Thursday, November 23rd, 2022 Andrew Koppelman is the author of Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed . It’s a fascinating history of this idea and an excellent lens for understanding so much of American life and politics. The core idea of liberalism is that people ought to be able to live as they like and libertarianism appeals to that desire for freedom. The question is how do you deliver it? A robust free market has proven to do more for the po...
Nov 23, 2022•43 min•Ep 222•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, November 10th, 2022 Rebecca Cokley is a disability-rights advocate and the first U.S. Disability Rights Program Officer for the Ford Foundation. From 2009 to 2013, she served as an appointee in President Barack Obama’s White House. We discuss the lived experience of being disabled in America. It's an important conversation that truly exposes the inequities of our society. We don't live in a society that allows for equality for disabled people. In fact, if you're disabled, you're more l...
Nov 17, 2022•55 min•Ep 221•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, November 10th, 2022 Thaddeus Johnson is a former police officer, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, and Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice & Criminology at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. This broad-ranging conversation discusses law enforcement and empowering communities and citizens so we can all be safer. Public safety falls under a much larger umbrella than just policing. Police officers need to be rewarded for community polic...
Nov 10, 2022•50 min•Ep 220•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, November 3rd, 2022 Dr. Alison Gill is a veteran, former federal government executive, and Host of Mueller She Wrote and the Daily Beans Podcast. We discuss democracy, accountability and all the legal troubles the former president is facing, and the power of your vote. Your vote matters and can deliver accountability at the ballot box, which is why there are so many efforts to suppress it. Personal outreach and relational organizing are the most effective in turning out the vote. Democr...
Nov 03, 2022•36 min•Ep 219•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, October 27th, 2022 Amanda Brown Lierman is the Executive Director at Supermajority and Supermajority Education Fund, which builds women’s political power through efforts to inform, train and organize women across age, race, and background. Women are 52% of the vote. Fundamentally, women believe that their lives should be safe, their bodies should be respected, their work should be valued, their families should be supported, and that the government should represent them. Relational orga...
Oct 27, 2022•45 min•Ep 218•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, October 20th, 2022 Orly Lobel is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Employment and Labor Law. Her latest book is The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future . We discuss reframing our public discourse around technology in order to proactively use it as a tool for equality. Lobel urges us to think about what our goals, social norms, and values are in a democratic society. Because we’re racing forward...
Oct 20, 2022•42 min•Ep 217•Transcript available on Metacast Tuesday, October 18th, 2022 We're sharing an episode of Civics 101 from New Hampshire Public Radio. The House and the Senate have mostly the same powers: they both propose and vote on bills that may become law. So why does the House have 435 members, and the Senate have 100? Why does legislation have to pass through both sides, and what kinds of power do each have individually? And finally: what role do you, as a voter, play in ensuring that Congress, and your Congressional delegation, is workin...
Oct 18, 2022•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, October 13th, 2022 Ryan Busse is a former firearms executive, Senior Policy Advisor to Giffords, and author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America . We discuss how guns are intricately interwoven through our democratic division and radicalization in our everyday lives and in our politics. The assault weapons ban helped codify societal norms. In the years after the legislation lapsed, the culture of hatred, division, fear, and conspiracy became widespread. ...
Oct 13, 2022•43 min•Ep 216•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, October 6th, 2022 Aidan Kohn-Murphy is the founder and Executive Director of the organization Gen Z for Change, a youth-led nonprofit working to educate and create change on issues that affect young people. Jack Petocz is a political strategist who also mounted a campaign to recall his local school board in Florida to fight back against anti-LGBTQ board members. With the tool of social media, Gen Z for Change is reaching millions of youth across the country to mobilize them to be citiz...
Oct 06, 2022•36 min•Ep 215•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 29th, 2022 Jonathan Friedman is the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. He oversees research, advocacy, and education related to academic freedom, educational gag orders, book bans, and general free expression in schools, colleges, and universities. We discuss the driving forces behind campaigns to ban books and silence teachers. Education has always been political and a part of the culture war. We’re currently experiencing an eruption of citize...
