America Trends Podcast

About one-fifth of the adult population in America experiences mental illness in any given year, yet less than half of them receive treatment.  Often, our approach is to prevent disaster rather than foster positive outcomes for the patient.  And media coverage exaggerates the danger involved in dealing with most people who experience serious mental illness, like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia,...

I know what you’re thinking, you don’t want one more podcast on AI.  However, it’s developing at a breakneck speed, with the full encouragement of the federal government, to move fast and break things.  Is it the human race that actually is in peril?  Astrophysicists, like Stephen Hawking, have warned us that AI and its onrushing development ‘could spell the end of the huma...

It might seem on paper that the world’s democracies, as part of their first act, have done a great job of building mechanisms and approaches to make the whole system work–voting and elections, safeguards for them, and ways to expand the franchise.  Yet, particularly in the United States, where money plays such a key role and lobbyists make a living representing special interests, have...

 In a recent decision, The United States Supreme Court struck down limits on coordinated spending between candidates and political parties. While some see this as a win for Republicans, our guest, Brody Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of “The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took over Big Government,” thinks in contrast to the ascendant position of Su...

Fixing our fragmented mental health care system is a key priority in dealing with the crisis we have today regarding Americans’ mental well-being.  The services are not uniformly available, often late in getting to the people who need them and all of this has a profoundly negative impact on both the patients and the providers.  Dealing with the physical side of the medical community is diffi...

 Underground movements and subcultures are not a recent phenomenon.  Throughout modern history these bohemian movements, often marginalized in their time, have brought us our greatest creative minds by virtue of their unwillingness to accept the norms of the day.  Great art, poetry music and thought have derived from these freethinkers.  In recent American history, we can go from the beatnik era o...

You will find that out early in the discussion that awaits you just ahead.  Our guest provides a thumbnail of modern Iranian history and in the process makes us realize that Western meddling in the mid-20th century, provides a throughline to where we are today.  And where we are today in this American misadventure reminds us why Western short-term thinking is overmatched by the long game the Irani...

There has been an association between cats and women throughout history.  It’s not always been a positive one as so many histories have been dominated by the male perspective.  Even in our era, as cats have taken their place alongside dogs, as popular home companions, they were derisively referenced in the 2024 campaign, as their guardians were referred to as ‘childless cats ladies.&#8...

What comes to mind if I say San Francisco–the hippies and Grateful Dead of the 1960’s, the locus of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s, the Internet revolution of the 1990’s, the urban decay of the pandemic era or the AI revolution that is clearly upon us?  Well, I think the best answer is all of the above.  The city is a complicated mix of culture, technology, business and a...

We are far from the days when Phyllis Schlafly led the Eagle Forum pushing back on the feminist leaders of the Left in the 1970’s.  However, she gave voice to issues like the pro-life movement, opposition to gay rights, and others that animated the first wave of pushback.  Today, with many conservative Christian women speaking out loudly and proclaiming their concern about traditional values...

 We know we are going to die, as difficult as that concept is to get our arms around, but we may imagine that our life’s work, our stuff, must be preserved because it will live on forever, particularly as we can now capture it in digital form.  Some might say that we are living in an era of permanent memory: everything is stored, searchable, and retrievable, especially now as AI systems inge...

 The term ‘grey divorce’ referring to the increasing trend of couples over the age of 50 ending long-term marriages, often for reasons driven by personal growth, financial independence, and growing apart, after spending much time together during the pandemic, is one of several topics we discuss on today’s podcast.  Divorce, by the numbers, is actually below the often-cited thresh...

 In a moment of crisis for American democracy and liberalism, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession.  Now we’re questioning where free speech ends and hateful discrimination begins.  Is it possible that law can check antisemitic impulses which have generally been below the surface, yet never extinguished, while avoiding the tendency to censor political speech? History shou...

 You’ve heard the phrase ‘horse sense’ which generally means the ability to make good judgments or decisions.  In other words, common sense, about which we have often been told isn’t all that common. Our guest today, Patrick Dorinson, has a lot of what I described earlier, and he lays it all out in his new book, “The Common Sense Cowboy’s Guide to Life: Stories...

There was a time when scientists could only read our biology, then came an advance with their ability to edit it and now it’s a moment to write a whole new chapter in evolution through synthetic biology, made possible in large part, you guessed it by artificial intelligence.  Breakthroughs in AI, gene editing and synthetic biology are coming together to make this an unprecedented time in the...

 Recently, noted author Walter Isaacson devoted a whole book to what he called “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written”, you know, the one that reads ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” While the beauty o...

In an unprecedented compilation, half of the faculty at Harvard Law School contributed essays, short and readable, about the work America has to do to build on the dreams and aspirations of our Founders as set out in our seminal documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Both of them commit our nation to shared governance, shared rights and shared accountability under the la...

 President Trump’s most prized word is ‘tariffs’ and on Liberation Day he extolled their virtues and told us that this would usher in a new era of reshoring and renewal of the manufacturing sector. He has also touted $18 trillion dollars in manufacturing investments here in the United States, but according to our guest that has yet to result in shovels in the ground.  After a yea...

Underpinning the growing use of AI is the need for state-of-the-art data centers. These data centers host a large number of file servers and networking equipment that can store, process, and analyze text, images, code, and other information sources.  While data centers have been around throughout the computer, internet and cloud eras none so big and controversial as these.  One proposed in the sta...

 Professor Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University, and the author of “Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate”, joins us today to discuss the three, five-alarm issues facing the globe: fighting climate change, saving democracy, and eradicating poverty.  Assuming that there is generally global consensus that these issues...

If you’re like many people, their mood is sour about their station in life and that of our nation.  It is a malaise, of sorts.  You can tell that Americans are struggling to determine who they are, their role in the world and what life is all about.  These are high order issues that people are struggling to address.  They are going to therapy, meditating, buying books and wellness products a...

Secretary of Defense (or ‘War’, as he prefers) Pete Hegseth is a poster child for the way military education likes to inculcate recruits and students into a macho culture of masculinity.  The Pentagon has a vast educational network through which to teach these lessons.  It includes basic training, service academies like West Point, JROTC, ROTC and dozens of military schools and war col...

 America’s First Amendment is a model of free speech protection unparalleled across the globe.  Yet, the United States saw the third largest decline in free speech between 2021 and 2024.  And 2024 marked the 19th consecutive year in which civil and political rights declined globally.  While it may seem paradoxical that while the new voices who are speaking out on unregulated platforms seem t...