Talk Cocktail

As music and the music business evolves today, the content of the music often plays second fiddle to the debate about economics.   About digital royalties, performance royalties, Pandora, Spotify, etc.  In many way the medium impacts the message, the songs we hear and what gets produced and what becomes popular. And why not?  After all, it is the music business!  In fact, it always has been a busi...

Revolutions are hard AND exciting. They combine courage and new ideas and the excitement of once in a generation change. However what’s even harder, is what comes next. The way in which the apogee of a moment of revolutionary fervor sticks and is translated into changes in government and in bureaucratic institutions. And perhaps most importantly, the way in which the multilateral ideas of the dive...

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, defines personality as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.”  Certainly that is the outer manifestation.  But science, brain research and  cutting edge psychology tells us that it's all part of a much more complex overall system.  A system that shapes our lives, our identities and our emotions.  It's a system that determines that the way in which we...

American political history is a complex and dynamic process.  In that process, there have been periods of entropy and period of great progress and imagination.  Both have been a function of a political system designed by our founders.  But also, the temper and tenor of the times and the degree to which individual leaders have known how to work those levers of power has also shaped our political de...

So many of the weaknesses of our media today are blamed on the digital revolution.  Certainly the transition to digital has rendered change.  But to a large extent those changes only magnify some of the fundamental flaws that afflicted American media as it evolved in the 20th century The weakening of regulation, the increased power of the free market to shape coverage of news and the increasing co...

Our nation was founded in opposition to dynasty.   From the push back to George III, to our concerns about another Bush/Clinton Presidential race, Americans have always been suspicious of the dynastic impulse. Yet today, we seem to be smothered in a dynasty of the elites.  Even while the politics of the fringes gets all the media attention, the centers of power in both political parties seem fixed...

Just as we demand a lot from our political leaders today, we also demand a lot from CEOs. Even if they are not founders,  they need to be telegenic, charismatic, visionary, have a detailed plan, and adept at working the politics of the boardroom.   They need to be comfortable in being a part of the one percent, have media coaches and PR people and be on a short leash from  quarter to quarter. Toda...

We live in an age in which everything has become politicized.  The coffee we drink, the food we eat, the shows and movies we watch, and the cars we buy,all seem to convey some kind of political message. Where once these things represented class, or taste, or education, today it’s all about politics.  Even in non-partisan races, political ideology becomes the central issue. So what impact does this...

The industrial revolution changed the world.  It changed the nature of work, it displaced workers, it ushered in the Gilded Age and created more inequality.  It shrank the world, drove consumerism, and reshaped political ideology. The Internet revolution, 150 years later, has had  startling  similar effects.  We worship at the altar of creative destruction, we fetishize technology and the freedom...

Long before radio, I spent years in Hollywood.  This was just as the Word Processor and the high volume copy machine were taking hold.  When those things came along, everyone joked that screenwriting software and easy access to copying machines would lower the quality of screenplays.  Little did those jokesters know, that was just the beginning. Not only did the medium become the message, it subsu...

It was Churchill who said that when the present sits in judgment of the past, we loose the future.  Obviously not the attitude of memoirists. But also not the attitude of someone who looks back on the totality of one's life and tries to understand who they are and where they came from.   Barbara Ehrenreich discovered, late in life, a journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence. She writ...

When something goes wrong with a car or an appliance, or even the human body, the “instructions” for repair are often clear. However my guest argues that the manual that tries to define the parameters and terms of mental illness, is without that kind of scientific basis. He says that even an auto repair manual, much less a biology textbook, has more science than the DMS 5 Yet with the fifth volume...

What might our knowledge of history be like if snapchat had been around in earlier centuries? The good news is that it wasn’t.  In a time when people wrote letters, not texts or emails, those letters got saved and later curated.  Letters that give us little glimpses into personalities, history and the human condition at another time, in another place. Shawn Usher, has devoted himself to being a cu...

Remembering the early days of the cell of phone, we all remember, “can you hear me now.”  For most of us this was modern nuisance.  But for some, those that are hearing impaired, or profoundly deaf, those words have far greater meaning.   While much progress has been made in the technology, treatment and study of deafness, we are just beginning to understand the broader implications, with respect...

What would it take for you to give up your Western lifestyle, move to Ghana, live in a mud hut and commit yourself to helping thousands of lost children? You would think that this kind of thing only happens in the movies, or in literature. That real lives are generally not a kind of fairy tail. Not true.  Lisa Lovatt-Smith did exactly that.  She traded in her glamorous life in Paris and a glamorou...

To achieve proficiency in a new language late in life is near impossible.  But suppose you didn’t just want to learn the language, you wanted total immersion.  You wanted to learn the culture, the origins of the language, to become one with the language.  That’s what my guest William Alexander set out to do with French. He wanted to be French and language was simply the vessel. But even with that...

It used to be that the classroom prepared you for a career.  Today your lifetime career is a classroom, where you must be continuously learning.  In doing so, the horizons open up and opportunities abound. The traditional straightjacket of education and career have been, like most things, disrupted. In it’s place, possibility and creative destruction.. Along with this comes a whole new way of doin...

One of the foundations of the changing nature of education, is the idea of deeper learning.  Direct, hands on mastery of content, though solving real world problems in a collaborative way. This has created dramatic results in all academic areas. But it’s also something that can take place right at home.  That’s what best selling author Mark Kurlansky did with his daughter Talia.  They combined cul...

To dream the impossible dream has been the great engine of progress in the world.  From the early explorers, to scientists and engineers, to man's quest to explore the planets.  The story of exploration is the story of mankind.   When John Kennedy laid down the predicate of reaching the moon by the end of a decade, he defined for the whole county that kind of clear goal that also drives individual...

Conventional wisdom has long held that we live in a vast and indeed expanding universe, in which we humans are but a seemingly small and insignificant part.   But in that classic view, are we not giving ourselves enough credit? Perhaps we are more unique than we think.  Perhaps we are not all that ordinary, on a not so ordinary rock in the vast cosmos.   Just maybe, that classic view, needs to be...

Perhaps part of what plagues us when we think about most issues today, is that we tend to see them in very myopic ways.  The world is a more and more complex place, and yet we do the opposite of what we should do.  We too often silo information or categories, or problems.   We don’t always see the connections and therefore we get frustrated, because we can’t seem to solve the problems.   Environme...

How often does a story leap off the pages of a magazine, to become a book, a documentary and a major motion picture?  Very rarely. And when it does, it’s clear that the story it tells has touched a powerful nerve among readers and viewers.   Such is the story that Wired  Contributing Editor Joshua Davis tells, of four underdogs from the streets of Phoenix, who, using Spare Parts  would take on the...

We’ve recently seen year end lists of the best places to work.  Free food, massage, pets, and a beautiful campus are all contributing factors.  However, research, behavioral analysis and science can also tell us what make a workplace effective, productive, and more innovative. The famed management consultant Peter Drucker said that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Affirming a long held convictio...

While the origins of the quote are sketchy, Harry Truman, frustrated by the problems he faced in the White House, is reported to have said that “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Today the same might be said of our pets in general, or in the politically correct parlance of the day, our companion animals.  Be they dogs, or cats. With all the talk about  the amount of money spend on ou...

Back in the 1940’s theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the serenity prayer. You all know it. It tells us to accept those things that we can’t change and the courage to change those we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Over the years, it’s been adopted by AA and various other groups. But it might also be the coda for Cheryl Strayed's fantastically successful book   Wild: From Lost to Found o...