Carnegie Council Podcasts

As electric vehicles become more common, policymakers will have a new set of ethical dilemmas to confront, says Senior Fellow Nikolas Gvosdev in this Ethics Article. Questions about pollution and geopolitics remain and the economic benefits are unclear and uneven. To read this article, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

The global energy crisis, greener energy, and the expansion of renewables (and those high electric bills) are many of the reasons electricity grids are making headlines. Research firm BloombergNEF estimates that demand for electricity will increase by 60 percent by 2050. What does this mean for policymakers and market influencers? Chiara Lo Prete, associate professor at the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, joins Doorstep co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin to explain our cross-border electric grid connections and the need to re-frame global geopolitical risks with these grids in mind. How can we create robust electricity foreign policy? Can we move forward with a global energy grid? What is China's role in driving change? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

In this episode, host Hilary Sutcliffe explores . . . the way we think about ourselves from another angle. She talks with Jon Alexander, founder of the New Citizenship Project and author of the inspiring book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, one of McKinsey's top five recommended books of 2022 alongside those of Bill Gates, Francis Fukuyama, Adam Grant, and Henry Kissinger. Alexander explores changes in the way we see ourselves, how we see one another, how the organizations and institutions that structure our society see us, and how we behave as a result. He also shows how the shift from people as subjects to consumers and now to citizens changes what we believe is possible. What are the implications for individuals and societies when we make the shift from being seen as passive consumers of products to empowered citizens? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

For our final Women's History Month podcast, The Doorstep launches a special live event series traveling across the country over the next year. In collaboration with Marymount Manhattan College and their Social Justice Academy: Great Migrations, co-host Tatiana Serafin speaks with Sana Mustafa, CEO of Asylum Access, about the need to re-frame our discussion about forcibly displaced persons starting with understanding how language shapes rights. In 2022, over 100 million people suffered displacement with greatly divergent access to rights and resources. What more can we do to build intersectional alliances and bring refugees into decision-making? How can we counter decades of structural bias and bring more accountability to states and NGOs? What can we do at a local level local to increase the pace of change? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

Climate tipping points are points of no return, beyond which the Earth's systems would reorganize beyond the capacity of socioeconomic and ecological systems to adapt, warns the OECD's Jo Tyndall, in a new C2GTalk. Policymakers need to do more to address these risks now, including through support for carbon dioxide removal technologies, accounting for both opportunities and challenges. While solar radiation modification is not currently feasible, more research is needed. Jo Tyndall is director of the Environment Directorate at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) where she oversees the implementation of the Directorate’s program of work, covering a broad range of environmental issues, including: green growth, climate change, biodiversity, quality of ecosystems, eco-innovation, circular economy, and resource productivity. Click here for more C2GTalk podcasts.

In the second conversation of our Women's History Month podcast series, Kristina Lunz, co-CEO and co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, joins Doorstep co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin to discuss the need for a new mindset in foreign policy decision-making that advances global gender equality. To date, 11 countries have adopted a feminist foreign policy to challenge legacy power hierarchies and gendered institutions, with Germany leading the way. What can other states, including the U.S., learn from their example? What challenges remain to global acceptance of a new way of framing foreign policy debates? How can civil society alliances promote new narratives that close the global gender gap? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

In this first episode, host Hilary Sutcliffe explores . . . our freedom to think from another angle. We might feel that what goes on in our heads remains in our heads, but international human rights lawyer Susie Alegre explores the surprising ways that our innermost thoughts are being exposed and manipulated through the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). She explains how what is often seen as the most fundamental human right, our freedom of thought, is being eroded; what this means in practice, and what we can do to protect what goes on in our minds. Alegre is the author of an award-winning book, Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate Our Minds. You can read her article "Freedom of Thought is a Human Right" in Wired's "World in 2023" issue or browse her extensive broadcasting and writing on this subject on her website.

In this new Carnegie Council podcast series, Hilary Sutcliffe, a member of the Artificial Intelligence & Equality (AIEI) Board of Advisors, explores fresh perspectives from some of today's most innovative thinkers who challenge the foundational understanding of some familiar concepts—such as human nature, democracy, capitalism, innovation, regulation—and bring them to you . . . from another angle. In this introduction to the podcast, Sutcliffe, along with AIEI co-directors Anja Kaspersen and Wendell Wallach, discuss the series and its aspiration to challenge our basic assumptions and open up new possibilities and different ways of responding to the pressing issues or our age. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

For Women's History Month, The Doorstep is highlighting steps being taken for greater global gender equality—a proposition that United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently stated is "300 years away." What can societies do to increase the pace of change? The first lady of Iceland, author and entrepreneur Eliza Reid, joins co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin to speak about Iceland's successes in attaining equality for all women and what cultural and policy frameworks can be exported to other countries in order to promote gender equality. What does "infrastructure for families" (ascribed to Senator Elizabeth Warren) mean on the ground? What challenges are most pressing? How can the media be a better "window on the world"?

Nita A. Farahany, Professor at Duke Law School, discusses the manipulation of brain and behavior with neurotechnologies, ethical concerns of dream incubation for marketing, neurotechnologies in the workplace, cognitive liberty, the impact of technology on self-knowledge, and a book recommendation on defending the right to think clearly in the age of neurotechnologies.