Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Apr 23 2024 4.3k

Features conversations with people who offer pieces of the puzzle of “a world that just might work” -- provocative approaches to business, environment, health, science, politics, media and culture. Guests have included Michael Lewis, Ken Burns, Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, Temple Grandin, Bill Maher, Cornel West, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Norman Lear. [http://terrencemcnally.net]

RSS feed Share

Copy RSS

Subscribe on Podcast Addict

Episode 641: ASTRA TAYLOR-Digging into Democracy, Debt, Insecurity and Solidarity

Apr 23 2024 62 mins

In 2020, I talked about democracy with filmmaker/writer/organizer/activist, ASTRA TAYLOR. Four years later, following a pandemic, waves of protests, an insurrection, and a couple of ongoing wars, we revisit our fragile and threatened way of political life. She’s been busy - working with the Debt Collective, a union of debtors she co-founded, and writing two new books, THE A

Episode 640: What would nature do? JANINE BENYUS, BIOMIMICRY: Innovation Inspired by Nature

Apr 19 2024 60 mins

Earth Day 2024 is April 22nd. Here’s my 2011 conversation with JANINE BENYUS, who coined a term and invented a field called Biomimicry. After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world has succeeded and survived. So why not learn as much as we can from what works? Nature has already solved many of the problems we grap

Episode 639: The Myths of Poverty & the Role of Luck-MARK RANK-The Random Factor

Apr 10 2024 60 mins

Why does our society produce more poverty than other wealthy countries? Why don’t we or why can’t we change our incentives? I speak with MARK RANK, about his books, THE POVERTY PARADOX and POORLY UNDERSTOOD: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty, and his latest, THE RANDOM FACTOR: How Chance & Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives & the World Around Us. Learn more at bit.ly/3

Episode 638: CHARLES EISENSTEIN (2019), Climate - A New Deeper, Fuller Story - People connect more with nature than policy

Apr 05 2024 60 mins

I describe the goal of my engagement with what we call the environment as “a healthy relationship with the rest of nature.” In this 2019 conversation, CHARLES EISENSTEIN asks: Have we become too focused on climate change? and reminds us that holding rivers, forests, and creatures as sacred and valuable in their own right, not simply as carbon credits, can engage emotional and p

Episode 637: Can we build immunity to mis- & dis-information? ANDY NORMAN & MELANIE TRECEK-KING of the MENTAL IMMUNITY PROJECT

Mar 27 2024 60 mins

With social media and AI, bad actors weaponize information, stressing democracy. We have two options: stop the lies or stop people from believing them. The former is near impossible in a free society, but there’s solid evidence the latter is achievable. I talk with two founders of the Mental Immunity Project, ANDY NORMAN, author of MENTAL IMMUNITY, and MELANIE TRECEK-KING, creato

Episode 636: Two for the Campaign Ahead: 1) DREW WESTEN (2007), The Political Brain 2) BERNIE HORN (2009), Framing the Future

Mar 19 2024 59 mins

As we fasten our seatbelts and plunge into the 2024 campaign, here are two conversations worth a re-listen. From 2007, I talk with DREW WESTEN about the ideas and advice in his influential book, THE POLITICAL BRAIN: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. Westen: Democrats almost always present the best arguments but lose elections to Republicans who have mastered t

Episode 635: ROB JOHNSON & I talk about the State of the Union - Biden’s speech plus our own take on things

Mar 13 2024 60 mins

ROB JOHNSON is a plain-speaking and passionate critic of an economic, financial, and political system that leaves too many behind. He and I do post-election shows - and we’ll do another this November, but this week we talk about the State of the Union as well as the state of the union. We talk about Biden’s speech and about how the two of us see things - the economy, the electi

Episode 634: TIM DeCHRISTOPHER-Courage & Conviction-Tim served 21 months in prison for civil disobedience protecting public lands

Mar 06 2024 57 mins

We know Republicans exercise minority rule in the states, the House, and the Supreme Court. Now Biden is arming Israel without meaningful or effective demands for humanitarian treatment of innocent civilians. Is it time for civil disobedience? Here’s my 2013 conversation with Tim DeChristopher. In a disputed auction of oil leases on pubic lands, Tim bid and won the rights to 22K

Episode 633: ANGUS DEATON, co-author, Deaths of Despair - ECONOMICS IN AMERICA: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality

Feb 29 2024 61 mins

ANGUS DEATON won the Nobel prize in Economics for work accomplished before he and his wife, economist Ann Case, wrote DEATHS OF DESPAIR and the Future of Capitalism. Pre pandemic, life expectancy in the US was no longer rising, and already falling among adults without 4 years of college, due in large part to alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicides. In his newest book, ECONOMICS IN

Episode 632: 5 BROKEN CAMERAS (2013)-EMAD BURNAT (Palestinian) & GUY DAVIDI (Israeli) co-directors, of the Oscar-nominated doc.

Feb 22 2024 58 mins

This week the media offers Academy Award buzz as well as the horrors of Israel’s response to the horrors of October’s attack by Hamas. Here’s my 2013 conversation with Palestinian EMAD BURNAT and Israeli GUY DAVIDI, co-directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary, 5 BROKEN CAMERAS. The film tells the story of Burnat, a Palestinian West Bank farmer, his wife, and four small ch

More Episodes