Talk Cocktail

What if the most disruptive thing about artificial intelligence isn’t that it takes your job, but that it makes your company indistinguishable from every competitor — and drains the humanity out of the work that’s left? Aaron Horwath has an unusual vantage point on that question. As director of AI operations at a creative technology company, his job is to put these tools to work. But in two essays...

Nathaniel Philbrick, a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer finalist, recasts the Gold Rush as the moment where America learned to embrace greed and live at warp speed. His new book, “ The Rush, ” and in our recent California Sun conversation, he explores instant wealth, immigration, slavery, and technological upheaval, then follows that same restless impulse from the Gold Rush through railroad...

Michael Moritz, a former journalist, became one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors — and a philanthropist who has quietly backed the Booker Prize and San Francisco journalism. Yet he never escaped the terror of his family’s past. On this recent California Sun podcast, the longtime Sequoia Capital leader talks about his new book, “ Ausländer ,” which traces how his family’s flight from N...

The bond market is getting restless. What rising yields, $40 trillion in debt, AI spending, and Scott Bessent reveal about the price of money. Bill Clinton famously exploded during a 1993 economic meeting: “You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f***ing bond traders?” More than three decades later, the bond traders are on...

For seventy-five years the truth about UFOs has been just about to come out, and never quite arrives. Adam Kirsch, senior editor at The Atlantic, tells me that the real question was never whether aliens are real, but why we so badly need the answer to be yes. In his new book, We Want to Believe , he reads UFO belief as a kind of faith, disclosure as a Messiah forever late, absence of evidence fold...

Everyone wants to name the moment it all went wrong. Most people name 2016, and one man, and an election they’re sure the next election can undo. My guest on a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Bianka Banova , says they’re off by decades. The disorder people feel now — the cost of living that won’t fall, the wars that won’t stop, the ground shifting underfoot — isn’t the beginning of anything. It’s the m...

Emily Hoeven expected the towns hosting America’s new data centers to be the angriest. She found the opposite. In our recent California Sun podcast, and in a recent column for the San Francisco Chronicle — titled “‘We were a dying little town’: How Silicon Valley data centers are reshaping rural America” — she maps a strange disconnect: the dread over data centers looms large in the Bay Area, crad...

Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University at the age of 17 wanting in. What he found, as he recounts in our recent California Sun Podcast and in his new book “ How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University , ” was a machine: venture capitalists scouting freshmen, “pre-idea funding,” yacht parties, and a secret elite — all riding on a culture of cutting corners that influenced...

Lose a pickup basketball game and you shrug it off. Lose a tennis match, Matthew Futterman learned, and it feels like you got beaten up. As the US Open gets under way this week, Futterman, veteran sports journalist for The Athletic and author of The Cruelest Game , goes inside the sport’s real battleground — the head — where even the greatest lose nearly half the points they play, and the hardest...

We're told the leader with the most data wins. Ronald Kraft, PhD, argues in his new book “ The 7 Laws of Intuitive Leadership, ” the opposite. As AI makes information infinite and answers instant, he says the real edge is disciplined intuition — a trainable "third system" of judgment no machine can copy. Can today's leaders relearn to trust the instinct the data keeps drowning out? Get full access...

What if the roots of fascism weren’t European at all, but embedded in America’s founding struggles over democracy and race? For more than a decade, we’ve been flooded with books warning about fascism — how to recognize it, how it spreads, how democracies lose their way. Almost all begin with the same assumption: Fascism was a European creation that eventually washed up on American shores. Joseph K...

The AI debate is endless. One writer decided to measure it by asking not how smart the machines are, but how humane they are. Talking about artificial intelligence has become its own industry. AI will save us or doom us. It will cure cancer or end work. Panels, manifestos, congressional hearings, op-eds without end — and through all of it, the machines keep getting better at talking back, and no o...

The digital world is being rebuilt around AI, and for the first time in a generation the concrete of that world is still wet. Lainey Feingold thinks that's the opportunity! Technology can now read any text aloud, describe any image, caption any voice in real time — the most powerful equalizer disabled people have ever had, if it's designed in rather than bolted on. Feingold, a disability rights la...

