FORA.tv - Audio Program of the Week

Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore talks politics and reads from his new book, Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life. This program was recorded at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, on October 2, 2011. Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life is an unflinchingly honest, take-no-prisoners ride through the life of Oscar-winning filmmaker and bestselling author Michael Moore. Moore shares far-ranging, irreverent, and stranger-than-fiction vignettes from his early life. One moment he's an 11-year-old boy lost in the Senate and found by Bobby Kennedy; and in the next, he's inside the Bitburg cemetery with Ronald Reagan. At 17, he goes to get a snack and ends up on the news, creating a firestorm that helps eliminate racial discrimination at private establishments across America. Funny, eye-opening, and moving, it's the book he has been writing and living his entire life. - Sixth and I Historic Synagogue Michael Moore is an Academy Award-winning American filmmaker, author and liberal political commentator. He is the director and producer of Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko, three of the top five highest-grossing documentaries of all time. In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, documenting his personal crusade to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections. He has also written and starred in the TV shows "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth." Moore is a self-described liberal who has criticized globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush and the American health care system in his written and cinematic works. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Sixth and I Historic Synagogue presents: Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow discussing their book, War of the Worldviews: Science vs Spirituality. This program was recorded on October 6, 2011. In War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality, the two bestselling authors debate the most fundamental questions of human existence. How did the universe begin? Where did life come from? Is there design in nature? Without defending organized religion, Chopra asserts that there is design in the universe and a deep intelligence behind the rise of life. Mlodinow, CalTech physicist and the writing collaborator of Stephen Hawking, argues for the viewpoint of science, specifically of modern quantum physics. War of the Worldviews opens the public's eyes to the fascinating frontier where knowledge and mystery converge and every assumption about life, God, and the universe are open to debate. Program moderated by Timothy Shriver, Chairman and CEO of the Special Olympics. Deepak Chopra is the author of more than fifty books translated into more than thirty-five languages. Dr. Chopra is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management, and a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization. He is founder and president of the Alliance for a New Humanity. Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and is now at Caltech. His book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives was a New York Times Bestseller, Editor's Choice, and Notable Book of the Year, and was short-listed for the Royal Society book award. His other books include two co-authored with physicist Stephen Hawking -- A Briefer History of Time, and The Grand Design. In addition to his books and research articles, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Forbes magazine, among other publications, and for television series such as McGyver and Star Trek: the Next Generation.

Author Alain de Botton talks about his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. This program was recorded in Melbourne, Australia, on April 23, 2009. For most people the word work is synonymous with jobs, labor and occupations. The things we do to pay the rent. The mundane routine can often overshadow the nuances of the work that we do. In this talk at RMIT in Melbourne, philosopher Alain de Botton reminds us of the importance of appreciating the details of work and workplaces. In this way we can have a greater understanding of the impact our daily tasks have on culture and society, or perhaps decide that it's time for a new career. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation Alain de Botton is a British writer and television producer who employs a philosophical and accessible approach to examining a variety of subjects from the abstract--love and happiness--to the material--architecture. In August 2008, he founded an unconventional new educational establishment in central London called The School of Life, which offers intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life. De Botton is a frequent contributor to numerous newspapers, journals and magazines and is a member of the Arts Council of England's literature panel. De Botton owns and helps run his own production company, Seneca Productions, which regularly broadcasts television documentaries based on his work. His most recent book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is an examination of the modern workplace and the role work has played in our lives throughout history.

Rebroadcast: This podcast originally aired on May 14, 2010. For years, NASA's David Morrison has been an active critic of fears that the world will end in 2012... and of imaginative con artists who use mass media to frighten people for profit. In an entertaining lecture titled, "Doomsday 2012: Nibiru / Planet X, Pole Shifts, Planetary Alignments, and the End of the World," Morrison lays out the case against apocalypse. This program was recorded in collaboration with the SkeptiCal Conference, on April 24, 2010. Dr. David Morrison is the Director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and Senior Scientist for Astrobiology at the NASA Ames Research Center. He holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard and is internationally known for his research on small bodies in the solar system, including advocacy for developing plans to defend the Earth from impacts by comets and asteroids. A Fellow of CSI, he has written extensively on such fringe science topics as Velikovsky, cosmic catastrophes, UFOs, the creation science movement, and most recently the climate crisis caused by global warming. For the past two years he has been the primary scientist critic of the widespread fear that the world will end in 2012, and of the doomsday sleaze artists who use the Internet, blogs, and cable TV to frighten people for profit.

