Latest Government20 Podcast Episodes
"The President of Forgetting"
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - March 13, 2024 12:00 - 4 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsAs we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made, Spencer Critchley has some thoughts about memory and freedom, from people who know the precious value of both. Excerpt: "Most of us in the U.S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead have b...
What's the Real News About Election '24? With Mike Madrid & Zach Friend
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - February 13, 2024 13:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsIf you wanted to, you could consume nothing but presidential campaign coverage all day every day. But how much of it would leave you feeling better informed about casting what may be the most important vote of your life? Not better informed about the campaign as a sporting event, with all the ex...
Luke Freeman on the promise & challenges of Effective Altruism: how to make giving count
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - December 22, 2023 08:01 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsBy some measures, well over half of charities do little or no good. When similar charities are compared, the most effective ones can be up to 100 times more effective than the least. And there’s often a big mismatch between where donors direct their support and where the need and potential benef...
What Cynics Get Wrong About Politics
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - October 25, 2023 07:01 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsThere are lots of reasons to be cynical about the crisis in our politics. The trouble is, one of the biggest causes of that crisis is cynicism itself. We should always be skeptical about politics. People aren’t angels, as James Madison reminded us. But skepticism involves checking to find ou...
A Hollow Man Vacates the Chair & Other Leadership Lessons, Cautionary & Otherwise, with Kevin Lewis & Zach Friend
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - October 05, 2023 18:14 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsA three-way conversation featuring host Spencer Critchley, Kevin Lewis, and Zach Friend on leadership lessons from the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, as compared with far better examples set by Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and others. It turns out, to the shock of cynics everywhere, that character ...
Kevin Lewis on AI: Lessons from Working with Meta, Obama, and the DOJ
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - September 19, 2023 09:26 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsIf you want to know more about the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence, you could hardly do better than to consult with someone who’s been a senior communications advisor for Facebook, lately known as Meta, the US Department of Justice, and a President of the United States. And that’s w...
Katie Davis: What We Really Know About Kids & Tech
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - July 11, 2023 07:01 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsIf you have children in your family, you’re probably worried about what technology might be doing to them. And maybe there’s some hope about what tech might do for them. In this episode, you can get guidance from one of the world's top experts on the subject. Dr. Katie Davis is a researcher an...
Joan Esposito: Talk radio for people who want better politics
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - February 01, 2023 08:01 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsThe episode before last, Spencer was the guest for a change, interviewed by Joan Esposito, who hosts a liberal talk radio show originating at WCPT-AM in Chicago. This time, Spencer interviews Joan about how she manages to conduct smart, in-depth, live political conversations three hours a day, f...
Sam Farr: How Democracy Can Work
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - December 21, 2022 08:01 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsSam Farr devoted 44 years of his life to elected office at the local, state, and federal level. That included 24 years as the Congressman for the Central Coast of California, where he grew up in the seaside village of Carmel. Among his inspirations were his father, longtime state legislator F...
Why do so many choose tyranny over democracy? Joan Esposito interviews Spencer Critchley
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - November 29, 2022 08:01 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsSpencer often talks with Joan Esposito, who interviews him about politics for her show on Chicago's WCPT-AM. This episode of Dastardly Cleverness replays one of those conversations that's especially relevant now. Joan and Spencer focus on why democracy, after all its successes, is now in so mu...
Les Francis & Lora Lee Martin: Can Democrats Save Democracy?
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - October 27, 2022 07:01 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsEven with democracy in grave danger, Democrats are in a close race against the people who are trying to finish it off. How can that be, and what should they do about it? Questions like that have been dominating discussions among a group of some of the country's most senior Democratic Party vet...
Sam Quinones: "America and hope in the time of fentanyl and meth"
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - October 11, 2022 07:01 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsIn many ways, addiction has become a defining feature of life in America. More and more of us have become addicted to drugs like alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and opioids, and to other things increasingly recognized as addictive, like sugar, junk food, and social media. The problem has been growin...
Sheri Berman: Is the Game of Democracy Over?
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - September 08, 2022 11:59 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsOne way of thinking about democracy is as a game — a game in which freedom, equality, and even lives are at stake. And one way of thinking about the state of our democracy is that one of the two main competitors is no longer playing the game, but trying to destroy it. As with any game, the ru...
Walter Shapiro: Finding the Democrats’ Missing Message
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - June 16, 2022 07:01 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsIt's not just Democrats who need the Democratic Party to remember how to win elections. Democracy does. Spencer's guest this time has some great ideas on where to start, based on his unique, decades-long experience studying politics from the inside and out. Walter Shapiro has reported on 11 ...
Russia Expert Jade McGlynn: Putin's Memory War
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - May 04, 2022 07:01 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsSpencer's guest this time has fascinating, important insights about Vladimir Putin's "memory war:" a campaign to rewrite history with Russia at the center of the world stage. That campaign is being enacted with horrific violence in Ukraine, but is pursued in different ways around the world, inclu...
