Terrence McNally podcast

Trump makes a prime-time speech, lying once again about fraud in previous elections and previewing his intention to disrupt and disable the 2026 mid-terms. Time to talk with ARI BERMAN, national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones' and the author of Minority Rule and Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. How realistic are our fears? What are Trump's most likely methods of attack? What scares Berman the most? How are we responding? What can listeners do? You can learn more at aribermanauthor.com 

We lost perhaps our nation’s most influential Buddhist with the death of ROBERT THURMAN June 16th at the age of 84. A former monk, ordained and partly trained by the Dalai Lama, left the monastery, earned a Harvard doctorate, taught at Amherst & Columbia, and wrote, edited and translated more than 20 books on Buddhism, both scholarly and for the general public. He was a founder of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia as well as Tibet House US in New York City, where he served for decades as president. In the first half of this episode you’ll hear our conversation recorded in 2011. In the second half you’ll hear my 2004 conversation with the late JONATHAN SCHELL about his book, A HOLE IN THE WORLD: An Unfolding Story of War, Protest, and the New American Order - his reflections on the experience of 9/11 and its aftermath. Schell passed away in 2014. Both wise men dedicated to working for a better world. This is the first time the Schell conversation has been available as podcast.

I learned a lot in this conversation with CORY DOCTOROW and in his new book, THE REVERSE CENTAUR’S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI. Rather than fear AI, Doctorow uses it daily, but he is also skeptical. He reminds us that nothing about the way things are unfolding with AI, technology, or society is inevitable, though that is the contention of those who profit from it. He warns that, if - in protesting AI’s threat - we buy into worst-case scenarios of its power, we promote its value.. More than what AI does, we need to pay attention to who AI does it to, and who AI does it for. Timely and useful. His website is craphound.com and he maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. (Photo: digital trends.com)

Here’s my 2008 conversation with ROBERT COLES, child psychiatrist, Harvard Professor, and author of 75 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning six volume Children of Crisis. He died June 4 at the age of 97. He spent a lifetime listening to people - often those ignored by others - and told their stories. Coles was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and the National Humanities Medal in 2001. 

I speak with ANNIE LEONARD & ANDRE CAROTHERS. She created the video documentary, The Story of Stuff, and led Greenpeace US for a decade. He worked for Greenpeace for 13 years and co-founded the Rockwood Institute. The new book they’ve written together, PROTEST: Respect it. Defend it. Use it includes brief essays on 42 protests from the 1700s to the present. It offers history and how-to, challenge and inspiration. Protest works. Protest is necessary. And as we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary, the right to protest is under attack. The website theprotestbook.com offers resources and links to help you to act.  Carothers & Leonard Transcript

When many believe HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - lacking in scientific, medical or public health training - is giving alternative medicine a bad name, here’s my 2003 conversation with Andrew Weil MD. We trace the evolution of Dr. Weil’s work and thinking from his earliest understandings of health and healing to his ongoing commitment to train a new generation of physicians. Weil’s definition of integrative medicine: rooted in the connection of medicine with nature and the natural healing potential of the organism, it utilizes the magic of the doctor/patient relationship to treat the whole person. On this episode, Weil, Spontaneous HealingHyla Cass MD joins the conversation.

Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah lost his brother to Israeli authorities in the second Intifada. Israeli Jew Maoz Inon lost both his parents to Hamas on October 7th. In their book,The Future Is Peace, these two travel guides to Israel/Palestine and lifelong peace activists, take readers on a journey across their holy bloodstained land. They share the mythic, political, and personal history that divides but also binds them and their peoples. This episode, recorded in front of an audience at a LiveTalksLA event in April, punctuated often by laughter, makes clear their love for each other and the land they share as well as their absolute conviction that dialogue and peace must and will prevail. You can learn more at thefutureispeace.com

Plato cautions that democracy inevitably leads to tyranny because the rich always want to get richer and the poor will follow a demagogue who promises to overthrow the rich. I first learned of Plato’s critique in this 2020 conversation with ASTRA TAYLOR, about her documentary WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? and companion book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. We explore democracy’s early roots as well as its current embattled state, and ask: Will we ever replace our current American rule of the wealthy with our never-quite-qchieved rule of the people?

I speak with former federal prosecutor BRENDAN BALLOU about a number of things. His first book was PLUNDER: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America and we get an update. He’s founder and CEO of the Public Integrity Project, which sues those who seek to bribe government officials, as well as officials who seek to be bribed. We check in on that. Ballou was among those who prosecuted the attackers of January 6th so we talk about Trump’s corruption & pardoning practices. Finally, we dig into his  latest book, WHEN COMPANIES RUN THE COURTS: Forced Arbitration and America’s Secret Justice System. You can learn more at PublicIntegrityProject.org

1) History-making entrepreneurial scientist CRAIG VENTER, died last week at the age of 79. The New York Times obituary leads with these words, “A risk-taking outsider, he brought speed, competition, and controversy to one of science’s biggest races.” In 2000, his team published the first sequence of the human genome – earlier and for far less money than the government-sponsored Human Genome Project. Here’s our 2008 conversation, on the release of his memoir, A LIFE DECODED: MY GENOME: MY LIFE. Learn more at jcvi.org 2) In the second half, my 2008 conversation with MacArthur Award winning evolutionary biologist STUART KAUFFMAN about his book, REINVENTING THE SACRED: A NEW VIEW OF SCIENCE, REASON, AND RELIGION. The two of us get excited as we work our way toward his notion that the ceaseless creativity of the universe may be the best way yet to think about God. Learn more at stuartkauffman.com

