Hotel home has become synonymous with the brand, Airbnb, as it fashions new ways to connect travelers with experiences that are more than a room that looks just like the next.  The company’s success in a decade’s time has been remarkable and disruptive in the hospitality game. Longstanding brands like Marriott, Hilton and Sheraton have taken notice and have had to adapt to what travelers have come to expect as a unique, inviting experience.  Airbnb, unlike many other start-ups in the tech space, has also demonstrated profitability to go along with the headlines. It’s had its share of controversies as the neighbor next door becomes a hotelier, but the business principles it has put into place can have profound effects on the provider/customer experience in many industries.  Its goals are expansive as it tries to make many other experiences you have when leaving home more alluring and accessible with a few clicks on your phone. Perhaps no one is better able to dissect a brand in the business world today than our guest, Joseph Michelli, author of ‘The Airbnb Way’, which is a must read if you want to understand its emergence and dominance in the sharing economy.

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  Did you feel imprisoned as a student in K-12?  Was the experience one that caused you harm and that you would like to see your child avoid?  Cevin Soling, the l’enfant terrible of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who writes and directs films about this topic, has a very dark vision of what the stringent, conforming aspects of public schools does to the psychology of the child.  While I admit that some children are constrained and abused in the system, and their unique learning styles ignored, my questions to him focused a good deal on practical alternatives. After all, this is an advanced a society that requires learning and certification in a formal process in order to go on to the next step in life. We explore a range of topics including my assertion that these institutions act as stabilizers for families and communities where structure and order are in little supply.  It’s a very provocative topic and our exchanges are healthy and challenging.  It will get you to think about whether schools, which clearly are failing by many measures, can be improved or is there any conceivable way to abolish them altogether.  Then what?

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The perception of the diplomatic corps for many is a well connected person who takes on a plush assignment overseas with all the trappings of privilege.  Yet throughout the impeachment hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives, the public was introduced to career diplomats whose love of country, precision in the use of language, meticulous note taking and general acumen about their posts was anything but that stereotype.  Apart from the careerist Foreign Service types, we also saw a donor diplomat, Gordon Sondland, who was clear in saying that he was not from that school and did not take careful notes.  America has a combination of approximately seventy percent career diplomats to thirty percent who are political appointees by the President.  (Most Western allies do not have such political appointments.) With that said, either can be effective, depending on their backgrounds and suitability for the assignment.  And then there are ‘expeditionary diplomats’ who are sent time and again to some of the hottest spots in the world to take on some of the most difficult assignments where chaos reigns and the normal functions of government are barely present.  Paul Richter, the author of ‘The Ambassadors’ describes four such diplomats whose duties are varied, complex and vital to America’s role in the world. Their understanding of political organization,  the cultures in which they are immersed and the necessity for improvisation in such circumstances is truly remarkable.  

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  Medicine’s advances are happening so quickly can the ethics and laws surrounding these changes keep up?  In the new book, ‘Who Says You’re Dead'(yes there are different definitions for that, too), Dr. Jacob Appel, an attending psychiatrist ay Mount Sinai and celebrated bioethicist, serves up provocative scenarios which demonstrate how complicated this all can be.  To this point: a daughter gets tested to see if she is a match to donate a kidney to her father.  The test reveals that she is not the man’s biological daughter.  Should the doctor tell the father.  Or the daughter?  Or you go to an orthopedic specialist (and they are highly speicalized) needing a hip replacement.  His specialty is the knee.  Does he have an obligation to tell you that there’s a doctor in the next office building who does your procedure much more routinely?  We explore a range of questions that are complex and open ended about designer babies, the three parent couple, and what our responsibility is in the realm of ‘informed consent’.  He even has some concerns about the ethical dimensions of the vaunted electronic medical record and its likelihood of being abused.  And while we invest all knowing characteristics to many of our doctors, are they better at predicting the course of disease in our body and should they be giving us timelines as to what it might mean to us in the near term and long run?  We cover a lot of ground in a brief space of time.  It will get you thinking, rest assured.

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  America seems to be hanging together by a thread these days.  In some ways the only normalcy seems to be between the lines when we see our professional sports teams come together to compete.  We get lost in it for a few hours and put aside all else in the world.  And yet in that world, changes have been dramatic.  No development has had more impact on the games we love than the unschackling of players and their ability to move from one team to the next in free agency.  And at one time or another, Jim Quinn, author of the book ‘Don’t Be Afraid to Win’,  has been lead counsel for each of the players’ associations in our four major sports.  He explains the significance of tearing apart the owners’ stranglehold on player movement, and to some degree, compensation, and allowing the market to determine their value.  In a far ranging conversation we track that history to the present with an ode to the first players’ strike lasting all of 21 minutes, but setting the table for much more protracted battles to come.  Key issues relating to sports in our society are discussed as part of this podcast, including the acceptance of gambling by the leagues, the brutality of football and whether that will limit its future, the effects of ESPN and TV in general on sports and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of the four major sports–baseball, football, basketball and hockey.

