Talk Cocktail

Recently I had a conversation with a Professor at UC Berkeley about the subject of Power.  In the course of the conversation he referred to what he saw as key centers of power. People who he saw as  exercising real power. He referred to great generals, political leaders and Wall Street. Wall Street was once a reflection of America's business. It was there to serve business. Today Wall Street and t...

Whether we want to believe it or not, every relationship we have...with a friend, a spouse, a child or co-workers, has a power dynamic as a part of it.  Power may shift and morph, but it’s a part of every relationship and often a force for good.  In understanding power at this most intimate level, we can better understand how it plays out, or should play out, on a more macro scale. It’s not someth...

We throw around the word globalization without really thinking about all of its impacts.  The instant and free flow of goods around the corner and around the world comes with a cost.  The iPhone delivered overnight from China, the speciality coffee from around the world, the stores filled with goods from hundreds of countries.   Rarely do we stop to think how all of this gets to us. Sure we see or...

We live in a world of bombast and noise.  Sometimes it seems the volume is turned up full blast, all the time.  A quick look at our Presidential campaigns is ample evidence. We forget that for leaders, or just average folks, sometimes quiet can have amazing power.  The power of thoughtfulness, of creativity and competence For young people, trying to find their place in the world, sometimes growing...

The poet William Blake talked about art as “seeing the world in a grain of sand.” I suppose that what he also meant was the ability to move in so tightly on something, that inside of it, we could construct an almost fourth dimension, through which to view the world and our experiences in it. In a way that’s what New Yorker Staff writer, author and Pulitzer Prize winner William Finnegan has done wi...

Not since the 1960’s have we lived in a time of more public anger.  Today, issues of race, economic disparity, power imbalance and distrust of traditional institutions, have all conflated to bring us to what some believe is the brink of insurrection. But should we be surprised?  Insurrection, riots, strikes have long been an instrument of policy for the disaffected.  It was a central form of prote...

A Scottish writer, back in 1915, coined the phrase “think globally, but act locally.”  While it was about grassroots movements, it could just as easily have been about our understanding of the universe. The fundamental laws of physics which govern the workings of the cosmos, are not some abstract untethered set of rules. They have a direct impact on how we live and on the very meaning of human exi...

For better or worse, particularly for those of us here in the Bay Area, we have come to think of science in rather utilitarian terms.  A better phone, a better app, or a better car. In fact science, especially theoretical physics, is or should be the real lens through which we see the world.  It is our understanding of the larger universe that shapes how we see our place in it and that more than t...

Think about our built environment and how much of it is designed around safety and security.  The gated communities, the numbers on top of office buildings, the entrances and exits, garages and elevators. eyes on the street.    Now imagine seeing our daily landscape through the eyes of someone that wanted to break into our homes and our offices.  Suddenly architecture takes on a whole new dimensio...

Ask any of the 20 and 30 somethings working in tech in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and I assure they think they are inventing the world.  But the fact is that most, including some that have become household names, are merely leaving footprints in the shadow of David Sarnoff. David Sarnoff born in 1891, had a visionary understanding of everything from the telegraph to the future of the interne...

It’s hard to believe from the rhetoric coming from both sides of the campaign trail this year, but there once was a time when policy mattered. When candidates on both sides talked about programs and public policy. Perhaps it was Reagan wanting to shrink the size of government and drown it in a bathtub, or Bill Clinton declaring that the era of big government is over.  The fact is we have stopped l...

How many times have you experienced an even mild form of depression, or anxiety or obsessive fear and wondered “how you got this way.”  It turns out the answer may have as much to do with your ancestry as with your circumstances. While today with things like 23andme and the vast array of genetic testing and sequencing we can do, we look for every clue to our health.  What diseases we may carry and...

We hear it in all the loose talk about health care.  About the wonders of medicine, about how we are living longer and about the advances of our doctors.  The fact is we are mostly still in the dark ages. The standard treatment for cancer today, poisoning the body, is a little like how we once viewed leaching. As for diagnostics, a huge percentage of today's sickest patient go through a multi year...

There is seemingly nothing in our society today that has not become politicized. From what bathrooms we use to the soda we drink, to the food we eat.  Sometimes if feels as if common sense and good judgment have gone out the window. We forget there are some absolutes.  There are some facts that are irrefutable. Sometimes to ignore this, is to do irreparable damage.  One of the areas where this is...

American history shows us that amidst election season we are often divided.  That partisan rancor is often high and it is a healthy part of the passion of democracy.  But today we seem to have something worse.  While we’ve been here before as a county, we are at one of those historical inflection points where the bitterness spills over into every aspect of life.  And while history shows us other b...

As they have done in so many other areas, the millennial generation has picked and chosen which parts of their social and sexual legacy they want to inherit.  Particularly for millennial girls who were handed a legacy of sexual revolution, increased efforts to promote self esteem, Title 9, several waves of feminism and the ability to Lean In, they have made some interesting choices and compromises...

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 v...

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 becau...

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 individua...

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...

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 unde...

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. T...

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...

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...

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 surpri...