Podcast Nears 150th Episode With New Name, Expanded Guest List
New York, June 19, 2019 —Podcast host Chris Riback announces the third season of his news and politics podcast, which launches with a new name: Chris Riback’s Conversations.
Chris Riback’s Conversations engages smart thinkers on issues of the day — mostly politics, but also business, tech, science, and more.
The podcast launched in 2013 as Political Wire Conversations and has published nearly 150 episodes:
- Season 1 ran through the 2014 U.S. Midterm Elections.
- With the explosion of interest in politics in 2016, Season 2 took listeners through not only the Trump election, but continued through the 2018 midterms.
- Season 3 debuts with with an expanded set of topics and a new name.
Guests have included: Sen. Maggie Hassan, Sen. Al Franken, Preet Bharara, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Lewis, Maureen Dowd, Michael Beschloss, Joseph Stiglitz, Ronan Farrow, Jennifer Palmieri, Gen. Michael Hayden, Garry Kasparov, Bill Browder, Nicholas Burns, Asha Rangappa, Angela Stent, Steve Coll, Dan Pfeiffer, Rick Wilson, Catherine Rampell, Tim Alberta, Norm Eisen, Joe Scarborough, John Dickerson, Robert Costa, Van Jones, Isikoff/Corn, Jim Messina, Stuart Stevens, Chuck Todd, Chris Matthews, Scott Jennings, Juliette Kayyem, Jim Lehrer, Frank Rich, Jonathan Alter, Stan Greenberg, Joe Lockhart, Mike McCurry, Graham Allison, Joe Nye, Charlie Cook, Howard Dean, Mark McKinnon, among others.
“I love politics and public policy. In these podcasts, I’ve talked with Senators, Governors, Mayors, and candidates; Generals, historians, journalists, and professors; Strategists, pollsters, and more – thinkers, writers and doers across the political spectrum,” Riback said. “But these aren’t my only conversations. I also talk with leaders, thinkers and doers in business, technology, science, and the global marketplace. Guests include Nobel Prize laureates, a U.S. Presidential Medal of Science winner, global CEOs, two U.S. Council of Economic Advisers chairs, tech & media entrepreneurs, the most incredible cancer researchers, and more.”
Besides politics and news, Riback hosts several other podcasts on business, tech, science, health, and more, including:
- Working Capital Conversations: Conversations with global leaders and thinkers discussing emerging ideas that drive business and innovation (Apple + Site)
- BCRF’s Investigating Breast Cancer: In BCRF’s flagship podcast, the world’s leading scientists discuss breast cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship and metastasis — in language we all can understand (Apple + Site)
Previous guests include: Joseph Stiglitz; Raghuram Rajan; Dr. Simon Levin (U.S. Presidential Medal of Science); John Chambers; Alvin Roth (Nobel Prize in Economics); Beth Comstock; MIT’s Donald Sull & Michael Cusumano; Liza Landsman (NEA Partner, former President, Jet.com); Austan Goolsbee; various leaders from Wharton, Harvard Business School, Stanford, Northwestern, NYU; Dr. Larry Norton; Dr. Joseph Sparano (TAILORx trial, largest breast cancer treatment trial in history); Dr. Susan Horowitz (created Taxol); U.S. Presidential appointees to the National Cancer Advisory Board; Members of the National Cancer Institute; among others.
The new name, Chris Riback’s Conversations, and expanded guest list reflects Riback’s success with other podcast properties and will bring the “best of class” conversations under a single banner.
Said Riback: “I like these conversations a lot. More importantly, I don’t see them as distinctly different from the so-called political podcasts I do. For example – is climate change science or public policy? Are economics for business audiences or political ones? Cancer researchers are often funded, in part, by government agencies – politics or medicine?”
He continued: “Today, everything connects. In our extraordinarily divided times – when reason and nuance and context feel like Stone Age relics – understanding those connections simply must be our way forward.”
Chris Riback (@chrisriback) is co-founder of Good Guys Media Ventures and host of podcasts on politics, business, technology, science and the arts, including Chris Riback’s Conversations, Investigating Breast Cancer (official podcast of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation), and Working Capital Conversations.
Riback’s career has sat at the intersection of media, business and technology.
He began as a journalist — working in the U.S. and overseas in broadcast news, print and web — including at CBS News (60 Minutes), CBS Sports, ABC News, and the Associated Press. Riback also served as guest host for a national show on the ABC radio network. Chris’ Political Wire Conversations (now Chris Riback’s Conversations) has been ranked No. 3 on iTunes News & Politics category.
He is co-author of You Won, Now What? How Americans Can Make Democracy Work from City Hall to the White House (Scribner), a political management book widely hailed by prominent politicians and journalists as a must-read for “anyone seeking to understand how American politics operates.” He was co-founder of Political Insider, one of the first political sites on the web.
In business, Riback served as a Managing Director at Citi, where among other roles he created and launched CitiMedia, the firm’s internal digital media agency. He also is co-founder of Good Guys Media Ventures, which helps companies create branded digital media properties – connecting actionable ideas and insights with key audiences to increase client engagement and remain top of mind in highly competitive business landscapes.
Riback earned degrees from Harvard University, Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.