Podcasts about Kennedy School

Bruce Schneier is a security technologist at Harvard's Kennedy School. Nathan Sanders is a data scientist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. They've been studying AI's impact on democratic institutions. Their new book is Rewiring Democracy.

“Enviado Especial da COP 30 para Cidades”, Philip Yang é o fundador do URBEM (Instituto de Urbanismo e Estudos para a Metrópole), parte importante de suas ilimitadas áreas de interesse. É mestre em Administração Pública pela Kennedy School of Government, da Universidade Harvard; diplomata formado pelo Instituto Rio Branco, tendo servido já em Washington e Pequim, e graduado em música pela Universidade de São Paulo, com especialização na Academia Franz Liszt de Budapeste. Se pluralidade pouca é bobagem, ele já foi empresário da área de petróleo e gás. Sua trajetória e sua formação raras conferem-lhe um pensamento invulgar, que concilia a paixão pela inovação, o apreço pela técnica e o viés humanista. Acompanhe a conversa especialíssima com Philip e atente para o seu olhar especialmente agudo sobre o que está em curso na China e nos EUA. Nada será como antes. Imperdível.

In this episode of the Leading Voices in Food podcast, host Norbert Wilson is joined by food and nutrition policy economists Will Masters and Parke Wilde from Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition, Science and Policy. The discussion centers around the concept of the least cost diet, a tool used to determine the minimum cost required to maintain a nutritionally adequate diet. The conversation delves into the global computational methods and policies related to least cost diets, the challenges of making these diets culturally relevant, and the implications for food policy in both the US and internationally. You will also hear about the lived experiences of people affected by these diets and the need for more comprehensive research to better reflect reality. Interview Summary I know you both have been working in this space around least cost diets for a while. So, let's really start off by just asking a question about what brought you into this work as researchers. Why study least cost diets? Will, let's start with you. I'm a very curious person and this was a puzzle. So, you know, people want health. They want healthy food. Of course, we spend a lot on healthcare and health services, but do seek health in our food. As a child growing up, you know, companies were marketing food as a source of health. And people who had more money would spend more for premium items that were seen as healthy. And in the 2010s for the first time, we had these quantified definitions of what a healthy diet was as we went from 'nutrients' to 'food groups,' from the original dietary guidelines pyramid to the MyPlate. And then internationally, the very first quantified definitions of healthful diets that would work anywhere in the world. And I was like, oh, wow. Is it actually expensive to eat a healthy diet? And how much does it cost? How does it differ by place location? How does it differ over time, seasons, and years? And I just thought it was a fascinating question. Great, thank you for that. Parke? There's a lot of policy importance on this, but part of the fun also of this particular topic is more than almost any that we work on, it's connected to things that we have to think about in our daily lives. So, as you're preparing and purchasing food for your family and you want it to be a healthy. And you want it to still be, you know, tasty enough to satisfy the kids. And it can't take too long because it has to fit into a busy life. So, this one does feel like it's got a personal connection. Thank you both for that. One of the things I heard is there was an availability of data. There was an opportunity that seems like it didn't exist before. Can you speak a little bit about that? Especially Will because you mentioned that point. Will: Yes. So, we have had food composition data identifying for typical items. A can of beans, or even a pizza. You know, what is the expected, on average quantity of each nutrient. But only recently have we had those on a very large scale for global items. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of distinct items. And we had nutrient requirements, but only nutrient by nutrient, and the definition of a food group where you would want not only the nutrients, but also the phytochemicals, the attributes of food from its food matrix that make a vegetable different from just in a vitamin pill. And those came about in, as I mentioned, in the 2010s. And then there's the computational tools and the price observations that get captured. They've been written down on pads of paper, literally, and brought to a headquarters to compute inflation since the 1930s. But access to those in digitized form, only really in the 2000s and only really in the 2010s were we able to have program routines that would download millions and millions of price observations, match them to food composition data, match that food composition information to a healthy diet criterion, and then compute these least cost diets. Now we've computed millions and millions of these thanks to modern computing and all of that data. Great, Will. And you've already started on this, so let's continue on this point. You were talking about some of the computational methods and data that were available globally. Can you give us a good sense of what does a lease cost diet look like from this global perspective because we're going to talk to Parke about whether it is in the US. But let's talk about it in the broad sense globally. In my case the funding opportunity to pay for the graduate students and collaborators internationally came from the Gates Foundation and the UK International Development Agency, initially for a pilot study in Ghana and Tanzania. And then we were able to get more money to scale that up to Africa and South Asia, and then globally through a project called Food Prices for Nutrition. And what we found, first of all, is that to get agreement on what a healthy diet means, we needed to go to something like the least common denominator. The most basic, basic definition from the commonalities among national governments' dietary guidelines. So, in the US, that's MyPlate, or in the UK it's the Eat Well Guide. And each country's dietary guidelines look a little different, but they have these commonalities. So, we distilled that down to six food groups. There's fruits and vegetables, separately. And then there's animal source foods altogether. And in some countries they would separate out milk, like the United States does. And then all starchy staples together. And in some countries, you would separate out whole grains like the US does. And then all edible oils. And those six food groups, in the quantities needed to provide all the nutrients you would need, plus these attributes of food groups beyond just what's in a vitamin pill, turns out to cost about $4 a day. And if you adjust for inflation and differences in the cost of living, the price of housing and so forth around the world, it's very similar. And if you think about seasonal variation in a very remote area, it might rise by 50% in a really bad situation. And if you think about a very remote location where it's difficult to get food to, it might go up to $5.50, but it stays in that range between roughly speaking $2.50 and $5.00. Meanwhile, incomes are varying from around $1.00 a day, and people who cannot possibly afford those more expensive food groups, to $200 a day in which these least expensive items are trivially small in cost compared to the issues that Parke mentioned. We can also talk about what we actually find as the items, and those vary a lot from place to place for some food groups and are very similar to each other in other food groups. So, for example, the least expensive item in an animal source food category is very often dairy in a rich country. But in a really dry, poor country it's dried fish because refrigeration and transport are very expensive. And then to see where there's commonalities in the vegetable category, boy. Onions, tomatoes, carrots are so inexpensive around the world. We've just gotten those supply chains to make the basic ingredients for a vegetable stew really low cost. But then there's all these other different vegetables that are usually more expensive. So, it's very interesting to look at which are the items that would deliver the healthfulness you need and how much they cost. It's surprisingly little from a rich country perspective, and yet still out of reach for so many in low-income countries. Will, thank you for that. And I want to turn now to looking in the US case because I think there's some important commonalities. Parke, can you describe the least cost diet, how it's used here in the US, and its implications for policy? Absolutely. And full disclosure to your audience, this is work on which we've benefited from Norbert's input and wisdom in a way that's been very valuable as a co-author and as an advisor for the quantitative part of what we were doing. For an article in the journal Food Policy, we use the same type of mathematical model that USDA uses when it sets the Thrifty Food Plan, the TFP. A hypothetical diet that's used as the benchmark for the maximum benefit in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is the nation's most important anti-hunger program. And what USDA does with this model diet is it tries to find a hypothetical bundle of foods and beverages that's not too different from what people ordinarily consume. The idea is it should be a familiar diet, it should be one that's reasonably tasty, that people clearly already accept enough. But it can't be exactly that diet. It has to be different enough at least to meet a cost target and to meet a whole long list of nutrition criteria. Including getting enough of the particular nutrients, things like enough calcium or enough protein, and also, matching food group goals reasonably well. Things like having enough fruits, enough vegetables, enough dairy. When, USDA does that, it finds that it's fairly difficult. It's fairly difficult to meet all those goals at once, at a cost and a cost goal all at the same time. And so, it ends up choosing this hypothetical diet that's almost maybe more different than would feel most comfortable from people's typical average consumption. Thank you, Parke. I'm interested to understand the policy implications of this least cost diet. You suggested something about the Thrifty Food Plan and the maximum benefit levels. Can you tell us a little bit more about the policies that are relevant? Yes, so the Thrifty Food Plan update that USDA does every five years has a much bigger policy importance now than it did a few years ago. I used to tell my students that you shouldn't overstate how much policy importance this update has. It might matter a little bit less than you would think. And the reason was because every time they update the Thrifty Food Plan, they use the cost target that is the inflation adjusted or the real cost of the previous edition. It's a little bit as if nobody wanted to open up the whole can of worms about what should the SNAP benefit be in the first place. But everything changed with the update in 2021. In 2021, researchers at the US Department of Agriculture found that it was not possible at the old cost target to find a diet that met all of the nutrition criteria - at all. Even if you were willing to have a diet that was quite different from people's typical consumption. And so, they ended up increasing the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan in small increments until they found a solution to this mathematical model using data on real world prices and on the nutrition characteristics of these foods. And this led to a 21% increase in the permanent value of the maximum SNAP benefit. Many people didn't notice that increase all that much because the increase came into effect at just about the same time that a temporary boost during the COVID era to SNAP benefits was being taken away. So there had been a temporary boost to how much benefits people got as that was taken away at the end of the start of the COVID pandemic then this permanent increase came in and it kind of softened the blow from that change in benefits at that time. But it now ends up meaning that the SNAP benefit is substantially higher than it would've been without this 2021 increase. And there's a lot of policy attention on this in the current Congress and in the current administration. There's perhaps a skeptical eye on whether this increase was good policy. And so, there are proposals to essentially take away the ability to update the Thrifty Food Plan change the maximum SNAP benefit automatically, as it used to. As you know, Norbert, this is part of all sorts of things going on currently. Like we heard in the news, just last week, about plans to end collecting household food security measurement using a major national survey. And so there will be sort of possibly less information about how these programs are doing and whether a certain SNAP benefit is needed in order to protect people from food insecurity and hunger. Parke, this is really important and I'm grateful that we're able to talk about this today in that SNAP benefit levels are still determined by this mathematical program that's supposed to represent a nutritionally adequate diet that also reflects food preferences. And I don't know how many people really understand or appreciate that. I can say I didn't understand or appreciate it until working more in this project. I think it's critical for our listeners to understand just how important this particular mathematical model is, and what it says about what a nutritionally adequate diet looks like in this country. I know the US is one of the countries that uses a model diet like this to help set policy. Will, I'd like to turn to you to see what ways other nations are using this sort of model diet. How have you seen policy receive information from these model diets? It's been a remarkable thing where those initial computational papers that we were able to publish in first in 2018, '19, '20, and governments asking how could we use this in practice. Parke has laid out how it's used in the US with regard to the benefit level of SNAP. The US Thrifty Food Plan has many constraints in addition to the basic ones for the Healthy Diet Basket that I described. Because clearly that Healthy Diet Basket minimum is not something anyone in America would think is acceptable. Just to have milk and frozen vegetables and low-cost bread, that jar peanut butter and that's it. Like that would be clearly not okay. So, internationally what's happened is that first starting in 2020, and then using the current formula in 2022, the United Nations agencies together with the World Bank have done global monitoring of food and nutrition security using this method. So, the least cost items to meet the Healthy Diet Basket in each country provide this global estimate that about a third of the global population have income available for food after taking account of their non-food needs. That is insufficient to buy this healthy diet. What they're actually eating is just starchy staples, oil, some calories from low-cost sugar and that's it. And very small quantities of the fruits and vegetables. And animal source foods are the expensive ones. So, countries have the opportunity to begin calculating this themselves alongside their normal monitoring of inflation with a consumer price index. The first country to do that was Nigeria. And Nigeria began publishing this in January 2024. And it so happened that the country's national minimum wage for civil servants was up for debate at that time. And this was a newly published statistic that turned out to be enormously important for the civil society advocates and the labor unions who were trying to explain why a higher civil service minimum wage was needed. This is for the people who are serving tea or the drivers and the low wage people in these government service agencies. And able to measure how many household members could you feed a healthy diet with a day's worth of the monthly wage. So social protection in the sense of minimum wage and then used in other countries regarding something like our US SNAP program or something like our US WIC program. And trying to define how big should those benefit levels be. That's been the first use. A second use that's emerging is targeting the supply chains for the low-cost vegetables and animal source foods and asking what from experience elsewhere could