Whowhatwhy's Podcasts

Big carbon and mass apathy are the existential double whammy, warns veteran climate campaigner Bill McKibben.

One of the leading experts on cults gives a new perspective on today’s politics -- and some of its frightening implications.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) shares insights from his early visits to detention facilities and his legislative proposals to address the horrors he witnessed.

President Donald Trump’s tweets often violate Twitter’s standards, but the company has taken no action to restrict or block them. A conversation with Mark Karlin and Russ Baker.

An examination of why we should be outraged that justice is not being served in the Epstein case.

Questioning accepted narratives is a healthy feature of an open society. But today’s conspiracists come without any evidence or sources — only a motive.

A look at how things like the Chinese Exclusion Act, eugenics, and white America’s desire for racial purity have historically been far worse than what we are seeing today — at least so far.

The stunning results of a 20-year investigation into Charles Manson, the CIA, corrupt prosecutors, and the secret history of the Sixties.

The current reality may be far more dangerous than past nuclear threats: Richard Clarke, the first White House official placed in charge of US cybersecurity policy, looks at the dangers of cyber warfare today.

Former Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak has jumped into the Democratic presidential primaries and is making a strong case against war with Iran.

Upon the death of Paul Krassner this week, we are sharing part of a conversation WhoWhatWhy podcaster Jeff Schechtman had with him back in 2009.

Gerrymandering expert David Daley explains the connection between partisan redistricting and Trump administration efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The leader of an LA based nonprofit talks about the trafficking of children -- a growing scourge.

A conversation with the author of RAND’s new follow-up report on the diminishing role of facts and data in the news.

If the Democratic debates told us anything, it’s that some of our would-be leaders don’t see the proverbial forest for the trees.   So many signs indicate that our democracy is not working. The infrastructure of our electoral system is failing, the Supreme Court just Ok’d gerrymandering for political gain, Russians keep interfering in our elections, climate change is an existential threat, kids are afraid to go to school for fear of being shot, China is on the verge of controlling the next generation of our communications, and the global world order that held things together since the end of World War II is tottering.  Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is Larry Diamond, a Princeton professor and author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. A longtime student of democratic processes around the world, he says that nothing short of a radical transformation can save our system. Diamond rejects the notion, put forth last month by our podcast guest,

Why and how algorithms are taking over our lives, why we should care and what we can do about it.

There are few First Amendment issues more pressing today than how online speech should be governed. It impacts our interpersonal relationships, our views of almost every aspect of society and of course our politics. Now, absent an easy solution, Congress wants to dive in and claim that they actually have a clue. The internet was supposed to set a million voices free...It didn't work out quite that way. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk to David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor and the United Nations’ leading voice on freedom of expression and human rights. He serves as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right of freedom of opinion and expression. In our conversation, we examine the balance between free speech and the regulation of the internet and its leading companies, the impact that these companies have on public life, and the question of who should decide whom gets censored. Facebook’s refusal to take down the recent doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-

As Democratic leaders offer their “Green New Deal” modeled on FDR’s “New Deal,” veteran environmental leader Randy Hayes has drafted the “New Green Deal,” a seven-point plan to address what he calls “a deep planetary emergency.” While Hayes supports all the goals of the Democrats’ proposal, he focuses more intently on the essential requirements to sustain human life on the planet. Hayes wants to shift to 100 percent renewable energy and ecological farming with a plant-food focus. He wants to end subsidies for carbon-based energy to reach a “true cost economy.”  And he calls for a plan to restore healthy ecosystems to half the earth, to offset the impact of humans on the other half. We discuss the recent “eco-spasms” that have flooded large parts of the Midwest and produced more than 500 tornadoes over a 13-day period in May. We talk about the recent launch of a misleading “astroturf” campaign funded by Big Oil. Its front organization, Americans for Carbon Dividends, dangles a carbon tax and dividend scheme a

RAND senior economist Dr. Howard Shatz gives us a primer on trade and globalization.