Talk Cocktail

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...

With just days to go before the June 2 California primary, J oe Mathews joins me on the California Sun podcast to examine how California’s race for governor has become strangely disconnected from the state itself and what it says about local politics everywhere. With almost all the campaigns built around generic national talking points and anti-Trump messaging, Mathews explores the growing nationa...

In my latest WhoWhatWhy podcast , you’ll see that there’s a moment in the conversation when something clicks. When the thread connecting baby names to the fall of the Roman Empire to Bitcoin to Jeffrey Epstein to the basket of deplorables to the last reserve currency suddenly becomes visible. And once you see it, you can’t look away. That thread is the signal. Not communication. Not language. Some...

Valerie Ziegler, a high school teacher in San Francisco, and Joel Breakstone, executive director of Stanford’s Digital Inquiry Group, join me on this California Sun podcast to talk about digital literacy in the classroom. Many self-described “screenagers,” they say, can no longer tell real from fake. Together, Ziegler and Breakstone are at the forefront of a movement to prepare young people for a...

On this California Sun Podcast I’m joined by William Riggs , a professor of engineering and management at the University of San Francisco and an expert on transportation innovation. He expalins how San Francisco — now ground zero for America’s autonomous vehicle future, with more than 1,000 Waymos on its streets — is exposing a strange contradiction: Society tolerates the deadly carnage caused by...

Everybody’s talking about prediction markets. In the hours before the US struck Iran, a cluster of large anonymous bets landed on exactly the right answer as to when the war would start. But almost nobody is explaining what these markets actually are, how they work, or why they keep getting the future right when everyone else gets it wrong. My guest on last week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is Robin Hanso...

Climate researcher and SOLARCYCLE co-founder Pablo Dias discusses why collective action is better than individual guilt in addressing environmental challenges. From China's renewable energy surge to the dangers of "doomism," Dias argues technology and markets are already delivering progress—but only if we move beyond lifestyle policing. The future isn't written, but are we reading the present corr...

When an authoritarian regime offers no ideology, no story, no reason to believe, it plants the seeds of its own destruction. Minneapolis and Iran show this story. In this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, I talk with political theorist John Ambrosio , about the moral failure that’s becoming to impossible to ignore. Every authoritarian regime in history has understood something that Donald Trump apparentl...

Smog was once as much a symbol of L.A. as palm trees — a bane to public health and a national punchline on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” My guest on this California Sun podcast, Ann Carlson, author of “ Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air .” details the decades-long battle that transformed the air from toxic to breathable. Today’s rollbacks once again th...

The old rules are gone. The new ones aren’t written yet. And no one in charge knows how to write them. Detail in my recent WhoWhatWhy podcast. The old world order is dead. The new one hasn’t been written yet. And the people currently in charge — on both sides of the Atlantic — are structurally incapable of writing it. That’s not a provocative opinion. It’s an analytical conclusion, and few people...

My California Sun conversation with Peter Richardson , author of the new book “ Brand New Beat : The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine.” A time when the media had a different kind of power — between 1967 and 1977 — when the Bay Area’s counterculture reshaped music and the journalism. From Haight-Ashbury to the Fillmore, Hunter S. Thompson to Annie Leibovitz, the magazine documented a social revo...

he inside story of how greed, ambition, and rivalry destroyed AI’s safety mechanisms — and why human failings, not technology, are driving us toward catastrophe. Despite everything you think you know about artificial intelligence — the models, the capabilities, the existential predictions — it’s simply humans all the way down. Men building things, making choices, placing bets, and abandoning safeg...

A jury recently shattered Big Tech’s legal shield. Meta and YouTube: guilty of engineering addiction. This is social media’s tobacco moment . Two industries in America have enjoyed near-total legal immunity for their products: gun manufacturers and social media platforms. Now, juries found Meta and YouTube guilty of harming users by deliberately engineering addiction, knowing the harm, and doing i...

Severin Borenstein , is a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and one of he nations leading experts on the economics of energy. He joins me on this California Sun podcast to explain exactly how the Iran war is disrupting global oil markets and why California especially faces even sharp price impacts. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

War without strategy. Drones without limits. Data without wisdom. How the Iran conflict is stumbling toward World War III — and no one can explain why. My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, RAND senior defense analyst David Shlapak , has for decades made a living by imagining how wars spiral out of control — war-gaming the scenarios where miscalculation becomes catastrophe, where deterrence...

Miriam Pawel, author of the definitive Cesar Chavez biography, " The Crusades of Cesar Chavez ," joins me on this recent California Sun Podcast to reflect on the shattering of the Cesar Chavez myth — and the harder questions beneath it: what was known, what was ignored, and why movements so often need saints. In this wide-ranging conversation, Pawel explores Chavez’s charisma, control, contradicti...

China loses two oil partners to US action in Iran. Their response? Strategic patience. Are we watching restraint or preparation for what’s next? There’s an old saying: When your enemy is digging himself a hole, the smart move is to hand them a bigger shovel. China appears to be doing exactly that — watching, waiting, keeping its powder dry while America commits massive military resources to the ot...

On this recent TalkCocktial podcast I’m joined by Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper, who has spent a decade studying when corporate scandals force actual change—Dieselgate, Cambridge Analytica, Goldman Sachs—and when they just fade away. His book Billionaire Backlash argues scandals briefly overwhelm corporate lobbying when they tap simmering public resentment. He pushes back hard on whe...