The author and journalist Mark Arax joins me on the California Sun podcast to discuss his recent sweeping essay in the Guardian, published under the headline “California: Land of Plunder and Hypocrisy.” From the Gold Rush to the artificial intelligence boom, Arax explores how California’s myths, ambitions, and repeated reinventions have often concealed a far more complicated history of extraction,...

We’re living through the greatest transfer of wealth in history. Trillions of dollars are slowly passing from one generation to the next. Yet for all the money that’s changing hands, something far more important isn’t: Power. Our guest on this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Yale historian Samuel Moyn , believes America has quietly become something few of us have recognized: an aging society where the balance...

The future is arriving faster than ever. So why are we more anxious than excited? We are living through one of the most extraordinary periods of technological advancement in modern history. Artificial intelligence is reshaping knowledge work. Biotechnology is opening doors to better health and longevity once thought impossible. SpaceX has redefined spaceflight, and a new generation of innovators i...

A veteran of three tech eras on how the innocence was lost — and whether AI actually might win it back, through what he calls “enlightened AI.” Recently, on WhoWhatWhy podcast , Matthew Stepka — early internet-café founder, McKinsey alum, nine-year Google veteran who shepherded many of the company’s mission projects including the first self-driving cars, and now an investor in what he calls “enlig...

Water is the oldest promise we have. Baptism, ablution, the plunge that separates who you were from who you're about to be. Every summer we go back to it — lakes, rivers, the cold shock of an ocean in June — as if some part of us still believes the water knows something. Kate Washington, on a recent California Sun Podcast , talks to me about the fifty immersions she did before her fiftieth birthda...

What if the real crisis isn’t aging leaders, but an aging democracy where power never seems to change hands? My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Yale historian Samuel Moyn, believes America has quietly become something few of us have recognized: an aging society where the balance between generations has fundamentally shifted. The cohort of people making the biggest political decisions, con...

What if the real threat to democracy isn’t artificial intelligence, but a government that never learns to use it? In this WhoWhatWhy podcast , Beth Simone Noveck makes the unexpectedly optimistic case that AI is not just one more thing for government to regulate. It may be the tool that finally reinvents how government works, and more to the point, how it feels to deal with it. For 50 years we hav...

One year after the death of the legendary Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, author David Beard joins me on the California Sun podcast to talk about his new book, “ All Summer Long : Conversations with The Beach Boys from Surfin’ to SMiLE.” Beard discusses how the Beach Boys didn’t just make iconic music but defined Southern California itself — surf, sun, cars, the postcard invitation west — while Wi...

New York in the 1980s was a city in convulsion — deindustrializing, gentrifying, financializing — and the young urban professionals who flooded its trading floors and law firms weren't just a cultural moment. They were the architects of the America we live in now. Historian Dylan Gottlieb explains how the yuppie takeover of New York wrote the blueprint for today's inequality — and why we're still...

Putin didn’t seize a democracy — he hollowed one out. Twenty-five years inside Russia’s slow spiral, and what it tells us about our own moment. My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast , Marc Bennetts, arrived in Moscow in January1997, before most of the world had ever heard of Vladimir Putin. He stayed for 25 years. He watched Putin rise, the economy boom and bust, and freedoms quietly disappea...

From Beijing to Washington to Cuba, the old world order has collapsed. Is this the most dangerous moment since 1945? One man says yes, and the clock is ticking. My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast is Peter Apps . As Reuters’s global defense commentator, he has spent two decades in the rooms and on the roads where history is actually made. His new book, The Next World War , puts the odds of...

Grief is the one experience nobody escapes, nobody schedules, and nobody gets to opt out of. In that sense it's almost democratic — ruthlessly, mercilessly so. I’m joined by Danielle Crittenden , long time journalist and the author of Dispatches from Grief . Danielle lost her daughter Miranda suddenly in 2024. She writes about it the way a foreign correspondent files from a war zone — dispatches f...