White House Chronicle

Americans treasure their freedom of expression. But at this time, that jewel of our society is losing its glimmer -- as is the truth -- at a rapid rate. PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect freedom of expression in America and worldwide. Its director of the Journalism and Disinformation program, Tim Richardson, speaks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Jaime Alemán is a lawyer, a businessman, and a former Panamanian ambassador to the United States, but mostly he wants to be known as an adventurer. Recently, was part of the Blue Origin NS-32 crew and he talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about his passion for travel and being the first person in space to have visited all the countries on Earth.

Dan Raviv, author, podcaster, and a former CBS News correspondent talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III (who was a CBS News colleague), about his new book, his podcasts, and broadcast journalism in the time of social media.

AI is fast becoming the essential technology in the electricity sector for cybersecurity, weather prediction, wildfire vulnerability assessment, grid risk reduction and other things. Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III discuss AI's potential in the sector with Ron Schoff, Director of R&D at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI); and Chris Ritter, Division Director of Scientific Computing & AI at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

In this episode, Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III dug into their broadcasting pasts -- including BBC, ITN, CBS, PBS and NPR -- to offer a way forward for public broadcasting, after President Trump targets funding.

Imagine a new cancer treatment that also can make people younger. Then imagine therapies that can slow, halt or even reverse age-related disease progression in humans and animals. Dr. Jason R. Williams. founder of the Williams Cancer Institute, and R. Rex Parris, co-founder of ReParris, a regenerative medicine company, discuss their here-and-now medical treatments and therapies with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Roland Trope, partner in the New York City offices of Trope and Schramm LLP, has concerns about Apple's asking users to opt-in for their emails to be sampled for training its generative AI model, Apple Intelligence. Trope, who has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, has pointers for consumers, and those in his profession, about the risks and challenges of generative AI. He talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III. 

Austin entrepreneur Kevin Koym began his career with Steve Jobs at NeXT. Now, as CEO and Founder of Tech Ranch Austin, Koym is on a mission to support pioneering entrepreneurs in Mexico and other countries to gain access to the markets, resources, and relationships so that they may solve local problems with global insight. He speaks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Kevin Brancato, an expert in federal government contracting, discusses the new landscape of the Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) transactions-based approach to justifying spending and contracts, and how businesses and universities seeking contracts can adapt and thrive with Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

"This is like a long-term marriage where one spouse has betrayed the other. Trust that took 150 years to create has been destroyed in just a few months. Americans don't understand the depth of Canadian anger." That is what Markham Hislop, a Vancouver Island, BC-based journalist and host of "The Energi Show" on YouTube, told Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell is the result of President Donald Trump's sweeping Canada tariffs and threats.

The silencing of the Voice of America is "a geopolitical blunder for the USA," according to Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA. The group, VOA reporters and a handful of unions has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Agency for Global Media and Kari Lake, who is President Trump's representative there. Weimers and Geoffrey Cowan, a University of Southern California professor, and a former director of the Voice of America, talk with Host Llewellyn King about the work of VOA and the consequences of the shutdown.

In this episode, Chris Brown, president of Intelygenz, and a self-described geek, talks with Host Llewellyn King about his start on a Commodore 64 in the north of England, and his current work to bring U.S. companies along on a "journey of confidence" in AI.

The White House has seized control of the press pool from the White House Correspondents' Association. In this episode, Bob Deans, a journalist, author, and a former president of the association, describes the pool of reporters who cover the president that they are "proxies for those people across the country who care deeply about the presidency and will never have a chance to ask the president a question. .... It's a big responsibility." He talks about the vital issue of press freedom with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Charles McMillan, who served as senior policy advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1983 to 1987, now a professor of business a York University in Toronto, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about the impact of President Trump's rift with Canada.

Dr. Mitesh Rao, CEO and founder of OMNY Health, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about the medical community's response to President Trump's drastic cuts on medical research at NIH, and their impact here and abroad.

