Talk Cocktail

Chef Geoff Davis opened Burdell in Oakland to cook the soul food his grandmothers made — a distinct American cuisine rooted in migration and adaptation rather than Southern tradition. In 2024, Food & Wine named Burdell the “Restaurant of the Year.” On our recent California Sun podcast, he expalins how it was a 20% service fee at the bottom of Burdell’s receipts that recently started a national con...

We imagine the internet as invisible—wireless, ethereal, everywhere and nowhere. The truth is far more precarious. Nearly 95% of global data moves through 900,000 miles of fiber optic cable lying unprotected on the ocean floor, controlled increasingly by four American tech giants. When Tonga's single cable was severed in 2022, ATMs went dark and the country vanished from the world. That was an acc...

Jeff Schechtman 03/06/26 Iran didn’t ask for regime change. It asked for bread. How a protest movement got hijacked — and turned into a war nobody planned for. And the man who saw all of this coming has been saying so, loudly and at personal cost, for 20 years. My guest on this very recent WhoWhatWhy podcast is Hooman Majd , the grandson of an ayatollah, the son of a diplomat who served the shah,...

The guardrails weren’t real — they were simply norms. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall. And the Madisonian dream? Always more myth than reality. So now what? The Federalist Papers , argues our guest, University of Maryland law professor Maxwell Stearns , belongs in the fiction section of the library. And after watching the Trump years dismantle everything we were told would hold, it’s getting ha...

For decades the conflict between Israel and Iran lived in the shadows—proxies, sabotage, and covert strikes. Not anymore. According to my guest, Michael Oren —historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States—what began with Hamas’s October 7 attack has spiraled into a widening regional war stretching from Gaza to Tehran. Oren shares his view of how a long-building confrontation suddenl...

Can democracy survive computerized vote counting? Systemic and man-made vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure may threaten integrity. My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jonathan Simon , senior editor at WhoWhatWhy and author of CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy , has spent more than two decades tracking the fault lines in America’s computerized vo...

When California legalized recreational cannabis, Silicon Valley envisioned a new Gold Rush. Tushar Atre — a tech entrepreneur, surfer, and disruptor — thought he could bridge two worlds: venture capital and the black market. On Oct. 1, 2019, he was shot execution-style on his own property, hands bound. Investigative journalist Scott Eden , author of “ A Killing in Cannabis ,” joins me on the Calif...

They’re booing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Toronto. At hockey games. In Canada. Not because Canadians have suddenly turned anti-American, but because for the first time in 150 years, they’re genuinely afraid of us. And that fear, says Andrew Coyne, is reshaping everything — their politics, their economy, their identity, their future. Coyne is a long time Canadian political observer and columnist...

Iran on the brink. On a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I spoke with Shay Khatiri who insists that the real question isn’t what happened on January 8 and 9 — it’s what comes next. Because this wasn’t an economic protest that got out of hand. This was the maximum force Iranian civil society can muster on its own. And it wasn’t enough. Khatiri — a leading Iran scholar expalins that every previous uprising...

While America now fully abandons climate action, the world races ahead—and watches in dismay. A look at the cost of US denial and how good things happening without us. Mads Christensen , the executive director of Greenpeace International, has spent three decades on the front lines of environmental activism. In my conversation with him on a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, he brings a perspective that cu...

The numbers coming out of Iran stop you cold: 12,000 to 20,000 dead in 48 hours. Not across months of civil war or years of grinding conflict, but concentrated into two January nights of systematic slaughter. My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Shay Khatiri , insists we’re focusing on the wrong horror. The real question isn’t what happened on January 8 and 9 — it’s what comes next. Because...

Diversity has become a political weapon—but what if it was never meant to be political at all? UC Berkeley law professor David Oppenheimer argues in our conversation that diversity is an intellectual principle, not a moral slogan or corporate checkbox. Drawing on history, law, and hard science, he explains why diverse perspectives drive better thinking—and how the idea got lost along the way. Get...

