Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Aired: 12/8/13What do you think are the biggest solvable problems facing humanity? Justice and inequality? Violence and war? Climate change and pollution? Today we're going to focus on one that I believe underlies all of those: Population. The last book from today's guest, ALAN WEISMAN, was thought-provoking, award-winning, and best-selling. THE WORLD WITHOUT US, which was made into a powerful documentary, imagined what would happen to planet earth if humans disappeared. Our massive infrastructure would collapse and vanish without human presence, and nature would swiftly begin to heal without our daily pressures. But, Weisman, would rather Imagine a successful world with us, and that led to his newest book, COUNTDOWN: OUR LAST, BEST HOPE FOR A FUTURE ON EARTH. For this one, he traveled to 21 countries asking politicians, scientists, family planning specialists, doctors, and religious leaders, crucial questions about how we can successfully deal with the size of human population.

Aired: 12/1/13What do you know about hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" of natural gas?Probably depends on who you're listening to. The fossil fuel industry tells you it's the biggest energy development of the century, which promises America energy independence for the US and a huge boost to our economy with benefits to local economies. Many of the communities themselves tell a different story - of pollution on the one hand and social disruption on the other.For the spoils of success, I recommend an article in March 2013 Harpers, Where Broken Hearts Stand, Grief and Recovery on the Badlands of North Dakota by Richard Manning. RICHARD HEINBERG has a new book, SNAKE OIL: How Fracking's Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future, looks at fracking from both economic and environmental perspectives, informed by the most thorough analysis of shale gas and oil drilling data ever undertaken.Join us as I try to find out, Is fracking the miracle cure-all to our energy ills, or a costly distraction from the necessary work of reducing our fossil fuel dependence?

Aired: 11/24/13After its recent IPO, Twitter is valued at nearly $25Billion. Now what is Twitter? Millions of tweets created and shared by users plus some ads. But how many users get a piece of that $25Billion? Well, none.Where would Facebook be without Friends? What would Twitter, Amazon, Yelp, and any network whose value is based on our data, be without us - sharing photos and feelings, making purchases, registering opinions. More than programming or advertising, TV has always been about selling our eyeballs. Likewise, today's online giants are selling our visits, our clicks, our shares. JARON LANIER, in his new book, WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?, writes: "At the height of its power, Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. Today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography is Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?"He believes the emerging business model in which companies with relatively few employees profit off the participation of all of us, could doom any hope of a rebirth of the middle class. Lanier wants to solve a problem not many are talking about, and he envisions a radical solution -- "a highly humanistic economy - one that will reward people for the valuable information they share with networks and the companies that control and profit from them.

Aired: 11/17/13The gap between rich and poor is huge and growing...legislative stalemate paralyzes the country...corporations fight federal regulations...the influence of money in politics is greater than ever...new inventions speed the pace of daily life. Sound familiar? Those headlines from the early 1900s set the scene for Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book The Bully Pulpit-a history of the first decade of the Progressive era - a time when courageous journalists and an ambitious president took on the Robber Barons - the 1% of their day - and won.Goodwin tells the tale through the long friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft - a relationship that serves both until it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that cripples the progressive wing of the Republican Party and helps elect Woodrow Wilson. Getting equal billing in her account is the golden age of journalism led by the muckraking press at McClure's magazine. Together a bold and progressive press and a strong and progressive president served the people of the US rather than the super wealthy and the corporations. What lessons can we learn to help us turn this country around a century later?

Aired: 11/10/13THE SQUARESundance Audience Award WinningDocumentary re Egypt’s revolution(s)JEHANE NOUJAIM, DirectorKARIM AMER, Producer KHALID ABDALLA, Participant

Aired: 11/4/13Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth.After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world is what has succeeded and survived. So why not learn as much aswe can from what works? Today's guest, JAY HARMON is doing just that, translating nature's lessons and models into technologies that solve problems and perform tasks more elegantly, efficiently, and economically. He's the author of THE SHARK'S PAINTBRUSH: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation. I believe biomimicry - a way of looking and working and designing - has enormous potential to save us from ourselves. I find this one of the most exciting developments in the world at this time.