be an inexpensive animal source food. What could be the most inexpensive fruits. What could be the most inexpensive vegetables? And that is the type of work that we're doing now with governments with continued funding from the Gates Foundation and the UK International Development Agency. Will, it's fascinating to hear this example from Nigeria where all of the work that you all have been doing sort of shows up in this kind of debate. And it really speaks to the power of the research that we all are trying to do as we try to inform policy. Now, as we discussed the least cost diet, there was something that I heard from both of you. Are these diets that people really want? I'm interested to understand a little bit more about that because this is a really critical space.Will, what do we know about the lived experiences of those affected by least cost diet policy implementation. How are real people affected? It's such an important and interesting question, just out of curiosity, but also for just our human understanding of what life is like for people. And then of course the policy actions that could improve. So, to be clear, we've only had these millions of least cost diets, these benchmark 'access to' at a market near you. These are open markets that might be happening twice a week or sometimes all seven days of the week in a small town, in an African country or a urban bodega type market or a supermarket across Asia, Africa. We've only begun to have these benchmarks against which to compare actual food choice, as I mentioned, since 2022. And then really only since 2024 have been able to investigate this question. We're only beginning to match up these benchmark diets to what people actually choose. But the pattern we're seeing is that in low and lower middle-income countries, people definitely spend their money to go towards that healthy diet basket goal. They don't spend all of their additional money on that. But if you improve affordability throughout the range of country incomes - from the lowest income countries in Africa, Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, to middle income countries in Africa, like Ghana, Indonesia, an upper middle-income country - people do spend their money to get more animal source foods, more fruits and vegetables, and to reduce the amount of the low cost starchy staples. They do increase the amount of discretionary, sugary meals. And a lot of what they're eating exits the healthy diet basket because there's too much added sodium, too much added sugar. And so, things that would've been healthy become unhealthy because of processing or in a restaurant setting. So, people do spend their money on that. But they are moving towards a healthy diet. That breaks down somewhere in the upper income and high-income countries where additional spending becomes very little correlated with the Healthy Diet Basket. What happens is people way overshoot the Healthy Diet Basket targets for animal source foods and for edible oils because I don't know if you've ever tried it, but one really delicious thing is fried meat. People love it. And even low middle income people overshoot on that. And that displaces the other elements of a healthy diet. And then there's a lot of upgrading, if you will, within the food group. So, people are spending additional money on nicer vegetables. Nicer fruits. Nicer animal source foods without increasing the total amount of them in addition to having overshot the healthy diet levels of many of those food groups. Which of course takes away from the food you would need from the fruits, the vegetables, and the pulses, nuts and seeds, that almost no one gets as much as is considered healthy, of that pulses, nuts and seeds category. Thank you. And I want to shift this to the US example. So, Parke, can you tell us a bit more about the lived experience of those affected by least cost diet policy? How are real people affected? One of the things I've enjoyed about this project that you and I got to work on, Norbert, in cooperation with other colleagues, is that it had both a quantitative and a qualitative part to it. Now, our colleague Sarah Folta led some of the qualitative interviews, sort of real interviews with people in food pantries in four states around the country. And this was published recently in the Journal of Health Education and Behavior. And we asked people about their goals and about what are the different difficulties or constraints that keep them from achieving those goals. And what came out of that was that people often talk about whether their budget constraints and whether their financial difficulties take away their autonomy to sort of be in charge of their own food choices. And this was something that Sarah emphasized as she sort of helped lead us through a process of digesting what was the key findings from these interviews with people. One of the things I liked about doing this study is that because the quantitative and the qualitative part, each had this characteristic of being about what do people want to achieve. This showed up mathematically in the constrained optimization model, but it also showed up in the conversations with people in the food pantry. And what are the constraints that keep people from achieving it. You know, the mathematical model, these are things like all the nutrition constraints and the cost constraints. And then in the real conversations, it's something that people raise in very plain language about what are all the difficulties they have. Either in satisfying their own nutrition aspirations or satisfying some of the requirements for one person or another in the family. Like if people have special diets that are needed or if they have to be gluten free or any number of things. Having the diets be culturally appropriate. And so, I feel like this is one of those classic things where different disciplines have wisdom to bring to bear on what's really very much a shared topic. What I hear from both of you is that these diets, while they are computationally interesting and they reveal some critical realities of how people eat, they can't cover everything. People want to eat certain types of foods. Certain types of foods are more culturally relevant. And that's really clear talking to you, Will, about just sort of the range of foods that end up showing up in these least cost diets and how you were having to make some adjustments there. Parke, as you talked about the work with Sarah Folta thinking through autonomy and sort of a sense of self. This kind of leads us to a question that I want to open up to both of you. What's missing when we talk about these least cost diet modeling exercises and what are the policy implications of that? What are the gaps in our understanding of these model diets and what needs to happen to make them reflect reality better? Parke? Well, you know, there's many things that people in our research community are working on. And it goes quite, quite far afield. But I'm just thinking of two related to our quantitative research using the Thrifty Food Plan type models. We've been working with Yiwen Zhao and Linlin Fan at Penn State University on how these models would work if you relaxed some of the constraints. If people's back in a financial sense weren't back up against the wall, but instead they had just a little more space. We were considering what if they had incentives that gave them a discount on fruits and vegetables, for example, through the SNAP program? Or what if they had a healthy bundle of foods provided through the emergency food system, through food banks or food pantries. What is the effect directly in terms of those foods? But also, what is the effect in terms of just relaxing their budget constraints. They get to have a little more of the foods that they find more preferred or that they had been going without. But then also, in terms of sort of your question about the more personal. You know, what is people's personal relationships with food? How does this play out on the ground? We're working with the graduate student Angelica Valdez Valderrama here at the Friedman School, thinking about what some of the cultural assumptions and of the food group constraints in some of these models are. If you sort of came from a different immigrant tradition or if you came from another community, what things would be different in, for example, decisions about what's called the Mediterranean diet or what's called the healthy US style dietary pattern. How much difference do this sort of breadth, cultural breadth of dietary patterns you could consider, how much difference does that make in terms of what's the outcome of this type of hypothetical diet? Will: And I think, you know, from the global perspective, one really interesting thing is when we do combine data sets and look across these very different cultural settings, dry land, Sahelian Africa versus countries that are coastal versus sort of forest inland countries versus all across Asia, south Asia to East Asia, all across Latin America. We do see the role of these cultural factors. And we see them playing out in very systematic ways that people come to their cultural norms for very good reasons. And then pivot and switch away to new cultural norms. You know, American fast food, for example, switching from beef primarily to chicken primarily. That sort of thing becomes very visible in a matter of years. So, in terms of things that are frontiers for us, remember this is early days. Getting many more nutritionists, people in other fields, looking at first of all, it's just what is really needed for health. Getting those health requirements improved and understood better is a key priority. Our Healthy Diet Basket comes from the work of a nutritionist named Anna Herforth, who has gone around the world studying these dietary guidelines internationally. We're about to get the Eat Lancet dietary recommendations announced, and it'll be very interesting to see how those evolve. Second thing is much better data on prices and computing these diets for more different settings at different times, different locations. Settings that are inner city United States versus very rural. And then this question of comparing to actual diets. And just trying to understand what people are seeking when they choose foods that are clearly not these benchmark least cost items. The purpose is to ask how far away and why and how are they far away? And particularly to understand to what degree are these attributes of the foods themselves: the convenience of the packaging, the preparation of the item, the taste, the flavor, the cultural significance of it. To what degree are we looking at the result of aspirations that are really shaped by marketing. Are really shaped by the fire hose of persuasion that companies are investing in every day. And very strategically and constantly iterating to the best possible spokesperson, the best possible ad campaign. Combining billboards and radio and television such that you're surrounded by this. And when you drive down the street and when you walk into the supermarket, there is no greater effort on the planet than the effort to sell us a particular brand of food. Food companies are basically marketing companies attached to a manufacturing facility, and they are spending much more than the entire combined budget of the NIH and CDC, et cetera, to persuade us to eat what we ultimately choose. And we really don't know to what degree it's the actual factors in the food itself versus the marketing campaigns and the way they've evolved. You know, if you had a choice between taking the food system and regulating it the way we regulate, say housing or vehicles. If we were to say your supermarket should be like an auto dealership, right? So, anything in the auto dealership is very heavily regulated. Everything from the paint to where the gear shift is to how the windows work. Everything is heavily regulated because the auto industry has worked with National Transportation Safety Board and every single crash investigation, et cetera, has led to the standards that we have now. We didn't get taxes on cars without airbags to make us choose cars with airbags. They're just required. And same is true for housing, right? You can't just build, you know, an extension deck behind your house any way you want. A city inspector will force you to tear it out if you haven't built it to code. So, you know, we could regulate the grocery store like we do that. It's not going to happen politically but compare that option to treating groceries the way we used to treat the legal services or pharmaceuticals. Which is you couldn't advertise them. You could sell them, and people would choose based on the actual merit of the lawyer or the pharmaceutical, right? Which would have the bigger impact. Right? If there was zero food advertising, you just walked into the grocery store and chose what you liked. Or you regulate the grocery store the same way we regulate automotive or building trades. Obviously, they both matter. There's, you know, this problem that you can't see, taste or smell the healthiness of food. You're always acting on belief and not a fact when you choose something that you're seeking health. We don't know to what extent choice is distorted away from a low-cost healthy diet by things people genuinely want and need. Such as taste, convenience, culture, and so forth. Versus things that they've been persuaded to want. And there's obviously some of both. All of these things matter. But I'm hopeful that through these least cost diets, we can identify that low-cost options are there. And you could feed your family a very healthy diet at the Thrifty Food Plan level in the United States, or even lower. It would take time, it would take attention, it would be hard. You can take some shortcuts to make that within your time budget, right? And the planning budget. And we can identify what those look like thanks to these model diets. It's a very exciting area of work, but we still have a lot to do to define carefully what are the constraints. What are the real objectives here. And how to go about helping people, acquire these foods that we now know are there within a short commuting distance. You may need to take the bus, you may need carpool. But that's what people actually do to go grocery shopping. And when they get there, we can help people to choose items that would genuinely meet their needs at lower cost. Bios Will Masters is a Professor in the Friedman School of Nutrition, with a secondary appointment in Tufts University's Department of Economics. He is coauthor of the new textbook on Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Before coming to Tufts in 2010 he was a faculty member in Agricultural Economics at Purdue University (1991-2010), and also at the University of Zimbabwe (1989-90), Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (2000) and Columbia University (2003-04). He is former editor-in-chief of the journal Agricultural Economics (2006-2011), and an elected Fellow of the American Society for Nutrition (FASN) as well as a Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). At Tufts his courses on economics of agriculture, food and nutrition were recognized with student-nominated, University-wide teaching awards in 2019 and 2022, and he leads over a million dollars annually in externally funded research including work on the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy (https://www.anh-academy.org), as well as projects supporting government efforts to calculate the cost and affordability of healthy diets worldwide and work with private enterprises on data analytics for food markets in Africa. Parke Wilde (PhD, Cornell) is a food economist and professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Previously, he worked for USDA's Economic Research Service. At Tufts, Parke teaches graduate-level courses in statistics, U.S. food policy, and climate change. His research addresses the economics of U.S. food and nutrition policy, including federal nutrition assistance programs. He was Director of Design for the SNAP Healthy Incentives Pilot (HIP) evaluation. He has been a member of the National Academy of Medicine's Food Forum and is on the scientific and technical advisory committee for Menus of Change, an initiative to advance the health and sustainability of the restaurant industry. He directs the USDA-funded Research Innovation and Development Grants in Economics (RIDGE) Partnership. He received the AAEA Distinguished Quality of Communication Award for his textbook, Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan), whose third edition was released in April 2025. 

