When tech billionaires make nice with authoritarians and AI challenges are everywhere, I check in with JONATHAN TAPLIN, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, a former tour manager for Bob Dylan & The Band, a producer of films including Martin Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS, and the author of MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy and THE END OF REALITY: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto. We talk about the relationships of AI, democracy, authoritarianism, inequality, billionaires, the arts, and the military. You can learn more at jontaplin.com

Let’s get down to basics. Does your life have a purpose? Can you justify your existence? I talk with REBECCA GOLDSTEIN, philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow, about THE MATTERING INSTINCT: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. Goldstein asserts we are “creatures of matter who long to matter” – physical beings governed by the laws of nature, yet obsessed with our own significance. She and I talk about the implications of this perspective on our understanding of what it means to be human, and about how we can put this understanding to use to help us turn things around in this challenging time of tribalism and social and political regression. Learn more at rebeccagoldstein.com/

 

To remind us what has to heal to put MAGA behind us, here’s my 2020 conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning husband-wife team, NICHOLAS KRISTOF & SHERYL WuDUNN. Their book, TIGHTROPE, tells how Nick’s childhood home – Yamhill, Oregon – was devastated by the loss of well-paying jobs and policy failures in education, healthcare, and justice that led to his childhood friends’ deaths of despair – and how we can end this crisis. We recorded this episode in the final year of Trump’s first term, a few weeks before the pandemic exploded.

I talk with TROY BRENNAN, professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and former Chief Medical Officer at CVS Health about his latest book, WONDERFUL AND BROKEN: The Complex Reality of Primary Care in the US. The US accounts for roughly half of total global health care spending, even though it’s only 4% of world population. The World Health Organization ranks US healthcare 37th overall compared to other Western countries. Primary care physicians play a pivotal role in both preventing disease and lowering healthcare costs but they are overworked, underpaid, and incentivized to move into higher-paying specialties while patients face provider shortages.