Jethro Jones contacted me to make a challenge that he wanted to do public and that part of this challenge and conversation gets very personal. We started talking about education. He’s a principal. The past few years have transformed my understanding of education and how critical it is for culture, society and democracy. It is not just something that happens in schools. For this podcast we’ll also talk about how[…] Keep reading →

I’m going to get to the heart of this conversation in a second but first I have to do this preface. The point of this conversation is about your values and how you live by them. Everyone I talk to they get it after a couple of objections and they find it thought-provoking, very thought-provoking. But they first have to get past that I’m asking you to compare your behavior[…] Keep reading →

I met Tim at least a year ago and I loved what he did and how much he loved what he did which was to turn a trashed wasteland into beautiful living space, also, a tourist destination throughout Europe, also a thriving business and now spreading around the world to become the same things in other places where industries have trashed the landscape. As a leadership and entrepreneurship teacher, it’s[…] Keep reading →

Chris does things. He does incredible things and I urge you to check out his web page and read some of the things that he does. I allude to it in the conversation but check it out for yourself. But he’s still humble and simple despite doing these incredible things. So if the part of the reason you’re here is you like my burpees or my avoiding food packaging or[…] Keep reading →

I want to differentiate between telling people facts and what to do or what they should do, on the one side, and leading them, on the other side. I see a lot of people telling others what to do, not a lot of people leading. Martin Luther King led people to choose and want to go to jail to create freedom. That’s leadership. He had no authority over them. He[…] Keep reading →

I just read about someone describing the ultimatum game as showing people are irrational. The ultimatum game is used in classrooms and by psychologists. The teacher pairs people up, gives one person ten dollars or something like that and says, “You can keep as much as you want but give the rest to the other.” But if the other vetoes, all the money comes back to the teacher. So you[…] Keep reading →

I care about the environment and I act on it. I’m going to talk to you today about how do we elect people including the United States president who act on and steward the environment. I’m going to present a plan that I believe can win the next election that transcends the usual divisions that led to today’s political situation, political misery, feelings of futility and the filth that we[…] Keep reading →

I have a letter from the president of NYU where I teach congratulating students on flying to third world countries – Africa, Central America, Asia, and helping people build schools, helping them work on projects there to make their lives better over there. I put to you that students at elite American universities are terrible at building things. NYU is building lots of buildings for itself here, right here in[…] Keep reading →

Whether you believe in global warming or not there is a lot of big environmental messes out there. There’s going to be more plastic in the ocean than fish, people project, within our lifetimes. When you think of how many fish there are and how big the oceans or when you think of how much plastic it would take to have more of that. I don’t know if that’s a[…] Keep reading →