Our speaker is Ricardo Hausmann who is a Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard's Kennedy School, and he is also the Founder and Director of Harvard's Growth Lab. I want to find out from Ricardo why know-how is so important and why additional capital and labor isn't valuable if workers don't know what to do. Get full access to What Happens Next in 6 Minutes with Larry Bernstein at www.whathappensnextin6minutes.com/subscribe

This week Jelani Cobb drops in to talk about Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, what we don't see onscreen, the promise of Barack Obama, and the rise of Donald Trump. Plus, we preview his new book, Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, 2012-Present. This is a powerhouse episode.About our guest:Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker's writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln's Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union, Policing the Police and THE RIOT REPORT.Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he earned a B.A. in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his MA and doctorate in American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project and the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. He received an Honorary Doctorate for the Advancement of Science and Art from Cooper Union in 2022, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Rutgers University in 2024. York College / CUNY and Teachers College have honored Dr. Cobb with medals.Dr. Cobb was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023.

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!Our guest this week is Jacinda Ardern. She became the world's youngest female head of government at age 37. Ardern served as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, earning global admiration for her empathetic and decisive leadership through crises like the Christchurch attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. Her trademark “be kind” approach redefined what modern political leadership could look like.In 2025, she released her memoir A Different Kind of Power, reflecting on how empathy can drive real progress. It's more than a political memoir, it's a profound insight into how it feels to lead.Since leaving office, Ardern has turned her focus to global initiatives on climate action, online safety, and compassionate leadership. She's a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, a Distinguished Fellow of Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government and a Trustee of Prince William's Earthshot Prize, continuing her work to inspire change on the world stage.She was recently made a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit — a fitting recognition for a leader whose grace and humanity have left a lasting mark far beyond her time in office.We talk about:A kinder definition of leadershipMedia's new incentivesChanging the culture of engagementTaking the money out of politicsThe dangerous loss of nuanceCaring is more important than caring about politicsAllowing politicians to change their mindBuying back guns from civiliansLet's do this!Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyzTwitter: @whrshallwemeetInstagram: @whrshallwemeet

On Tuesday, October 14, 2025 @thebigtentusa‬ convened a dynamic discussion on the forces reshaping American journalism—examining how business models, paywalls, and political influence affect the flow of information in today's media landscape. Featuring Daniella Ballou-Aares of Leadership Now Project and Heidi Przybyla of Get Real News, the conversation delved into the growing strain between democratic values and the financial and political pressures on news organizations. The speakers explored how reduced access to trusted reporting can fuel misinformation and why restoring public confidence in the media depends on transforming how journalism is supported and sustained. The panelists also pointed to signs of renewal across the industry, with independent outlets and emerging creators using social platforms, innovative funding models, and new technologies like AI to connect with audiences and strengthen the foundation of fact-based reporting. Learn more about Leadership Now Project: https://www.leadershipnowproject.org/ Learn More about Get Real News: https://www.getrealnews.org/ ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Daniella Ballou-Aares is Founder and CEO of the Leadership Now Project, a national membership organization of business and thought leaders committed to fixing American democracy. She began her career at Bain & Company, working in the US, South Africa, and the UK, then became a founding Partner at Dalberg, where she led the Americas business and helped grow the startup into the largest social impact strategy firm with 25 offices worldwide. Daniella later served five years in the Obama Administration as Senior Advisor for Development to the Secretary of State under Secretaries Clinton and Kerry. Her perspectives have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Fast Company, POLITICO, and the World Economic Forum. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a 2014 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. Daniella holds an MBA from Harvard, an MPA from the Kennedy School, and a BS from Cornell. Heidi Przybyla is an award-winning investigative and television correspondent championing new approaches to reporting that put Americans first. A veteran journalist, she has regularly broken exclusive stories on how White House, congressional, and presidential policies affect everyday people. Her reporting has spanned top newspaper, digital, radio, and TV outlets, with appearances on CNN, PBS, NPR, CBS, ABC, FOX, and across NBC News platforms. She was part of a team honored with a George Polk Award, Batten Medal, and Toner Prize for reporting on dark money in the making of the Supreme Court, which was also a Pulitzer finalist. Previously, she was an investigative correspondent at NBC and senior political reporter at USA TODAY, where she led coverage of Hillary Clinton's campaign and the 2016 presidential field. In late 2024, Przybyla founded Get Real News, a platform using new technologies and independent journalists to deliver reliable local and national news. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bigtentnews.substack.com

