EP 136 E.T. Contact
Do you believe in extraterrestrial beings and contacts from deep space? Or are you just awakening to more openness about issues of higher consciousness? If you’re like many Americans you’re becoming much more accepting of phenomena previously considered unusual and little spoken of. Producer and director Caroline Cory has just made a film, titled ‘E.T. Contact: They Are Here’. She has a long history with the supernatural and takes viewers through work being done by scientists to give empirical support to what more and more of us are sensing: that we are not alone and that experiences we’ve had go beyond simple explanation. Start with our podcast and then take in her film.
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For a relatively young and small country–only 70 years old and less populated than North Carolina–with few natural resources, Israel is playing a disproportionate role in solving some of the world’s biggest challenges in tech, medicine, agriculture, water independence and other fields. What explains this? Author Avi Jorisch says that while the Jewish concept of repairing the world is part of the answer, this innovation involves Jews, Christians and Muslims in Israel. In ‘Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World’, he takes us well beyond the known innovation in defense technology into areas designed to make the world a better place. Could this be a key to Israel’s survival and a blessing to the rest of the world? Find out in this podcast.
This episode begins a two-part series on how modern Israel came to be, what it is today and how it is making innovation its calling card to friendly and hostile nations alike. In this episode, author and scholar Michael Brenner helps us to understand Zionism in an historical context and current day challenges for the state of Israel as it faces rapid transformation ethnically and culturally. Of course, we touch upon the two-state solution and Israel’s relationship with the U.S. After you hear Michael, pick up his latest book, ‘In Search of Israel’.
Description: We know the movement ‘Black Lives Matter’, but after hearing Dr. Warren Farrell address the problem, you will wonder why there is no analog to that called ‘Boys Lives Matter’. By virtually any measure, boys in America are in crisis. They are falling behind in schools, being yanked out of the workforce as automation and offsourcing sideline them and they are often left to grow up without fathers. And killing their peers. In ‘The Boy Crisis’, Dr. Farrell and co-author, Dr. John Gray(who also wrote ‘Men are from Venus, Women are From Mars’)turn these sobering numbers about boys in our culture into a story untold that has profound implications for our society. Dr. Farrell will have you asking what you can do to reverse this most disturbing trend in our country
You might find it increasingly difficult to get in to see your doctor–or any physician, for that matter-in the near future. The demand for doctors in the U.S. has outpaced supply, and the problem is only expected to get worse. According to new research from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the U.S. faces a looming doctor shortage of between 40,800 and 104,900 physicians by 2030. Dr. Elaina George, author of ‘Big Medicine: The Cost of Corporate Control and How Doctors and Patients Working Together Can Rebuild a Better System’, joins us to discuss. Many of the reasons for the shortage will surprise you and her observations are always direct from the heart of a practicing physician.
Description: Predictive analytics is about to take the fun out of not knowing the future, according to Rebecca Costa, a sociobiologist (yes we have her explain that science). She explains that “we have more information–more empirical data–about the future than at any other time in human history. We know when a hurricane, tornado or tsunami is en route; when a country’s currency is on the verge of collapse; which automobiles are the safest in an accidents…’ So what does it mean to decision-making in the 21st century and the skills we will need to turn this data into actionable results? Our guest is the author of ‘On The Verge’ and is a tour de force presenter who makes you think in new ways about what lies just ahead. No more guesswork.
Description: Whether it’s concerns about Internet security or real world impacts on the brick and mortar economy, high tech companies are under attack. And given their size and impact, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse–Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon–are coming under scrutiny for various reasons. Some say they have grown too big and made various elements of the economy anti-competitive, others that they don’t pay their fair share in taxes for the dislocation they cause in the job market and to others they’ve simply grown to powerful and cavalier in protecting Americans privacy. We get you thinking about this increasingly intense debate as we discuss it with David Cadden, professor emeritus of entrepreneurship and strategy at Quinnipiac University.
Description: Fifty years after the sexual revolution, sex in America is in decline. Americans are having less sex, the share of Americans who say they never once had sex in the past year is rising, and–perhaps most surprising–this revolution in sexual behavior is being led by the young. And this trend pre-dates the #MeToo movement. We’ll explain why this is happening. It’s a counter revolution which seems counter to all that we would imagine. And it has implications–good and bad–for our society. W. Bradford Wilcox, of the American Enterprise Institute, breaks this trend down for us.
It’s doubtful that the subject of this episode is something you’ve given much thought to, but once the concept of ‘intangible assets’ is laid out it can make for a really important conversation about the future. Simply put, how do you put a value on a ride company that owns no cars(Uber)or a hospitality service with no rooms(Airbnb)? Generally, we have thought about assets as tangibles–factories, inventories, trucks and such. Since 2013, intangible assets have grown faster than tangible ones in our economy. It creates a whole set of new questions about how to measure those intangible assets as part of GDP(software is now included) and how companies can protect the value of what they have designed when another company can come along and ‘model’ it, shall we say? Refer to Apple and the development of the Google Android, in its wake, as a prime example.. Stian Westlake, co-author of ‘Capitalism Without Capital’, joins us to discuss.