Don’t feel bad about taking the elevator instead of the stairs. Blame evolution for not preparing you for voluntary physical activity. But, says anthropologist Dan Lieberman, there are ways to make exercise rewarding as well as healthy. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Studying the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers has led to the surprising discovery that dieting simply to lose weight misses the real benefits of cutting calories. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
The wonderful Helen Mirren is as honest and searching in conversation as she is in the rich characters she’s brought to us in performance after performance. She’s just as thoughtful and fun as you’d expect her to be. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Alan and Clear+Vivid’s executive producer Graham Chedd preview the new season. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
And if it comes to that, wrist, elbows, and lungs? Neil Shubin found that fish in 375 million-year-old rocks in the Canadian Arctic. It was the earliest known evidence of what Neil calls the Great Transition, when life was about to emerge from water to land. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Using her voice, her body, and a close observation of speech patterns, Anna Deveare Smith has chronicled our times with staged portraits of the people who lived them. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Journalist John Colapinto blew out his voice singing too loud and too long in a rock band. The good news is that it inspired him to find out what happened – and that led to a terrific book about that remarkable instrument, the human voice. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
A searing experience with an apparently uncaring doctor when she was young helped make Dr. Jillian Horton a passionate advocate for a radical rethinking of how doctors are trained. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Bill Bryson loves finding out about stuff – like how much the earth weighs and why you have a spleen – then letting the rest of us know what he’s learned in books that are delightfully clear and vivid – and funny. In conversation with Alan, he tells why and how he does it. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
In her new book, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir, Sherry Turkle movingly—and candidly—weaves together events in her own life with her dawning understanding of the way technology can weaken human connections. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Brian May, famed guitarist and founder of the rock group Queen, is also Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist. His research on the dust that swirls around the solar system and his fascination with 3-D imaging has led to his working with NASA on projects ranging from tracking asteroids to the Perseverance mission on Mars. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Something is pushing the Universe apart. We don’t know what it is, but Michael Turner named it: Dark Energy. This cosmologist’s way with words helped raised the public profile of what Michael calls the greatest question in all of science. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
The wonderful Laura Linney really knows how to relate, on stage and off. The way actors have to be present for one another can be a good model for how we relate in life, too. But it’s not always easy. Like, what do you do when the other actor doesn't relate back? Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
In a moving and frank conversation – punctuated by laughter – Alan talks with Rabbi Steve Leder about the unavoidable subject, which people usually avoid — only adding to their loss. Their talk is inspired by Rabbi Leder’s new book, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Walter Isaacson’s latest exploration of the lives of creative geniuses focuses on Jennifer Doudna, the co-inventor of the revolutionary gene editing tool CRISPR. Alan explores with Isaacson his fascination with people who have changed the world, from Leonardo to Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
A look ahead at the people we have in the new seasons of both C+V and SC+V, starting next week. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Deborah Tannen, author of the hugely influential best seller, You Just Don’t Understand, swaps stories with Alan about conversations that went wrong; and talks about her new book, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Embedding themselves in a fundamentalist Mormon community, journalists Sarah Ventre and Ash Sanders wove together the stories of both those in thrall to its all-powerful prophet and others seeking escape. They take Alan behind the scenes of their gripping and evocative podcast Unfinished: Short Creek. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Propelled by events in her own life, Reisa Sperling is working hard to defeat this disease that cruelly destroys brains and crushes families. As we live longer lives, more of us are in danger of contracting Alzheimer’s. But Reisa’s work is exciting. And so are the signs that we’re making progress. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
The British actor, Sanjeev Bhaskar, started his career later in life and is glad he did. He didn’t try to portray human experience until he actually had some. It’s led to useful wisdom, both on the stage and off. Fans of Masterpiece Theatre will recognize him as the co-star of the crime drama Unforgotten. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
They walk among us. Some percentage of the genes of many modern humans have been handed down to us from Neanderthals. Alan, who has about 2% of those genes, is more than a little excited to hear from expert Rebecca Wragg Sykes how Neanderthals looked, lived and loved. Her new book is Kindred. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
First impressions are supposed to tell us a lot, and they often do. Problem is, as Malcolm Gladwell explains in his latest book Talking to Strangers, sometimes what they tell us is wrong – dangerously wrong. Even deadly. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
A passionate astronomer and a vivid writer, Emily Levesque describes a life of watching what’s out there in the universe so vividly, you may want to run out and get a telescope. Her new book is The Last Stargazers. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Recently nominated as the first presidential science advisor with a seat in the cabinet, Eric Lander talks with Alan about his leading role of the Human Genome Project and how the insights it’s revealed into diseases as different as Covid-19 and cancer are leading to treatments, and even cures, that he never imagined possible. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
When we see a magic trick, is the magician fooling us, or are we fooling ourselves? Penn Jillette, the talking half of the magic team Penn and Teller, tells Alan how tricks are a test of how we process reality. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
We not only need to sleep, we need to dream, too. Robert Stickgold explains why we must go to the movies every night when we sleep – it’s to make sense of our waking world. And it’s all in his book When Brains Dream. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
They did their military service, not in Vietnam, but in the world's largest research hospital – and over the years their work has saved millions of lives. You’ve probably never heard this story, even though someday yours may be a life that is saved by the Soldiers of Science. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
An in-depth preview of the upcoming eleventh season of Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
Two old friends who have played together on stage and on camera have a chat. And not only discover new things about each other’s approach to acting, but also share their joy of connecting on stage – and the role the audience plays in those moments of spontaneity that make a live performance magical. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid
A leading scientist who studies how genes make bodies, Cassandra Extavour almost became a musician and still sings professionally. She works with an extraordinary insect gene called oskar. Hundreds of millions of years ago oskar borrowed a fragment of a bacterial DNA that made sexual reproduction possible in the vast majority of animals– including you, me, and scientists who sing. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid...