Steven Hendrix, who was the highest-ranking USAID official at the State Department, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about his work with USAID and how its loss will cost America.

Paul Lee, founder and CEO of Mind AI, based in Seoul, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about his company's development of an AI technology that can explain its reasoning process. "We want everyone to trust AI technology more without worrying about hallucinations," he said.

Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg, discusses the new realities in journalism and their impact with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Lawrence Jones is a global man. He was born and raised in Liberia, attended college in Sweden, and has just been inducted into the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences. As the Edison Electric Institute's senior vice president of international programs, he runs an annual global electrification forum that crosses industry sectors, from AI to fashion to water."Electricity makes all these things happen, " he tells Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III in this episode.

In the run-up to his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump has been showing his wild hand, from not ruling out military action to take Greenland and the Panama Canal to making Canada the 51st state to getting rid of windmills. Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III discuss how Trump's strategy is impacting the nation and the world.

Gregg Lord, who has been involved in emergency response and preparedness for 44 years, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about the issues that have led to significant instability in the emergency medical service structure in America.

Llewellyn King, Adam Clayton Powell III, Linda Gasparello

Vilas Dhar, president and trustee of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, speaks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell II about the foundation's work and its global aspirations for AI.

David Derigiotis, an insurance expert and TED talker, is an AI enthusiast. But he is also a realist about the hurdles ahead for the development of this exciting technology. For example, backdoors and privacy. He talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Marvin Kalb, author, professor and a legend in broadcasting, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about the early 1960s, when he was Moscow correspondent for CBS News, and the confrontation between Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, and President John F. Kennedy. It was "a different Russia," also the title of his new book, than the Putin-era one -- in which Putin, unlike Khrushchev, regularly turns his back on the West. Kalb also talks about the peril to democracies of a dearth of foreign correspondents.

James Schaefer, senior managing director of Guggenheim Securities Investment Banking, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about the role "new safer and more robust" nuclear technologies might play for baseload, low-carbon electricity and to help the United States retain it leadership in fission. He also discusses the need for natural gas in the nation's energy mix. 

Podcasts, social media, blogs, oh, my! These communications sources have been simmering in U.S. elections for years, but came to a boil in the 2024 elections. Geoffrey Cowan, director of USC's Annenberg 's Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, discusses the rise and impact of the new media with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Peter Morici thinks that AI gives Americans good reason to be optimistic. Morici, columnist, economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, looks at AI in an almost fatherly way. As AI grows up, there is going to be bad behavior, but we should watch for it not stifle the technology with regulation. It has the potential to do wonderful things, from finding us perfect matches to fostering new industries. He speaks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

A cover story in The Economist shows why America is the envy of the world. Host Llewellyn King, Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III and Producer Linda Gasparello discuss that enviable position as the election enters its final stretch.

John Kutsch, executive director of the Thorium Energy Alliance, believes fervently that "Thorium will power the world." In addition to its potential use as a fuel, it can also be used in medicine, alloys, coatings, and superconducting materials. He speaks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Perry Carpenter is chief human risk management strategist at KnowBe4, and author of "FAIK: A Practical Guide to Living in a World of Deefakes, Disinformation, and AI-Generated Deceptions." He speaks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about the mechanics behind deepfakes, disinformation, and other cognitive security threats, and how to survive in the ever more tangled digital jungle.

The space economy is growing rapidly. Currently, 90 countries have earth-imaging satellites in orbit. Mark Brender, a former ABC journalist, now a consultant to the geospatial and satellite Earth observation industry, speaks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about how we are entering "an age of super-panoptical technocracy."

Not in my backyard (NIMBY) is a syndrome that has stymied the supply of homes, electricity, roads and other projects in the United States and abroad. Patrick Sleven's insights on NIMBYism come from his experience as mayor of Safety Harbor, a city on the west shore of Tampa Bay in Florida. He discusses ways to overcome NIMBYism with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Adam Russell, head of AI research at USC's Information Sciences Institute, has an engrossing discussion with Adam Clayton Powell III, who guest hosts the episode, about the development of AI -- and what Russell terms "AI Now, AI Next, AI in the Wild." 

