The baby formula crisis in America caught many off guard, but not our guest on this podcast. Richard Williams, Ph.D., served as the director for social science with the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the Food and Drug Administration. He is the author of ‘Fixing Food: An FDA Insider Unravels the Myths and the Solutions’. He was our guest on a previous podcast discussing the inner workings of the regulators at the FDA. We asked him back to discuss the specifics surrounding this massive baby formula problem made worse by actions, or in actions, of the agency. You will want to hear his perspective.

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The U.S. Senate recently, by consent vote, sent to the House of Representatives what its sponsor Sen. Marco Rubio calls ‘The Sunshine Protection Act’.  The measure would give us permanent daylight saving and an extra hour of afternoon sunshine in the winter.  The idea is to encourage people to shop, eat out and be more active so as to boost the economy.  The problem is there is only so much sunlight to go around(you can’t fool Mother Nature)so it has to come from somewhere.  And that, of course, is in the morning.If this is enacted by the House and signed by the President,  Many children would go to school in the dark.  And the morning commute for many would start out the same way.  While most Americans would like to avoid time changes twice a year, experts in the field of health suggest the smarter play is to have one standard and that being standard time which follows the human body’s rhythms and patterns more precisely.  By the way, we’ve tried the daylight saving time year round model before and it didn’t work.  Jay Pea, founder and president, of Save Standard Time, joins us today to discuss the many timely matters involved.

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There is no denying that Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, is a skilled legislator and, perhaps, the most powerful force in the modern history of the Senate, given his years in leadership, but to what end has he used his influence?  To move policy forward?  To forge meaningful compromises?  To enhance the institutional moorings of the Senate?  Hardly.  He hovers over the august body like some kind of dystopian figure insuring that I’m against whatever the other party is for.  And while you would have imagined that given their differences in style and temperament, he would have been a bulwark against Donald Trump’s presidency by insuring the independence of the Senate, he allowed the Imperial Presidency to run amok, in the two impeachment trials and in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection.  According to Ira Shapiro, author of ‘The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned Amerca’, his fixation has been on stocking the federal judiciary, and particularly the US Supreme Court, with conservative jurists.  If that means denying Merrick Garland his Senate hearings or reversing the logic he used in the Garland case to hasten Amy Coney Barrett’s ascension to the Court, so be it.  How has McConnell’s ‘success’ tracked with our country’s fortunes and the public’s confidence in the body he holds so much sway over?  Find out on this podcast.

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The United States Postal Service remains the only mail and package delivery mechanism with the capability of reaching all of America. Despite new technologies and competitors that have been heralded as the end of postal delivery, it remains critical to many Americans, particularly those in rural sectors. And in 2020, when it faced greater pressures than ever during the pandemic, it rose to the challenge of becoming essential to the election process. Our guest, Christopher Shaw, author of ‘First Class’, argues that it must be preserved because it is a national treasure. At the same time, he acknowledges that since mail volume has dropped 40% over the past 15 years, its business model is in need of updating. He’s got an slew of ideas to do that. Most importantly, though, Congress just passed the Postal Reform Act on a bipartisan basis which will go a long way to making the stressed financial situation of the Postal Service better and more sustainable.

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While America’s democratic institutions held in 2020’s presidential election, it was because some people, Republicans and Democrats–election officials, secretaries of state, in particular–did their constitutional duties and withstood pressure from the sitting president and his acolytes to overturn the results by various means, including pressuring state legislatures to overturn results in battleground states, challenging results in the courts, setting up alternate slates of electors to represent states in the Electoral College and enraging supporters to the point that they stormed the Capitol hoping to pressure Vice President Pence and Congress to go beyond their constitutional limits in certifying election results.  A task force set up to examine what happened here and how it could be avoided in the future wrote that these attempts to overturn the election ‘likely caused lasting damage, not only to the acceptance of the 2020 election outcome, but the perceived legitimacy and long-term stability of American institutions and our system of government’.  So what will we need to repair it, particularly in light of changes in many state laws making voting more restrictive based on ‘the big lie’ and not the consensus view that 2020 was the fairest election in recent memory?  This task force, and others, believe that changes will be needed in election administration, election laws and the news ecosystem.  To discuss this very important topic is our guest, Robert Brandon, president and CEO, of the Fair Elections Center(fairelectionscenter.org).