National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common's fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama's best books of the year list. Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class (Scribner, 2024), out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she's working on next. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, Harper's, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her 2020 book She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. A former writing professor, Smarsh has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She lives in rural Kansas, where she is currently at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem. ­­Read Sarah Smarsh's essay “Death of the Farm Family” in The Common here. Learn more about her books and work at her website. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese's Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common's fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama's best books of the year list. Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class (Scribner, 2024), out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she's working on next. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, Harper's, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her 2020 book She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. A former writing professor, Smarsh has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She lives in rural Kansas, where she is currently at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem. ­­Read Sarah Smarsh's essay “Death of the Farm Family” in The Common here. Learn more about her books and work at her website. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese's Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common's fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama's best books of the year list. Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class (Scribner, 2024), out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she's working on next. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, Harper's, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her 2020 book She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. A former writing professor, Smarsh has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She lives in rural Kansas, where she is currently at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem. ­­Read Sarah Smarsh's essay “Death of the Farm Family” in The Common here. Learn more about her books and work at her website. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese's Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common's fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama's best books of the year list. Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class (Scribner, 2024), out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she's working on next. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, Harper's, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her 2020 book She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. A former writing professor, Smarsh has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She lives in rural Kansas, where she is currently at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem. ­­Read Sarah Smarsh's essay “Death of the Farm Family” in The Common here. Learn more about her books and work at her website. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese's Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gordon Hanson is the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Academic Dean for Strategy and Engagement at Harvard Kennedy School. He is best known for his research on the labour market consequences of globalisation, including pioneering work on the China trade shock. Hanson's current research addresses the causes and consequences of regional job loss, the effectiveness of place-based policies in alleviating regional economic distress, and how the energy transition will affect local labour markets. This work is part of the Reimagining the Economy project at the Kennedy School, which Hanson co-directs with Dani Rodrik. In this podcast we discuss America's historical obsession with manufacturing from the Industrial Revolution to today, manufacturing job losses and their impact on non-college workers, how traditional economics fails to measure human flourishing beyond consumption, and much more.    Follow us here for more amazing insights: https://macrohive.com/home-prime/ https://twitter.com/Macro_Hive https://www.linkedin.com/company/macro-hive

Energy has long been used as a weapon. The United Kingdom blocked oil exports to Germany during World War I. Hitler's fall was due in part to losing access to oilfields in the Caucasus. And the most recent example: the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which shocked the global economy.  During the following fifty years, the energy weapon largely receded from the geopolitical stage, and in many countries energy security started to feel like a given. But developments including Russia's weaponization of natural gas against Europe, China's restrictions on critical minerals, and growing trade tensions around the world have brought energy back to the center of great-power competition.  So is this a new age of energy weaponization? What would that mean for global energy security? What new vulnerabilities are emerging as the clean energy transition accelerates and electricity demand surges? And how can countries protect themselves in this new age of fragmentation and rivalry? This week, Bill Loveless speaks with Jason Bordoff and Meghan O'Sullivan about “The Return of the Energy Weapon,” a Foreign Affairs essay published today, in which they explore how, after a fifty-year period of relative stability, the use of energy as a coercive tool of statecraft is making a comeback. Jason is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where he is a professor of professional practice. He is also on the faculty of the Columbia Climate School, where he is cofounding dean emeritus. He previously served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for energy and climate change on the staff of the National Security Council.  Meghan is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, director of the Geopolitics of Energy Projects, and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School. She has served in multiple senior policymaking roles and has advised national security officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Credits: Hosted by Jason Bordoff and Bill Loveless. Produced by Mary Catherine O'Connor, Caroline Pitman, and Kyu Lee. Engineering by Gregory Vilfranc.  

Mission Driven - How To Make Better Decisions - From Former Commanding Officer US Navy SEAL Team TwoGuest:Mike Hayes A Managing Director at Insight Partners * Former Commanding Officer of US Navy SEAL Team TWO* Managing Director, Insight Partners* Author of National Bestseller Mission Driven (distilled nicely in this article)All of Mike's profits from his book sales go to a 501(c)(3) he founded, The 1162 Foundation, which pays off mortgages for Gold Star families – he's paid off 12 widows' mortgages to date.AUMRegulatory assets under management $90B and 600 portfolio managers. Timeless LessonsLeaders Don't need to make the best decision.They need to make sure the best decision gets made. Team, Teammate, SelfAlgin these 3 things – for purpose and elite performance:What gives someone energy?What are they good at?What's good for the business?Best adviceWhenever you are having a hard day, find someone else who's having a harder day and help them. Social Profiles* Instagram @thisis.mikehayes* X @thisismikehayes* LinkedInBioMike Hayes is Managing Director at Insight Partners, a global software investment firm with $90B+ in regulatory assets under management and 800+ portfolio companies across every stage of growth.Prior to Insight, Mike was Chief Operating Officer at VMware, where he led the company's worldwide business operations, their SaaS transition, and the successful acquisition into Broadcom for $94B. Before that, Mike served as Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Operations for Cognizant Technologies, where he ran a $2B P&L for Cognizant's global financial services clients.Mike previously spent four years at Bridgewater Associates, an investment management firm, where he served in Chief of Staff to CEO and COO roles. Prior to Bridgewater, he spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy SEALs where his career began as one of 19 graduates from a class of 120. Mike served throughout South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, including the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.His last job in the Navy was the Commanding Officer of SEAL Team TWO, which included ten months as the Commander of a 2,000-person Special Operations Task Force in southeastern Afghanistan. Before that, Mike was selected as a White House Fellow ('08/'09) and served two years as Director of Defense Policy and Strategy at the National Security Council.In the Bush Administration, Mike was responsible for the START Treaty, where he produced a new proposed START Treaty and flew to Russia for negotiations. In the Obama administration, he led the White House response to President Obama's first major foreign policy showdown — the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia. Prior to the White House Fellowship, Mike served as the Deputy Commander for all Special Operations in Anbar Province, Iraq.Mike holds an M.A. in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School and received his B.A. from Holy Cross College, where he was an active Big Brother. His military decorations include the Bronze Star for valor in combat in Iraq, a Bronze Star for Afghanistan, and the Defense Superior Service Medal from the White House.Mike is the author of the best-seller Never Enough: A Navy SEAL Commander on Living a Life of Excellence, Agility, and Meaning, and donates all profits to a 501(c)(3) he started that pays off mortgages for Gold Star widows and children.He serves on the board of Immuta, a data governance company, and is the founding board member of the National Medal of Honor Museum. Mike is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is fluent in German and Spanish, frequently speaks about leadership and elite organizations, and enjoys mentoring others to success.He is a life-long Sox/Pats fan, but most enjoys laughing with his wife, Anita, and their 24-year-old daughter, Maeson.

In academia, private sector, government and media, Professor Juliette Kayyem is an international leader in crisis management and homeland security. She serves as the faculty chair of the Homeland Security and Security and Global Health Projects at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Previously, she served as President Obama's Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and as MA Governor Deval Patrick's Homeland Security Advisor. She is an on-air CNN Senior National Security Analyst, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and contributing writer for The Atlantic and Boston's local NPR station, GBH. She also consults for governors, mayors, public and private institutions on crisis management. She is a Senior Advisor to Teneo, the global consulting firm, and founded her own consulting firm to support the preparedness needs of companies, from Fortune 500 to startups. Juliette is the author or editor of six books, including her most recent "The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters” Join us for this important, insightful conversation about Venezuela, the Argentina bailout, and Trump 2.0's foreign policy and military strategy...or lack thereof Got somethin' to say?! Email us at BackroomAndy@gmail.com Leave us a message: 845-307-7446 Twitter: @AndyOstroy Produced by Andy Ostroy, Matty Rosenberg, and Jennifer Hammoud @ Radio Free Rhiniecliff Design by Cricket Lengyel

Dr. Mark McClellan has served as a Member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But his experiences before, and accomplishments following these leadership roles at the highest levels of government health policy are equally important to his perspective on the healthcare ecosystem – especially during a time of rapid policy change.Dr. McClellan always intended on pursuing a medical degree and entered a joint Harvard-MIT program that took him in a slightly different direction. He ended up studying economics and the rising cost of healthcare at MIT. He ultimately earned a medical degree from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, and a master's in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School.Dr. McClellan began his career at the Treasury Department in the Clinton Administration, and returned to public service under the George W. Bush Administration where he led the FDA and CMS. Today, Dr. McClellan is the Robert J. Margolis, M.D., Professor of Business, Medicine and Policy at Duke University and the founding Director of the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy. His work centers on improving health care through policy and research, with a focus on payment reforms, quality, value, and biomedical innovation.With his expertise in medicine, economics and public policy, Dr. McClellan talked to Keith Figlioli in this episode of Healthcare is Hard to share his perspective on adapting to rapid change in the current healthcare landscape. Topics they discussed include:Misalignment of innovation and outcomes. While advancements in digital health are coming to market faster than ever before, Dr. McClellan says there's still a lack of technology truly centered on keeping patients healthy. He says traditional payment methods make it hard to support this type of innovation. For example, advancements in AI are helping physicians gather information for prior authorization requests, and ambient scribing saves time with note taking and administration. But these technologies essentially help providers see more fee-for-service patients or bill for more profitable services. He argues that more outcome-oriented payments are needed to advance technology-embedded care models. The evolution of value-based care. After Congress passed the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003 to establish Medicare Advantage, Dr. McClellan became administrator of CMS at the President's request to lead its implementation. With unique insight from leading some of the earliest VBC programs, he shared his thoughts on the speed of adoption and why it hasn't happened faster. He discussed how early MA models needed to be based on existing fee-for-service infrastructure, his surprise that not much has changed, and his optimism that it's finally starting to.Mobilizing private capital for public health. Private investment will be essential to support the significant changes required to improve healthcare – especially with uncertainties around future levels of government funding. Dr. McClellan explained how the Duke-Margolis Capital Impact Council (CIC) was launched to guide and improve the role of private investment in healthcare. He described how members of the council are developing and sharing practices for investors and their portfolio companies to track health value return on investment alongside financial ROI.To hear Dr. McClellan and Keith discuss these topics and more, listen to this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders.

