Category: podcast

EP 743 Finding an Audience For Your Product or Service Requires New Skills in 2024

EP 743 Finding an Audience For Your Product or Service Requires New Skills in 2024

It seems as if everyone is screaming out for attention in this era given the ease with which people can find audiences for their meanderings, political views, loves and pet peeves.  Just jump on line and wail away, with photos, videos and all manner of content.  Given this new reality, and everyone living in their own communications bubble, you can only imagine how challenging it can be for a company or service provider in this era to decide how to go about the process of finding their audience.  Does television still work?  Does anyone listen to the radio or only podcasts?  How do I find my audience on line…is it through Tik Tok or Facebook?  The choices are endless.  Yet budgets and resources to go audience shopping are not.  Ray Sheehan, Founder of Old City Media, a North American event production and experiential marketing agency, joins us to discuss how he goes about the process of marketing today and the need to make it ‘experiential.’  He’ll define that term and tell us what he thinks is the most effective marketing campaign he sees today in this environment.

EP 742 On the Lips of Republican and Democrats: No New Taxes

EP 742 On the Lips of Republican and Democrats: No New Taxes

America was born in rebellion over taxes.  Remember the Boston Tea Party?  And then hundreds of years later in the 2010’s came the TEA Party, which stood for Taxed Enough Already.  However, that has been the mantra of the Republican Party for the last 50 years beginning with Proposition 13 in California, a property tax cap that Ronald Reagan hailed as “a second American Revolution.”  And while Republicans have been most identified with the continuing attempts to provide tax cuts, often to the rich, or make the IRS the villiain in many political scenarios, the Democrats, fearing backlash, have been timid in pushing back fearing voter anger in opposing Republican dogma.  And while neither party cuts spending while in office and both put more things on the federal credit card, evidenced by Donald’s Trump ballooning the national debt by $7 trillion, while saying he would erase it, that is how we have arrived at an unsustainable $32 trillion in debt.  And much of it, unlike a similar debt laden period after WWII, is owned by foreign interests.  Our guest, Michael Graetz, a professor emeritus at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School and a leading authority on tax politics and policy, and the author of “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America” feels that the modern anti-tax movement is the most overlooked social and political movement in recent U.S. history.

EP 741 Are We Now in the Midst of a Second Cold War?

EP 741 Are We Now in the Midst of a Second Cold War?

America has more than a rooting interest in wars taking place in places like Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere around the globe.  If we go back to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s, we were led to believe it was the ‘end of history’ and that our ideas about a liberal democratic political framework and a capitalist economic system had prevailed and the rest of the world would do well to emulate us.  Yet, by virtue of a world in conflict, it seems as if that message was not received in the way we had hoped.  The big question is: did America overplay its hand when we strode across the globe as the only superpower?  Could we have embraced a different framework, one our guest calls ‘charter internationalism’ more fundamentally than an adherence to ‘liberal internationalism’?  In his compelling book “The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War,” Richard Sakwa explains how America erred in wanting other powers, most importantly China and Russia, to adopt our governing philosophy when it would have been more advantageous to have them simply accept a rules based order.  How this overreach played out is the source of much of the turmoil we see today and the basis for his book and our discussion.

EP 740 Remember: Animals Can’t Turn on Their Air Conditioners

EP 740 Remember: Animals Can’t Turn on Their Air Conditioners

Just because humans stride atop the animal kingdom doesn’t mean that what affects us doesn’t affect other species on this earth  or that the impact on them by things like climate breakdown doesn’t turn around and affect our lives.  Naturalist Adam Welz tries and succeeds in driving this point home in his book, “The End of Eden,” which stands as a stark warning about the “intimate ecological breakdowns” which imperil all of life of Earth.  And while we can design technologies and mitigate the consequences of our actions, flora and fauna remain helpless in the face of a rapidly deteriorating climate crisis.  Let’s take for instance the issue of heat.  While he reminds us we do not see birds falling out of the sky, if you keep your eyes open you will see many bird species pausing for much longer periods in the shade to regather their strength.  Or you might live in Maine and notice that the ticks that would go south for the winter are now able to stay in the north longer and have harmful impacts on the moose population.  And so it goes.  Perhaps an appreciation for the impacts of climate ‘weirding’, as he calls it, on overlooked species might capture the imagination of many who tend to look away otherwise.

EP 739 Weight Loss Drugs Are All the Rage

EP 739 Weight Loss Drugs Are All the Rage

When a gorgeous Poli theater was restored in my hometown about a decade ago, one of the changes that had to occur was making the seats larger, because since the early 20th century Americans have gotten heftier.  Along with this collective weight gain, thanks to processed foods and more sedentary work lives, has come an assortment of maladies including diabetes, heart conditions and strokes.  And while the general toolkit we had to address the obesity crisis consisted of better diet and exercise, or barbaric surgery later on, that wasn’t enough to really move the needle.  And then along came drugs like Ozempic and the ‘off label’ prescribing of this diabetes medication for weight loss, Wegovy, specifically for weight loss, and others now in early stage use and development and it seems like many people we all know are injecting these drugs and finding that they are losing 15 percent of their weight in the process.  Now, hold on.  When something sounds too good to be true…so what is the story with these drugs?  How long do you have to stay on them?  What are the side effects?  Are they safe for childhood obesity?  We’ll discuss all this today with Dr. Richard Siegel, co-director of the Diabetes and Lipid Center and a doctor at the Weight Loss and Wellness Center at Tufts Medical Center and an associate professor at the Tufts School of Medicine.

