Better Tomorrow Speaker Series Better Tomorrow Speaker Series

How can democracy be safeguarded? Can America survive another four years of Trump? Political scientist and New Yorker writer Corey Robin has answers that may surprise you.

What types of creatures are we? Are we cruel and competitive or kind and cooperative? Physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis, Director of Yale’s Human Nature Lab, joins us to discuss the evolutionary origins of human social behavior, our capacity to harm but also our inclination to nurture, educate, and love.

Rebecca Diamond is a Stanford economist who is specializes in housing and inequality. With a wide-ranging research agenda, she has published on gender gaps in the gig economy, the geography of unequal consumption, rent control, affordable housing development, and the effects of foreclosure. She is uniquely positioned to discuss best practices Hawai‘i should adopt to increase housing affordability and mitigate inequality in the post-Covid economy, and in this conversation, she does just that.

Maria Ressa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and co-founder of Rappler.com, discusses her long career in journalism, from the People Power Revolution that drove Ferdinand Marcos from power to the rise of demagogic populism that brought his son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., back to the presidency.
In this searching conversation, Ressa explains the repression of free journalism in the Philippines, the rise of misinformation and fake news, the complicity of massive online platforms like Facebook, and the ghastly toll of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war.

Ressa sat down with the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series for this interview while she was in Honolulu for the East-West Center’s International Media Conference. Interviewer: Robert Perkinson

New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose discusses the dystopian future of artificial intelligence that has already arrived—and what we can do about it. Taking from his new book, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, Roose outlines practical steps we can take—individually and socially—to ensure that machines work for us rather than the other way around. Interviewed by Robert Perkinson.

“Climate justice is both the acknowledgement that harm was done [and] the provision of tools to rebuild and restore from that harm. And it’s the provision of tools to then chart a course forward.” In this interview with Victoria Keener, Tina discusses what it means to fight in the frontlines in the battle against catastrophic climate change and how she believes we can work together to secure our future.