Links from the show:

* Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway

* Connect with Dale

* Rate the show

About my guest:

Dale Jenkins has had a lifelong interest in the Navy and international affairs. He is a former US Navy officer who served on a destroyer in the Pacific, and for a time was home-ported in Yokosuka, Japan. Pacific Fleet commitments took him to the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. While on active duty he was awarded the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal. His business career was primarily in international banking, and he also was a staff director at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Dale currently serves on the Samuel Eliot Morison Committee of the Naval Order of the United States, New York, and as a Regional Director of the Naval War College Foundation. As a result of his active duty experience and new revelations, Dale provides insights into the diplomacy and strategies of the Pacific region. He has degrees in history and business from Harvard and Columbia.

Having a long and affectionate relationship with Japan, Dale (on right of picture) and wife Sandra (third from right) with friends had tea at the Tokyo home of recently departed, but forever revered, artist Toko Shinoda (second from left).

For outside activity Dale plays golf, and two years ago fulfilled an ambition to play in Scotland. The photo to the right is of Dale on the 18th tee of St. Andrews, a nanosecond before impact.

Links from the show:

* Orwell: The New Life

* Connect with D.J.

* Rate the show

About my guest:

D. J. Taylor is the author of The Lost Girls; Derby Day (nominated for the Booker Prize); and Orwell: The Life (2003), winner of the Whitbread Biography Award. D. J. is a book critic for several British newspapers and lives in London.

Links from the show:

* Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

* Connect with Matt Stoller

* Follow Matt on Twitter

* Subscribe to Matt’s newsletter

* Rate the show

About my guest:

Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” David Cicilline, Chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, has called Stoller’s work “an inspiration.” Stoller is a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee.

He also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the financial crisis. While a staffer, he wrote a provision of law mandating a third party audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending activities. He also helped cut part of a $20 billion subsidy to large financial institutions. His 2012 law review article on the foreclosure crisis, The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship, predicted the rise of autocratic political forces, and his 2016 Atlantic article, How the Democrats Killed their Populist Soul, helped inspire the new anti-monopoly movement. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fast Company, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, Vice, The American Conservative, and the Baffler. Stoller writes the monopoly-focused newsletter Big with tens of thousands of subscribers, which you can subscribe to here.

Links from the show:

* Fascinating True Tales from Old California

* Connect with Colleen

* Rate the show

About my guest:

Colleen Adair Fliedner is an award-winning author, journalist, and historian. She has written three nonfiction books, radio and t.v. commercials, screenplays, and hundreds of articles for newspapers, magazines, and online publications. She was a staff writer for the Orange County Register newspaper’s online travel website and was a regular contributor for Talking Travel Radio Network based on the East Coast. In the Shadow of War: Spies, Love & the Lusitania is her first novel. 

Colleen began her professional career as a research historian, writer, and oral historian at California State University, Long Beach, CA.  Her job included writing newspaper articles, brochures, radio, and cable television scripts, and more.  Her first nonfiction history book was written for the County of Los Angeles, a five-year-long project which required conducting more than 100 oral history interviews and combing through historic ledgers, photographs, and dusty, long-forgotten boxes of old documents. 

Her next two books were a history about Park City, Utah, “Stories in Stone: Miners and Madams, Merchants and Murders,” and “Quick Escapes from Orange County, published by Globe Pequot Press. She was then hired to ghostwrite two books and numerous blog articles for an internationally famous psychologist.

Her awards include Alumni of the Year (California State University, Long Beach) for her first nonfiction book commemorating the 100th anniversary of Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center, which began as the Los Angeles County Poor Farm. An article she wrote about Oklahoma City received an award from the Oklahoma Convention and Visitors Bureau. And her historical novel, In the Shadow of War: Spies, Love & the Lusitania, was the grand prize winner over 300 entries in the San Mateo Literary competition, an award which resulted in its publication by the Sand Hill Review Press. Recently, Colleen was honored by the California Writer’s Club (statewide competition) for a nonfiction short story about George Freeth that appears in their annual literary magazine.

