It is a provocative question and it’s being discussed by serious historians.  Is the polarization in America the antecedent to a physical conflict that pits the red versus the blue, rather the blue and gray?  First people look for a correlation between 1859 and the current era. A State Department official, Keith Mines, was reported to have said ‘it is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun’.  Yet others believe that if the cauldron that was boiling over in the 1960’s, between a raging overseas war, civil rights unrest and political assassinations wasn’t enough to tip us over into a hot civil war, this period won’t either.  While some boldly say that the clock is ‘two minutes to Fort Sumter’, our guest, Ian Morris, a historian and archaeologist at Stanford University, tends to think the worst can be averted. We explore whether our current disunion could lead to an actual break-up of the country.  It will get you thinking.

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 As a child, mathematics was Cathy O’Neil’s passion: ‘math provided a neat refuge from the messiness of the real world’.  After teaching for a time, she began to apply her math wizardry for players on Wall Street and saw first hand how dangerous mathematical models, or as she titles her book, ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’ can be.  They may look cleansed and pure, but according to her, they contain the goals and biases of those who create them. And they tend to stack the deck against the poor and dispossessed who have always been discriminated against, no matter who or how the counting is done.  In the book and in this episode of the podcast, she explains how algorithms now dictate everything from teacher evaluations to bank credit ratings to predictive policing and we need to understand how they are designed, by whom and for what ends. This is particularly important in an age when THE growth industry in this country is predicting our behavior and selling it to marketers of all types.  Given her concerns, we felt she offered another perspective of analytics which gives you much to consider after listening to our previous podcast with Rebecca Costa.  

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  Rebecca Costa is an amazing woman.  She is a sociobiologist and a futurist.  She proclaims that a faith in science and empiricism will pay off in conquering many of the world’s challenges if we trust it and follow its dictates.  Of course, human beings can be rational, at times, but often rely on emotions(and biases)in their decision-making process. She urges us to follow logic and data as it will help us to avert danger, get a head start on what may seem to be intractable problems and make this world a better place on the whole.  She will discuss concepts like foreknowledge and preadaptation, which allow new insights in all realms of human activity–if we follow the information. She believes that advances in Big Data, predictive analytics artificial intelligence and the like has brought nations, businesses and individuals to the edge of clairvoyance.  She has no illusions that we act on the information available and, thus, we fall short in utilizing it to its full advantage. It’s great to have her insights as I struggle to even find the right questions to put to her. Hopefully, you will glean much from her answers. The next podcast we will publish, however, takes a less confident view of analytics as currently applied.  Consider this part one of a two-part mini-series.

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  As John Lennon once said in song ‘you may call me a dreamer’.  Well, Italian neurosurgeon Dr. Sergio Canavero has been called that and worse with his long pronounced intention to do a head transplant.  You read that correctly. Not a facial transplant…a head transplant. While some may say it’s a true medical moonshot, others consider him to be perpetrating a medical fraud that is impossible, given the skill, technology and techniques never accomplished before.  So which is it? I interviewed him back in 2016 and today he’s still in the news, so we decided to publish the interview. Recently, he said that the ability to treat ‘irreversible’ spinal cord injuries, a necessity to accomplish his ultimate goal of the head transplant.  All of this raises profound questions related to medical science, ethics and surgical questions. We thought you’d find his thoughts on the work interesting, to say the least. Is this all sensationalism or the next medical frontier? You decide.

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 Conspiracy theories are as old as politics.  But, according to Russell Muirhead, the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College and Nancy Rosenblum, the Senator Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics is Politics and Government at Harvard University, in their new book, ‘A Lot of People Are Saying’, there is a new twist–conspiracies today have introduced these shadowy tales with no theories attached to them at all.  The intention is not to explain events, but to engage in a political take down. Classic conspiracy theory insist that things are not what they seem and gathers evidence–especially facts ominously withheld by official sources–to tease out secret machinations. The new conspiracism is different. It demands no evidence, doesn’t connect dots and doesn’t examine shadowy plotters. Through repetition(like the President’s penchant for the phrase that constitutes the title of the book)and bold one word assertions(‘rigged’, ‘fake’, ‘witch hunt’)they target the foundations of the democracy to de-stabilize our politics for their advantage.  It is a political trend that we have caught up with and lay bare in this episode.

