I talk with SHARON WEINBERGER, for years the National Security and Foreign Policy Editor at the Wall Street Journal, now the Editor-in-Chief of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, about her new, important, and timely book, VALLEY OF DEATH: How BIG TECH Is Fueling the Future of War. The tech bros are staking out a new relationship with government, taking crucial decisions out of the hands of the people’s representatives - however flawed. Think Starlink in Ukraine. Private command of the development and implementation of potentially self-controlling technologies scares me. You can learn more at sharonweinberger.com.

This past April, Trump signed an executive order accelerating development of psychedelic drugs as medical treatments for mental-health conditions. CHARLES GROB MD has conducted approved clinical research with psychedelics since the early 1990s and has published numerous articles and chapters in the medical and psychiatric literatures. He’s editor of Hallucinogens: A Reader; co-editor (with Roger Walsh) of Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics; and co-editor (with James Grigsby) of the Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens. You can learn about his current studies at lundquist.org.

I speak with SHERRY TURKLE, MIT professor & Founding Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology & Self, author of Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, about her new book, ARTIFICIAL INTIMACY: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. What do we lose by outsourcing emotional needs to machines? How much of the gaps we seek to fill with AI were made worse by social media? Preparing for this conversation, I felt overwhelmed at times by the challenges we face and the power of social media and artificial intimacy to take us away from our only hope, our humanity. You can learn more at sherryturkle.com

SVEN BECKERT, in his latest book, CAPITALISM: A Global History, traces its story across the world since the dawn of the last millennium. He reminds us that capitalism is not natural or inevitable, but a human invention, one that has survived - even dominated - as its form has changed. What can we learn from history? If we invented capitalism, does that offer the possibility we could invent something to replace capitalism or that we could invent a capitalism that values sustainability and justice? You can learn more at svenbeckert.com

I’m one who says the 60s didn’t end until about 1973. John Jenkins was a young journalist in Washington DC in ’71 when some shit was going down. War still raging in Vietnam. Largest mass arrest of protestors in US history. Daniel Ellsberg steals, copies, and delivers the Pentagon papers and the Supreme Court rules they can be published. The deaths of George Jackson and the Soledad brothers in California, the Attica riots in New York. Jenkins did the historical research and revisits those eventful months in his new book, Summer of 71: Five Months That Changed America. You can learn more at johnajenkins.com

RICHARD HEINBERG, a guest a handful of times on this show died July 19th, just two weeks after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He was often a few steps ahead of whatever the current conversation might be regarding humanity’s relationships with nature, energy, power, and each other. His books include A New Covenant with Nature; Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology; The End of Growth; Our Renewable Future, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, and The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies - the one we talk about in this episode. It was recorded in 2003, a month into the war on Iraq.

Heinberg, Richard Transcript

I talk with Harvard professor, DANIELLE ALLEN about (1) her latest book, RADICAL DUKE, about the third Duke of Richmond who inspired the colonies’ independence and their establishment of representative democracy; and (2) her ongoing work on the promise and challenges of democracy today. She’s Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Democratic Knowledge Project at Harvard and Founder and Chairperson of Partners In Democracy, where she advocates for progress towards a new social contract that serves and includes us all. Learn more at danielleallen.scholars.harvard.edu, The Atlantic Magazine and The Renovator Substack.