WhoWhatWhy's Podcasts

In this wide-ranging podcast, Barrett Brown and actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter talk about the complacency that ails so much of American society. They also discuss how, instead of fixing the systemic problems that plague the US, people across the political spectrum are focusing on the sideshow that President Donald Trump provides. In the meantime, however, all the institutions that are...

The US government is currently holding about 400,000 men and women in a patchwork of immigration prisons. Some are kept in corporate facilities that are guaranteed a minimum number of prisoners daily; others are in cells leased from county jails and other lockups.  Carlos Hidalgo has spent two stretches at California's Adelanto Detention Facility, where he witnessed food with maggots, guards havin...

The traditional American notion of almost absolute freedom of speech may have run its course. Journalist and academic Damon Linker says some Americans may be having second thoughts about what we've come to accept as free speech. In this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, he talks to Jeff Schechtman about his recent analysis that found free speech is under siege from all sides. Linker notes what's happenin...

Coleen Rowley is a former FBI special agent whose bravery as a whistleblower exposed many of the FBI's pre-9/11 failures. She was named one of Time magazine's "Persons of the Year" in 2002. This week she talks with Jeff Schechtman about the recent shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  Rowley accentuates two problems with the FBI. One, that local threats — even in high schools — are n...

To understand the plundering of Iraq's oil wealth, we have to look first at the original sin of the invasion itself. Blueprints showing how oil could help rebuild the country were drawn up post Desert Storm in the 1990s and resurrected in 2003. It never happened.     Journalist Erin Banco explains why, as she talks to Jeff Schechtman in this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast. She laments the dashed hopes...

Andrew Keen is the Anthony Bourdain of technology. The author, entrepreneur and futurist has traveled the far corners of the world to see what works and what doesn't. He has seen the internet reflecting both the best and the worst of us, and concluded that we and our technology need to grow up.   In this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, Keen talks to Jeff Schechtman about the next chapters in the digita...

The shrinking role of facts and evidence-based analysis in American public life poses a threat to democracy, to policy making, and to the very notion of civic discourse.   This is the alarming conclusion spelled out in the RAND Corporation's recently released 300+ page report provocatively titled "Truth Decay." The co-author of this report, RAND political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh, is Jeff Schec...

Are undercover FBI agents responsible for pushing some of the terrorism suspects it arrests toward acts of violence? That is the question Peter B. Collins tackles in his brand new WhoWhatWhy podcast. In this premiere episode he talks with investigative journalist Darwin BondGraham of the East Bay Express in Oakland, CA, about his recent report " Terror or Entrapment ?" (https://www.eastbayexpress....

With the annual gathering of global financial elites taking place this week in Davos, and all the recent news focusing on money laundering, taxes and the .0001 percent, it seems an appropriate time to take another look at where so much of the wealth-that-dare-not-speak-its-name is being stashed.   Back in 2016 we learned that a Panamanian law firm had become a kind of digital safe-deposit box for...

Martin Sheil, a retired branch chief of the IRS Criminal Division, discusses his WhoWhatWhy series on Deutsche Bank and how nearly all the main figures involved in Russiagate also have ties to the financial institution.

Popular author and journalist Sarah Kendzior looks at the many battles ahead to combat voter suppression in 2018.

A look at how social media's "charisma of certainty" is changing the nature of warfare.

The artificial intelligence revolution is here. It's already impacting the economy and the military. It needs to be discussed now in the arena of public policy.

Forty-six years after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg reveals another set of documents on how nuclear war might have been waged in the 1950s and 60s.

An overview of Guardian correspondent Luke Harding's expose of the 40-year Trump/Russia collusion.

Bill Binney was an NSA analyst whose work was so effective it was shut down. It threatened to derail the gravy train fueled by the kinds of problems he might have solved — including preventing potential terrorist attacks. The contractors and executives riding that train had a motto: "keep the problem going, so the money keep flowing."

As the Korean War broke out, Donald Nichols was a major American player for the CIA. He helped launch the South Korean Air Force and picked bombing targets in the North. He ended up a non-person, discredited in the eyes of the US government. This is his story.

With the world feeling like it's spinning out of control, with a new crisis happening every day at a speed beyond our ability to process, humor may be the only thing that can get us through. For this holiday weekend, WhoWhatWhy 's Jeff Schechtman sits down with Chicago comic and professor Al Gini to talk about humor, satire and why we need both to fend off our fear of the world.   Certainly there...

Worried about Russian hackers or other outsiders meddling in US elections? Arguably, the greatest threat to our democratic system comes not from the outside but from forces within our own two-party system that are trying, and often succeeding, to prevent American citizens from voting.   In this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to journalist Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy...

In this nearly hour-long interview, WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker takes veteran podcaster Peter B. Collins through the details of Anthony Weiner's fall — and the effect it had on Hillary Clinton's presidential race. They go deep into the shadows where political traps are constructed.