Matt Crawford speaks with author David Singer about his book, From Cab Driver to Carnegie Hall. David and I talk about his eclectic careers and how he managed to end up playing Clarinet for two U.S Presidents; one the same day as he was driving a cab. Resilience and gratitude is the overarching message of this book and everyone can take something from this story.

In this gripping episode, we sit down with Stephen Willeford, the man who courageously intervened during the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting, one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history.

Willeford, a former NRA instructor and lifelong resident of Sutherland Springs, recounts the harrowing events of that day—how he heard gunfire from his home, grabbed his rifle, and confronted the gunman, barefoot. But this conversation goes deeper than headlines. We explore the aftermath: the emotional toll, his reflections on faith, the responsibilities of gun ownership, and how one act of courage changed the course of many lives.

This episode is a powerful meditation on trauma, heroism, community, and personal responsibility in the face of unimaginable violence.

Matt Crawford speaks with author Stephen R. Platt about his book, The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S Special Forces in World War II.

In this compelling episode, historian Stephen R. Platt joins us to discuss his latest book, The Raider, a powerful chronicle of Evans Carlson—the controversial, visionary Marine officer who broke ranks with military convention during World War II to lead one of the first elite units in U.S. history. We explore Carlson's radical leadership philosophy, his time with Mao Zedong in China, and how his story shaped the birth of what would become modern American Special Forces.

Platt shares how this little-known chapter of WWII history challenges our assumptions about heroism, leadership, and the cost of innovation in the military.

Matt Crawford speaks with Columbia Law Professor Susan Sturm about her book, What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions. Even as anti-racism practices seemed to be gaining momentum, the nation shows signs of falling back into long-standing patterns of racial injustice and inequality. Leaders who introduce anti-racist approaches to their organizations often face backlash from white colleagues and skepticism from colleagues of color, leading to paralysis. In What Might Be, Susan Sturm explores how to navigate the contradictions built into our racialized history, relationships, and institutions. She offers strategies and stories for confronting racism within predominantly white institutions, describing how change agents can move beyond talk to build the architecture of full participation. Sturm argues that although we cannot avoid the contradictions built into efforts to confront racism, we can make them into engines of cross-racial reflection, bridge building, and institutional reimagination, rather than falling into a Groundhog Day–like trap of repeated failures. Drawing on her decades of experience researching and working with institutions to help them become more equitable and inclusive, Sturm identifies three persistent paradoxes inherent in anti-racism work. These are the paradox of racialized power, whereby anti-racism requires white people to lean into and yet step back from exercising power; the paradox of racial salience, which means that effective efforts must explicitly name and address race while also framing their goals in universal terms other than race; and the paradox of racialized institutions, which must drive anti-racism work while simultaneously being the target of it. Sturm shows how people and institutions can cultivate the capacity to straddle these contradictions, enabling those in different racial positions to discover their linked fate and become the catalysts for long-term change.

Matt Crawford speaks with Academy award winning documentary filmmaker of My Octopus Teacher and author Craig Foster about his book, My Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World. Craig and I discuss his worldwide phenomenon documentary My Octopus Teacher and how that led to his follow up book My Amphibious Soul. How do we connect with nature in an increasingly disconnected world? Foster takes us through is journey and struggle of maintaining that connection and balancing his own well-being and mental health. We discuss what led him to start a daily routine of immersing himself in the ocean and to maintain that practice for over a decade and how that led to his film My Octopus Teacher. His new book takes us deeper into his methods and emotions and the impact his work has had on him.

Matt Crawford speaks with author Dean Van Nguyen about his book, Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur. Before his murder at age twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the preeminent storyteller of the 1990s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. He recorded no fewer than ten platinum albums, starred in major films, and became an activist and political hero known the world over. In this cultural history, journalist Van Nguyen reckons with Tupac's coming of age, fame, and cultural capital, and how the political machinations that shaped him as a boy have since buoyed his legacy as a revolutionary following the George Floyd uprisings. Words for My Comrades engages—crucially—with the influence of Tupac's mother, Afeni, whose role in the Black Panther Party and dedication to dismantling American imperialism and combating police brutality informed Tupac's art. Tupac's childhood as a son of the Panthers, coupled with the influence of his stepfather's Marxist beliefs, informed his own riveting code of ethics that helped audiences grapple with America's inherent injustices. Using oral histories from conversations with the people who directly witnessed Tupac's life and career, many of whom were interviewed for the first time here—from Panther elder Aaron Dixon, to music video director Stephen Ashley Blake, to friends and contemporaries of Tupac's mother—Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history, and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics. Van Nguyen reveals how Tupac and Afeni each championed the disenfranchised in distinct ways, and how their mother-son bond charts a narrative of the last fifty years of revolutionary Black American politics. Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture, and how America produced two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries.