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Donald Trump has a unique leadership style, to say the least.  In this episode, we explore his impact on the notion of what a leader should, or should not, be doing going forward. Thanks to the expertise of Dr. Joshua Weiss, Director of the MS program in leadership and negotiation at Bay Path University in Springfield, Massachusetts, we examine what the art of the deal means in the context of this presidency.  Does he exhibit the characteristics of a leader or ruler?  And how different are the attributes of one to the other?  We also analyze his style of negotiation which is more transactional than ethical or values motivated.  We ponder whether his penchant for mercurial decision-making and for breaking deals, rather than making new ones, may place America in a precarious position vis a vis the long view approach of our chief rivals, the Chinese.  It’s a very important discussion for these times.

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While we have professionalized the rituals of dying, from our care in the final days of life to the processes of interment with funeral home directors, it is fair to say that a trend in our society is that Americans are taking back control of the process.  People seem to be craving a more humane mourning and burial process.  Further fueling the desire to do it our own way, are the concerns about the cost, environmental impacts and sameness of the process.  We are bringing death public again and celebrating the lives of those who have died in distinctly individualized ways.  In the process, we are inventing new and adapting old traditions, burial places and memorials.  It’s a fascinating development best characterized by the extraordinary adoption of cremation as the new way to handle the body, even giving  way to a new term ‘cremains’.  There is, perhaps, no better describer of this change, David Sloane, a trained historian at the University of Southern California and a descendant of multiple generations of cemetery managers.  His book ‘Is the Cemetery Dead’ explains the changes in an industry and a reality that affect us all.

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: Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and public intellectual, has been working on the sources and dangers of inhuman zealotry for decades.  The conditions and individuals he studies involve brainwashing, religious extremists, political cultists and mass murderers.  In the process he examines totalitarian politics from the left and right, disinformation and social media impacts.  In his new book, ‘Losing Reality’, which interweaves older work with new thinking from the era we find ourselves in,  he comes to the startling conclusion that ‘mental predators are concerned not only with individual minds but with the ownership of reality itself’.  And while religious zealots look to dominate the thinking of those within the group and political zealots look to control the masses, they draw inspiration from the same fountain.  He has many thoughts about Donald Trump as a purveyor of a self-generated reality which he is able to impart to followers who are geographically dispersed.  This phenomenon adds a new dimension to his studies.  His sense that there is a dangerous proclivity of the human mind to bend toward extremism, which can simplify and bring order in a complex society, is a challenge to liberal democracies going forward.  Stay with the conversation as it will provide thinking you rarely are exposed to.

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On February 18, 1965 a packed hall at Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England came to see a historic, televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley, Jr., a relentless critic of the movement and America’s most influential conservative intellectual.  The topic was ‘the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro’.  Nicholas Buccola’s book, ‘The Fire Is Upon Us’ is the first book that captures the emotion, dynamism and roots of the conversation that took place that night.  He also sheds light on how the debate that evening continues to reverberate in the politics of our time as we still struggle with America’s racial divide.  A recent survey found that 62 percent of Americans believe that ‘we haven’t arrived at racial equality’. This, of course, in the aftermath of what many thought in the wake of Barack Obama’s two term presidency was a post-racial America.  Donald Trump drove a wedge through that notion.  James Baldwin and William f. Buckley, Jr. were towering figures and this recounting reminds us that some issues are transcendant in our culture and politics and are destined to remain the unfinished work of every generation.

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  Candidate one has good grades, great SAT scores, and a boatload of extracurricular activities.  Candidate two has OK grades, average SATs and his parents donated $1 million to the school’s capital campaign.  Who gets in?  Take a guess.  In America’s most elite colleges only 40 percent of the students enrolled are strictly there based on merit.  The rest are part of a system built a web of connections and preferences that limit upward mobility in our society and maintain familial advantages for generations.  And that’s before the standard practices of universities become tainted by scandal, as in the case of Operation Varsity Blues which ensnared Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin and others.  In his groundbreaking book, ‘The Price of Admission’, Daniel Golden explains how socioeconomic diversity counts least to many elite schools and even how sports, thought to be a great leveler, also favors the rich.  His book has been updated to include a compelling chapter on the highly publicized scandal.  He points to some schools that do avoid the temptations of giving preference to the privileged and famous, but they are far too few.  And he has little hope of significant reform of the process given the fact that elite colleges see the benefits of their admissions practices(more money and prestige) far outweighing the disadvantages.  Hear how the game is played on this podcast.

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