Aired: 10/06/13What do you feel when at sporting events or other public gatherings crowds join in a call to "support the troops?" If you're like me, I always have some misgivings. On the simplest level, the gesture seems pretty meaningless. What am I or anyone else in that crowd actually doing to support the troops? And when they add some clichéd phrases about fighting for our freedoms, a voice in my head always asks, "Yeah, how? Where?" In Iraq, Afghanistan, operating a drone that's flying over Pakistan or Yemen? Today's guest ANDREW BACEVICH has thought long and hard about such things, and has written a series of fairly short, very readable books that pursue questions that too many ignore or pretend don't matter. The United States has been "at war" for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a gap has widened between America's soldiers and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." In his latest book, BREACH OF TRUST, Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its implications, which include a nation with an appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a volunteer army and a huge number of private contractors unable to achieve victory.

Aired 092913A new documentary film opened Friday 9/27 in 23 cities, including Los Angeles, starring former Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, Berkeley professor, best-selling author, and frequent guest on this program, Robert Reich. Titled INEQUALITY FOR ALL, can it do for this "inconvenient truth" what the original did for climate change? My first guest this week will be the film's director JACOB KORNBLUTH.Early reviews are positive. It's got a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93%. Here's Ken Turan in the LA TIMES: Smart, funny and articulate, Robert Reich is the university professor we all wish we'd had. He's so accessible and entertaining he takes a subject that sounds soporific and makes it come alive like you wouldn't believe. Here's just a few numbers to remind you how crazy things have gotten:* In 1978, a typical male worker made $48K, a typical member of the top 1% $393K. In 2010, a typical male worker made $34K - a drop of 30%, while a typical member of the top 1% made $1,101K a gain of 180%.* In 2013, the richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150M.* And as remarkable as those numbers are, I think the most important number in the film is this one: Consumer spending = 70% of the US economy. (i.e., Middle class = job creators).The last quarter of the show, we'll get an important update on the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant from HARVEY WASSERMAN.

Aired: 09/22/13Standing on an island off the Alaskan coast, PHILIP CAPUTO marveled that Inupiat Eskimo schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children of Cuban immigrants in Key West, six thousand miles away. And a question began to take shape: How does the United States, peopled by every race on earth, remain united?CAPUTO resolved to drive from the nation's southernmost point to the northernmost point reachable by road, talking to everyday Americans about their lives. Fourteen years later, nearing 70, CAPUTO, his wife, and their two dogs drove a truck and an Airstream trailer from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, covering 16,000 miles. They avoided interstates, and invited conversations with Americans you meet when you avoid interstates. Somewhere in many of those conversations, Caputo would ask two questions: What holds a country as vast and diverse as the United States together? Was it holding together as well as it once did?

Are you doing more sharing these days? In a virtual sense, most of us would probably answer yes. Sharing political petitions, photos shot with our mobile phones, and of course, cute cat stuff. But what about sharing in the real world - are you doing more of that? Well, as a society the answer again is yes. Whether bike sharing, which is rolling out in 500 cities, car-sharing, even Hertz is getting into the game, or apartment sharing through services like AirB&B.Habits and practices of simpler times like swapping, trading, renting, and sharing, have been reinvented through real-time technologies and peer-to-peer networks to make sharing more efficient and affordable than buying new things.nullAccording to the Economist, "Occasional renting is cheaper than buying something outright or renting from a traditional provider such as a hotel or car-rental firm. The internet makes it cheaper and easier than ever to aggregate supply and demand. Smartphones with maps and satellite positioning can find a nearby room to rent or car to borrow. Online social networks and recommendation systems help establish trust; internet payment systems can handle the billing."Whether driven by economic hard times or technological innovation, something's going on here and I'll be talking about it for the next hour with April Rinne, Chief Strategy Officer of the Collaborative Lab.