This week on Facing the Future, former CBO director Doug Elmendorf of Harvard's Kennedy School discussed the state of the economy, the government shutdown and why policymakers should not rely on economic growth alone to rein in the unsustainable growth of debt.

This week on Facing the Future, former CBO director Doug Elmendorf of Harvard's Kennedy School discussed the state of the economy, the government shutdown and why policymakers should not rely on economic growth alone to rein in the unsustainable growth of debt.

Mike speaks with Nicholas Burns, Managing Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Burns previously served as the U.S. Ambassador to the People's Republic of China from 2021-2025. They discuss where we are in U.S.-China relations, how the relationship has become much more complicated in recent years, how the U.S. is working with allies and partners in the region, their vital role in supporting U.S. strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific, and much more.

In this episode of ‘My Identity' Professor Colin Graham (Maynooth) is in conversation with Leo Varadkar. Leo Varadkar was Taoiseach of Ireland from 2017 to 2020 and from 2022 to 2024. During the thirteen years he spent in cabinet, he held many positions across the Ministries of Transport, Tourism and Sport, Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Social Protection, and Health. After stepping down from political life in late 2024, he was appointed as a Hauser Leader at the Center for Public Leadership in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a Board Member of Brussels based Care4Everybody and writes a column for the Sunday Times Ireland. In this episode he discusses, among other things, national identity, religion, family and his book: Speaking My Mind. About the Series My Identity is hosted by Professor Colin Graham, Maynooth. In this series, Colin is in conversation with a range of people whose ideas, work and life experiences shed light on the topic of identity on the Island of Ireland. My Identity is part of the ARINS project. Colin Graham is Professor English and formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Maynooth University. His books include Northern Ireland: Thirty Years of Photography, Deconstructing Ireland and Ideologies of Epic. He was editor of The Irish Review from 2004 to 2020. During the Brexit negotiations he created the Twitter account @borderirish and wrote the book I am the Border, so I am, published by HarperCollins. ARINS: Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South brings together experts to provide evidence-based research and analysis on the most significant questions of policy and public debate facing the island of Ireland, north and south. The project publishes, facilitates and disseminates research on the challenges and opportunities presented to the island in a post-Brexit context, with the intention of contributing to an informed public discourse. More information can be found at www.arinsproject.com ARINS is a joint project of The Royal Irish Academy, an all-island body, and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs. My Identity is hosted by Professor Colin Graham. Podcast management and production by Dr Susie Deedigan.

We sit down with Arielle Galinsky, CEO and co-founder of The Legacy Project Incorporated. Arielle is not only a dual-degree graduate student at Yale Law and Harvard's Kennedy School, but she's also a passionate advocate for intergenerational connections and storytelling.The Legacy Project, which now spans 25 college campuses, began from Arielle's personal drive to preserve the life stories of older adults—a mission fueled by loss in her own family and a desire to bridge the gap between generations. In our conversation, Arielle shares how the Legacy Project grew from high school interviews to a fast-growing nonprofit, the challenges of launching a student-led organization, and the critical importance of including young people in conversations about aging.Together, we explore the power of sharing life stories across generations, how college students are building bonds with seniors, and why these connections matter more than ever in today's world. You'll hear inspiring insights, learn practical ways to get involved, and gain a vision for the future of intergenerational engagement in communities everywhere.If you like this episode, please let us know. We appreciate the feed back, and your support of offset costs of producing the podcast!Here are 3 key takeaways:Intergenerational Connections are Powerful: The Legacy Project is growing across 25+ college campuses, pairing students with seniors to record life stories. Both seniors and students consistently find value in these relationships, breaking down age-related stereotypes and fostering mutual learning.Storytelling as Civic Engagement: Arielle emphasized that sharing stories isn't just "feel good" work—it's a tool for combating social isolation, reducing ageism, and even driving community change. The project is now launching an Intergenerational Changemakers fellowship to encourage civic collaborations across ages.Opportunities & Resources Abound: From forming campus chapters to collaborating with local senior communities and national organizations like Generations United, there are so many ways to get involved. Whether you're a student, educator, or community member, resources and guidance are available to help you create or join an intergenerational initiative.Moments00:00 Shaping Long-Term Care Policy04:44 "Intergenerational Storytelling Legacy Project"08:24 Legacy Project Integration in Coursework11:55 Conference Sparks Growth in Aging Services15:05 "Mutual Benefits of Generational Ties"18:36 Growing Industry: Services for Seniors20:02 Shift from Recruitment to Expansion24:37 Podcast Resource on Legacy Project25:54 Youth Caregivers Face Unique Challenges30:27 "Intergenerational Change Makers" Initiative32:17 "Fostering Multigenerational Community Dialogue"38:21 Live an Intergenerational Lifestyle39:21 "Embrace Life's Stories"We would love to hear from you.Give us your feedback, or suggest a topic, by leaving us a voice message.Email us at hello@lookingforwardourway.com.Find us on Bluesky and Facebook.Please review our podcast on...

Kaj Larsen: From Navy SEAL to Groundbreaking Journalist This week on the Team Never Quit Podcast, Marcus and Melanie welcome an extraordinary guest whose life reads like an action thriller—Kaj Larsen. Born in Santa Cruz, California, Kaj earned his Political Science degree from UC Santa Cruz and went on to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for a master's in Public Policy, where he was a Shorenstein Center fellow and a joint fellow at Tufts Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies. Kaj's journey is anything but ordinary. Before breaking stories on global conflict zones, he served five years on active duty as a U.S. Navy SEAL Lieutenant leading special operations overseas. He continues to serve in the SEAL reserves with U.S. Special Operations Command. As an award-winning filmmaker and journalist, Kaj has reported from some of the most dangerous places on earth—Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and beyond—producing groundbreaking documentaries on terrorism, national security, and humanitarian crises. He's been a senior correspondent at NowThis News, hosted the Emmy Award-winning VICE on HBO, and developed the Vanguard Journalism series for Current TV. Kaj made headlines for being the first journalist to bring waterboarding to public attention—by undergoing it himself on camera—and for breaking media silence in Mogadishu as the first Western TV journalist there in over a decade. Outside the newsroom, Kaj is a two-time national open-water swimming champion, an Escape from Alcatraz duathlon competitor, and a dedicated practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Muay Thai boxing. His commitment to service extends beyond reporting: he co-founded The Mission Continues and serves on the boards of Team Rubicon Global and other veteran service organizations, deploying for humanitarian missions around the world. Join us as Kaj shares stories from his remarkable career—what it takes to tell the truth from the frontlines, the lessons learned from military service and global reporting, and why resilience and service are at the heart of his mission. Tune in for a gripping, behind-the-scenes look at a life dedicated to serving, reporting, and making an impact on a global scale. In this episode you will hear: • [COVID} Here's a crisis that is about health, and you're shutting down wellness. (7:10) • Murph was my roommate when I first got to BUD/S. He's the first person I met. (32:04) • The thing that got me through was the old “I guess you just have to do it.” (37:12) • Your inner monologue and how you talk to yourself is the only thing that gets you through. (38:34) • Everybody wants to be a frog man on a sunny day. (38:52) • You gotta be careful who you surround yourself with, because cowardice is contagious. (42:37) • I could cover any story I wanted, anywhere in the world. Anything I thought was important. (60:52) • I was always working on helping veterans (62:56) • Purpose maters. (64:09) • The real truth is the greatest and most consistent ways for Americans to build wealth over the last 50 years has been investing in the stock market. (66:22) • A lot of people don't understand the concept of compound interest. (77:40) • We're the greatest economy the world has ever seen. (82:26) Support Kaj:  www.kajlarsen.com - Tactical Wealth podcast - IG: Kajlarsen Support TNQ   - IG: team_neverquit , marcusluttrell , melanieluttrell , huntero13   -  https://www.patreon.com/teamneverquit Sponsors:   - Navyfederal.org        - meetfabiric.com/TNQ   - masterclass.com/TNQ   - Prizepicks (TNQ)   - Dripdrop.com/TNQ   -  cargurus.com/TNQ    - armslist.com/TNQ    -  PXGapparel.com/TNQ   - bruntworkwear.com/TNQ    - Selectquote.com/TNQ    - Groundnews.com/TNQ    - shipsticks.com/TNQ    - strawberry.me/TNQ    - stopboxusa.com {TNQ}    - ghostbed.com/TNQ [TNQ]   -  kalshi.com/TNQ   -  joinbilt.com/TNQ    - Tonal.com [TNQ]   - greenlight.com/TNQ   - PDSDebt.com/TNQ   - drinkAG1.com/TNQ   - Shadyrays.com [TNQ]   - qualialife.com/TNQ [TNQ]   - Hims.com/TNQ   - Shopify.com/TNQ   - Aura.com/TNQ   - TAKELEAN.com [TNQ]   - usejoymode.com [TNQ]

In this conversation, host Daniel Johnson welcomes author and leader Peter Greer, who discusses his latest book, How Leaders Lose Their Way: And How to Make Sure It Doesn't Happen to You. Drawing from decades of leadership experience and research, Peter explores the subtle and often invisible forces that cause leaders to drift from their mission, values, and integrity. The episode is a deep dive into the habits, mindsets, and relationships that help leaders finish well.

