EP 972 Are Companies Responding to the Needs and Skills Working Parents Bring to the Workplace?
Most families require two incomes these days to survive. Thus, by definition the working parent is populating every workplace. And while accommodating the needs of working parents may be difficult for some small companies with not a person to spare at any time, what about the larger companies that have infrastructure to do so? Are they waking up to the types of policies and approaches that allow the working parent to thrive in their corporate environments? And why should they? Our guest Mason Donovan, along with Mark Kaplan, have written a book titled ” The Parenthood Advantage: Building Corporate Cultures that Value Working Parents.” Their cogent argument is that working parents have skills that make them MORE valuable. Things like adaptability, efficiency and empathy. And yet most workplaces have yet to figure out how meaningfully to accommodate them. And the legal culture in America has never significantly strengthened laws around parental leave, daycare and other practices which might support these dual roles, so they harmonize better on a day- to- day basis. It’s an important subject that we explain in depth on this podcast.
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Have you ever heard the word gerontocracy? Well, according to our guest, you’re living in one. The point may be best illustrated by the last two presidential campaigns where we elected an elderly man, Joe Biden, to be our president in 2020 and when feeling that he was too old to serve another term, we replaced him with another old man, Donald Trump. It’s not only happening in our politics among the candidates, funders and voters (oh it’s true that older Americans outvote and other demographic groups), but also in business and other endeavors. Many of them, baby boomers, were brought up on the youth culture of the 1960’s and cannot see themselves giving up their positions and privileges. This trend has an impact on many things, including the ability of young people to move on up, the differential in social safety nets between young and old and the types of short- term issues our politics might address at the expense of long-term ones, like the warming of the planet. It’s a fascinating topic and our guest, Samuel Moyn, a Yale professor describes its many implications in detail in his new book, “Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Power and Wealth–and What to Do About It.” He is our guest today.
Our guest feels that we are in the midst of the greatest transformation in high education in over a hundred years. The factors at play are the demographic shifts in the country, the economy and technology. Arthur Levine, President of Brandeis University and co-author of the new book, “From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed,” says that we can even look at twenty percent of colleges closing their doors in the period ahead. COVID was an accelerant in this process, but certainly not the only reason. The person we think of as a college student–between 18-24 living on campus seeking a four- year bachelor’s degree–is no longer the prototypical one. And new approaches to getting what he calls a ‘just in time’ education’ will supersede the old model of a ‘just in case’ approach. He explains. There are new certificates and badges for competency that colleges offer, as do online providers and employers. The competition to engage the learning process beyond high school is vitally necessary in this era of constant change and the competition to provide it is getting fiercer. Much of it is online. President Levine wrote this book with Scott Van Pelt.
Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on day one of his second term in 2025. One of those executive orders was the beginning of the end for the agency known as USAID. It was started in 1961 by President Kennedy in order to advance human survival around the world, stabilize economies in the developing world and make the path to peaceful democracy smoother. It was, and for all these intervening years remained, a noble cause credited with saving the lives of tens of millions around the world by treating and preventing serious health issues such as HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria and more. And while not a focus of Project 2025, somehow it became a target for dissolution by President Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team. Decades long dedicated staff, with expertise in this field, were summarily fired with the new Administration caring little of past success and future necessity. Nicholas Enrich, a former civil servant who worked at USAID through four administrations, focusing on Global Health initiatives, had seen enough before he, too, was dismissed and had written some powerful memos that became part of the public record. He documents what happened and why he continued the fight in his new book, “Into the Woodchipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.”
The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that pushed many institutions, including corporations, to confront racial inequality. Looking back at 2020 to 2024, companies issued public statements embracing racial justice causes in the hopes of protecting their reputations from claims that their practices perpetuate inequality, particularly in regard to race. In response to a furious conservative backlash, many began to withdraw those commitments. The pendulum of retraction has swung quickly. Our guest, Fordham Law Professor, Atinuke Adediran, author of “Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress,” notes that even when companies pledge to hire and promote people of color or fund racial equity causes, those pledges often serve to narrow the scope of social responsibility. Often, these public pronouncements are put in place to preserve corporate financial interests while appearing responsive. It’s an interesting discussion in these times of pushback against DEI practices in America.
