POSTHOC Digital Salon With Susan MacTavish Best

Today’s guest is Jean Lee, one of the world’s foremost experts on North Korea and a journalist whose reporting has reshaped how we understand one of the most secretive countries on earth. Jean co-hosted the BBC World Service’s acclaimed podcast The Lazarus Heist, the gripping true-crime investigation into the billion-dollar cyberattacks tied to North Korea — from the Sony Pictures hack to global financial crime rings and crypto-gangsters. She led The Associated Press coverage of the Korean Peninsula as bureau chief from 2008 to 2013, and in 2012 became the first American reporter to join Pyongyang’s foreign press corps, opening AP’s Pyongyang bureau. Over the years, she has made dozens of extended reporting trips into North Korea, visiting farms, factories, schools, military academies, and private homes — gaining rare access and insight into daily life inside the country.

Susan MacTavish Best interviews Jim Kennedy,  President at ThREE Consulting & Caldera Holding LLC.  Susan and Jim discuss the economic, national security and geopolitical ramifications of China’s rare earth monopoly.  Live music from Queen Esther and Firas Zreik. 

Susan MacTavish Best interviews Ali Kashani, CEO and co-founder of last mile robot delivery company Serve Robotics (NASDAQ: SERV). Musicians Queen Esther and friends perform live. About Ali Kashani: Dr. Ali Kashani is the co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, the maker of Level 4 autonomous sidewalk delivery robots that has received investments from Uber and NVIDIA.  Founded in 2017 as the robotics division of Postmates, Serve has completed tens of thousands of deliveries for enterprise partners such as Uber Eats and 7-Eleven. Ali is a serial founder with multiple exits, including smart-home hardware maker Neurio (sold to Generac) and Lox (sold to Postmates). Following Postmates acquisition of his venture, Ali launched Postmates X, the internal innovation unit that created Serve’s award-winning robot. Ali received his Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of British Columbia in 2012. He is the recipient of Canada’s premier scholarship, the Alexander Graham Bell Fellowship, and has been awarded over 15 patents. 

I'll be speaking with Hind Hassan, the 2024 winner of The Neal Conan Prize for Excellence in Journalism.  We'll be discussing her life, experiences, and views on the current state of journalism.  With live performances from Posthoc's artist in residence, Queen Esther & pianist Sharp Radway.

I'll be speaking with national security expert and geopolitical thinker Dmitri Alperovitch. Dmitri recently published World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century. With live performances from Posthoc's artist in residence, Queen Esther.

The History of Intelligence with Max Bennett.  Max is the author of The Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains, and is the cofounder & CEO of Alby, an AI company based in NYC. This salon features music by Queen Esther & Friends and is supported by a grant Posthoc received from Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF).  Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Diverse Intelligence (DI) initiative seeks to break down disciplinary boundaries and build a new scientific community. DI is a multiyear, global effort to understand a world alive with brilliance in many forms. Its mission is to promote open-minded, forward-looking inquiry in animal, human, and machine intelligences. TWCF collaborates with leading experts and emerging scholars from around the globe, developing high-caliber projects that advance our comprehension of the constellation of intelligences.

Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.  Neil is a specialist in the philosophy of human rights, philosophy and technology, sexual ethics, and research on alternative sexualities. He is the co-editor of Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press) and Fragile Freedoms: The Global Struggle for Human Rights (Oxford University Press).  He is particularly interested in the intersection of sex and technology and is the co-author of “The Rise of Digisexuality: Therapeutic Challenges and Possibilities" where the authors argue a new sexual identity is emerging: digisexuality. Digisexuals are people for whom technology is an integral part of their sexual identity, and who may not feel the need for human partners.

Posthoc Salons founder, Susan MacTavish Best, interviews Lisa Ferri about her experiences covering the Trump trial, the verdict, and what she sees ahead in the media landscape in the run up to the Presidential election.   Lisa is an Emmy award-winning journalist who's spent three decades covering politics and culture inside some of America's most storied newsrooms: 60 Minutes, MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and Deadline White House, ABC's Good Morning America and World News Tonight.

Does Consciousness Matter?  A conversation w/philosopher David Chalmers in SoHo for evening filled with conversation, live music, homemade food and our warm NYC Posthoc community.  The salon is supported by a grant Posthoc received from Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF). TWCF funds grants that are accelerating research on consciousness, and David is a fellow grantee of TWCF.

In this episode of the POSTHOC Digital Podcast, Susan interviews Deborah Bonello, Editorial Director for Latin America @VICE News and author of NARCAS: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America's Cartels. Deborah made the journey to the POSTHOC LA warehouse all the way from Mexico City to discuss her reporting on female-led organized crime that ultimately led to writing NARCAS.

For the last salon of 2023 we invited Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg to discuss her life's work as an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. She emigrated from Venezuela, attended Harvard as a single mother in the 1970s, founded her own firm Strategic Investment Group, served as CIO of the World Bank penchants fund and founded Orchestra of the Americas, which finds diverse musical talent in underserved communities and gives musicians a platform to develop their talents and launch a career playing music professionally in orchestras around the world. Under the umbrella of OA is the Global Leaders Institute, which offers students an opportunity to study for an MBA for the Arts, a degree supporting artistic innovation and social impact. Lucky us, we'll have a few musicians from OA performing.  This salon is supported by a grant Posthoc received from Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF). TWCF funds grants that investigate individual freedom and free market theories and how that relates to human flourishing globally, and Hilda exemplifies this approach.

