Best David Jacob Smith Podcasts (2025)

1
Disrupting Financial Services: How Sterling Shire is Changing the Game with Steven Woods 31:24

3h ago31:24

31:24

David DeCelle interviews Steven Woods, CEO of Sterling Shire, about his journey and the firm's innovative approach to the financial industry. Steven shares his background, including dropping out of high school, joining Wall Street, and founding Sterling Shire. The firm aims to revolutionize the industry by offering advisors a 100% payout model, eli…

1
401 [BEST OF] Bob Johansen on Full Spectrum Leadership for a VUCA world 41:35

4h ago41:35

41:35

Welcome to the Best Of series on Partnering Leadership. While many of us take a bit of a breather in July and August, we’re revisiting standout episodes—conversations that are worth hearing again, especially as leadership challenges shift and new moments call for fresh thinking. I’ve also pulled together 12 of the leadership books I recommend most …

1
Megan Cummins, "Atomic Hearts" (Ballentine Books, 2025) 51:51

2h ago51:51

51:51

Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they’re together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New…

1
Timothy W. Kneeland, "Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA" (Syracuse UP, 2021) 1:15:17

2h ago1:15:17

1:15:17

Join me for an insightful and timely conversation with historian Timothy Kneeland about his book Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA (Syracuse University Press, 2021). This book masterfully bridges the gap between academic research and real-world policy implications. Hear from the author himself as he reflects on …

1
“Truth is a Pathless Land”: Krishnamurti and Revolutionary Spirituality with Connie Jones 1:41:12

4h ago1:41:12

1:41:12

In this episode, “Truth is a Pathless Land,” we speak with Transformative Inquiry Program faculty member Connie Jones to explore the micropolitical stakes of revolutionary spirituality through Krishnamurti’s challenge to religious prescription, psychological conditioning, and egoic identification. We discuss techniqueless meditation, the primacy of…

1
Dom Ford, "Mytholudics: Games and Myth" (de Gruyter, 2025) 56:10

2h ago56:10

56:10

Dom Ford joins Jana Byars to talk about Mytholudics: Game and Myth (DeGruyter Brill, 2025). Games create worlds made of many different elements, but also of rules, systems and structures for how we act in them. So how can we make sense of them? Mytholudics: Games and Myth lays out an approach to understanding games using theories from myth and folk…

1
Michael Niebauer, "Four Mountains: Encountering God in the Bible from Eden to Zion" (Lexham Press, 2025) 34:20

2h ago34:20

34:20

How can war stories, farming proverbs, and strange visions draw you closer to Jesus? In Four Mountains: Encountering God in the Bible from Eden to Zion, Michael Niebauer shows how to see the Bible's big story and meet with God in his word. Four mountain-top encounters with God (Eden, Sinai, Tabor, and Zion) unify the Bible's grand story. The earlie…

1
Preserving Traditional Rice and Rice Culture in the Philippines 24:04

4h ago24:04

24:04

In the Philippines, rice serves as a fundamental component of the diet, typically accompanying most meals as either white or brown rice. It is also a key ingredient in various snacks and desserts. Consequently, the Philippines ranks among the top countries globally in rice per capita consumption, alongside nations like China and India. However, the…

1
Craig W. H. Luther, "Guderian's Panzers: From Triumph to Defeat on the Eastern Front (1941)" (Stackpole Books, 2025) 1:03:14

2h ago1:03:14

1:03:14

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union that opened the Eastern Front in World War II. With lightning speed and devastating success, the German army tore through Soviet territory and rolled over the Red Army, scoring some of the most dramatic victories in military history--until the bl…

1
"Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsideration of how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation" 1:08:59

4h ago1:08:59

1:08:59

“Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsidering how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation” by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera appeared in Nuevos Horizontes in 2024. The article examines age as a dimension of identity, creativity and cognition, and in this episode, Heidi Landecker, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Jenny Wilson consider the importa…

1
Heather Browning and Walter Veit, "What Are Zoos For?" (Policy Press, 2024) 1:30:35

2h ago1:30:35

1:30:35

Are zoos an anachronism in the 21st century when we can watch animals in their natural habitat, close-up from our couches without worrying about cruelty? Should they go the way of other bygone era ‘spectacles’ and ‘attractions’ that we now regard as barbaric? There are vocal campaigners and activists who believe so. Heather Browning and Walter Veit…

1
A Spatial History of Disco 1:14:07

5h ago1:14:07

1:14:07

In the third episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares take you on an immersive journey through the hot nights and wild streets of Lower Manhattan during the Seventies. For this episode, Jesse Rifkin, a New York-based music historian and the owner and sole operator of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, designed a…

1
Jean-Marc Coicaud, "The Law and Politics of International Legitimacy" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 40:39