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  For many in America they are at different stages of the ‘woke’ process.  Recognizing the social changes afoot, they are sympathetic to them, but don’t want to become totally removed from the places from which they come.  Yet, those places may seem lost in time. Debra Gwartney, like our last guest, Darrell West, struggle with the question of where she belongs. She explores the challenge women, in particular, can sense of up rootedness and yearning for a deep and authentic connection to a home that now feels so distant and unwelcoming.  In her memoir, ‘I Am a Stranger Here Myself’, she does a remarkable job of painting a picture of the pioneer women who preceded her in the American West, and her situation growing up in 1950’s Idaho and going home today. Join Debra in seeking answers to the question of how you can hold on to your beliefs and still go home to places you love.

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This episode, along with the next we will post, examine how hard it is to go home when the politics of the times are as rancorous as they are.  Given the transient American culture, many of one generation leave home both physically and culturally. Returning to that place can be unsettling and dissonant, as American politics has turned into a blood sport.  Darrell West, author of ‘Divided Politics, Divided Nation ‘ tries to bridge the gap as one who left a conservative dairy farm upbringing for the halls of academe in the East. He writes a heartfelt account of the tribes we have entered into and how we might try to find some common ground.  He explores how we have reached this boiling point and how we might turn some of the noise down in the best interests of the nation.

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Let that headline sink in for just a moment.  Differences in the performance on math, reading and science tests between disadvantaged and advantaged U.S. students have remained essentially unchanged for nearly half a century.  And in that time period, we established a federal Department of Education, saw funding changes meant to address the problem throughout the country, developed early childhood education and remedial initiatives and tried new models of schooling, including magnets, charters and others.  The study which documents this sad fact is a joint effort of Harvard and Stanford University, two of our nation’s most prestigious higher education institutions. Presenting the findings and methodology is one of the co-authors, Eric Hanushek, of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. It’s one of the most important topics we will report on to you this entire year.  Please listen.

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Just as millions of baby boomers are reaching their golden years, the state of retirement for many in America is something of a disaster.  The pension process has collapsed, union protections for most in the private sector have evaporated, the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation, set up to protect benefits hard earned, is itself in financial jeopardy and Social Security is on the clock as to when it will run short of resources to assure current benefits.  What’s left is the overworked 401K which was never set up to be the only avenue for savings, but rather a supplement. And, yet, still some observers say there is no crisis. Katherine Newman, author of ‘Downhill From Here’ provides stark data and heartbreaking stories to make the case that the crisis is real and imminent.  She discusses how retirement insecurity is the twin of the vast inequality that’s eating away at America’s social fabric. She is a remarkable sociologist and this episode demands your attention as the problem affects more than just the baby boomers.

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  History has given us a guide to removing unpopular, unable or unfit chief executives.  And, despite all the chatter about impeachment, it’s only one method. And come to think of it, it’s never been successfully carried out to its final conclusion–that being a conviction in the U.S. Senate and removal of the sitting President from office.  The one case where the threat of impeachment led to removal was Richard Nixon in 1974, when he resigned in lieu of facing the true likelihood of a conviction for crimes committed during Watergate. David Priess, author of ‘How To Get Rid of a President’, offers many examples throughout our history as to how presidents have been removed or diminished while in office.  They may not have occurred to you so I know that this episode will be a learning experience and a fun way to impress your friends. During the interview, I referred to it as 50 ways to lose your leader. It’s fascinating and I assure you you’ve not thought about this question in the way you will after giving David a listen.

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