Here’s my 2017 conversation with ROBERT WRIGHT on his best-seller WHY BUDDHISM IS TRUE. Wright has been asking big questions for nearly four decades in books like THE MORAL ANIMAL, NON-ZERO, and THE  EVOLUTION OF GOD. On Substack, he’s persuasively critical  of much of what happens in Washington under either party. Why in the fall of Trump’s first year, first term, did he put out WHY BUDDHISM IS TRUE: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment? We talk evolutionary psychology, cognitive delusions, tribalism, and Trump. We asked then, what can mindfulness offer people trying to make sense and justice of contemporary politics? Almost exactly 8 years later, the question now, how can mindfulness help us deal with a dictator? 

Here’s my 2020 conversation with psychiatrist & author ROBERT JAY LIFTON whose work led him into some of history’s darkest corners – Hiroshima survivors, Nazi doctors, torture at Abu Ghraib. I turned to him as the pandemic raged and the BLM  protests were in full bloom. We talk about his book LOSING REALITY: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry. Lifton wrote the foreword to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump:  27 Psychiatrists & Mental Health Experts Assess a President. He died September 4th at the age of 99. Learn more at robertjaylifton.com

I talk with BILL McKIBBEN (The New Yorker), co-founder of both the global climate campaign, 350.org, and, in 2021, ThirdAct for folks 60 & above. In these dark times, his new book, HERE COMES THE SUN offers hope – not with happy talk but with a clear declaration of facts: Solar and wind are no longer alternative fuels. They are the cheapest as well as the cleanest. (So cheapest also in external costs, health, for example.) Experience has taught Bill that winning on the science and now the economics is not enough. It will take the power of the people to fight the power of the fossil fuel industry. In the book – and in our conversation – Bill offers marching orders for action. billmckibben.com, thirdact.org 

McKibben-08-28-2025-Transcript

First half: This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Here’s my 2006 conversation with Douglas Brinkley about his book The Great Deluge, in which he investigates the failures of government at every level, and traces the character flaws, inexperience, and ulterior motives that allowed the disaster to devastate the Gulf Coast. Second half: As school year begins, here’s my 2005 conversation with National Teacher of the Year, Rafe Esquith, on a PBS documentary celebrating his Hobart Shakespearians. Esquith leads fifth graders at LA’s Hobart Elementary, one of the nation’s largest inner-city grade schools, through a challenging curriculum of English, math, geography, and literature. At semester’s end, students – few for whom English is their first language – perform a full-length Shakespeare play. 

BRINKLEY, DOUGLAS (2006)-transcript

ESQUITH-2005-transcript