Sep 29, 2022•47 min•Ep 214•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 22nd, 2022 Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale and the author of 5 books, including How Propaganda Works and most recently How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. We discuss the logic of fascism and why we need to use it as a concept to make sense of our times. Using a concept like fascism makes plain that their goal is to end democracy. Fascists use projection as the core of their propaganda; they scapegoat a variety of targets like the...
Sep 22, 2022•35 min•Ep 213•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 15th, 2022 Steve Pierson is the host of the How We Win podcast. He’s an activist, community organizer, and trainer, who started as a “class of 2016” volunteer. He’s currently an elected California Democratic Party Delegate and chairs their Organizing Committee. We discuss the nitty gritty of Get Out the Vote, phone banking, and a whole host of other boots on the ground politics as we head toward the midterms. According to a recent NBC poll, threats against democracy are perce...
Sep 15, 2022•41 min•Ep 212•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 8th, 2022 Ian Bremmer is a political scientist and he’s the founder and president of the research and consulting firm Eurasia Group. We discuss his latest book, The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats -- and Our Response -- Will Change the World . He argues that the major challenges humanity is facing are spurring us to create a new world order that works against these common threats. The climate crisis, disruptive technologies, and pandemics are existential threats to humanit...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep 211•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 1st, 2022 Christopher Beem is Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, co-host of the Democracy Works podcast, and the author of The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy . We discuss vices and virtues in the context of democratic thinking, democratic acting, and democratic belief. American democracy is at a crisis point. To fix our politics, we have to change our culture first. We can all take part in creat...
Sep 01, 2022•41 min•Ep 210•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 25th, 2022 Rob Sand is Iowa’s State Auditor, which is the taxpayers’ watchdog in the state. He’s the first Democrat to beat an incumbent Republican in Iowa in 50 years. We discuss putting public service above politics, delivering good governance, and how to get stuff done even when you are part of a political minority. The auditor’s job is to promote transparency, uncover wrongdoing, and report their findings to the public. Their work is key in holding powerful people in positio...
Aug 25, 2022•49 min•Ep 209•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 18th, 2022 Jennifer Taub is a lawyer, advocate, and author of Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime . We revisit our discussion on who gets a pass for committing such crimes, what the actual consequences are to our society, and how to hold the perpetrators accountable. White collar crime, as originally defined by Edwin Sutherland in 1939, are offenses committed by someone of high social status and respectability in the course of their occu...
Aug 18, 2022•42 min•Ep 208•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 11th, 2022 Zephyr Teachout is Senior Counsel for Economic Justice for the New York Attorney General and law professor at Fordham University. We revisit our conversation with her about her book, Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money. We discuss how monopolies are deeply anti-democratic, how we can break them up by enforcing existing anti-trust laws, and protect our democracy. Monopolies are anti-democratic because they have the power to set the...
Aug 11, 2022•50 min•Ep 207•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 4th, 2022 Elizabeth Yeampierre is an internationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and environmental and climate justice leader of African and Indigenous ancestry, a national leader in the climate justice movement, and the co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. She is also the Executive Director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization. UPROSE helped the Sunset Park community in Brooklyn lead their efforts against industry city with a vision that re...
Aug 04, 2022•43 min•Ep 206•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, July 28th, 2022 Amanda Renteria the CEO of Code for America, an organization of people-centered problem solvers working to improve government in a meaningful way. We discuss making government work better for everyday people by design . Good governance starts with getting the basics right, such as delivering clean water to all communities. Making government simple and accessible is also key. Currently it’s so complicated that many people have lost trust in the government's ability to re...
Jul 28, 2022•44 min•Ep 205•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, July 21st, 2022 Miles Rapoport and E.J. Dionne are the co-authors of 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting. In a time when the erosion of democracy is real and undisputed, they argue that every adult American citizen should be made to vote. We discuss the big idea at the core of America: democracy! Democracy itself needs to be on the ballot and the dangers of extremism need to be on the ballot. If we want something close to 100% democracy, we have to abandon the idea that inclu...
