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in all areas. Restrictions apply. I'm

1:05

Alan Alder, and this is Clear

1:08

& Vivid, conversations about

1:10

connecting and communicating. Hi,

1:16

we're beginning Season 25 next week, and

1:18

I'm here with our executive producer, Graham

1:20

Shed, to give you a

1:22

little preview of some of the fascinating guests

1:24

we have in store for you. And we

1:26

have a very special start to the season,

1:29

the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Yeah, I was

1:31

really excited when I heard that Doris Kearns

1:33

Goodwin was to be on our opening show.

1:36

She's not just a purely surprise winning

1:38

presidential historian. She's charming and

1:40

fun, and she tells stories that are personal

1:42

enough to make you feel

1:44

you know the people she's telling you about. In

1:47

her new book, she's even more personal because

1:49

she's in the story. The

1:52

book is called An Unfinished Love Story, and

1:54

it tracks the momentous events of the 1960s,

1:58

while she and her husband Richard Goodwin are in the story. and

2:00

were in the rooms where it happened. She

2:03

is a young historian helping Lyndon Johnson

2:05

with his memoirs and

2:07

Dick Goodwin working intimately with John Kennedy

2:09

and later Lyndon Johnson as a speechwriter.

2:12

At the age of 80, Dick decides finally to

2:15

go through 300 boxes of

2:17

memorabilia from his entire life

2:20

and he and Doris embark on a

2:22

project that becomes an extremely personal look

2:25

at the events of that explosive decade.

2:28

All my life I've tried to bring people

2:30

who are long dead to life you

2:33

know by looking at their memoirs and

2:35

their diaries and the newspaper clippings and

2:37

I would always talk to them and they would

2:39

never answer me. I mean my kids remember one

2:41

time when my when they were little and I

2:44

was in the room talking to Franklin and Eleanor

2:46

and telling them to be nicer to each other

2:48

and they wonder what is going on in there

2:50

but now I had my guy was my husband

2:52

as we were working on this project and I

2:54

could ask him questions and then he could argue

2:56

with me and it was a wonderful experience. It

2:58

was the last great adventure of our life to go

3:00

through these 300 boxes that he had

3:03

saved for 40 years but was

3:05

so sad about the way the 60s

3:07

ended that he didn't want to open them until

3:09

he finally passed 80 and he realized if I

3:11

don't do it now it's now or never and

3:14

we relive the 60s but from the beginning to

3:16

the end without knowing all the sad things that

3:18

were going to happen and it was an incredible

3:21

decade a wonderful decade in many ways so much

3:23

happened on civil rights and voting rights and medicare

3:25

and aid to education and the country was

3:28

alive with a conviction that they could change

3:30

things. But they came away

3:32

with different impressions of how things managed

3:34

to change. Dick worked

3:36

for Kennedy who inspired him and

3:39

he also worked for Johnson who vacillated

3:41

between flattering him and bullying him. As

3:44

you went through the 300 boxes

3:47

it seems that Dick was more

3:49

a JFK guy and you

3:51

were more an LBJ person. I remember a

3:53

conversation that came up between the two of

3:55

you that you tell about in the book

3:58

where you said to Dick. not

4:00

one of the programs that he promised

4:03

was ever passed during his presidency.

4:06

They were all passed during LBJ's and

4:09

I think you saw that it was necessary to

4:11

have both skills. You're absolutely

4:13

right. I think what we both came

4:15

to understand was that each one was

4:17

made stronger with the other, that what

4:19

happened is the JFK had inspired the

4:21

nation to want those programs and LBJ

4:24

was able to get them through but

4:26

as Dick would then respond to me,

4:29

perhaps if JFK had been in charge

4:31

longer the war might have come to an earlier end.

4:34

But I think most importantly is the sense

4:36

that obviously I don't think JFK would have

4:38

won the election if LBJ had not

4:40

been the vice president and won Texas Forum.