2h ago40:39

40:39

The Law and Politics of International Legitimacy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines the significance of the issue of political legitimacy at the international level, focusing on international law. It adopts a descriptive, critical, and reconstructive approach. In order to do so, the book clarifies what political legitimacy is in general an…

1
Benjamin Francis-Fallon, "The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History" (Harvard UP, 2019) 53:47

6h ago53:47

53:47

While media pundits continually speculate over the future leanings of the so-called “Latino vote,” Benjamin Francis-Fallon historicizes how Latinos were imagined into a national electoral constituency in his new book The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Harvard University Press, 2019). Francis-Fallon, Assistant Professor of History at Western Ca…

1
CAMP PENNSYLVANIA: The Murders of Gregory Stone & Christopher Seifert (Case Against Hasan Akbar) 59:34

1d ago59:34

59:34

After talking to CSM Womack, I wanted to dig into the 2003 Camp Pennsylvania insider attack conducted by Hasan Akbar, one of four men on military’s death row. In this episode, I dive into the story through the post trial appeals and even discuss the victims' continued fight for the purple heart. Check out CSM (Ret) Womack’s book Embedded Enemy - av…

1
Toby Lincoln, "An Urban History of China" (Cambridge UP, 2021) 1:31:18

1d ago1:31:18

1:31:18

In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urba…

1
Robert Morstein-Marx, "Julius Caesar and the Roman People" (Cambridge UP, 2021) 1:27:12

3h ago1:27:12

1:27:12

Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic's traditions and its greatest heroes of the past. Catastrophe befell Rome not because Caesar (or anyone else) turned against the Republic, its norms, and institutions, but because Caesar's…

1
Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019) 1:00:13

6h ago1:00:13

1:00:13

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which …

1
César Brioso, "Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Professional Baseball In Cuba" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) 42:49

1d ago42:49

42:49

Today we are joined by César Brioso, author of the book Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Professional Baseball In Cuba (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Blending the love for baseball fans in Cuba had during the 1950s with the political upheaval that led to Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959, Brioso weaves a fascin…

1
Lizzie Wade, "Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures" (Harper, 2025) 1:29:26

6h ago1:29:26

1:29:26

A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations. A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips throu…

1
Michelle De Kretser, "Theory & Practice" (Catapult, 2025) 1:03:10

1d ago1:03:10

1:03:10

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Australia on unceded Gadigal land. She writes fiction but has also published a short book about Shirley Hazzard's work. Theory & Practice, her seventh novel, recently won Australia's Stella Prize for writing by women. Theory and Practice is set in 1986, when “beautiful, radical ideas” are in th…

1
Giles Tremlett, "The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War" (Bloomsbury, 2021) 53:27

1d ago53:27

53:27

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, tens of thousands of young men and women from across the world flocked there to fight against the Nationalist uprising. Though their history has been told before, Giles Tremlett’s The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2021) draws upon previously unavailable mat…

1
Jan Dost, "Safe Corridor" (DarArab, 2025) 32:11

10h ago32:11

32:11

A bold, unforgettable novel of war, imagination, and survival. Thirteen-year-old Kamiran is fleeing the collapse of Syria when his body begins to harden literally—turning to chalk. As his transformation unfolds, he pours his memories, secrets, and darkly funny confessions into a piece of chalk he stole at school. Through the eyes of this precocious…

1
William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025) 1:05:38

2d ago1:05:38

1:05:38

Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—eve…

1
Dan Reiter, "Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 43:57

2d ago43:57

43:57

How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan Reiter overturns this perspective with the compelling argument that states craft flexible foreign policies to avoid unwanted wars. Through a comprehens…

1
Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018) 1:00:09

2d ago1:00:09

1:00:09

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections between tobacco, gender, and empire in her latest monograph, Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, …

1
Anand Pandian, "Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down" (Stanford UP, 2025) 52:22

1d ago52:22

52:22

In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country—from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York—seeking out fellow Americans with markedly different soc…

1
Margaret C. Jacob, "The Secular Enlightenment" (Princeton UP, 2019) 1:04:36

2d ago1:04:36

1:04:36

The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives. It’s a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures shar…

1
David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2025) 47:19

2d ago47:19

47:19

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and relig…

1
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan ed. et al., "Holocaust Testimonies: Reassessing Survivors' Voices and Their Future in Challenging Times" (Bloombury, 2025) 1:00:15

2d ago1:00:15

1:00:15

Close to a time when there will be no more survivors to speak about their suffering, this innovative study takes much-needed stock of the past, present and future of Holocaust testimony. Drawing from a vast range of witness accounts including a never-before-published survivor interview and carefully situating analysis within broader historical and …

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David Jacob Smith Podcasts

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