The Perkins Platform

Join us on Wednesday, December 6 @ 6pm EST for an exciting conversation with Jen Franks Ahaghotu, Harvard College graduate and founder and CEO of Disruptive Truth, LLC, as she shares her work and insight on her organization. An educator for 15 years, Jen designed and implemented a multi-million dollar initiative in New York City schools called Learning Partners Program that impacted 250 schools and 100,000+ students a year, the largest scale work of its kind at the time. This included diving deeply into life changing racial identity work with her team and then scaling racial equity initiatives across the city. The inaugural project of Disruptive Truth is called the Black Women World Record and honors the educational achievements of black women around the world. Jen is here to gather black women together to speak their truth and change the world and supports people from other marginalized communities to do the same.

Science journalist fascinated with brains, minds, and culture, David McRaney joins us to discuss his latest book, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. David created the blog/book/podcast You Are Not So Smart to get a better understanding of self delusion and motivated reasoning. It became an internationally bestselling book and then podcast, where he continues to interview scientists who study the psychology of reasoning, decision-making, and judgment. In the early days, David was a newspaper reporter covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and in the Pine Belt region of the Deep South. Since then, he has been an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, journalism teacher, lecturer, and tornado survivor. He has worked for several years as the head of digital media for WDAM-TV where he produced The Green Couch Sessions, a TV show about the music of the Deep South. He has also written for Heineken, Duck Tape and appeared in a Reebok ad that he helped write. Most recently, he wrote, produced, and recorded a six-hour audio documentary exploring the history of the idea and the word: genius. www.davidmcraney.com. Tune in on Wednesday, December 13 @ 6pm EST!