Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Learn to connect better with others in every area of your life. Immerse yourself in spirited conversations with people who know how hard it is, and yet how good it feels, to really connect with other people – whether it’s one person, an audience or a whole country. You'll know many of the people in these conversations – they are luminaries in our culture. Some you may not know. But what links them all is their powerful ability to relate and communicate. It's something we need now more than ever.

Episodes

December 22, 2025 37 mins

In the almost six years since the beginning of the pandemic he’s developed an on-line personality that’s an exuberant mix of medical expert and next-door neighbor, expressed in engaging videos on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.


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Alan and executive producer Graham Chedd look ahead to the new season, which includes episodes on how babies who giggle become socially smarter; prizes for science that makes you both laugh and think; why truth is so elusive; and how Marlo Thomas kick started Alan’s movie career as well as helping her father found the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.


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December 9, 2025 38 mins

How technological innovation has shaped our culture, with lessons from history and even from bees. And how these lessons can help tame and curate the information overload that AI is contributing to on social media.


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December 2, 2025 36 mins

The Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism talks about how social media is overtaking traditional newspapers and television as most people’s source of news; what this means for journalism; and how Columbia is preparing tomorrow’s journalists for the new reality.


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MASH changed Alan’s life as well as the lives of the rest of the MASH cast. In this revisit of a free-wheeling conversation recorded in 2019 Alan, and the gang reminisce about an extraordinary eleven years of connecting and communicating.


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November 18, 2025 44 mins

Alan revisits a conversation he had with Michael seven years ago, at a time when Fox had been grappling with Parkinson’s Disease for 27 years and Alan for three. As Alan says in this updated episode, both have been fighting Parkinson’s with attitude – plenty of attitude.


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November 11, 2025 40 mins

A confident prediction from the man who first brought our warming planet to public attention some 35 years ago. Energy from solar and wind is now cheaper than traditional fossil fuels and is being rapidly adopted across the world. The exception is the US where the federal priority is planet-warming coal, oil and gas. But even in the US, local action, prompted in part by McKibben-backed organizations like Third Act and 350.org, is p...

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November 4, 2025 37 mins

In a surprising shift in how we communicate about the climate crisis, Kate Marvel explores the feelings evoked by her research. Her new book tackles what’s happening to our changing planet, each chapter triggering in her a different emotional response – from wonder and anger, though guilt to love: using emotion along with facts to spur action.


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October 28, 2025 38 mins

Data: dry and boring, right? Not in the hands of Justin Evans, a data expert himself, who set out to show that data is not only the lifeblood of today’s world; it is also the source of moving stories of other data experts who have achieved remarkable things – like the epidemiologist whose inspired use of data in the early days of Covid helped save hundreds of thousands of lives in New York city alone.


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October 20, 2025 38 mins

After adopting a beagle that had spent the first four years of his life as an experimental subject in a laboratory, she set out – with Hammy the beagle by her side – to explore the murky world of animal experimentation. She tells the story of her travels and her discoveries in a new book, Lab Dog.


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October 14, 2025 36 mins

Not only are non-violent protests more effective than armed resistance, but a surprisingly small percentage of the population – around three and a half percent – has been enough to change governments.


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With long memories and the ability to figure out what other crows are thinking  – then plot to outdo them, using what Nicky Clayton calls “sleight of beak” – crows are at least as smart as chimpanzees, despite having very different brains.


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It then becomes “common knowledge,” and can be both beneficial – like cementing friendships or empowering peaceful protests – or destructive, causing a run on toilet paper or splitting society into silos, each with their own common knowledge.


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September 23, 2025 31 mins

Alan and Executive Producer Graham Chedd look ahead to next season and some unexpected connections between our first guests. They include best-selling author Steven Pinker, and how you know that I know that you know that I know; psychologist Nicky Clayton and why crows are so smart; Erica Chenoweth and the power of peaceful protest; climate scientist Kate Marvel on why she gets emotional in her new book; and journalist Melanie Kapl...

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September 15, 2025 34 mins

Perched on a mountain top in Chile, the new Vera Rubin Observatory’s telescope will view the universe as it’s never been seen before, seeking answers to cosmic mysteries like dark energy and dark matter, but also helping keep Earth safe from potentially dangerous asteroids.


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September 9, 2025 39 mins

With lessons learned from the Covid pandemic, he points to how we might better tackle the next, inevitable, global pandemic — at a time when science has been all but discarded from the leading government agencies responsible for public health.


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Unlike most other land animals, we can live almost anywhere – from deserts, to mountains, rain forests, even the arctic. We are supremely adaptable, and that adaptability has led to our diversity – not only in our biology but also in our cultures.


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Along with revelations about snake sex, their contributions to medicine, that flickering tongue and why slithering is a secret to their success, Stephen Hall goes at least some way to convincing Alan that snakes – “the ultimate other” – deserve our respect as well as our dread.


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August 19, 2025 38 mins

She’s had a love-hate relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald since she was a teenager. And she’s now written a wonderful new take on The Great Gatsby, reimagining the story with a cast of the Black elite in post-war Los Angeles.


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August 12, 2025 39 mins

An old friend of Clear and Vivid is back to enlighten Alan on some of the oddities of human behavior – both good and bad – and to talk about his entertaining new podcast, Father Offspring Interviews, hosted by his daughter.


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