In the fall of 2021, I finally got to leave my house and speak to a live audience at the Pebble Beach Authors and Ideas Festival in Monterey, California. After over a year of the pandemic, everyone was a little rusty with in-person interactions, except for one presenter—Dr. Mark Moffett. 

Mark’s presentation, his animated style, and fun demeanor captured the crowd that weekend in a way that no one else could. His description of the Southern California ant wars captivated the crowd, and put everyone, including me, who had been trapped in their houses for more than a year completely at ease.

Informally known as “Dr. Bugs” and “the Indiana Jones of entomology,” Mark Moffett is biologist, writer, and globetrotter who has examined species’ life and death from the forest floor to canopies. His research has brought him all over the world from Sri Lanka to Costa Rica to Easter Island.

Dr. Mark Moffett is currently studying the stability of societies across animal species and humans up to the present day through a grant with the Templeton Foundation.

“Dr. Bugs” joined Clint to discuss his global expeditions, winding career path, and how we aren’t so different from ants after all.

Colin Woodard is an award-winning historian and a New York Times bestselling author. 

Author of the bestseller American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of America, Woodard has written six books, including The Republic of Pirates, a New York Times bestselling history of Blackbeard’s pirate gang that was made into a primetime NBC series, and Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, which tells the harrowing story of the creation of the American myth in the 19th century, a story that reverberates in the news cycle today.

He is the recipient of the 2012 George Polk Award for journalism and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting. Colin is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University where he is launching Nationhood Lab, a project to devise and disseminate a new civic national story for the U.S.

A native of Maine, Colin has reported from more than 50 countries from all seven continents. He lived in Eastern Europe for more than four years, where he witnessed firsthand the collapse of the Soviet empire and the transition that ensued. 

Colin spoke with Clint about what he’s learned writing his book, living in the Balkans, and how American Nations applies to the cultural fracturing of the United States today. 

Dr. Nahid Bhadelia is one of the of the amazing doctors explaining COVID-19 to Americans, serving on the frontlines of the pandemic, and helping counter the false information that has accompanied the virus’s spread among populations.

Dr. Bhadelia is the founding director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University (CEID), an associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), and an Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. 

She designed and served as the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit (SPU), a medical unit designed to care for patients with highly communicable diseases, and was dispatched to West and East Africa during the 2013-2016 Ebola virus epidemic, where she worked directly with patients and community stakeholders to treat and manage the disease. 

Along with her medical work, Dr. Bhadelia holds a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts, where she specialized in health security with a focus on pandemic response. 

Dr. Bhadelia joined Clint to talk about COVID-19 from an infectious disease doctor's perspective, her journey to medicine, and working through the Ebola epidemic.