Humorist and Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman presents information on the secrets of famous magic tricks, from his forthcoming book That Is All. This program was recorded in collaboration with Maker Faire New York, on September 17, 2011. John Kellogg Hodgman is an American actor, author and humorist. In addition to his published written works, such as The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require, he is known for his personification of a PC in contrast to Justin Long's personification of a Mac in Apple's "Get a Mac" advertising campaign, and for his correspondent work on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His writings have been published in One Story (to which he contributed the debut story), The Paris Review, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Wired and The New York Times Magazine, for which he is editor of the humor section. He contributes to Public Radio International’s This American Life, and CBC Radio One’s Wiretap. His first book and accompanying audio narration, The Areas of My Expertise, a satirical tongue-in-cheek almanac which actually contains almost no factual information, was published in 2005. His second book, More Information Than You Require, went on sale October 21, 2008. Hodgman is most recently the author of That Is All, to be released November 2011.

Khan Academy founder Salman Khan explains the concepts driving his wildly popular (and free) YouTube-based lecture series. Could this be the groundwork for a new classroom model? This program was recorded in collaboration with WIRED Business Conference 2011, on May 3, 2011. Salman Khan, Founder, Khan Academy in conversation with Clive Thompson, Contributing Editor, WIRED Salman Khan is the founder and one-man faculty of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing free, high-quality education to "anyone, anywhere" in the world. A hedge fund analyst with degrees from MIT and Harvard, Khan was helping a young cousin with math in 2004, communicating by phone and using an interactive notepad. When others expressed interest, he began posting videos of his hand-scribbled tutorials on YouTube. Demand took off, and in 2009 he quit his day job. The Khan Academy website now provides self-pacing software and unlimited access to over 2,200 instructional videos on its YouTube channel, targeting the K-12 grade levels. It's the most-used library of educational videos on the web, with over a million unique students per month and over 45 million lessons delivered. In 2009, the academy received the Microsoft Tech Award for Education. The following year, it was selected from among 150,000 submissions as one of five "world-changing" ideas in Google's Project 10^100.

Devilishly-naughty restaurant critic AA Gill goes 50 minutes with “No Reservations” tv show host Anthony Bourdain upending the tables on food pretensions, culinary icons and vegans in what can be only described as a restaurant-lovers’ “food fight”. Their topics range from the pretension of chefs, dining versus eating, to the selection of last meals and eating human flesh...from Japanese food fetishes and mafia run “lard markets” in Eastern Europe to the importance of communal eating in the development of human civilisation. Prepare to be very amused. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on May 19, 2011. Anthony Michael "Tony" Bourdain is an American chef, author and television personality. He is well known for his 2000 book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and is the host of Travel Channel's culinary and cultural adventure program, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. Adrian Anthony Gill is a British writer who uses the byline A. A. Gill. He is currently employed by the Sunday Times as their restaurant reviewer and television critic and Vanity Fair magazine as a restaurant reviewer.

Physicist Geoffrey West presents "Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster." This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on July 25, 2011. As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot. These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West's examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. - The Long Now Foundation Geoffrey West (b. 1940) is a physicist. He was born in a rural town in western England and moved to London when he was 13. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Cambridge and pursued graduate studies in California at Stanford. He eventually became a Stanford faculty member before he joined the particle theory group at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. After Los Alamos, he became president of the Santa Fe Institute, where he works on biological issues (such as power laws in biology such as the allometric law). He has since been honored as one of Time magazine's "Time 100."

In this classic FORA.tv program from May 2007, noted atheist Christopher Hitchens discusses his bestselling book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. This event was recorded in collaboration with Washington, D.C.'s Politics and Prose Bookstore. Christopher Hitchens speaks about his new book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens, an always colorful and sometimes outrageous commentator, now takes aim at God. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have tried, but that hard-to-hit Fellow keeps popping back up. Worse still are the violent ways of his flock: waging religious warfare, keeping women enslaved, fomenting universal hatreds. Hitchens makes a powerful case for atheism. - Politics and Prose Bookstore Christopher Hitchens is an author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on May 17, 2011. In the Opening Address at the 2011 Sydney Writers Festival, Fatima Bhutto, scion of the Pakistani political dynasty, addresses the current state of her country. Her talk focuses on Pakistan’s love/hate relationship with the United States and, in this way, reminds us of their parallel "nervous breakdowns." Pakistan is, at once, a country plagued by natural disasters, endemic political corruption, religious fundamentalism and is claimed by many to be the central headquarters of Islamist terrorism. Bhutto sees this condition Pakistan suffers as a plain result of crippling conspiracy-theorizing and manifesting as paranoiac nuclear armament. But Bhutto finds not all the fault lies at home. She speaks to the West’s hypocrisy with regards to its aggressive “freedom fighting”, including its ever-mounting use of Drone strikes under Obama’s presidency and the civilian casualties which are beyond measure. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation Fatima Bhutto is an Afghan-born Pakistani poet and writer. She studied at Columbia University and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Bhutto is the granddaughter of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and niece of Benazir Bhutto. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004, majoring in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2005 with a Masters in South Asian Government and Politics. Her books include Whispers of the Desert, 8.50 am 8 October 2005 and most recently, Songs of Blood and Sword. She is a regular contributor to the New Statesman, The Daily Beast and The Guardian.