We hosted a salon with Substack in LA to celebrate their community of writers and creators, and to meet the company's co-founder Hamish McKenzie, whose interview you're about to hear. We discussed the origins of the company, Hamish's own background as a writer and what about the platform fosters such a unique relationship between creators and subscribers. 

The Age of Prediction salon was co-hosted with Amy Brand, Publisher, MIT Press celebrating the publication of the new book The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk by MIT Press authors Igor Tulchinsky and Christopher Mason. Igor is the Founder/CEO of WorldQuant, a quantitative investment firm. Christopher is Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction. Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, co-moderates the conversation with POSTHOC founder and CEO, Susan MacTavish Best.  On the music front, Frank Almond performed on his rare, 400 year old violin, and shared the story of its theft and return. Frank held the Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for 25 years. He has also held the Concertmaster position with the Rotterdam Philharmonic with Valery Gergiev and Guest Concertmaster of the London Philharmonic with Kurt Masur. This salon was underwritten by the MIT Press. The MIT Press is a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design, and is widely considered the world’s most innovative university press. The MIT Press has been an open access leader for over two decades, publishing hundreds of freely accessible books every year. Known for bold design and creative technology, the Press mobilizes knowledge by publishing provocative works from leading thinkers around the globe for the broadest possible impact and audience.

In this week's edition of the Posthoc podcast we're interviewing Matt Gutman in Los Angeles about his life, experiences and his new book. Matt is ABC News' Chief National Correspondent and his book No Time to Panic came out this week and is currently featured in Oprah's book club. We'll also hear a musical performance from Queen Esther who flew in from NYC for her very first performance in LA - enjoy!

You're listening to the Posthoc Salon Podcast and in this episode we'll be speaking with Emma Cherniavsky, CEO of UNHCR (UK), the UK arm of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We'll here music from pianist Maria Angel Garcia, who won first prizes and has been a semi- finalist in well renowned national and international piano competitions. This salon is supported by a grant Posthoc received from Templeton World Charity Foundation.

You're listening to the Posthoc Salon Podcast and in this episode we'll be speaking with Emma Cherniavsky, CEO of UNHCR (UK), the UK arm of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We'll here music from pianist Maria Angel Garcia, who won first prizes and has been a semi- finalist in well renowned national and international piano competitions. This salon is supported by a grant Posthoc received from Templeton World Charity Foundation.

Embracing the Future of Humanity with Art & Science - This salon, tackling the rapid evolution of our relationship with technology, was co-hosted in London with Templeton World Charity Foundation and co-moderated by TWCF President Andrew Serazin.Our guest interviewees will include artist Agnieszka Pilat, who paints large-scale portraits of technology with the help of AI-powered painting-assistant robots. We’ll also be speaking to Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of the forthcoming book - A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of How We Got Here and Where We're Going. We will have two musical performances: Kiran Gandhi, aka Madame Gandhi. Kiran is an electronic music producer, artist and activist, and soul-singer J Warner, who both brought the house down at this salon.

In this episode of the Posthoc podcast, Susan will be doing her third interview with Justin Garcia, Executive Director of The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University about The State of Sex, Love, Gender and Well-Being in 2023 in Los Angeles and Beyond. This is POSTHOC's second salon with Justin; our last one was a public salon in the fall of 2022 with New York Public Radio at WNYC's Greene Space. While that salon primarily focused on New Yorkers, this time around Justin and I will dig in on West Coast data and beyond about the state of love, sex and relationships. Our artist in residence Grace Weber will be performing her new single intimate, and she brought along another wildly talent artist known as Love Moor. You’ll hear both of their songs throughout the interview - enjoy and follow us at @posthocsalons on Instagram. 

Posthoc's latest salon on forgiveness was co-hosted w/ Templeton World Charity Foundation, surrounding their participation in Harvard University's conference “Forgiveness: Interdisciplinary Perspectives." We invited Templeton grantee, psychologist Ev Worthington who has been studying the science of forgiveness for over 30 years and in addition to being a renowned researcher on the subject. His interview with Susan and Templeton President Andrew Serazin is woven into musical performances on the subject of forgiveness by Queen Esther and Ben Arthur of SongWriter Podcast.

In this episode of the Posthoc podcast, Susan interviews Dan Lyons, a New York Times best-selling author who has also written for the HBO hit series Silicon Valley, served as senior editor at Forbes, and has been published in virtually every major outlet from The Economist, NYT and Wall Street Journal to Wired, NPR, BBC and The Guardian. Dan's latest book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in a World That Won't Stop Talking, was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in February. This salon is supported by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of their listening and learning in a polarized world initiative. This podcast also features a very special musical performance from jazz-soul artist Koa Ho, curated by our POSTHOC artist-in-residence, Grammy-winner Grace Weber.