Talk Cocktail

We all remember the youthful spiritual song Dem Bones, about the angle bone being connected to the shin bone, the thigh bone being connected to the hip bone, etc.  What the song didn’t include is the connection between the stomach and the brain.  And it’s not just about what you eat.  It's about the vast array of bacteria and microorganism that live in your gut, and the impact they have on how you...

Everyday it seem the world speeds up.    The advances of technology, the need to make faster decisions, multitasking and a sometimes dizzying array of options, are all part of the creative destruction that is making the world a more efficient an  in many ways, a better and freer place. On the other hand human evolution is a slow, deliberate process. So, to what extent have our brains evolutionary...

In talking to someone recently about my guest, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, they went into a bit of tirade of criticism of him, saying that he was “just one of those Democrats they trot out to make things go away, to sweep things under rug.”  My friend went on to say, “it proves that it's all just one big party.” Well the other side of that same coin is that Senator George Mitche...

It has often been conventional wisdom that the military is always fighting current wars, based on lessons learned from the last war.  That’s why we used centralized WW2 tactics in Vietnam, and then turned around and used the lessons of Vietnam in Iraq.  But the fact is that today there is a whole new breed to military tacticians and strategists whose ideas come not from the last war, but from the...

We are a culture obsessed with youth.  We are told that youth is wasted on the young, but we do everything in our power to stay young. Growing up is seen as giving up.  We are told that with each passing year, doors close behind and head of us.   In short, youth is and has been the foundational cultural idea of the West for almost half a century.  From the 60’s mantra of “never trust anyone over 3...

It sometimes seem that every generation has its disease.  In earlier generations it was Tuberculosis, in the 40’s and 50’s the fear and the scourge of Polio gripped the nation. In the 80’s and 90’s, the fear and reality of AIDS overwhelmed the national consciousness. When we look at these diseases...the death tolls from them, the way they were perceived, the medical mystery, the research, the trea...

Someone once wrote that happiness is serious business. But should happiness be a goal in and of itself, or is it simply a construct for achieving what we really desire, and helping us in finding our pace in the world?  Woody Allen in Annie Hall, saw the world divided only into the “horrible,” and the “miserable.”  What kind of a construct is that? Certainly not the one laid out by philosopher Fred...

Nietzsche said “that which doesn't kill us, makes us stronger.”  Little did anyone know at the time that those words have a powerful psychological basis.   Everyday we hear about trauma.  About people surviving horrible tragedy to themselves and to their loved ones. And we all wonder how do they go forward.  We know for example that the incidence of divorce, after the death of a child, is well ove...

For years now, Sir Ken Robinson has been tirelessly explaining  that conformity in education does not work.  That it is the enemy not only of creativity, but of an authentic life.   But understanding the problem, even articulating it as brilliantly as Sir Ken Robinson has, in his Ted Talk, viewed over 32 million times, his book The Element, and in his other books and lectures, is only half the bat...

Earlier this month most of you completed your taxes.  Probably either you had someone else do it, or you spent hours navigating the complexity of the Federal tax code.  Perhaps that tax code is the apotheosis of complexity...with the possible exception of booking air travel.  On the other hand, if we look at Silicon Valley, it’s filled with examples of companies that have figured out how to do a l...

Back in 1995, Robert Putnam argued in his bestselling book, Bowling Alone, that  civic life in America was declining. That we had reached a kind of apogee from things like the closing of the American mind, our culture of narcissism and the ideas of people like Ayn Rand. The payoff from increased suburbanization also added to the general shift away from engaging with people, that were not exactly l...

For years we’ve had just one image of the drug wars.  Images conjured up from movies like the Godfather or Scarface, or reading about the LA battles between the Bloods and the Crips. But drugs, like everything else, are subject to the pressures and demands of the free market. And creative destruction in the drug business has meant a drug dealer that is kinder and gentler.  A dealer that appreciate...