4:43

Obviously LBJ

4:46

could not have gotten those programs through if they

4:48

hadn't already been inspired in the country and sadly

4:51

the death of JFK I think helped

4:53

to mobilize the support for them. So

4:55

the two of them I think became stronger together

4:58

and I look at them now in

5:00

history and they're linked in many ways and

5:02

rather than they're being competitive with one another or

5:04

you have to like one or the other, I mean

5:06

I think both Dick and I, I came to

5:09

understand and feel much more respect for the

5:11

speaker that JFK had become, the

5:13

inspirer that he was and Dick

5:15

of course remembered those extraordinary moments

5:18

with LBJ that he had almost

5:20

forgotten because he had turned against him on the

5:22

war. So in the end those

5:24

arguments were softened and they'd really been

5:26

arguments for most of our

5:28

42 years of marriage. We both were loyal

5:30

to our guys, me to LBJ

5:33

and him to JFK. I call them our guys.

5:40

What Doris in her book calls the interlocking

5:42

legacies of LBJ and JFK is nicely illustrated

5:44

by an event that happened in 1961. When

5:46

they were both watching

5:49

the launch of Alan Shepard, the first American

5:51

to go into space, as Vice

5:54

President Johnson had established NASA and

5:57

JFK joked with him that if Shepard made it

5:59

safely, no one would know Johnson's

6:01

role. But if the mission was a

6:03

flop, everyone would know. And

6:05

although it's Kennedy who's remembered for his 1962 speech

6:07

saying, we will put

6:10

men on the moon before the decade is out, it

6:12

was Johnson who had done the work to allow that to

6:15

happen and continue to press for

6:17

Apollo in the years after Kennedy's death. It's

6:20

now been over 50 years since the last

6:22

Apollo astronauts walked on the moon, but

6:24

that's set to change. The moon,

6:27

which just yesterday played a starring role

6:29

in the solar eclipse, is

6:31

also the star of a new book called

6:33

Our Moon by the science writer, Rebecca Boyle.

6:36

Here's a clip from your conversation with her. There's

6:39

a lot of preparation being made now to

6:42

go back to the moon, both

6:44

with robots and with humans. They've already,

6:46

I believe they've already chosen a team

6:49

to return to the moon. What

6:51

are you looking forward to? Do you hope to

6:53

find something, some new information that

6:55

you don't have now? Yes,

6:58

I mean, I think this is super exciting and

7:00

I think people should be

7:02

up there and exploring and asking

7:05

new questions about how the moon got

7:07

here, what Earth was like. I

7:10

mean, this planet recycles itself. We have

7:12

plate tectonics, we have wind and rain

7:15

and erosion. So

7:17

we don't know what Earth was like far into

7:19

the past. The moon is like a

7:21

time capsule for us. We can learn a lot about

7:23

Earth's history by looking at the moon in

7:25

part because it has a record of our own

7:28

atmosphere and it has a record

7:30

of the early sun and has a

7:32

record of any asteroids that we're hitting both

7:35

here and there. So we can learn a

7:37

lot about ourselves really from being on the moon.

7:40

And I think it's super exciting. I

7:42

also hope that people are thoughtful about

7:44

what we're doing as we go back. Tell

7:46

me about that, what's thoughtful in what way?