EP 738 America’s Nuclear Sub Fleet: Our ‘Silent’ Military Advantage

EP 738 America’s Nuclear Sub Fleet: Our ‘Silent’ Military Advantage

As a Connecticut resident, it’s hard not to be aware of the storied history of Hiram Rickover, the “Father of the Nuclear Navy” and the development and commissioning of the first nuclear submarine in in 1952 at the Groton, Connecticut. Now with a fleet of over 220 boats, or ships as they came to be called, America’s superiority in this realm cannot be overstated. This ‘silent service’ patrols the world’s oceans, un- detectable to adverseries, who are nonetheless aware of the powerful capabilities they hold and the payloads they carry. The nuclear propulsion allows these ships to stay underwater, literally, for months at a time. Prior to using nuclear generated power, submarines had to rise to the surface on a daily basis. America has maintained its nuclear sub superiority for many decades now and shows no sign of giving it up, which presents great challenges to any country trying to engage with us. James Goodall, our guest, has penned 29 books and his latest, “Nautilus to Columbia: 70 Years of the US Navy’s Nuclear Submarines” is a remarkable pictorial of the history of one of the most successful military programs developed in the history of warfare. Stay to hear what he says about the role they might play if China, as it indicates, tries to take back Taiwan by force.

EP 737 The Government was the Architect of Housing Segregation in America: Now What?

EP 737 The Government was the Architect of Housing Segregation in America: Now What?

Richard Rothstein did America a great public service back in 2017.  In his groundbreaking book, “The Color of Law” he laid out chapter and verse the complicity of American government, at all levels, in the discriminatory practices that have led us to a condition of housing segregation in America.  That segregation is apparent in our core cities, often disproportionately minority based, and our suburbs, except in the inner ring, lopsidedly white.  It also shows up in ownership patterns which result in yawning net worth disparities between whites and blacks. This form of discrimination shows up in unequal educational opportunities, worse health outcomes and minorities subjected to environmental indignities.  Before his book no one had quite put the finger on the many practices that got us here.  Many thought it was random and based on individual choice.  Well now Rothstein, and his daughter, Leah, have co-authored a new book entitled “Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.”  Not willing to stop at exposing the problem, he’s joined with Leah, who has broad experience in the efforts to provide affordable housing, to describe how we can begin to undo the damage.

EP 736 Will There Be Water For All in the Future?

EP 736 Will There Be Water For All in the Future?

The current approach to water management is failing to meet the demands of the growing human population and the severe challenges brought on by climate change.  Our guest, David Sedlak, director of the Berkeley Water Center and author of “Water for All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate” argues that there are solutions to address these water shortages around the globe, but they differ from region to region and call for different technological and policy solutions.  He believes that America, and its built out water infrastructure, is too married to the dams, pipes and systems we built well over a hundred years ago.  He shares with us the creative responses to both our reservoirs above ground and aquifers below ground.  The work going on is extensive and he describes the emerging technologies in desalination to innovations for recycling wastewater and capturing more of the water that falls on fields and cities.  He even describes the in building efforts that may make our use of water in homes net zero in the future.  I found the discussion enlightening and the engineering going on extraordinary.

EP 735 Aging Population at Greatest Risk From Climate Change

EP 735 Aging Population at Greatest Risk From Climate Change

When Hurricane Ian devastated Florida in 2022, two-thirds of the people who died were older adults.  Similarly, the greatest number of fatalities during Hurricane Katrina, the California Camp Fire and the winter power outages in Texas were among the same population.  And when you stop to think about it, it makes sense.  Many older Americans have chronic conditions that make them more susceptible to extremes and their options in terms of housing and transportation are key factors, as well.  After all, the vast majority of older Americans live in their own homes, which often met their needs in an earlier phase of life, but not now.  And, then, of course, there’s the issue of social isolation which means many seniors are on their own in emergency situations.  All these factors, along with solutions, are included in Danielle Arigoni’s book, “Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation.” As she points out strikingly, in this podcast, our climate changes are on a collision course with our demographic trends in an ever aging America.

EP 734 Expert Leaders Outperform the Growing Legion of Generalists

EP 734 Expert Leaders Outperform the Growing Legion of Generalists

Our guest today has a basic rule, based on research, about leaders of businesses and organizations.  They should, first and foremost, be experts in the activity they lead and then acquire and assume the leadership skills required to run the operation.  In too many cases, as has been the trajectory since the 1980’s, more and more chief executives come with MBA’s, yet no practical experience in the widgets or services being created, or crossover from manufacturing, say, cars to then being hired to run a bank.  And, according to research, the results with experts are far better by many measurements–happy and productive workforce, focus on the mission and the bottom line.  Perhaps, most important is the long view, not just quarterly results, that expert leaders take when committed to the products or services they provide, is key to their success.  Amanda Goodall, a business school professor at the University of London, and author of “Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders” is our guest today.