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Most decisions we make are by listening to our gut or by talking to a few trusted friends.  There is now, however, a better approach to decision-making, according to our guest, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of ‘Don’t Trust Your Gut’ and a former Google data scientist.  Using data to get what we really want in life is a much better way to be happy, find the right mate and make great decisions early on that will help our children achieve great results throughout their lives.  In an engaging way in his book and on the podcast, he lays out an empirical case to prove that the new religion, ‘dataism’, is a much better indicator of will bring us better approaches than methods available to us before.  Data points, the breadcrumbs left on the computer road of Google searches and Facebook likes, are rich in  predictive capacity to explain how your actions will achieve the results you’re hoping for.  Much of this, he describes, as ‘the moneyball of life’.  Just as sabermetrics has changed the stodgy game of baseball, so will a new confidence in this data offer a new the way to attain greater fulfillment and success.  It’s really worth a listen.

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As our nation careens from crisis to crisis and trust in institutions fades, Americans are looking for fresh, visionary leadership. As we have seen the courage and exemplary leadership of President Volodomyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine we know that his development as a leader has been revealed through the unimaginable experience of war. In his new book ‘Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made’, David Gergen, a key White House adviser to four presidents, of both parties, describes the elusive qualities that define a true leader, through historical example and scholarly research. As director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School, he draws on his vast experience in public life to bring definition to this indispensable trait. Consider his approach a philosophical, how to guide to bringing purpose and direction to human pursuits.

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Regrettably, it’s a fair question. Sufficed to say, the pandemic, political angst, war and personal setbacks associated with all of the above have battered our collective sense of calm and well-being. Americans have seen loss of friends and family to COVID, been isolated for long stretches and brought closer to financial peril. While all measures point to greater mental anguish as a result, the silver lining, If there is one, is that the stigma of mental illness and distress is now lifting and Americans seem more willing to share their fears and anxieties than in the past. This is a big step forward toward healing, according to our guest, Chuck Ingoglia, the president and CEO of the National Council for Mental Well being(the national council.org) The numbers surrounding stress and depression are staggering. A whole new industry of digital care giving has grown up in response during the pandemic. The parity between mental and physical disease is getting closer in the public’s mind. Still more needs to be done to provide for adequate resources to deal with the problem, particularly among our youth and in minority communities.

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Dan Golden, the author of the classic book “The Price of Admission’, which documents how the wealthy and well connected have an inside track on getting into elite universities, joins us again to discuss trends in college admissions.  The optional SAT, a by-product of the pandemic, may well become the norm as Harvard has extended the period in which they are striking that requirement.  Others are beginning to follow suit.  With fewer young people applying to college, because of low birth rates in the recent past, competition among colleges is fierce and we discuss the possibility that some just may not make it unless they offer a unique value proposition.  And we touch on the trend that caught my eye recently.  That being the disparity between women and men attending and completing college.  It startled me and has implications for society at large going forward.

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Jon Marshall, Medill School of Journalism professor at Northwestern University and author of ‘Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis’ for a second episode of our podcast focusing on the state of the new media industry as it morphs in response to the digital times.  The two most disturbing trends are news deserts, the growing number of locations across the country, that have no local newspapers and the proliferation of uncurated sites on the internet, in particular, which contain content that is anything but objective.  The difficulty in the case of the latter is determining the reliability of that content.  It requires a great deal of media literacy, which is lacking in any curriculum in our schools.  We discuss waning effectiveness of the newspaper business model, the new approaches, like non-profit media organizations sprouting up, and some new ways of making local media more profitable so that it can serve citizens and, literally, play a role in preserving our democracy.

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