In a spirited debate, Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp and NYU research professor Diane Ravitch ponder the realities of comprehensive reform for America's public education system. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Aspen Ideas Festival, on June 29, 2011. What Does Real Reform Require? WENDY KOPP CEO and Founder, Teach For America DIANE RAVITCH Research Professor of Education, New York University; Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution Moderator: JAMES BENNET Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic Entering its seventh year, the Aspen Ideas Festival will gather some of the most interesting thinkers and leaders from around the US and abroad to discuss their work, the issues that inspire them, and their ideas. Presented by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, the Festival is unique in its dedication to dialogue and exchange, and in its commitment to bringing ideas to the public at large. FORA.tv is pleased to present Festival programs taking place at the Aspen Institute's Paepcke Auditorium.

"Scientists are discovering viruses faster than they can make sense of them," says science writer Carl Zimmer of the most rapidly-evolving organism on the planet. Zimmer explores how little we really know about these mighty, miniscule lifeforms. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on June 7, 2011. Carl Zimmer is the author of several popular science books and writes frequently for the New York Times, as well as for magazines including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Science, Newsweek, Popular Science, and Discover, where he is a contributing editor. Carl's books include Soul Made Flesh, Parasite Rex and Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea. His latest book is A Planet of Viruses.

In an interview with WIRED's Chris Anderson, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates considers which developing energy technologies may present the best long-term alternatives to oil and coal power plants. This program was recorded in collaboration with the WIRED Business Conference 2011, on May 3, 2011. Bill Gates III is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. In July 2008, Gates transitioned out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates continues to serve as Microsoft's chairman and an advisor on key development projects. Chris Anderson is editor in chief of WIRED magazine, a position he's held since 2001. During his tenure, the magazine has received eight National Magazine Awards and seven additional nominations. It won the prestigious top prize for general excellence in 2005, 2007, and 2009. In 2009, Adweek honored WIRED as its Magazine of the Decade.

Adam Davidson, a host of NPR's Planet Money radio show and podcast, takes an engaging look at how technology is rapidly changing even the most traditional of American industries. This program was recorded in collaboration with the WIRED Business Conference 2011, on May 3, 2011. Adam Davidson is a host and co-founder of the NPR feature Planet Money. In regular reports on Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and This American Life, as well as through its blog and biweekly podcasts, Planet Money helps listeners understand how economic changes affect their lives -- and does so in a way that is consistently engaging and accessible. Before that, he was an international business and economics correspondent for NPR. He also served as Middle East correspondent for PRI's Marketplace and spent a year in Baghdad, from 2003 to 2004, where his reporting on corruption in the US occupation attracted widespread attention. Davidson has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including the Peabody, the DuPont-Columbia, and the Polk. His documentary on the housing crisis, "The Giant Pool of Money," was named one of the decade's top ten works of journalism by New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Jimmy Fallon, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon Sean Parker, Founders Fund This program was recorded on June 22, 2011. NExTWORK is a one-day, interdisciplinary conference that will feature world-renowned business leaders, technologists, and thinkers exploring the promise and peril of the network's future, as well as the most pressing digital issues and opportunities today. Sean Parker is an entrepreneur with a record of launching genre-defining companies that reinvent ways to spread information online. In 1999, at the age of 19, Parker co-founded Napster and changed how people think about and share music. Two years later, Parker co-founded Plaxo, pioneering viral engineering technology for updating contact information. Parker served as Plaxo's president until 2004, when he joined with Mark Zuckerberg to develop the online social network Facebook. Parker was Facebook's founding president, helping transform that small start-up into an industry giant. Parker's latest venture is Causes, which he co-founded in 2007, and which has become the largest online platform for grassroots activism and philanthropy. At Founders Fund, Parker searches for and fosters the same spirit of innovation that he saw at Facebook, Plaxo, and Causes in new company founders, and has provided essential mentorship to the portfolio companies, including helping develop Alamofire's wildly popular PackRat. Jimmy Fallon is the host of NBC's late-night talk show, having succeeded Conan O'Brien in that role in March 2009. The show is a regular ratings winner and has been praised for reinvigorating the talk-show format, bringing to it a youthful energy exemplified by Fallon's choice of house band, the hip-hop legends the Roots. Among the show's innovations are short videos, ideal for viral distribution, affectionately spoofing popular TV series; it won an Emmy for a Glee takeoff called "6-Bee," where the Late Night crew challenges the cast of Parks and Recreation for glee-club supremacy. Late Night has also been honored for its website, and Fallon himself received the Webby Person of the Year award.