Lincoln Project Co-Founder Mike Madrid: Latino Voters Have an Urgent Warning for Democrats
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - March 28, 2022 14:37 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsMike Madrid is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a longtime political consultant for candidates of both parties, and a leading expert on Latino voting. Mike says Latino voters are sounding an urgent alarm for the Democratic Party about how it may lose the presidency and more, by losing its wor...
Treating People as People, Not Machines: Dr. Rose Kumar on How to Heal Healthcare
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - December 09, 2021 15:09 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsThe way we live is also the way we get sick and die: "Lifestyle diseases" are the leading causes of death for Americans, six out of ten of whom have a chronic condition. And yet we treat the symptoms, with expensive drugs and procedures, instead of addressing the causes. After training at top ...
Michele Gelfand: What Tight & Loose Cultures Tell Us About the World & Ourselves
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - November 04, 2021 15:06 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsIn Singapore, you can face a heavy fine or even jail for offenses like spitting on the sidewalk and importing chewing gum. Meanwhile in New Zealand, a man who hatched himself from a giant egg was appointed the country’s “official wizard.” These are examples of tight and loose cultures. Much of...
A Guide for the Confused: Just What Is Critical Race Theory?
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - October 18, 2021 15:56 - 35 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsEven if you see through the phony panic being spun up by Trumpists, some of what you hear from critical race theorists can sound extreme, especially if you don’t know much about the context. In this episode, host Spencer Critchley offers a guide for people who feel confused about Critical Race T...
To Go Forward, We Must First Look Back: Colleen Murphy on Transitional Justice
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - August 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsSometimes we can't "just move on." Sometimes we must first confront the truth about the past. According to our guest this time, we can do that through transitional justice. It addresses situations where doing wrong is not the exception, but has been made normal, as has happened in places like...
Georgina Mendoza McDowell: What We Know About How to Reform Policing
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - July 15, 2021 19:53 - 54 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsWe already know a lot about how to reform policing: not just to make it more fair, but to make it more effective. It turns out that when police work in partnership with the communities they protect, crime goes down, often way down. Spencer's guest this time is an expert on what works. Georgina M...
Susan Neiman: What America Can Learn From Germany About Facing Its Past
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - June 08, 2021 04:13 - 57 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsIt may be hard for many Americans to imagine, but there are striking parallels between post-Civil-War America and post-World-War-2 Germany. Our guest this time is an expert on those parallels, and wrote a deeply-researched, insightful, and important book about them. Philosopher Susan Neiman is t...
Abené Clayton: Guns and Lies
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - May 15, 2021 20:24 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsCompared to other high-income countries, our rate of gun deaths per capita is 25 times higher. But much of what Americans think they know about the costs and causes of gun violence is wrong. And few are aware of solutions that have already been shown to work. To help fix that, The Guardian h...
Vinz Koller: How to Repair Democracy Now
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - April 03, 2021 16:32 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsAmerican democracy is more fragile than many of us ever imagined. But we’ve been neglecting and abusing it so much that maybe the bigger surprise is that it’s lasted as long as it has. A lot of that damage can still be fixed, though—as long as we don’t let the whole thing fall apart first. S...
Living With Big Lies
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - March 27, 2021 18:13 - 14 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsEven with Trump out of office, the Republican Party's leaders and media enablers appear determined to keep on living in a world of lies — a place where democracy can't live. As host Spencer Critchley says, it's like life under Soviet domination as described by writers such as Vaclav Havel and Cz...
The State of Democracy: An Ask Anything Discussion
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - February 08, 2021 23:04 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsSpencer Critchley hosts a Zoom-based "Ask Anything" discussion covering the chaos in the Republican Party, how we can both believe in tolerance and make clear moral judgments about something like the Capitol riot, whether better education would be enough to save democracy, what we can learn fro...
The Psychology of Trumpism
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - January 26, 2021 18:46 - 18 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsThis time, host Spencer Critchley talks about the psychology of sedition, Trumpism as Freudian dream logic, and the apparent belief of Capitol rioters that they were in a movie. Excerpt: In dream logic, the Capitol riot was the start of a patriotic revolution led by Trump. And it was an anti...
What History Can Teach Us About the Attack on Our Democracy
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - January 18, 2021 19:25 - 13 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsSpencer Critchley talks about: Why we can’t “just move on” after the Capitol riot - or everything else that’s happened over the past four years. The circle of shared moral values that must encompass democracy and how each of us can and must defend it — starting by simply speaking up. Lesso...
The Attack on Democracy
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - January 11, 2021 20:08 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsJust about the only thing many of us are thinking about these days is the endangered state of American democracy, especially since the attempted coup on Jan. 6. In this episode, Spencer Critchley offers some of his thoughts, and invites you to share yours. You can do that at these links: Twitt...
Zach & Spencer on Election 2020
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - October 21, 2020 17:22 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsZach Friend is an author and a public policy and communications expert who has worked for Barack Obama and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Democratic National Committee. He’s been featured on an...
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