Our first scholar in the series is Kartik Srivastava, who is a PhD candidate at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. Before this, he received his bachelor's degree from Yale University, where he majored in Economics and Engineering Sciences.  His research focuses on development economics, labor economics, and political economy. We spoke about his job market paper titled, Familiar strangers: Evidence from referral-based hiring experiments in India. We talked his large-scale experiment at a footwear manufacturing firm in Delhi, on how referral-based hiring improve firm productivity, cohesion, and inclusion, differences in hiring between higher caste versus lower caste networks, feudalism and labor opportunities, and much more. Recorded August 28th, 2025. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Connect with Ideas of India Follow us on X Follow Shruti on X Follow Kartik on X Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox.

Eli Reed was born in the US in 1946 and studied pictorial illustration at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, graduating in 1969. In 1982, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. At Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he studied political science, urban affairs, and the prospects for peace in Central America.Eli began photographing as a freelancer in 1970. His work from El Salvador, Guatemala and other Central American countries attracted the attention of Magnum, he was the first African American photographer, and indeed the first person of colour, to join the agency, becoming a full member in 1988.In the same year, Eli photographed the effects of poverty on America's children for a film documentary called Poorest in the Land of Plenty, narrated by Maya Angelou. He went on to work as a stills photographer for major motion pictures. His video documentary Getting Out was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1993 and honored by the 1996 Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame International Film and Video Competition in the documentary category.Eli's special reports include a long-term study which became his first, highly acclaimed book, Beirut, City of Regrets; the ousting of Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti (1986); US military action in Panama (1989); the Walled City in Hong Kong; and, perhaps most notably, his documentation of African American experience over more than 20 years. Spanning the 1970s through the end of the 1990s, his book Black in America includes images from the Crown Heights riots and the Million Man March. In 2015, he published his first career retrospective, A Long Walk Home.Eli has lectured and taught at the International Center of Photography, Columbia University, New York University, University of Texas and Harvard University and is a member of Kamoinge, the collective of black photographers founded in 1963 and the longest continuously running non-profit group in the history of photography. On episode 264, Eli discusses, among other things:His ongoing mentoring of former studentsHow working in a hospital was good prep for the kind of work he doesGrowing up in the Delaney Homes housing project in Perth Amboy, NJHow a visiting art critic gave him early encouragement at schoolLosing his mum at 12 years oldThe importance of certain teachers and mentors, especially Donal GreenhouseHow his project Black In America came aboutWorking for the San Francisco ExaminerJoining Eugene Smith's workshop after a long waitHow Philip Jones Griffiths invited him to join MagnumWhether he is still an optimist?Photographing TrumpKamoingeA teaser about the book he is writingBeing the first person of colour to join Magnum PhotosReferenced:Jaqueline KennedyRoy De CaravaW Gene SmithBruce DavidsonEugene RichardsSusan MeiselasSon of SamGordon ParksGilles Peress Become a A Small Voice podcast member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of 200+ previous episodes for £5 per month.Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides.Follow me on Instagram here.Build Yourself a Squarespace Website video course here.

MDJ Script/ Top Stories for September 10th Publish Date:  September 10th    Commercial: From the BG Ad Group Studio, Welcome to the Marietta Daily Journal Podcast.    Today is Wednesday, September 10th and Happy Birthday to Roger Maris I’m Keith Ippolito and here are the stories Cobb is talking about, presented by Times Journal Cobb Habitat Interfaith Coalition dedicate 25th home Austell officials call for greater oversight after Labor Day show goes largely unnoticed Investigation underway after Waffle House brawl in east Cobb All of this and more is coming up on the Marietta Daily Journal Podcast, and if you are looking for community news, we encourage you to listen and subscribe!  BREAK: INGLES 9 STORY 1: Cobb Habitat Interfaith Coalition dedicate 25th home  On Sept. 7, the Cobb Interfaith Habitat Coalition handed over the keys to their 25th Habitat house—a future home for D, a Cobb County public servant, and his family. D works long hours as a Project Utility Manager for Cobb DOT, keeping the county’s infrastructure running smoothly. But despite his steady job, he and his wife, Dreika, have struggled to find affordable housing in the very community he serves. Their current rental? Cramped, water-damaged, and unsafe. But now, with Habitat’s help, they’re building a home—a real home—with space for their kids to play and a future that feels secure. STORY 2: Austell officials call for greater oversight after Labor Day show goes largely unnoticed An Austell city-sponsored Labor Day celebration fizzled, leaving residents and officials frustrated and pointing fingers. Councilwoman Meredith Adams said she didn’t even know about the event until she heard music from her house. “Less than 200 people showed up,” she said, despite the city spending $7,500 on fireworks. The Austell Business Association, which organized the event, struggled with volunteers and promotion. Residents like Claudette Parker demanded better communication. Mayor Ollie Clemons promised more oversight moving forward. STORY 3: Investigation underway after Waffle House brawl in east Cobb Cobb Police are on the hunt for a group of teens who turned an east Cobb Waffle House into chaos early Sunday morning. It all went down around 1:58 a.m. at the Sandy Plains Road location. Witnesses say the teens were asked to leave multiple times but refused—then things got ugly. Plates were knocked off counters, and some of the teens jumped over the counter into the kitchen. One staff member was put in a headlock and hit repeatedly. A video of the fight surfaced online, sparking rumors the teens were local high school students, though police haven’t confirmed any connection. The investigation is ongoing. We have opportunities for sponsors to get great engagement on these shows. Call 770.799.6810 for more info.  We’ll be right back. Break: COBB MAKE A WISH STORY 4: Former Smyrna mayor's granddaughter seriously injured by falling branch Former Smyrna Mayor Max Bacon’s 12-year-old granddaughter, Claudia, was seriously injured over the weekend when a tree branch fell on her during the Paulding Meadows Arts Festival. A sudden storm brought the branch down, striking Claudia in the head. “It was a huge tree, and she’s just a small girl,” reads a GoFundMe set up for her recovery. She suffered a fractured skull, a bruised lung, and a broken rib, and required a blood transfusion. Claudia faces a long recovery ahead. STORY 5: After 41 years, Cobb authorities identify Mableton woman as 1984 homicide victim After 41 long years, Cobb Police have finally given a name to the young woman found near the Chattahoochee River in 1984: Veronica Jane Miller. Miller, just 20 at the time, was identified through groundbreaking genetic genealogy work by Othram Labs. A DNA match with a half-sister and family testimony confirmed it. Her partially clothed remains were discovered in May 1984, but for decades, her identity—and her story—remained a mystery. Metal pins in her ankle, facial reconstruction surgery, and a life cut short. Now, her family knows. But her case, ruled a homicide, is far from closed. Anyone with information is urged to come forward. Break: STORY 6: Cobb Veterans Memorial Foundation vows to keep 'promises made'  The Cobb Veterans Memorial Foundation isn’t giving up. Despite setbacks, they’re determined to raise the $1 million still needed to break ground on the long-promised memorial, according to a letter from President Donna Rowe. Last month, the Cobb Commission rejected a proposal to reallocate $1 million in SPLOST funds to the project, citing an agreement that the foundation would primarily fundraise. Rowe pushed back, saying the foundation has exceeded its fundraising goals, averaging $34,000 a month. STORY 7: Renowned AI expert Kathy Pham speaks at Kennesaw State’s inaugural Presidential Lecture Series event  Kennesaw State kicked off its Presidential Lecture Series on Sept. 8 with a bang—computer scientist and entrepreneur Kathy Pham took the stage to talk about artificial intelligence, a field where KSU is quickly making waves. Pham, VP of AI at Workday and a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, spoke to a packed house on “AI Across Boundaries: The Only Way Forward.” Her message? AI isn’t just about tech—it’s about collaboration. Industry, academia, government, and advocacy all need to work together to shape its future. KSU’s commitment to AI? Impressive. From launching a master’s program to groundbreaking research—like non-invasive blood sugar monitors and pest protection for crops—the university is diving headfirst into the AI revolution. We’ll have closing comments after this. Break: TRUCK A PALOOZA Signoff-   Thanks again for hanging out with us on today’s Marietta Daily Journal Podcast. If you enjoy these shows, we encourage you to check out our other offerings, like the Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast, the Marietta Daily Journal, or the Community Podcast for Rockdale Newton and Morgan Counties. Read more about all our stories and get other great content at www.mdjonline.com Did you know over 50% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly? Giving you important news about our community and telling great stories are what we do. Make sure you join us for our next episode and be sure to share this podcast on social media with your friends and family. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Briefing and be sure to like, follow, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the BG Podcast Network Show Sponsors: www.ingles-markets.com #NewsPodcast #CurrentEvents #TopHeadlines #BreakingNews #PodcastDiscussion #PodcastNews #InDepthAnalysis #NewsAnalysis #PodcastTrending #WorldNews #LocalNews #GlobalNews #PodcastInsights #NewsBrief #PodcastUpdate #NewsRoundup #WeeklyNews #DailyNews #PodcastInterviews #HotTopics #PodcastOpinions #InvestigativeJournalism #BehindTheHeadlines #PodcastMedia #NewsStories #PodcastReports #JournalismMatters #PodcastPerspectives #NewsCommentary #PodcastListeners #NewsPodcastCommunity #NewsSource #PodcastCuration #WorldAffairs #PodcastUpdates #AudioNews #PodcastJournalism #EmergingStories #NewsFlash #PodcastConversations See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My conversation with Bruce begins at 33 mins in today after my headlines and clip show Stand Up is a daily podcast. I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. This show is Ad free and fully supported by listeners like you! Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 750 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous souls Learn more about my guest Bruce Schneier Buy his books!  REWIRING DEMOCRACY: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship I am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people. I've been writing about security issues on my blog since 2004, and in my monthly newsletter since 1998. I'm a fellow and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, a board member of EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc. This personal website expresses the opinions of none of those organizations. Join us Monday's and Thursday's at 8EST for our Bi Weekly Happy Hour Hangout's !  Pete on Blue Sky Pete on Threads Pete on Tik Tok Pete on YouTube  Pete on Twitter Pete On Instagram Pete Personal FB page Stand Up with Pete FB page All things Jon Carroll  Follow and Support Pete Coe Buy Ava's Art  Hire DJ Monzyk to build your website or help you with Marketing Gift a Subscription https://www.patreon.com/PeteDominick/gift  