Daniella Mestyanek Young escaped a notorious sex cult, then joined the Army where she studied terrorists—and recognized the same coercive tactics everywhere. The author of The Culting of America , she reveals in our podcast how cult dynamics pervade American life, from MAGA's authoritarian tribalism to corporate culture. We're obsessed with AI threats, she argues, while missing the real danger: hu...

On this recent California Sun Podcast, I spoke with Los Angeles-based artist Laurie Lipton about creating massive political works in chaotic times, her obsessive cross-hatching technique learned from Dutch Masters, and returning to the US after 36 years abroad to find America rolled back to 1955. A relentlessly productive artist, Lipton described drawing as an almost physiological need. “I use my...

It started with Rodney King—eighty-two seconds of video that should have changed everything but didn't. Thirty-four years later, after George Floyd and now events unfolding in Minneapolis, we're still asking: what happens after the cameras capture undeniable truth? Danny Goldberg was there in 1991 when an unlikely Los Angeles coalition fought to hold the LAPD accountable. His book Liberals with At...

Esther Mobley, the senior wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, joins me on the California Sun podcast to talk about California and the world’s wine industry crisis — In California alone, nearly 5,000 wineries competing for declining demand, 38,000 vineyard acres removed in 2025, mounting closures. She discusses why younger generations aren’t drinking wine, what happens to tourism-dependent...

Two garbage trucks of plastic hit the ocean every minute. Microplastics are in your brain. Recycling doesn’t work. What the plastic industry never told you. In this WhoWhatWhy podcast , former EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck pulls back the curtain on an industry built on deception. Her new book, The Problem with Plastic , connects dots most people miss — between fracking booms and plastic f...

Last week, MTV officially shut down, ending an era that revolutionized music, video, and shaped California’s youth culture. Tom Freston co-founded the television channel 44 years ago, building a creative empire on principles that seem impossible today: hiring people with no experience, protecting creatives from corporate pressure, valuing disorientation over data, and treating loyalty as strategy....

Why is America uniquely terrified of AI while the world races ahead? The arguments driving that fear often collapse under scrutiny—real concerns go unaddressed. In this Talk Cocktail podcast, economist and author of the Noahopinion Substack, Noah Smith helps us understand what happened to American optimism—and why our fear may be built on foundations far shakier than we realize. Somewhere between...

Eleven federal workers reveal what it felt like to be fired by Musk’s DOGE — the emails, the trauma, and the institutional destruction we’ve never heard about. On this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I talked with journalist Sasha Abramsky, the author of American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the US Government. Abramsky spent six months embedded with 11 fired federal workers from eight dif...

We’re not one nation split by politics — we’re 11 regional cultures that have been at war since the colonies. And now the divisions are life and death. What if the America we think we know has never actually existed? The divisions tearing us apart aren’t new — they’re four centuries old, rooted in the very founding of this country. And now there’s data proving it. On this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast...

When billionaires mock the Pope with memes and fund “cheating apps,” something’s gone seriously wrong. The collapse of tech idealism; betting takes its place. Silicon Valley used to sell itself as the future. Today it often feels more like a funhouse mirror of the culture — loud, aggrieved, addicted to posting, increasingly divorced from any notion of social purpose. In this WhoWhatWhy podcast I t...

Arkansas legally whipped prisoners until 1968. Today, U.S. officials celebrate images from El Salvador’s concentration camp-style prisons while federal courts abandon “evolving standards of decency” for 1790s baselines. Yale Law Professor Judith Resnik , author of book Impermissible Punishments , talks to me about how prisons maintain structural ties to plantations and argues democratic government...

On this recent California Sun podcast Roddy Bottum , a founder of the alternative metal band Faith No More, talks with me about 1980s and ’90s San Francisco — a dark, overlooked era between the Summer of Love and the tech boom. His memoir, “ The Royal We ” recalls a vanished city of bicycle messengers and punk rock in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. It’s a poetic testament to community, loss, and t...

In this recent California Sun podcast I talk with Dina Gilio-Whitaker , author of the new book “ Who Gets to Be Indian ? “ She explores how California became ground zero for Native American identity fraud — from Hollywood’s early film lots to today’s casino capitalism and tribal disenrollment crisis. All of it created the perfect conditions for “Indianness” to become commodified, challenging authe...