Climate scientist MICHAEL MANN (The New Climate War) has been a target of threatening abuse ever since he led the team that produced the “hockey stick graph” making clear the extreme rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. PETER HOTEZ (Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism) has likewise been targeted since his highly visible role in vaccine development and public heath communication during the Covid 19 pandemic. Together they’ve written SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World, in which they name those forces - plutocrats, professionals, petro-states, propagandists, and the press; and offer a path to repel their attacks so that we may effectively confront critical challenges. Learn more at michaelmann.net & peterhotez.org

In “even-a-broken-clock …” news this week, Donald Trump did something I applaud. He signed an executive order to accelerate research and access to psychedelic drugs for medical use, particularly to treat serious mental illness. Psychedelic substances have been used for ceremony and as medicine for millennia. Such properties were being cultivated and studied in the US in the 1960s and early ‘70s till widespread and careless use of psychedelics - think Timothy Leary -  and sensational media reports produced a backlash. Here’s my 2012 episode in which I talk first with CHARLES GROB MD about the scientific research, including his own ground-breaking studies. And then with JAMES FADIMAN about the ideas, the vision, and the advice in his book, PSYCHEDELIC EXPLORERS: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys.

When tech billionaires make nice with authoritarians and AI challenges are everywhere, I check in with JONATHAN TAPLIN, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, a former tour manager for Bob Dylan & The Band, a producer of films including Martin Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS, and the author of MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy and THE END OF REALITY: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto. We talk about the relationships of AI, democracy, authoritarianism, inequality, billionaires, the arts, and the military. You can learn more at jontaplin.com

When tech billionaires seem okay with authoritarianism and AI may be today’s existential challenge, here’s my 2013 conversation with Jaron Lanier about his book, WHO OWNS THE FUTURE? Lanier envisions a radical solution to surveillance capitalism that he believes could restore the American middle class: we all get paid for our data - which is, after all, the source of the value of networks like Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, etc. We talk about a lot more than that and it’s wild to realize this took place 13 years ago.

Let’s get down to basics. Does your life have a purpose? Can you justify your existence? I talk with REBECCA GOLDSTEIN, philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow, about THE MATTERING INSTINCT: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. Goldstein asserts we are “creatures of matter who long to matter” - physical beings governed by the laws of nature, yet obsessed with our own significance. She and I talk about the implications of this perspective on our understanding of what it means to be human, and about how we can put this understanding to use to help us turn things around in this challenging time of tribalism and social and political regression. Learn more at rebeccagoldstein.com/

To remind us what has to heal to put MAGA behind us, here’s my 2020 conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning husband-wife team, NICHOLAS KRISTOF & SHERYL WuDUNN. Their book, TIGHTROPE, tells how Nick’s childhood home - Yamhill, Oregon - was devastated by the loss of well-paying jobs and policy failures in education, healthcare, and justice that led to his childhood friends’ deaths of despair - and how we can end this crisis. We recorded this episode in the final year of Trump’s first term, a few weeks before the pandemic exploded.

I talk with TROY BRENNAN, professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and former Chief Medical Officer at CVS Health about his latest book, WONDERFUL AND BROKEN: The Complex Reality of Primary Care in the US. The US accounts for roughly half of total global health care spending, even though it's only 4% of world population. The World Health Organization ranks US healthcare 37th overall compared to other Western countries. Primary care physicians play a pivotal role in both preventing disease and lowering healthcare costs but they are overworked, underpaid, and incentivized to move into higher-paying specialties while patients face provider shortages.

For Oscar week, two half hour film-linked episodes from the archives. First my 2006 conversation with ROGER EBERT, following that year’s Oscars, where CRASH beat BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN for Best Picture. The vote was controversial in the film world and the fact that a gay cowboy movie came close riled the homophobic hearts of the Christian Right. So lots to talk about. In the second half, my 2007 episode with television trailblazer, PHIL DONAHUE, who died in 2024 at the age of 88. We talk about some of his courageous choices over the years and about Body of War, the documentary he co-directed about a severely disabled Iraq War veteran. His condemnations of the Iraq War and its beginnings are sadly and infuriatingly ripped from today’s news.

TRILLION DOLLAR WAR MACHINE - the title of the new book BILL HARTUNG & BEN FREEMAN wrote together - is about a trillion dollar a year machine for waging wars and for creating them. Donald Trump has discovered he likes using it. We spend more than we did in 1985 for a military half the size. Hartung & Freeman talk about a military-lobbyist-newsmedia-entertainment-sports-industrial complex. The tech bro’s want in on the gravy train and see AI as their ticket. I assume we don’t talk about defense spending because no one expects anything to change. We’re about to find out once again how crazy that is. We recorded this conversation 2/26 - one day before the war on Iran. Learn more about Bill & Ben at the Quincy Institute - quincyinst.org/

Here’s my 2017 conversation with CHIP BERLET, investigative journalist, research analyst, activist - and friend - who died January 30, 2026. Over the last 50 years, Chip was one of a handful of folks who consistently tracked and organized against right-wing extremism. As MAGA grew and metastasized from its roots in the Silent Majority and the Tea Party, Chip was on the beat. Can’t say he didn’t warn us. Berlet was part of a team at the National Lawyers Guild who revealed the COINTELPRO program, in which US security and military forces disrupted left-wing movements for years, and co-authored (with Matthew N. Lyons) Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort a year before 9/11. We recorded this conversation two months into Trump One and five months before Tiki Torches in Charlottesville.