Are the decisions you are making now aligning with your ultimate purpose? The earlier you can course correct, the better. Today's guest, Peter Greer, talks about how we are all bound to face times that test us. Those are the moments that matter; it's where god does some of the most significant work on us. I hope this episode is as encouraging to you as it was for me.    In this episode, you'll discover…  Key trait to win at home and at work (1:15) Balance when making impact and meaning  (7:40) Can you do the work before you hit the wall? (13:00) Why Peter wrote Rooting for Rivals (18:47) Peter's Bio:  Peter Greer is president and CEO of HOPE International, a global Christ-centered organization working to alleviate physical and spiritual poverty in more than 27 countries around the world. Peter's favorite part of his role is spending time with the remarkable entrepreneurs HOPE serves. A graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School, Peter has co-authored 15 books, including Lead with Prayer, Mission Drift, and Rooting for Rivals. He lives with his wife, Laurel, and their four children in Lancaster, PA   What's Next?  NEW!! Join the new RISE community. Check out my newest book, 'Rise and Go', HERE!

There's a conservative wave washing over some local governments in the Valley's suburbs. Some point to Donald Trump's aggressive efforts to erase DEI policies in city businesses. Others contend it's a natural swing of the pendulum to correct governing bodies that they say have leaned too far left. This week on The Gaggle, we are joined by an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Together we discuss why this phenomenon is happening and what the consequences of knowing the political allegiances of local councils are. ⁠Read the article here⁠⁠ Email us! thegaggle@arizonarepublic.com Leave us a voicemail: 602-444-0804 Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tik Tok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Guest: Justin de Benedictis-Kessner⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Mary Jo Pitzl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Ron Hansen⁠⁠⁠⁠ Producer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amanda Luberto⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

#226: General Stanley McChrystal, a retired four-star general, is best known for his leadership as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and as head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), where he reshaped counterterrorism efforts and interagency collaboration. Over his decorated military career, he commanded elite units such as the 75th Ranger Regiment and spent more than six years deployed to combat following 9/11. In 2009, he was appointed Commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan and NATO ISAF, leading over 150,000 troops from 45 allied nations until his retirement from the Army in 2010.After retiring from military service, McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group in 2011, a leadership advisory firm that works with global businesses to help them navigate complexity and build stronger, more adaptive teams. He has also served as a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he taught courses on leadership. In addition, he sits on the boards of several major companies, including JetBlue Airways, Siemens Government Technology, and Navistar International, and is a highly sought-after public speaker on leadership, organizational culture, and team dynamics.McChrystal is also a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, with works including My Share of the Task, Team of Teams, and Leaders: Myth and Reality, Risk, & On Character. A strong advocate for service and veteran affairs, he chairs the Board of Service Year Alliance, promoting national service opportunities for young Americans. A graduate of West Point and the Naval War College, McChrystal has also completed fellowships at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the Council on Foreign Relations, further shaping his perspective on leadership, strategy, and civic responsibility.His newest book On Character: Choices that Define a Life can be found in the link below as well as www.mcchrystalgroup.com, Amazon, and where all books are sold. For more on General McChrystal check out www.mcchrystalgroup.com Enjoy the show! 

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion.

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Tuesday 17th November the Rt. Hon. Professor Shirley Williams delivered the 2009 Alcuin lecture at the Law Faculty, discussing the future of the European Union after the Lisbon Treaty.Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby, was one of the 'Gang of Four' moderate Labour politicians who in 1981 founded the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which merged with the Liberal Party in 1988 to form the Liberal Democrats.Baroness Williams was first elected as an MP in the 1964 General Election to represent the Labour Party in the constituency of Hitchin, Hertfordshire. She rapidly rose to a junior ministerial position and subsequently served as Shadow Home Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection, Secretary of State for Education, and Paymaster General until she lost her seat in the general election of 1979.In 1981 she resigned from the Labour Party to form the SDP, along with Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Bill Rodgers. Later that year she won the by-election for Crosby in Merseyside to become the first elected SDP MP. After losing her seat in 1983 she became a familiar face as a broadcaster on In conversation with Shirley Williams and has appeared on the BBC's Question Time more than any other panellist.n 1988, Williams moved to the USA as Professor of Elective Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government until 2001. She helped draft constitutions in Russia, Ukraine and South Africa, served as a UN Special Representative to the former Yugoslavia, and has been President of Chatham House, the Royal Institute for International Affairs. With Amartya Sen, she is a director of the US-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, which seeks to reduce the risk of use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; and in 2007 was appointed by the Prime Minister as an independent advisor on nuclear proliferation.The Alcuin lectures are named after the 8th century scholar Alcuin of York, who was a key advisor to the Emperor Charlemagne and a central figure in the Carolingian Renaissance. The lectures were established in 1999 with a benefaction from Lord Brittan, himself a former European Commissioner. The theme for the lecture must be some aspect of the relationship between Britain and the European Institutions. Previous speakers have included Lord Patten, Lord Hannay and Dr Carl Bildt.

Today on the show, Fareed is joined by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and Tarek Masoud of Harvard's Kennedy School in a conversation about Israel's recently announced plans to take over Gaza City. Then, Indian journalist Barkha Dutt talks to Fareed about Trump's threat to impost 50% tariffs on India and the ramifications for the US-India relationship.  Finally, Fareed sits down with author and veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson to discuss the long-lasting impacts of the Iranian revolution—and how it reshaped the Middle East. GUESTS: Bret Stephens; Tarek Masoud; Barkha Dutt (@BDUTT); Scott Anderson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if building a brand partnership with a major entertainment property could happen in 5 minutes instead of 6 months—and drive 10x better results? What would that change for your marketing strategy? Today I'm joined by Alan Gould, CEO of Mutual Markets. Alan is at the forefront of a major shift in digital marketing and advertising—using AI to reduce friction between brands and entertainment partners, making high-impact collaborations accessible to brands of all sizes. Mutual Markets is already working with major streamers and delivering successful partnerships, like PopCorners' Super Bowl spot with Breaking Bad and Dashlane's collaboration with NCIS. Alan's here to talk about how AI is democratizing access to branded entertainment partnerships and what that means for the future of marketing. About Alan Gould Alan Gould is a visionary leader and the Founder and Co-CEO of MutualMarkets, the world's first advanced AI powered partnerships platform that has revolutionized the digital advertising industry. MutualMarkets' goal is to provide brands with a more organic and efficient way to connect with consumers by setting new industry standards to transform how brands engage with their audiences. Alan has a long history in data, analytics, and marketing. Prior to co-founding MutualMarkets with his brother Eric Gould, Alan co-founded IAG Research, a media-measurement company created to gauge the effectiveness of ads, and sold it to Nielsen in 2008 for $250M. Alan is also co-founder of a venture capital firm called Peak Opportunity Partners and has been involved in several successful exits from companies like Maker Studios, WorkFusion, Embark Veterinary, Vizu, and early investor roles in iSport.TV, which later saw a $325M minority position from Goldman Sachs valuing the company at $750M. Under his leadership, MutualMarkets has expanded its global footprint, strengthened its portfolio, and adopted cutting-edge technologies to enhance client outcomes. Alan is passionate about fostering a culture of innovation, transparency, and collaboration, ensuring that the company remains at the forefront of the ever-evolving marketing landscape. In 2021, MutualMarkets announced its $30M raised in seed capital. In 2023, CBS' Paramount Global partnered with MutualMarkets to grow its advertising efforts. In 2024, MutualMarkets announced its latest innovation - the AI-enabled CMAU - which enhanced collaboration by empowering brands to identify and partner with TV shows and movies seamlessly. Alan has a Bachelor of Science degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School, and a Doctor of Law degree from New York University's School of Law. Alan Gould on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alangould/ Resources Mutual Markets: https://www.mutualmarkets.ai/ https://www.mutualmarkets.ai/ The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Boston, August 11-14, 2025. Register now: https://bit.ly/etailboston and use code PARTNER20 for 20% off for retailers and brands Don't Miss MAICON 2025, October 14-16 in Cleveland - the event bringing together the brights minds and leading voices in AI. Use Code AGILE150 for $150 off registration. Go here to register: https://bit.ly/agile150" Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

Luis Benitez: Conquering Everest and the Seven Summits, Life Advice from the Dalai Lama, and Outdoor Recreation Evangelism.Luis Benitez has worked as a high-end international mountain guide, with six Everest summits to his name, as well as having conquered the "Seven Summits" — the highest mountains on each of the world's continents. He's also an outdoor educator and a policy leader in the outdoor industry. In 2015, Benitez was appointed by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper to lead the Outdoor Recreation Industry Office. He is currently the Vice President of Government Affairs for Lululemon.Benitez holds an executive MBA from the University of Denver, with an emphasis certification in behavioral sciences and public policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is also the author of Higher Ground.Notable Links:Luis Benitez WebsiteHigher Ground Book*****This episode is brought to you by Kase Filters. I travel the world with my camera, and I can use any photography filters I like, and I've tried all of them, but in recent years I've landed on Kase Filters.Kase filters are made with premium materials, HD optical glass, shockproof, with zero color cast, round and square filter designs, magnetic systems, filter holders, adapters, step-up rings, and everything I need so I never miss a moment.And now, my listeners can get 10% off the Kase Filters Amazon page when they visit. beyondthelens.fm/kase and use coupon code BERNABE10Kase Filters, Capture with Confidence.

