Ayn Rand’s Triumph: I’ll discuss how America has fallen under the sway of the godmother of capitalism, her ideological tentacles extending from the White House to Wall Street to the Tea Party—and what can be done to counteract her pervasive influence.

Wall Street Versus Main Street: In this talk I’ll describe the myriad ways—from the blatant to the obscure—in which Wall Street takes advantage of the American people. The financial crisis was just the tip of the iceberg.

Occupy Wall Street: the real Tea Party: The protests sweeping the nation are the flip side of the Tea Party protests—common people, sometimes energized by radicals, giving vent to widespread feelings of discontent.  The protests are not a flash in the pan, and the political establishment, especially the Democratic Party, needs to confront their implications.

America’s Moral Crisis: I’ll discuss how the fight over the size of government and entitlement programs is actually a question of Judeo-Christian morality—with the radical right, guided by Ayn Rand, repudiating the moral character of social programs like Medicare and Social Security. America needs to reclaim the Founding Fathers from the right, especially the progressive voices of the American Revolution like Thomas Paine.

Weight Loss Surgery: the New Prozac. I’ll discuss the amazing growth of weight-loss surgery, the biggest medical phenomenon since the Prozac craze of the 1990s, and how it is revolutionizing the treatment of obesity and impacting on the health care and insurance industry. Americans spend $61 billion a year on losing weight, and almost a quarter a million people a year resort to weight-loss surgery that used to be rare and dangerous. From my intimate, inside perspective as a weight-loss surgery patient—losing 120 pounds in less than a year—I’ll describe the staggering implications of weight-loss surgery.