Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah lost his brother to Israeli authorities in the second Intifada. Israeli Jew Maoz Inon lost both his parents to Hamas on October 7th. In their book,The Future Is Peace, these two travel guides to Israel/Palestine and lifelong peace activists, take readers on a journey across their holy bloodstained land. They share the mythic, political, and personal history that divides but also binds them and their peoples. This episode, recorded in front of an audience at a LiveTalksLA event in April, punctuated often by laughter, makes clear their love for each other and the land they share as well as their absolute conviction that dialogue and peace must and will prevail. You can learn more at thefutureispeace.com

Plato cautions that democracy inevitably leads to tyranny because the rich always want to get richer and the poor will follow a demagogue who promises to overthrow the rich. I first learned of Plato’s critique in this 2020 conversation with ASTRA TAYLOR, about her documentary WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? and companion book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. We explore democracy’s early roots as well as its current embattled state, and ask: Will we ever replace our current American rule of the wealthy with our never-quite-qchieved rule of the people?

I speak with former federal prosecutor BRENDAN BALLOU about a number of things. His first book was PLUNDER: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America and we get an update. He’s founder and CEO of the Public Integrity Project, which sues those who seek to bribe government officials, as well as officials who seek to be bribed. We check in on that. Ballou was among those who prosecuted the attackers of January 6th so we talk about Trump’s corruption & pardoning practices. Finally, we dig into his  latest book, WHEN COMPANIES RUN THE COURTS: Forced Arbitration and America’s Secret Justice System. You can learn more at PublicIntegrityProject.org

1) History-making entrepreneurial scientist CRAIG VENTER, died last week at the age of 79. The New York Times obituary leads with these words, “A risk-taking outsider, he brought speed, competition, and controversy to one of science’s biggest races.” In 2000, his team published the first sequence of the human genome – earlier and for far less money than the government-sponsored Human Genome Project. Here’s our 2008 conversation, on the release of his memoir, A LIFE DECODED: MY GENOME: MY LIFE. Learn more at jcvi.org 2) In the second half, my 2008 conversation with MacArthur Award winning evolutionary biologist STUART KAUFFMAN about his book, REINVENTING THE SACRED: A NEW VIEW OF SCIENCE, REASON, AND RELIGION. The two of us get excited as we work our way toward his notion that the ceaseless creativity of the universe may be the best way yet to think about God. Learn more at stuartkauffman.com

Kauffman polished transcript

 

Climate scientist MICHAEL MANN (The New Climate War) has been a target of threatening abuse ever since he led the team that produced the “hockey stick graph” making clear the extreme rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. PETER HOTEZ (Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism) has likewise been targeted since his highly visible role in vaccine development and public heath communication during the Covid 19 pandemic. Together they’ve written SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World, in which they name those forces – plutocrats, professionals, petro-states, propagandists, and the press; and offer a path to repel their attacks so that we may effectively confront critical challenges. Learn more at michaelmann.net & peterhotez.org