3pm: The Foreword:  Honesty and Honor System Farm Stands // Guest – Bruce Schneier – Author at Schneier.Com, public speaker and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School and Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, INC. // Honesty, trust and morality in 2025 // This Day in History // 1493 - The King of England bans kissing // Noem teases liquid size changes for TSA at Hill Nation Summit

6pm: The Foreword:  Honesty and Honor System Farm Stands // Guest – Bruce Schneier – Author at Schneier.Com, public speaker and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School and Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, INC. // Honesty, trust and morality in 2025 // This Day in History // 1493 - The King of England bans kissing // Noem teases liquid size changes for TSA at Hill Nation Summit

Show SummaryOn today's episode, feature a conversation with Rear Admiral Terry Kraft, US Navy, Retired. Terry is the President and CEO of the USS Midway Museum, the longest-serving aircraft carrier int eh 20th Century that is now a museum in San Diego. Terry also serves on the board of directors for PsychArmor, and we talk about both of those roles in our conversation.  Provide FeedbackAs a dedicated member of the audience, we would like to hear from you about the show. Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts about the show in this short feedback survey. By doing so, you will be entered to receive a signed copy of one of our host's three books on military and veteran mental health. About Today's GuestRetired RADM Terry B. Kraft's military service spanned a remarkable 34-year Navy career highlighted by unparalleled leadership across diverse domains. As the son of a Navy captain, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1981 and earned his designation as a Naval Flight Officer in 1982. His academic achievements include a master's degree in political science from Auburn University, a fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and graduation from the Navy Nuclear Power Program. Throughout his military service, RADM Kraft excelled in operational and strategic roles. He commanded aviation squadrons, ships, and a carrier strike group. As Executive Officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, he contributed to major operations including Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, and Enduring Freedom. His pivotal shore assignments included roles with VA-128, the Air Command and Staff College, U.S. Pacific Command, and the Chief of Naval Operations staff. His leadership in Maritime Aviation, Unmanned Aerial Systems, and Intelligence and Surveillance capabilities reflects his strategic vision and innovative approach. Additionally, he commanded the Navy Warfare Development Command and U.S. Naval Forces Japan, where he spearheaded critical initiatives to advance naval operations.After retiring from the Navy, Terry continued to demonstrate exceptional leadership in the private sector. From 2015 to 2023, he held senior management roles at General Atomics, driving technological and strategic advancements. Now, as President and CEO of the USS Midway Museum, he combines a commitment to preserving naval history with a passion for public education—values closely aligned with PsychArmor's mission. Terry and his wife, a fellow Navy veteran, reside in San Diego, where they enjoy attending music concerts and spending time with their children sailing around San Diego Bay. Links Mentioned During the EpisodeUSS Midway Museum WebsiteTerry's Bio on PsychArmorPsychArmor Resource of the WeekThis week's PsychArmor Resource of the Week is the PsychArmor Course, the Basics of Military Culture. Understand key values, customs, and experiences unique to service members and veterans through stories from six American service members. Perfect for employers, healthcare providers, and anyone working with military-connected individuals. You can find the resource here:  https://learn.psycharmor.org/courses/military-culture-series Episode Partner: Are you an organization that engages with or supports the military affiliated community? Would you like to partner with an engaged and dynamic audience of like-minded professionals? Reach out to Inquire about Partnership Opportunities Contact Us and Join Us on Social Media Email PsychArmorPsychArmor on TwitterPsychArmor on FacebookPsychArmor on YouTubePsychArmor on LinkedInPsychArmor on InstagramTheme MusicOur theme music Don't Kill the Messenger was written and performed by Navy Veteran Jerry Maniscalco, in cooperation with Operation Encore, a non profit committed to supporting singer/songwriter and musicians across the military and Veteran communities.Producer and Host Duane France is a retired Army Noncommissioned Officer, combat veteran, and clinical mental health counselor for service members, veterans, and their families.  You can find more about the work that he is doing at www.veteranmentalhealth.com  

Send us a textDr. Barbara Kellerman is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership. She was the Founding Executive Director of the Center, and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over twenty years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Christopher Newport, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A. M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala (1996-97), she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books. Kellerman has also appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.From 2015 to 2023 she was listed by Global Gurus as among the “World's Top 30 Management Professionals.”A Few Quotes From This Episode“Leadership is learning lifelong...just like medicine or law.”“You don't develop leaders overnight.”“Because the (leadership) industry is so profitable, nobody really wants to break up the existing model.”Resources Mentioned in This Episode Book: Professionalizing Leadership by Barbara KellermanFilm: AnoraAbout The International Leadership Association (ILA)The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!About  Scott J. AllenWebsiteWeekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for LeadersBlogMy Approach to HostingThe views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic. ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.

Trump targets Harvard for CCP ties as reports reveal Chinese elites trained at its Kennedy School. Rubio tightens visa rules while Harvard faces backlash from all sides, with critics blasting its tax breaks, free speech issues, and foreign influence.

In this episode of The Psychedelic Podcast, Paul F. Austin welcomes back Rick Doblin, Ph.D., Founder and President of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), for a deeply personal and visionary conversation on the recent FDA rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy. Find full show notes and links here: https://thethirdwave.co/podcast/episode-306/?ref=278 Rick opens up about the painful setbacks, internal missteps, and his own process of recovery and renewed hope. He explains why this isn't the end—but a critical turning point for psychedelic medicine. Rick and Paul unpack the nuances of drug plus therapy, exploring why context, integration, and culture matter as much as pharmacology. They reflect on the future of MAPS, the psychedelic renaissance beyond FDA approval, and how business, politics, and spirituality intersect with healing. The episode also explores Rick's enduring belief in public benefit models, global collaboration, and the potential of a spiritualized humanity. Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the Founder and President of MAPS. He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and has spent nearly four decades advancing the safe and legal use of psychedelics and marijuana through science, education, and advocacy. Highlights: The cost of MAPS' quiet period Why MDMA therapy was rejected by FDA Pharma vs. therapy: What's best for patients? Drug-only treatments vs. integrated therapy Ibogaine's role in brain healing and PTSD MAPS' path forward: Phase 4 vs. Phase 3 What the Dutch got right about MDMA Spiritualized humanity and self-transcendence The global impact of MAPS' work Business, love, and psychedelic ethics Want to attend this year's Psychedelic Science 2025 Conference? For our community: Use code THIRDWAVE15 for 15% off registration. Learn more and register at psychedelicscience.org — See you there! Episode Links Psychedelic Science 2025 Conference MAPS Website Psychedelic Science on Instagram MAPS on Instagram Psychedelic Science on LinkedIn MAPS on LinkedIn Psychedelic Science on X Episode Sponsors: Golden Rule Mushrooms - Get a lifetime discount of 10% with code THIRDWAVE at checkout Psychedelic Coacing Isntitute's Intensive for Psychedelic Professionals in Costa Rica - a transformative retreat for personal and professional growth.

Christina Kantzavelos is a neurodivergent, and first-generation (third culture) Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), life coach, writer and chronic illness warrior.  She received both her BA and MSW from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and her MLIS from San Jose State University (SJSU). She specializes in treating clients with chronic health conditions  (aka spoonies and medical refugees) and trauma (including medical trauma). Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the Founder and President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master's thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients.His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences. He also conducted a thirty-four year follow-up study to Timothy Leary's Concord Prison Experiment. Rick studied with Dr. Stanislav Grof and was among the first to be certified as a Holotropic Breathwork practitioner.His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife and puppy, with three empty rooms from his children who have all graduated college and begun their life journeys. Learn more about Rick by listening to his Origin Story, watching his TED Talk, and watching his SSDP talk about lessons for political activism from a series of his psychedelic experiences. In This EpisodeChristina's websiteNeural Retraining informationConstructed AwarenessRick's InstagramMAPS WebsiteYou can learn more about what I do here:The Trauma Therapist Newsletter: celebrates the people and voices in the mental health profession. And it's free! Check it out here: https://bit.ly/4jGBeSaThe Trauma Therapist Podcast:  I interview thought-leaders in the fields of trauma, mindfulness, addiction and yoga such as Peter Levine, Pat Ogden, Bessel van der Kolk and Bruce Perry. https://bit.ly/3VRNy8zBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-trauma-therapist--5739761/support.

In this weekend episode, Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc talk about the global treaties made in the 1920s, tariff wars, Trump's cabinet meeting, Scott Bessent, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and choices made by Kash Patel.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.