Jul 21, 2022•45 min•Ep 204•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, July 14th, 2022 Matthew E. Kahn is Provost Professor at the University of Southern California and the author of six previous books about environmental and urban economics issues. His latest book is Going Remote: How the Flexible Work Economy Can Improve Our Lives and Our Cities . We discuss the future of our cities and the future of work--whether that's remote or in person. The pandemic revealed a new geography of economic opportunity. Some jobs that were only in person before are now ...
Jul 14, 2022•47 min•Ep 203•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, July 7th, 2022 Rachel Vindman is the host of the Suburban Women Problem podcast and wife of retired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman. We discuss the disenchantment of suburban women with our politics–who historically vote in very high numbers, our personal responsibility to use our voices for change, and the war in Ukraine. One of the fastest ways to mitigate domestic issues like inflation and high gas prices is to help Ukraine defeat Russia. This would ease pressure on the world w...
Jul 07, 2022•45 min•Ep 202•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 30th, 2022 This week, Future Hindsight is sharing an episode of The Financial Confessions – a podcast by The Financial Diet. The Financial Diet is the largest personal finance platform for women on the internet. Money impacts everything we do, and talking about it can be scary. In each episode, host Chelsea Fagan sits down with a subject matter expert for an in-depth chat about their particular field of work with a financial-first lens. In this episode, she speaks with writer and ...
Jun 30, 2022•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 23rd, 2022 Katie Fahey is the Executive Director of The People, an organization working to find common ground and take action to create a more responsive government of, by, and for the people. In 2016, Katie founded Voters Not Politicians, an organization that successfully organized and passed a ballot initiative to end gerrymandering in Michigan in 2018. We discuss the appetite for non-partisan civic engagement and more accountability from elected representatives. Voters Not Poli...
Jun 23, 2022•42 min•Ep 201•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 16th, 2022 Sung Yeon Choimorrow is the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, whose mission is to elevate AAPI women and girls to impact policy and drive systemic change in the United States. We discuss age-old and hardened stereotypes, changing the narrative about who Asian-Americans are, and activating Asian communities to take civic action. The term model minority was coined by a white sociologist to pit Japanese Americans against Black America...
Jun 16, 2022•41 min•Ep 200•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 9th, 2022 Jeff Clements serves as President of American Promise, an organization that is focused on repairing the constitutional foundation to renew freedom for all Americans, to support effective and honest government and an equal shot at the American dream. He is the author of Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations. We discuss ratifying a constitutional amendment that would rid American politics of dark money. Once the Supreme Co...
Jun 09, 2022•46 min•Ep 199•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 2nd, 2022 Amy Westervelt is a climate journalist and the founder and executive producer of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. She hosts the Drilled and Hot Take podcasts. We discuss the long tentacles of the fossil fuel industry, the key takeaways from this year's IPCC report, and how a small group of people have locked us into climate crisis. We have the tools and technology to mitigate the climate crisis now and the reasons that we're not taking dramatic action come down to...
Jun 02, 2022•53 min•Ep 198•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, May 26th, 2022 Andrea Miller is the President of the National Institute for Reproductive Health. As we await the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which will likely overturn Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion, we discuss how we got here and how we can prepare for the unwelcome reality of a post-Roe America. Abortion access is essential to equality, bodily integrity, community safety, and the economic future of all Americans. Everyone knows and loves someon...
May 26, 2022•50 min•Ep 197•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, May 19th, 2022 John Opdycke is the President of Open Primaries, an organization building a coalition of diverse Americans to enact open primaries in all 50 states. We discuss why it is time to shake up the closed-party primary system. In an open primary, all voters get to vote on the same ballot and all candidates get to run on the same ballot. The number one growing demographic among voters is independents, and yet, they’re often shut out. Primaries are publicly funded, so every voter...
May 19, 2022•40 min•Ep 196•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, May 12th, 2022 Marie Yovanovitch is the former Ambassador to Ukraine and best-selling author of her memoir, Lessons from the Edge . In a live event for Big Tent USA, we discuss the powers of diplomacy, the corrosive effects of corruption, and the war in Ukraine. Her memoir details her illustrious career, her courage and integrity, and her patriotic dedication and service to the United States. She exemplifies how career diplomats – public servants – serve their country, Republican or De...
May 12, 2022•47 min•Ep 195•Transcript available on Metacast 