In addition, she has optioned a screenplay and two teleplays, written radio and t.v. commercials, plays, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Her credits include the Los Angeles Times Travel Section, the Orange County Register; Westways, Home & Away (both Auto Club publications), France Today, BajaTRAVELER, and Native Peoples Magazines.

Her latest project is a nonfiction book, “Fascinating True Stories from Old California,” a compilation of interesting accounts of some of the Golden State’s most unique people, places, and things.

Colleen lives in Orange, California with her husband, Rick, and two Pomeranians. 

Links from the show:

* American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

* Connect with Wesley or follow him on Twitter

* Rate the show

About my guest:

Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best selling author, podcast host and on-air correspondent.

At The Marshall Project, he is among the team members working on Testify, an unprecedented effort to examine the criminal courts in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. At The Washington Post he led a Pulitzer Prize winning team conducting groundbreaking investigations into law enforcement nationally. At CUNY, he runs an investigative journalism lab.

He was an executive producer of In the Cold Dark Night, an Emmy-nominated documentary chronicling the effort to solve the 1983 lynching of Timothy Coggins.

For GQ, he has gone deep about marriage and monogamy with Will Smith, talked politics and the press with Trevor Noah, dove into the post-scandal life of Andrew Gillum, and chronicled the last days of death row inmate Dustin Higgs. For Men’s Health he wrote about opiod overdoses among black men in Milwaukee and cities across the country. And for the cover of Ebony he profiled Tessa Thompson.

As an on-air correspondent for 60 Minutes+. the streaming version of CBS News’ iconic newsmagazine, Lowery reported from protests in Minneapolis and Kenosha, aboard a crab boat in the Chesapeake Bay, and from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lowery has extensively chronicled police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement, and specializes in journalism that marshals data to illuminate the realities within the three branches of the American criminal legal system — police, prosecutors and prisons.

Links from the show:

* Behold the Monster: Confronting America's Most Prolific Serial Killer

* Connect with Jillian

* Rate the show

About my guest:

Jillian Lauren is a writer, storyteller, adoption advocate, rock-wife, and lousy kickboxer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED, and SOME GIRLS: My Life in a Harem, and the novel PRETTY. SOME GIRLS, which recounts her time spent in the harem of the Prince of Brunei, has been translated into eighteen languages.

She was the only journalist to extensively interview Samuel Little, the most prolific serial killer in American history. This experience is chronicled in Joe Berlinger’s hit STARZ documentary series, CONFRONTING A SERIAL KILLER, and in Michael Connelly’s podcast MURDER BOOK: The Women Who Brought Down Samuel Little. Her book BEHOLD THE MONSTER: Confronting a Killer is forthcoming.

Jillian has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Elle, Flaunt Magazine, The Daily Beast, Salon, and many others. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in The Moth Anthology, and True Tales of Lust and Love.

Jillian is a regular storyteller with The Moth and performs at spoken word and storytelling events across the country. She did a Tedx talk about adoption and identity at Chapman University in 2014. She has been interviewed on The View, Good Morning America and Howard Stern, to name a few.

Jillian is married to Weezer bass player Scott Shriner. They live in Los Angeles with their two sons.

Links from the show:

* The Paradox of Debt: A New Path to Prosperity Without Crisis

* Connect with Richard

* Rate the show

About my guest:

Following a career that has spanned fields as varied as banking, energy, credit, and the arts, Richard Vague has recently served as Secretary of Banking and Securities for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He is author of numerous books, including An Illustrated Business History of the United States, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Links from the show:

* Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire

* Connect with Clare

* Rate the show

About my guest:

Clare Frank served as the State of California’s first and only female Chief of Fire Protection. She began firefighting at age 17 and worked her way through the ranks, handling all types of fire and rescue emergencies and major disasters in both urban and rural settings. Along the way, she earned a spot on an elite state command team, a bachelor’s in fire administration, a law degree and bar card, a master’s in creative writing, and several leadership awards. Now, she brings humor and candor to her stories about first responders, lawyers, and life. She lives near Lake Tahoe with her husband and always a dog or two.