7:49

Well, I think, you know, Americans not

7:51

the only ones going up there, Japan

7:53

became the fifth country to land on

7:56

the moon in January and so far

7:58

two private companies. that are

8:00

based in the US have sent spacecraft up

8:03

there. One didn't make it from a fuel

8:05

issue. One did make it and

8:07

landed on the moon and then tipped over

8:09

a little bit. But it

8:11

was still a huge success for a private

8:14

company commercially funded, not paid

8:16

for by NASA, not a NASA rocket,

8:18

not a government rocket at all or

8:21

a government lander. And while

8:24

that's super interesting and fascinating and exciting,

8:26

I think it also just

8:28

portends some interesting questions that could arise where

8:31

who gets to own the moon, who gets

8:33

to land there, who's in charge? The answer

8:35

is really no one right now. And

8:38

that can be alarming

8:41

in some ways. Like I hope that

8:43

people are thoughtful about who is going,

8:45

why they're going, what they're doing and

8:49

what responsibility we have to the

8:51

moon. Like what do we owe the

8:53

moon after this whole history that

8:55

we've shared with it that

8:57

it's really sculpted our history? Are we really

8:59

just gonna go and like mine up there? If we

9:01

are, who is that gonna

9:03

benefit? And what

9:06

countries, what cultures are gonna reap

9:08

the benefits of that? And I think this

9:10

is a very important time to ask those

9:12

questions of ourselves and have that conversation. I'll

9:21

never look at the moon in the same way after

9:24

listening to your conversation with Rebecca Boyle. Just

9:27

one example. The moon, she

9:29

says, played a crucial role in creating we

9:31

humans by literally dragging fish out of the

9:33

ocean millions of years ago. But

9:36

her concerns about people returning to the moon

9:38

in the coming years also play a big

9:41

role in your next conversation with

9:43

the husband and wife team of Kelly and Zach

9:45

Wienersmith. Kelly is

9:47

a PhD ecologist and Zach is a

9:49

cartoonist. So they might seem an

9:51

odd couple to be asking questions about going to the

9:54

moon. But they've spent several

9:56

years digging into what's become to many people,

9:58

among them a couple of billionaires. A fascination,

10:01

even an obsession, with the

10:03

notion of setting up colonies on both the

10:05

Moon and Mars. Originally

10:08

intrigued themselves with the idea, they've become,

10:10

to put it mildly, deeply

10:12

skeptical. Here's Kelly

10:14

responding to your question of just who is it

10:16

that wants to see us set up settlements on

10:18

the Moon and Mars. Well,

10:21

so there's a couple different camps. There

10:23

aren't many people who are excited about settlements on

10:25

the Moon, per se. Most people think of the

10:27

Moon as a really good place to learn about

10:29

living in space. So the Moon lacks a lot

10:32

of stuff we need. It doesn't have a lot

10:34

of water. It's got some water locked up in ice

10:36

on the poles, but probably not enough

10:38

for millions of people. And it's in the

10:40

vacuum of space, so it's going to be a very difficult

10:42

environment. It's lacking things like carbon. There's a little

10:44

bit of carbon, but probably not enough to grow

10:46

crops. So you have to take a bunch of carbon

10:48

from Earth. But it's a good place to

10:51

make sure that your equipment works, because it's just a couple

10:53

days away. And if it turns out

10:55

your equipment's going to break down, you'd like to

10:57

be two days away from Earth, as opposed to

10:59

two years away from Earth. So because of orbital

11:01

mechanics, Mars takes six months to get

11:03

to, but you can only leave every two years.

11:06

So you get there for six months, you've got to stay for about

11:08

a year, and then it takes six months to get home. So

11:11

you want to make sure that everything you bring with you is going

11:13

to work, and that you've brought enough stuff to keep you alive

11:15

for that whole trip. And if you're going to live there forever,

11:17

then of course you've got to bring even more stuff. So

11:20

your objective is to have what you need

11:22

in order to have a large

11:24

settlement on Mars. Yeah.

11:27

Who wants to do that? And why do they want to do

11:29

it? It depends. The interesting

11:31

thing about space is that it's kind of the locus of all

11:34

utopias. So

11:37

very common fantasy is a kind of libertarian

11:40

idea that Earth has become kind of bureaucratized

11:42

and generally wimpy, and it'd be good to

11:44

do away with that. And if we could

11:46

just get away from the sort of bureaucrats

11:48

and overarching authorities, we could set up this

11:50

sort of superior society. That's

11:53

very common, but there are other ones that have to do

11:55

with just sheer abundance. So that

11:57

first one is kind of like more of the Elon

11:59

Musk view of things. Jeff Bezos, who's another

12:01

big fan of these, who has been since at least the

12:03

70s, sees it

12:05

as like abundance and environmentalism, meaning we

12:07

will have all the riches of space

12:10

and will also boost a lot of

12:12

us and a lot of our heavy

12:14

industry to space and clean things up.

12:17

And then there are even what you might call

12:19

sort of left wing fantasies having to do with

12:21

sort of leaving capitalism

12:23

behind and starting over. And

12:28

so there are a lot of different camps that are latched on

12:30

to this fantasy of a new chance.