Dana Milbank, a Washington Post opinion columnist, knows there is humor in truth. He has written a hilarious and truthful book on the dysfunctional state of the current Republican House, "Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House." Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III had the fun of talking, as Lewis Carroll's Walrus said, "of many things" with Milbank.

Puerto Rico is vulnerable to devastating hurricanes, as is much of the Caribbean Basin. Adam Rousselle, CEO of the Caribbean Basin Power Authority, talks to Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about his proposed undersea cable which would bring reliable and resilient electricity to Puerto Rico, and eventually to other locations in the Caribbean Basin.

As the Biden administration hits Russia with sanctions over efforts to manipulate the U.S. elections, Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III talk with Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon about disinformation, which he calls the "No. 1 threat to our country."

Jeffrey Cole, who directs the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about his research on the social disruptions that new, injectable, weight-loss drugs like Ozempic might create, going far beyond health and health care.

John F. Lansing, who held top media jobs,  recently stepping down as CEO of NPR, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about his career and navigating the current media environment.

Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III talk to Marina Sirota and Alice Tang, two University of California, San Francisco medical researchers, about how AI can help spot early risk factors for Alzheimer's Disease and the field of computational health sciences.

The cellphone has come a long way since 1973, when Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, called Joel Engel at AT&T to let Engel know he had lost the race for a new technology. Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III discuss the cellphone as an instrument of change with Christopher Guttman-McCabe, chief regulatory and communications officer at Anterix.

Executive branch agencies will likely have more difficulty regulating the environment, public health, workplace safety and other issues under a Supreme Court ruling to overturn a 1984 decision, known as Chevron, that has instructed lower courts to defer to federal agencies when laws passed by Congress aren't crystal clear. Host Llewellyn King and Adam Clayton Powell III discuss the impact of this ruling with Clinton Vince, chair of the U.S. practice of Dentons, the global law firm.

Keeping the lights on (KLO in electricity industry speak) presents a myriad of challenges for a Western electric cooperative that has both urban and rural customers, especially in a time of aberrant weather and energy transition. Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell talk with Lisa Tiffin, senior vice president of energy management at the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, based near Denver.

Lee Rainie, a former director of internet and technology research at the Pew Research Center, and now head of Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Center, talks to Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III on AI's impact on the human workforce.

The longtime dream of a commercial fusion plant, supplying the nation with abundant clean energy, may soon be a reality. Brandon Sorbom, co-founder and chief scientist at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, talks with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III about how his work on superconducting magnets, which began as a student at MIT, has moved at a fast pace to a company marketing star power on Earth.

White House Chronicle Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III talk about the people they knew, the print and broadcast outlets they worked for, and journalism today.

Dan Fine, a retired entrepreneur who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Khrystyna Drahomaretska, an architect-turned-animal shelter manager in Odesa, Ukraine, are leading a heroic effort to sterilize and vaccinate dogs -- in care or on the street -- and stop the spread of rabies. They spoke with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

When it comes to electricity supply, the United States is in a "hyper-complex risk environment," according to Jim Robb, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III discuss with him the risks the nation's utilities and consumers have been facing from the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, the extreme weather events, security, and new in 2023, according to a recent NERC report, the surging growth in demand.

Writer and scholar Orville Schell began his study of China well before President Nixon's historic trip to China in 1972, ending 25 years of isolation between the United States and China, and resulting in establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1979. Schell discusses "the end of U.S.-China engagement" with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

The U.S. air traffic control system is the world's largest but lags far behind other countries, including Canada and New Zealand. Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, discusses fixes for the system with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III. 

Andra Ghent is a professor of finance at the University of Utah, where she also directs the Ivory-Boyer Real Estate Center. She discusses the deep roots of America's housing crisis and offers some solutions to it with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.