Crooked Media -- my new favorite podcast emporium

If you are a Republican Trump supporter and listen to a full Crooked Media episode, I will listen to a podcast episode of your choice.

Crooked Media, which produces several political podcasts, was started by Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s head speechwriter from 2005–2013, Jon Lovett, previously a speechwriter for Hillary Clinton and President Obama and Tommy Vietor, who spent nearly a decade as a spokesman for President Obama, specializing in foreign policy and national security issues. They are highly qualified and well connected so are able to attract high-ranking interview guests from government and academia.

They started Crooked Media because they "couldn’t find a place to talk about politics the way actual human beings talk" and are unabashed, but critical, Democrats. Their motto is "Do Something -- Tweets are not The Resistance" and they have plans to go beyond podcasting.

This might sound kind of wonky and dull, but it is actually wonky and funny and relaxed -- you really need to check them out. Not convinced? Check out the following excerpts from two interviews conducted by Tommy Vietor on his foreign policy podcast, PodSavetheWorld.

To whet your appetite, I created two excerpts dealing with US-Cuba policy. (I chose these excerpts because they are typical of Crooked Media interviews and I have an interest in Cuba).

One excerpt is from an interview of Dan Restrepo, who served as a top Latin America advisor to President Obama. Restrepo had written a Cuban-rapprochement roadmap for candidate Obama during his first campaign and he returned to the topic in 2013. He says Obama was playing a "long game," knowing that his executive authority was limited and he could not move faster than US public opinion. Restrepo characterizes Obama's strategy as a bet that by creating a degree of freedom among the Cuban people, for example by expanding reparations and undermining Castro's excuse of blaming all problems on the Evil Empire, the Cuban government would be forced to change. He noted that the blame-US game was a hard sell after the Cuban people saw the Evil Emperor, who looked more like them than the current Cuban leaders, giving a speech on TV or at a baseball game with Raúl Castro.

The excerpt (14:20) is here and the full podcast (48:37) here.

The second excerpt is from an interview of Ben Rhodes, who served as a speechwriter and emissary for President Obama and was one of two White House staff members handling the negotiations leading up to our opening with Cuba. Rhodes and his colleague Ricardo Zuniga traveled to Canada for 12-15 secret meetings with Cuban representatives while working out the rapprochement details. At the start, they were only negotiating for the release of Alan Gross because Obama reasoned that rapprochement would be politically unacceptable if Gross remained in a Cuban prison. Early in the negotiation for Gross, they realized more was possible and the scope of the discussion broadened. Only a few people in the White House knew of these negotiations, but the Vatican was informed early and played a key role. (If you are unfamiliar with the Alan Gross case, click here).

The excerpt (11:30) is here and the full podcast (1:00:48) is here.

Even if you are a Republican Trump supporter, check out Crooked Media's podcasts. (If you are a Republican Trump supporter and listen to a full Crooked Media episode, I will listen to a podcast episode of your choice).

Recommended podcast: Get your next eye exam on a smartphone by Andrew Bastawrous

A smartphone with a cheap attachment can diagnose eye disease and let us restore sight to millions of blind people

In 1973, E. F. Schumacher published a book called "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered." Schumacher wrote of the need for "approriate technology" -- technology that was small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled. His emphasis was on, but not confined to, developing nations.

Andrew Bastawrous' low-cost smartphone ophthalmic tools are a textbook example of appropriate technology. He uses an Android phone to assess vision, view the retina, and simulate a persons vision for another to see the world as they do. Eye exams are conducted by technicians on bicycles with solar panels on their backpacks to keep the phones charged. They also have a map-based app to maintain their database of patients and village elders.

Two quotes from the talk:

• There are 39 million people in the world who are blind. Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya, and the absolute majority do not need to be blind. They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable.

• It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye, and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars, and people can be cured of blindness, and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we've developed cures and we don't deliver them. But now we can.

For more information on Andrew Bastawrous and his project as well as a transcript and downloadable audio and video copies of the podcast (6:33), follow this link.

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Solar power charges the backpack and the
technician travels on a bicycle or motor bike.

Imaging the retina

You could have made a lot of money in one second yesterday if ...

Michael Lewis has written a book entitled the eFlash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt in which he describes the efforts of high speed traders to gain an advantage by saving a few milliseconds in making a trade. Terry Gross also interviewed Lewis on Fresh Air, and you can listen to the interview (37m 25s) here or read the transcript here.

In addition to talking about the advantage that super fast access and trading algorithms confers, Lewis talks of the complexity of computer trading and the possibility of instability.

We saw a small example yesterday, when, as Bloomberg columist Matt Levine put it, the stock market went WOOSH for a second.