Hundred of years ago if men wanted to settle a personal matter, even a political one, they picked up swords or guns and dueled their way to resolution.  We all remember everything from d'Artagnan to the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Today there are many that seem to long for a return to those days.  And while they are hardly condoned by respectable public standards, they still percolate within the he...

Those of us in California know all too well what’s its like to be living in the midst of a drought.  Gov. Jerry Brown recently put in place restrictions demanding that urban water use be cut by 25%.  Already the push back is coming.  In a state where agriculture uses well over 50% of the state’s water, and only contributes 3% to the state’s economy, urban water users are becoming angry. There is m...

One of the big things missing in politics today is historical and institutional memory.  The sense of collegiality, of institutional respect and the positive value of public policy, seem to have been replaced by gotcha politics, partisan positioning and the effort to achieve petty political advantage.   Former Congressman Barney Frank has born witness to this change and he’s seen it from all sides...

Sometimes, even the most interesting of subjects are presented to us in more or less predictable or at least accepted ways.  It’s rare that a work of ideas come to us in an truly imaginative form. But that is exactly what David Kishik has done with The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City As cities are becoming ever more important, as most of America and the world moves into urban spaces, underst...

There once was a time, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, when public shaming was the norm.  The stockades, corporal punishment, torture marks and even the famed Scarlet Letter, all represented ways in which society could express it’s scorn. Today, with the power and reach of the Internet and social media, we are in a golden age of shaming.  Monica Lewinsky’s recent Ted Talk on the subject has b...

The rate of voter participation in America continues to decline.  Yes, some of it is our politics today. But another part of it just may be a failure to embrace the true education for citizenship. And it’s no wonder. Some of the fundamental ideas of what it means to be a citizen; the ability to reason, to analyze, and to articulate those views, has gone into remission. In our education today, we a...

Everyday we hear and read more about how life is changing.  Probably while we were sleeping last night, someone came up with an app that will alter the way we work or play or interact. It’s not surprising then that all of this profoundly impacts the careers we choose, the work we do and and what that work might look like in five, ten or fifteen years. So where to begin.  If you are a young person...

One of the dangers of our celebrity culture today, is that we tend to look at those who've attained that status, regardless of their field of endeavor, as fully formed human beings, whose life began and ended with the achieve that catapulted them into iconic status.  Nothing can be further from the truth.  In looking at the stories or biographies of these celebrities, on the one hand we have case...

Technological change and creative destruction is everywhere.  It’s changed the way we work, the way we interact with each other, the foundation of education, and not surprisingly the nature of warfare. We’ve all seen the media images of drones giving us perfect images; the perfect eye in the sky for perfectly targeted air strikes.  As least that’s how it looks on Homeland, and 24 and the images fo...

Conventional wisdom has long held that evolution is something that takes place slowly and  over centuries.  Concurrently we know that technological changes, and changes in the human condition have speeded up at a hyper multiple pace.  We have often thought that much of our anxiety and even some fundamental social problems stem from that dissonance, from that disconnect between our external and our...

It was Churchill who reminded us that history is written by the victors.  Well this is as true of religious history as it is of military, political and geopolitical history.  We’ve all been been told since childhood of the Christian foundation of America.  That the history of America is John Winthrop's "Shining City on a Hill."  That the Christian Village Green represented the apotheosis of Americ...

Art theft is always a funny thing.  The public is usually fascinated by the story, but can seldom feel the kind of empathy with the theft, they feel if their neighbors car were broken into. Art theft, at the highest level is a very special an almost elite kind of crime.  Like reading the pages of Rob Report, it fascinates, but never engages.  Perhaps that's why so many art thefts are never solved....

Historians and journalists have devoted millions of pages to trying to understand the world. In fact, it may be a lot simpler than that.  Just maybe it can be done by eating. We’ve all seen politicians in America, campaigning by eating the local foods and imitating local eating customs.  Why isn’t the same true for geopolitics? If we can understand the culture of another country through its food,...