploring  the Russia that’s far from Moscow, in what some might call the Russian heartland.



Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russiais her story of twenty plus years of reporting from a town on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. She reveals a Russia that today embraces a unique combination of Western goods, inherent corruption, and authoritarian rule



My conversation with Anne Garrels:

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Just for fun, pull out or get a copy of the originally published version of the best seller What Color Is Your Parachute. Originally published in 1970, virtually no job that it listed that even touches technology, is even close to the same today.  Remember that came out 46 years ago,  just as the boomers were going into the workforce.



Today’s changes, human, technological and social, are happening at a geometrically much faster pace.  Imagine then what the workplace will look like 46 years from now.



Children entering school today will work in a world that has almost no relationship to today's world.  The jobs, the skills, the workplace and the products will be vastly different.



Given this, how do we plan? How to we teach our kids, shape public policy and prepare for a fourth industrial revolution that will happen, even if we do nothing to get ahead of it.



Alec Ross, one of America’s leading experts on innovation, served as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  He’s the author of The Industries of the Future.



My conversation with Alex Ross:

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We've all heard it before. Sixty is the new fifty, fifty is the new forty, etc.



It's all in the service our fear, or dread of aging; of death and the lost endless possibilities of youth. We believed that as we turned the corner onto the proverbial back nine, that a kind of midlife crisis would overtake us.



For a generation of narcissistic baby boomers, it seemed like the logical step. But a surprising thing happened along the way.  Many of those same baby boomers began to appreciate age and its companions of wisdom and calmness



Some boomers actually began to thrive in midlife and that's the story that Barbara Bradley Hagerty tells in Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife



My conversation with Barbara Bradley Hagerty:

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Andy Grove, perhaps more than anyone other than Steve Jobs transformed technology, drove the growth of Silicon Valley and shaped the views of so many of the people that run tech companies today.  To say that he was the Godfather of Silicon Valley would not be an understatement. 



Andy Grove, who passed away yesterday,  was one of the founders and CEO of Intel Corporation, where he transformed the role of semiconductors from an obscure part of tech, to almost a consumer product. 



He was also at the cutting edge of the computer and Internet revolution.  Back in 1996, twenty years ago, Grove wrote a book entitled Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.  It's still widely read and respected.



Upon the publication of that book in 1996, I had the chance to speak with Andy Grove.



At the time, WiFi didn’t exist, Hi Speed Internet was still a dream, and networks were reserved only for the biggest of corporations.  But Grove saw that key inflection points were coming.  He foresaw the change they would bring about the creative destruction that would result in the change that has swept the world today.



Here is a little of that 1996 conversation with Andy Grove:

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