The Conversation

Growing up as the only child of legendary comedian George Carlin wasn’t all laughs and jocular exchanges of the “seven dirty words.” In her new memoir, “A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George,” author, radio host and podcaster Kelly Carlin describes her tumultuous upbringing, awash in drugs, alcohol and screaming fights - but also with a great deal a lot of love and affection. In this int...

Lawrence Lessig is running for president as a Democrat, but you wouldn’t know it from watching the first Democratic debate on CNN. Lessig’s solitary focus is on ending the corrosive, corrupting influence of money on the American political system, a position that may be too hot for the Democratic National Committee, which barred Lessig from the first Democratic debate on October 13th in Las Vegas....

Chris Ryan is the author, along with his wife Cacilda Jetha, of the New York Times bestseller “Sex At Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships,” which advice columnist Dan Savage described as "the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948." In this wide-ranging i...

Dave Spencer is a "Rockefeller Republican" in two senses: first, in that he believes the GOP should be more open to compromise, evidence-based and reasonable and second, because his great-great-grandfather was actually John D. Rockefeller. Spencer suffered a life-threatening car accident at age 19, which cost him his right leg and full use of his right arm. Since then he's - Has an MBA from Stanfo...

Harvard Law Professor and longtime political activist Lawrence Lessig wants to win the presidency of the United States to accomplish one critical objective: ending the corrupting influence of money on politics. With that done, he says he’ll step down and let someone else take over the Oval Office. It’s a radical notion, the single-issue presidential candidacy, but as he points out, only a radical...

The activist, blogger and DJ who goes by the name “Fumes” has built a large following on Twitter and Tumblr by voicing strong objection to white appropriation of African-American culture, calling out white privilege in all its forms and targeting the fashion industry for what she describes as “Columbusing, colonizing and exploiting” black culture for profit without acknowledging the centuries of s...

On April 15, 2015, 61-year-old rural mail carrier Doug Hughes grabbed headlines after flying his one-man gyrocopter from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Washington DC and touching down on the west lawn of the Capitol building, bringing with him 535 letters - one for each member of Congress to draw attention to the pressing need for campaign finance reform. In this interview with The Young Turks’ Cenk...

One of the earliest digital entrepreneurs, Drew Curtis built Fark.com into a hugely popular news aggregation site to rival Huffington Post, Drudge Report and Yahoo. Now he’s set his sights on a new challenge: an upstart independent campaign for governor of Kentucky, running on a platform of getting money out of politics, data-driven policy making and adopting best practices from other states’ expe...

Norman Lear is a living legend, a pioneering TV producer who rewrote the rules for network television with ground-breaking shows like “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” “Maude,” “Sanford and Son” and “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” He then turned his attention to politics, founding “People for the American Way,” an influential progressive advocacy group defending foundational Constitutional righ...

Alex Winter rose to prominence in the 1980s, starring in hit films like “Lost Boys” and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” He later turned to writing, producing and directing, and has since directed “Downloaded,” the acclaimed documentary about the rise and fall of Napster, as well as his most recent effort, “Deep Web, the Untold Story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road.” In this interview, Winter an...

Aasif Mandvi established himself as a working actor in Hollywood in the 1990s and early 2000s appearing on TV shows like Miami Vice, CSI, Law & Order, The Sopranos and Oz. But he became a household — if often mispronounced — name after joining The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as a “Senior Foreign-Looking Correspondent” in 2006. Today Mandvi writes, produces and stars in a comedy web series poking f...

Dave Koller interviews UCLA professor Ramesh Srinivasan. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Karen Straughan is a self-styled "anti-feminist" and spokesperson for the group Men's Rights Edmonton. She has a popular blog (http://owningyourshit.blogspot.com) and YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/girlwriteswhat) where she talks about a range of gender-related issues, in particular fathers' rights and domestic violence against men. Watch the interview to see whether she and Cenk Uygur agre...

Pastor James David Manning of ATLAH World Missionary Church has gone back and forth with Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, and The Young Turks, and today they attempt to set the record straight. What did Pastor Manning mean when he said he wanted to stone gay men and wants Harlem to be a homo-free zone? Could Starbucks really be mixing "gay semen" into coffee because of the delicious taste? Is Manning hi...