How do you imagine most bills are constructed in state legislatures in America?  Is it by one aggressive lawmaker having a novel idea and drafting the bill from scratch for their fellow legislators to review and vote on?  That’s one way, but increasingly there is a trend of policy plagiarism or cut and paste legislation that goes viral across the country.  These pieces of legislation might start with interest groups, industries or political operatives that want to make heroes of local legislators and build momentum throughout the country for their cause or policy. In many cases, the origin of the bill is difficult to trace and the sponsoring legislator may not even know how it arrived on his or her desk, but just that it was well within their philosophical sweet spot.  While both sides do it, conservatives have a big leg up in the process by affiliation with ALEC–the American Legislative Exchange Council which holds conferences and writes numerous pieces of legislation that find their way throughout the country. USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity have studied the impact of fill in the blank lawmaking for two years now  and Liz Whyte, a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, describes their findings on this episode.

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  Stanley Greenberg, the respected Democratic pollster, has seen enough in the data to suggest that the revenge of the ‘New America’ is just around the corner.  And the evidence is in the blue wave of 2018 and the growing intensity of those who feel scorned, demoralized and bitter about the Trump era.  His book “R.I.P. G.O.P.’ is not built on political musings and meanderings, but hard fact and much research.  In his view, ‘the year 2020 will produce a second blue wave on at least the scale of the first in 2018 and finally will crash and shatter the Republican Party that was consumed by the ill-begotten battle to stop the New America from governing’, he writes.  This understanding the demographic landscape was echoed recently by retiring Republican Congress, Will Hurd, who said that the 2020 electorate is changing so quickly that 2016’s electorate is no gauge.  Who comprises the New America? It’s brown, black and Asian Americans, millennials, urbanites, and a growing growing of suburbanites who see the current Republican Party as too harsh on social issues.  It’s a fascinating look ahead and well worth your time in understanding these trends which may suggest a major political realignment and, according to our guest, and a positive period ahead when we tackle many of the issues now in lockdown because of gridlock.

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 The military has a recruitment problem that it doesn’t want to talk about.  It’s an open secret that may be one of the nation’s great defense vulnerabilities going forward.  Yet those who attribute it to long deployments, pay issues, methods of marketing to young people may all mask an even greater problem in society which will require longer term solutions that go well beyond the military to the very essence of our society.  That is Mark Perry’s assessment. I won’t share his take. You should hear it from him. He is the author of ‘The Pentagon’s Wars: The Military’s Undeclared War Against America’s Presidents’.  We did a previous podcast with him focused on the book but wanted his unique, and troubling, perspective on this issue.  And while that’s a good portion of this episode, we go on to discuss rising defense threats to America around the globe and whether our responses are adequate.  We further explore the status of our international alliances and what the military’s role might be if our political order becomes even more polarized in the period ahead.  It is really a freewheeling conversation from which you will glean important information about our defense posture today.

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  Coming of age can be a trying time both for those going through it and those trying to help adolescents make the journey into adulthood as safe and satisfying as possible.  In the animal kingdom, it turns out, there are many commonalities among species in that regard.  In the book ‘Wildhood’, Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers demonstrate through their research that like human teens, animal adolescents can be moody, boundary-pushing and sometimes socially awkward.  Wild animal ‘teens’ often take outlandish risks-and like their human counterparts, take more of them under peer pressure.  At the same time, there is commonality in their creativity, exuberance and need to explore the boundaries of behavior that are societally acceptable.  They found that these not quite grown up creatures of various species-including ours-share a horizontal connection.  And all of this is routed in the evolutionary past.  This is groundbreaking work and their ability to explain it in terms that are clear and compelling makes this podcast a must listen, particularly if you’re trying to understand this time of life because you’re raising a child now part of the wildhood club.

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  In recent years, the calls for the National Collegiate Athletic Association(NCAA) to relax its rules prohibiting athlete pay have grown louder and louder.  The argument is that student-athletes should share in revenues of college sports because they are a ‘product’ that so many others, like coaches, television networks and advertisers, are benefiting from directly.  In the process, they sacrifice their time, talent and, often, their bodies and while their scholarships, for the most talented, are a good starting point, they represent too little compensation for too much work.  Many colleges are actually able to lessen their marketing costs and increase enrollments because of the added value of the visibility of their athletic programs.  It’s even got a name– ‘The Flutie Effect’.  Nevertheless, opponents of ‘pay to play’ say that a number of problems will emerge if this change is made, including tax liabilities for the players and difficult issues around compensation for athletes in non- revenue generating sports.  Others wonder what impact it will have on Title IX and women’s sports overall.  Regardless, there is legislation in California that would allow student athletes to be compensated for their likeness and image by a third party, like NIKE.  It’s a fascinating topic and one that is being reviewed in courts and state legislatures throughout the country.  Attorney Marc Edelman, specializes in sports law and is a tenured Professor of Law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, City University of New York.  He joins us today to discuss.