12:38

Let's not leave out a favorite subject

12:40

of mine, creativity. I'll

12:42

be talking with someone who's pursued

12:45

creativity relentlessly. After

12:47

winning many, many awards as the editor

12:49

of magazines like the New York Times

12:51

Magazine and New York Magazine, Adam

12:54

Moss decided to put it all aside

12:57

to pursue a passion for painting. As

13:00

he struggled to understand the creative process

13:02

more deeply, he began interviewing creative

13:04

people in a wide range of

13:06

arts. And he came up with

13:08

a book called The Work of Art.

13:12

You've written a really interesting book

13:14

about the creative process. And

13:16

it comes from such a personal place. It's

13:18

so enticing. You leave your job and you

13:21

commit to being a painter. That's

13:23

right. And you weren't satisfied.

13:25

Why weren't you satisfied with your painting?

13:27

Well, because I was a terrible painter.

13:29

But you were obsessed with it. I

13:31

was. I was. So

13:33

I had a career working in a group as

13:37

an editor does and finding

13:39

it enormously creatively satisfying. But

13:42

I had this yin to try to make images

13:45

myself. But

13:49

I had no background in it. So

13:51

I was kind of starting as a

13:53

fairly advanced adult from

13:55

scratch. And I

13:58

had ambitions. You know like

14:01

like I think most people have ambitions. I had ambitions. I

14:03

thought well you know maybe I'll be really good at this

14:05

and Then I

14:07

found that no matter how hard I tried and I

14:09

did try hard That

14:13

I couldn't get much beyond mediocre

14:17

and I While I

14:19

recognized that you know you can

14:21

acquire skills if you work hard enough at it

14:24

there Was

14:26

something fundamental I didn't understand and

14:28

and that was how artists think

14:30

so I set about Writing

14:34

a book Actually at the

14:36

beginning it wasn't even a book. It was just said

14:39

about having conversations, which then it then occurred

14:41

to me would make a book with

14:45

artists about how they Thought

14:48

and particularly how they worked through their feelings

14:50

of doubt and frustration Which

14:54

I came to I came to realize was

14:56

kind of the heart of the artists

15:00

work So you made

15:02

this decision to interview?

15:04

Well, I think over 40 artists

15:06

in very different fields. Well,

15:09

I began to think that that

15:11

maybe There was some connection

15:14

across genres about the way that artists

15:16

thought so I I interviewed novelists

15:19

and poets and and

15:23

Sculptors and painters and

15:25

architects and joke

15:27

writers on a television show And

15:31

sandcastle builders and food makers But

15:34

fundamentally artists the way we think about artists. It's

15:36

most of what's in the book and

15:39

try to understand their path from Passing

15:43

notion to finished thought finished

15:46

work With all

15:48

the torture in between and and as

15:50

a side hustle of the book It

15:53

wasn't the main object but tried to

15:55

see whether there were actually similarities in

15:57

the way people understood the way they

15:59

created What was interesting to me, of

16:01

course, is that very few people think about the way

16:03

they create. They are

16:06

superstitious about it. They

16:08

fear trying to understand it too

16:11

much because they think that the

16:13

magic will somehow disappear and they'll be unable

16:15

to do that. So it was

16:18

an interesting struggle of my own

16:20

in this book to try to get

16:22

people who were as interested as I

16:24

was in interrogating where creativity

16:28

comes from. And

16:30

I did. And I

16:32

had these 40

16:34

plus, 43 conversations. Many

16:40

of them were conversations over a long period of

16:42

time. So

16:45

about how the subtitle of

16:47

the book is how something comes from

16:49

nothing. And that's what I was exploring. Graham,

16:57

I'm really happy we were able to get Fred

16:59

Gutenberg and Joe Walsh on the show. A

17:02

lot of people, including me, have

17:04

been saddened, even crestfallen about the

17:06

great divide in our country now.