As you see here, you could have made a lot of money in one second if you had a super fast computer with a super fast connection to a stock exchange:

Does this sort of thing undermine our belief in the impartiality of capital markets?

Recommended podcast: Charles Robinson, Africa's next boom

Emerging markets economist Charles Robinson predicts an African boom, contending that Africa is where India, China and prosperous Asian nations were 25 years ago. He presents demographic, educational and other data and predicts African GDP will increase from $2 trillion today to $29 trillion in 2050. Africa also has the advantage of having learned from the experience of Asian nations and better domestic and global technology than those nations had at a similar stage in their development.

You can read a transcript of the talk here and here are a couple of his slides -- on the availablity of young workers and the relationship between poverty and corruption:

Recommended podcast: Interview of Bill and Melinda Gates

Chris Anderson's TED interview of Bill and Melinda Gates. The interview covers the work of the Gates Foundation and the Gates' philanthropic goals, strategy and philosophy. They also talk about their family, relationship and child raising.

Edited transcript of the talk

Recommended podcast: Hans Rosling on data visualization (19:50)

In this data visualization classic, Hans Rosling applies his visualization tools to data on life expectancy, fertility rate, GDP, infant mortality, etc. His tools present data dynamically -- we see changes over time -- and he is a dynamic, funny speaker as well.

The talk ends with visualization of some Internet penetration data and a plea for open access to government data.

The talk is immodestly titled "The best stats talk you've ever seen," but it delivers what it promises. If you are hooked, you can interact with his tools and follow him on his Website.

Recommended podcast: Radioab -- when the moon was close and the days were short (14 minutes)

The title of this podcast, "The Times they are a Changin," does not refer to the Bob Dylan song, but to the fact that, on a cosmic scale, we can't take anything for granted.

The Radiolab hosts weave commentary with clips from experts to explain that, about 4.5 billion years ago, when the moon was created, it was about ten times closer to the Earth than it is today and days were around six hours long.

(The podcast has a second part -- a six minute long conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson).

Recommended podcast: Capturing Egypt's neverending story (9:54)

Brooke Gladstone of On The Media interviews Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, the producer and director of The Square, an Oscar nominated documentary on the Arab Spring. They speak of the Arab Spring and the global paradigm shift social media is causing.

Producer Karim Amer on the importance of social media:

And we look today at what’s happening in Kiev, we see the same exact image. We look at Caracas last week, and the same thing is happening. We look at Istanbul. And we start to realize that this isn’t just the Arab Spring, Winter or Summer. This is a global paradigm shift. When it started off in Egypt it was a very lonely fight between the Egyptian dictator versus the Egyptian protester, but when all of you and the rest of the world started watching what was happening, you leveled the playing field. Your witness provided protection for us. And that’s the way that we can change the world today.

(For what was perhaps the first example of political citizen journalism on the Internet, see this discussion of Usenet during the 1991 Soviet Coup attempt).

Recommended podcast: Interpreting the Constitution in the digital era

Jeffrey Rosen asks "Can the police, without a warrant, put a secret GPS device on the bottom of someone's car and track him 24/7 for a month?"

If you are interested in legal and moral issues of privacy and autonomy, you will like Terry Gross' interview of George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, who is co-editor of a new book called Constitution 3.0 Freedom and Technological Change.

In this NPR interview, Rosen says that information technologies are "challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways" and that "none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today." He discusses both current cases with today's technology and speculates on information and biological technology that may become available in the future and raise even thorniner problems.

The interview is 36 minutes 33 seconds, and you can stream or download it or read the transcript here.

Recommended podcast: Maajid Nawaz on radical's use of the Internet

Maajid Nawaz

At first we naively expected the Internet and other communication technology to favor democracy over dictatorship. In a 1998 report on the Internet in Cuba, I wrote of

the 'dictator's dilemma' -- the desire to have the benefits of the Internet without the threat of political instability. How do you give people access to information for health care, education, and commerce while keeping them from political information?

Today, we have a more nuanced view of the Internet as a force for democracy -- we see that it is not only used by democrats, but by dictators and even terrorists, as illustrated by the use of Google Earth to plan missile attacks.

al-Aqsa commander in Gaza

Maajid Nawaz, presents a vivid picture of the use of the Internet by radical Islamists in his Ted Talk A global culture to fight extremism. Nawaz feels that extremists -- whether Islamists or white power advocates -- make better use of the Internet than democracy advocates. He speaks with authority, having used the Internet as a propagandist and recruiter for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir for 13 years, including five years in an Egyptian prison for attempting to overthrow the government. He describes the use of the Net by extremists, asks why they have succeeded across borders and goes on to argue for a countervailing grass roots, youth-led movement to advocate for a democratic culture.