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Starving children on street corners,  Slums without adequate clean water and sanitation.  A sense of hopelessness in the air that is almost palpable. We, Americans, are moved by these scenes and should be.  The question is whether traditional anti-poverty programs and foreign aid can really ameliorate these conditions over the long term.  Or whether they provide a band-aid, with the donor feeling good, but the effects short-term for the recipient.  (Let alone how much gets siphoned off by corrupt regimes).  Along comes Clayton Christensen, the disruptive innovation guru at Harvard and two of his associates, Efosa Ojomo and our guest Karen Dillon, putting their thoughts about long lasting prosperity, the type that America gained over a long stretch of time ,into the book, ‘The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty’. Co-author, Dillon, says that instead of fixing the visible signs of poverty, we would be better off creating lasting prosperity through market creating innovations.  She points to examples around the world and describes what results from innovation in places you might not imagine. It’s a way of considering the daunting problem of poverty through a different lens.  It’s a different approach to economic development and nation building from a team that has virtually redefined ways of building success in so many areas of business and service delivery.  Could this work? Listen in. 

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The answer is no.  At least, given the real science of anti-aging as it exists today.  The true goal of real scientists is to improve the health span, not necessarily the life span. Now, mind you, there is a great deal of work going on in labs throughout the world on the subject and the spending on life enhancement and extension is a serious business which will go from 110 billion dollars presently to 610 billion dollars in 2025, according to reports.  Unfortunately, the many products that define their purpose as ‘anti-aging’ in pharmacies today is alluring, but unscientific.  The work is being done in fields such as senolytics, stem cell research, immune therapies and regeneration of organs.  Pioneers like Greg Bailey of Juvenescence says that ‘science fiction has become science’ in this field and that ‘progress will happen faster than people think’.  We turn to Dr. Judith Campisi of the Buck Center for Research on Aging for a clear picture of the state of play in the industry today and what it means going forward.

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The statistics tell us that men more often than not are both the perpetrators and victims of violent assault and murder.  Yet if you look at the audience for the growing number of media outlets devoted to it, women are obsessed with it.  Movies, TV shows and networks, books and podcasts may have trouble filling the pipeline for stories about true crime as the actual number of homicides has been going down, while the fascination with the topic continues to skyrocket.  Author Rachel Monroe, who admits to having fallen into a crime funk from time to time, dissects the various ways and reasons that women seem to have ‘Savage Appetites’.  She studies four women, in particular, each relating to one of four archetypal crime figures: the all knowing detective, the wronged victim, the crusader defender and the dark, raging imaginings of a killer.  How does a woman’s vulnerability in our society explain this phenomenon?  How is this genre not just sensationalist entertainment, but a window into political and social realities worth taking seriously?  Now even this podcast enters the realm of true crime. 

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Like two superheros, the back story behind the start up war of FanDuel and DraftKings is fantastical and the characters larger than life. Perhaps more compelling is the explosion they set off in fantasy sports and legalized gambling in America.  We have just begun to feel the ripples as state after state is getting in on the action, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2018.  We’re at the early stage of a battle only a decade old that is poised to change your relationship to sports.  It’s hard to imagine that governments, major sports leagues, media companies and 60 million fanatics would now consider the wagering aspect of sports as intrinsic to that experience as the competition.  Albert Chen, a senior editor at Sports Illustrated and author of ‘Billion Dollar Fantasy’ joins us for a primer on this fast evolving part of our society’s future.  As a novice myself, I try to walk through this story, step by step, so that those of us who have seen some of the avalanche of advertising and marketing by these two behemoths can understand the complexities of this burgeoning industry.  I’ll bet you’ll find it a fascinating listening.  

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: ‘Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are extremely old’, so begins a compelling article by Timothy Noah on politico.com.  And while age can be a virtue, when accompanied by wisdom and experience, it can also define the issues and interests a society chooses to be most concerned about.  Some of those might not be as far-reaching as future generations would like.  So, as America is poised to see a battle for president among men in their seventies(perhaps)and as leadership in both chambers of Congress is of the same age, should we ask ourselves whether that’s a good thing on the whole?  Or, perhaps, we should ask that huge cohort of millennials why they are not voting in the numbers they should in order to compete for the positions of power that the baby boomers continue to hold on to.  Let’s state the obvious: baby boomers are living much longer than previous generations and they vote in greater numbers, too.  And speaking of aging, we might also want to consider our system of government itself.  That, too, is old and less than fully functioning.  No nation has a Constitution older than ours and harder to amend if recent practice is any guide.  Enjoy this interesting discussion of all these issues on this podcast.

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