Matt Crawford speaks with Andrew Holter about his book, Going Around: Selected Journalism Murray Kempton. A courtly man of Southern roots, Murray Kempton worked as a labor reporter for the New York Post, won a Pulitzer Prize while at Newsday, and was arrested at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago along the way. He wore three piece suits and polished oxfords and was known for riding his bicycle around New York City while listening to his CD Walkman and smoking a pipe with wild red hair that later turned white. He developed a taste for baroque prose and became, in the words of Robert Silvers, his editor at The New York Review of Books, ''unmatched in his moral insight into the hypocrisies of politics and their consequences for the poor and powerless.'' He went to court proceedings and traffic accidents and funerals and to speeches by people who either were or wanted to be rich and famous. He wrote about everything and anybody—Tonya Harding and Warren Harding, Fidel Castro and Mussolini, Harry Truman and Sal Maglie, St. Francis of Assisi and James Joyce and J. Edgar Hoover. From dispatches from a hardscrabble coal town in Western Maryland, a bus carrying Freedom Riders through Mississippi, an Iowa cornfield with Nikita Krushchev, an encampment of guerrillas in El Salvador, and Moscow at the end of the Soviet Union (these last two assignments filed by a reporter in his 70s), Kempton's concerns and interests were extraordinarily broad. He wrote about subjects from H.L. Mencken to Tupac Shakur; organized labor and McCarthyism; the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; presidential hopefuls and Mafiosi; frauds and failures of all stripes; the "splendors and miseries" of life in New York City.

Matt Crawford speaks with Professor Bill Yousman the director of the Media Literacy and Digital Culture graduate program at Sacred Heart University. We discuss misinformation, disinformation and the important distinction between them as well as how we can become more literate in our media consumption. If we start there, that will enable us to have more meaningful conversations based in fact and not emotion.

Matt Crawford speaks with former CDC Epidemiologist Dr. Charles LeBaron about his book, Greed to Do Good: The Untold Story of CDC's Disastrous War on Opioids: A CDC Physician's Personal Account.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that overdose deaths had quadrupled in ten years, hitting a record high of 90,000 in 2020, opioid researchers around the country expressed shock with terms such as "huge" and "unprecedented." They might have reserved a few adjectives since overdose deaths grew to 100,000 in 2021 and 110,000 in 2022. Each year there are now twice as many deaths from overdoses as from breast cancer or colon cancer and more deaths than from automobiles and firearms combined. In the past two decades, a million Americans have died of overdoses. In the next decade, at the current epidemic rate, a million more are projected to perish.

In a series of vividly personal vignettes, this book recounts the untold story of how CDC, the federal organization charged with controlling epidemics, implemented a misguided strategy that helped detonate an opioid overdose explosion. No other book has given a similar frontline, insider glimpse into the world's premier public health agency.

To provide a unique, first-person perspective on the human consequences, the author chronicles his experiences as a physician prescribing opioids in Appalachia and treating gang members in prison attacks, as well as his own near-death ordeal as a patient receiving high-dose opioids for severe pain. Drawing on twenty-eight years as a CDC epidemic control specialist, Dr. LeBaron concludes that we do have the means to emerge from the cruel, lethal paradoxes of this self-inflicted opioid war—which is really a war upon ourselves.

Matt Crawford speaks with author Robert Walker about his book, Six Moons, Seven Gods: An Arthurian Fantasy Medieval Adventure (The Legends of Baelon Book 1.) The skilled thieves of the Takers Guild plot to overthrow the kingdoms of Baelon, but when their plans are thwarted by a prescient woman and her brooding daughter, they must turn to the League of Assassins for assistance. Meanwhile, retired royal guard Rolft Aerns returns to the palace of King Axil with an old score to settle. When they all cross paths and swords in the dark shadows of Fostead's south end, nothing is as it seems and the murder count rises quickly. The long fingers of the Guild reach everywhere, and one overly ambitious thief is all it takes to spark a chain of events that will haunt the world of Baelon for many years to come.