17:09

But these two guys have found a way to pitch

17:11

in and they're doing something about it. They

17:14

once were enemies. They were filled

17:16

with contempt for each other, unable to listen

17:19

because they came from opposite ends of the

17:21

political spectrum. And each

17:23

one knew instinctively that the other was

17:25

wrong and dangerous. They

17:27

couldn't work out their differences the way you have

17:29

to in a democracy. But

17:32

now they toured the country billed

17:34

as two dads defending democracy. They

17:37

just might have come up with a cure for

17:39

our current pandemic of otherness. They

17:41

tell me how they did it. The

17:44

day after my daughter was killed, I

17:47

walked in my house and I said, I'm

17:50

going to go to break the effing gun

17:52

lobby and everybody associated with it. And

17:55

I went on this mission to just

17:57

tear everybody down and to tear that

17:59

lobby apart. And I saw

18:01

Joe as somebody who I needed

18:03

to tear apart and demonize. But

18:06

then three, almost three

18:08

years ago, it was just before Father's

18:10

Day, probably right

18:14

around January, probably around February, March

18:16

of 2021. I

18:22

started this effort to engage

18:24

dads, gun owners, people

18:27

who it's okay to have a gun.

18:29

I want you to believe in gun safety. And

18:31

I went and I started

18:33

this effort with Brady. I asked people

18:36

to sign this letter with a whole

18:38

list of proposals that I thought were

18:40

respectful of the second amendment and gun

18:42

owners, but also could reduce gun violence.

18:45

Joe and I did our usual back and forth

18:49

until Joe did something different. And

18:51

he said, you know, we'd probably disagree on

18:53

everything, but I respect the hell out of what you're

18:56

trying to do. And

18:58

that crack

19:01

opened up a discussion where we went back

19:03

and forth on Twitter. And then I said,

19:05

why don't we take this offline and talk

19:07

on the phone, which we did. And

19:10

then we had a dinner together. And

19:12

Alan, the context, as you know,

19:15

is I was the political asshole.

19:18

I was the face of the tea party, big

19:20

gun guy. I was Charlton Heston.

19:23

You'll get this gun from my

19:25

cold, dead hands. And,

19:27

and then Fred's daughter is brutally

19:29

murdered at a school six,

19:31

six years ago. Um,

19:33

he and I, Alan would go at

19:36

each other on Twitter and at each

19:38

other on TV, arguing and fighting

19:40

about guns, and it would get personal like

19:43

much of America does today. And

19:46

then, as Fred said, a few

19:48

years ago, we, we decided to take

19:50

our fight private. Alan, I

19:53

was convinced before I began to

19:55

speak to Fred privately, I was

19:58

convinced that Fred Guttenberg. wanted to

20:00

take away my guns. And

20:03

so we did, I did what most

20:05

of America does now, we

20:07

demonize the other side. Man,

20:10

I made a decent living doing that.

20:13

And it wasn't until we started to

20:16

talk privately that I realized Fred doesn't

20:18

wanna take away my guns. But I

20:20

wanna work with people like

20:22

Joe to tell this

20:24

story so that we can go out

20:27

together and publicly share, there's

20:29

a lot of things, this gun owner

20:31

and this gun safety guy agree upon

20:33

that can save lives. Alan, here's sort

20:35

of the thesis of what Fred and

20:38

I are doing with this

20:40

Two Dads Defending Democracy Tour. Full

20:43

disclosure, we both are doing whatever we

20:45

can in our own lives to help

20:47

make sure Donald Trump is never elected

20:50

again. I'm a very high

20:52

profile, never Trump-er. But

20:54

the whole point of this tour is, no

20:57

matter who wins in November, I

21:00

believe the country is gonna be 100 times more

21:02

divided. And if we stay on

21:05

this road where we hate, I

21:08

mean hate the people we disagree with,

21:11

I just don't think our democracy can

21:13

stand that way. And so Fred and

21:15

I are trying to say to everybody

21:18

around the country as we go around,

21:20

look, we did it, it hasn't

21:22

been easy, but we did it. Let's

21:31

just a sample of a few of our great guests that are coming this season. And

21:33

among the others you'll be talking to is an astronaut who

21:35

for 159 days was the only woman on

21:39

board the International Space Station. And

21:41

then we have Othello Britt, who's written a book

21:43

with a fabulous title, The Science of Weird Shit.

21:47

And the fitting of podcasts dedicated to connecting

21:49

and communicating, a man who's made a study of

21:52

who he calls super communicators. I

21:55

guess that means people like you. It all depends on

21:58

you. All begins

22:00

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