Episodes

Jacob Martinez: How Digital NEST Helps Youth Take Flight

Jacob Martinez is the founder of Digital NEST, an incubator for young tech talent in the farming towns of Watsonville and Salinas, California.

Digital NEST graduates graduates have been hired not just by local companies but by multi-nationals like software maker Adobe, and the NEST has attracted donations from major venture capitalists. As we hear in this episode, Jacob thinks the success of Digital NEST can be replicated in small towns up and down California, and maybe even across the country.

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Alex Gershenson: The Huge Potential of Making Corporate Buying More Sustainable

Most of the stuff we buy is made of raw materials and components traded back and forth all over the world. It’s a huge web of what are called supply chains, worth trillions of dollars a year—and it has huge environmental and social impacts.

A company in Santa Cruz, California called SupplyShift helps corporations manage their supply chains to make them sustainable. This episode: an eye-opening conversation with SupplyShift’s CEO, Alex Gershenson.

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Patrice Maginnis: How Tech—High & Low—Is Changing the World of the Blind & Visually Impaired

Patrice Maginnis has experienced life as someone who can see, and as someone who can’t. She was born with retinitis pigmentosa and gradually went blind, losing all usable sight at age 60.

After a career on the music faculty of UC Santa Cruz, she now helps people adapt and thrive at the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired. That often involves some surprising high tech solutions—like creative uses of smart phones—and some decidedly low tech ones as well—like the power of a welcoming community.

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Saving Democracy: The Way Forward

This time: a live recording of a terrific panel discussion featuring very smart people from across the ideological spectrum who have national experience in politics and media.

Amanda Renteria, Mike Madrid, Debbie Mesloh, Dan Schnur, Kristin Olsen, and Zach Friend joined host Spencer Critchley at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California on March 21, 2019 to go way beyond the usual talking points and offer deep insights into where we are — and how we go forward.

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Bud Colligan: Social Enterpreneur

Business drives our economy — but our guest this episode thinks it can also make society better. Bud Colligan has been part of some of the most successful businesses of our time, including Apple.

He’s also a social entrepreneur: he invests in ventures that promise to achieve social good, such as through education, or environmental protection, or inclusive economic development.

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Be Right or Do Right? Zach Friend & Paul Shone on the New Congress

Can we look at the top priorities for the new Congress without talking about likability, who curses more, or a dancing video?

Yes we can. On Dastardly Cleverness: Politics Edition it’s not about the horse race, or the latest outrage, but how to make politics do what it’s supposed to do: make our lives better, not just more entertaining — or depressing.

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Lenny Mendonca: Progressive Federalism May Be the Answer to America’s Problems

Lenny Mendonca is the co-founder of New America, a “think and action tank.” He believes that what America is going through now is similar to the Gilded Age: technology is enabling a few people to get very rich while the lives of millions of others are disrupted.

And he thinks the solution to many of our problems is also rooted in the past: progressive federalism, a pragmatic and yet hopeful approach that he believes can win support from the left and the right. He says it’s the answer to making progress towards the values most Americans hold dear.

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Beyond the Horse Race: What the Election Can Teach Us About Making Change

It was called the most important election of our lifetimes, but so much of the coverage has been the same old horse race stuff.

Not on Dastardly Cleverness, though: in this episode we dig deep with experts who have worked with Barack Obama, John McCain and the Democratic National Committee, among others:

Kevin Lewis, Dan Schnur, and Enrique Gutierrez.

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Highlights From Our First Year

We’re celebrating our first season with highlights from the past year!

It’s an episode full of gifts of insight from leading social innovators, on the future of work, universal basic income, reforming the way we bank and invest, why we vote the way we do, saving the oceans, saving democracy, and much more.

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Amanda Renteria: How to Create Impact in the Public & Private Sectors

Raised in a farmworking family, Amanda Renteria has worked for Goldman Sachs, the City of San Jose, and two senators; has been a teacher and coach at her old high school; has run for Congress; held a top position in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign; directed operations for the California Department of Justice and this year, ran for Governor of California.

She has the insights to show — many of them arising from her own life story — as you’ll hear in this interview with Dastardly Cleverness host Spencer Critchley.

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