Much has been written about the ill effects of our over-reliance on our on-life life with endless content, algorithm-driven polarization and pressure to publicly present oneself. In this podcast, our guest, Patricia Martin, author of “Will the Future Like You: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention,” argues that the damage goes even deeper. It is eroding the ability to form and sustain one’s identity. Are we hyper-focused on presenting a version of ourselves that will get likes and friends in a virtual world or have we done the hard work to figure out who we are at our core? What makes all this more difficult is the fact that many of the institutions designed to help us foster that growth and understanding of our identity are crumbling. We’re reminded that identity is formed in three ways–how we see ourselves, how others see us, and our will to shape ourselves. The balance in this triad is now skewed and leading to a host of issues for the generations growing up in a digital world.
I ran a few small state house and senate races in Connecticut back in the day. It was an era of news releases, radio ads, bumper stickers and small events in the district. To be honest, I cannot imagine the pressures of running campaigns today given the fractured and interactive media of this era, constant need to raise funds and to respond to incoming attacks every hour on the hour. Early in our conversation with Eva Posner, the CEO and Founder of Evinco Strategies, who does this for a living, she admitted that it’s exhausting. Messaging strategies today have to be so targeted that your approach has to be pinpoint and not shotgun, as in my day. She describes her reluctant use of AI as part of her toolbox but needing to do it so as not to give an important advantage to her political opponent. We get to the issues of 2026 and the overall political climate, and she said something quite interesting as we went along about her team’s inability to out organize voter suppression. Listen in while she explains what that means. It’s a good listen.
The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965, and considered to be the most important civil rights legislation in American history, was effectively jettisoned by the ruling of the United States Supreme Court last week, according to our guest, David Daley, one of the leading experts in the country on the Act itself, and partisan and racial gerrymandering. The majority opinion in the case was written by Justice Samuel Alito and while he calls it an updating of the statute, others like Professor of law Richard Hasan, an elections law expert, begged to differ calling it an “earthquake” decision which sharply erodes the Voting Rights Act. With Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act already scrapped years back by the Roberts Court, and on the heels of the Louisiana vs. Callais decision last week, one is left to wonder what is left of protections for Black citizens across the South to ensure that their voices will count. I have had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Daley several times in the past. Never have I heard his words as impassioned and compelling as those he brings to this podcast. You will walk away with history surrounding this vitally important legislation, the immediate real- world impacts of this decision, and what the road ahead looks like for gerrymandering and voting rights. He is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” and “Antidemocratic,” his latest book.
Greek mythology. Greek tragedy. Greek philosophy. Any of us who took a course or two on Western civilization remembers the name John Davies Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. We may not revisit them, but they revisit us in many of the traditions that are woven through to our modern- day concept of the world. And for anyone who wants to grasp where they still stand today in time, place and in Western traditions of thought, may I recommend a book? It’s John Davie’s “Greek to Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World.” He is our guest today and to some it will feel like a primer, others a refresher, but altogether a fascinating step back in time that connects to our present day.
Whistleblowers in our society our either considered heroes or traitors. In any event they have a massive impact in our history. For those who compile such lists of modern-day whistleblowers often Mark Felt, Deep Throat from Watergate is number two and Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who revealed the Pentagon Papers, is number one. Ellsberg’s son, Michael Ellsberg, and Daniel Ellsberg’s long-time assistant, Jan Thomas edited Daniel Ellsberg’s unpublished works into a new book, entitled “Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope.” Daniel Ellsberg is best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers regarding the truths behind our ill-fated involvement in Vietnam. However, as a perusal of this new book demonstrates, he was a man with a curious mind who devoted much of his long lifetime to raising concerns about nuclear annihilation and the ways that the human species may indeed bring on its own demise. My discussion with his son, Michael, will explore the depth of his thinking and what we can all learn from a man I consider to be a hero for what he did and the warnings he tried to convey throughout his life.