Talk Cocktail

Before Lin-Manuel Miranda, before the Play there was the book.  Miranda has talked about how his inspiration was Ron Chernow's 2004 book about Hamilton.  Here is my May 2004 conversation with Ron Chernow about HAMILTON. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

We are a nation that believes deeply in the Horatio Alger story of hard work and pulling oneself up by their bootstraps.  In political terms this has translated into an ethos of individualism, which arguably has been corrosive to our body politic. In part, it grew in response to the culture of monarchy and inheritance that America was founded in opposition to.  It is certainly far more egalitarian...

We know that children living in poverty generally tend to do worse academically than middle class kids.  We also know that even some kids from wealthy backgrounds fail or breakdown. We’ve come to learn, in part through the writing of my guest Paul Tough, that it’s more than IQ or temperament. There is something else. Something that has to do with innate character, perseverance or just plain old fa...

“We hear of of war and the rumor of war.”  We thank our soldiers for their service and we think that we are welcoming them back into society.  But what are actually welcoming back into? They return often with an experience we cannot really comprehend. An experience that often bonds them together into their own tribe.  One that makes them different from us.   In fact as many of us work hard to brea...

If anything represents the new new thing in our technological age, it's the arena of artificial intelligence.  From the factory floor to the glittering glass office of law firms, smart machine are doing job, after job, after job. The conversation about jobs going offshore is so yesterday.  Today it’s robots and algorithms that are the threats. Manufacturing is only the beginning.  Service sector j...

Look around us. Conflict is everywhere. In our culture, certainly in our politics, in the broader world and in our interactions with institutions.  Sometimes, to try and seek shelter from that sea of conflict, we look into our own personal relationships for solace.  When we do, we place even more pressure on those relationships and often the seeds of more conflict are sown.   So with all of this c...

Recently I had a conversation with a Professor at UC Berkeley about the subject of Power.  In the course of the conversation he referred to what he saw as key centers of power. People who he saw as  exercising real power. He referred to great generals, political leaders and Wall Street. Wall Street was once a reflection of America's business. It was there to serve business. Today Wall Street and t...

Whether we want to believe it or not, every relationship we have...with a friend, a spouse, a child or co-workers, has a power dynamic as a part of it.  Power may shift and morph, but it’s a part of every relationship and often a force for good.  In understanding power at this most intimate level, we can better understand how it plays out, or should play out, on a more macro scale. It’s not someth...

We throw around the word globalization without really thinking about all of its impacts.  The instant and free flow of goods around the corner and around the world comes with a cost.  The iPhone delivered overnight from China, the speciality coffee from around the world, the stores filled with goods from hundreds of countries.   Rarely do we stop to think how all of this gets to us. Sure we see or...

We live in a world of bombast and noise.  Sometimes it seems the volume is turned up full blast, all the time.  A quick look at our Presidential campaigns is ample evidence. We forget that for leaders, or just average folks, sometimes quiet can have amazing power.  The power of thoughtfulness, of creativity and competence For young people, trying to find their place in the world, sometimes growing...

The poet William Blake talked about art as “seeing the world in a grain of sand.” I suppose that what he also meant was the ability to move in so tightly on something, that inside of it, we could construct an almost fourth dimension, through which to view the world and our experiences in it. In a way that’s what New Yorker Staff writer, author and Pulitzer Prize winner William Finnegan has done wi...

Not since the 1960’s have we lived in a time of more public anger.  Today, issues of race, economic disparity, power imbalance and distrust of traditional institutions, have all conflated to bring us to what some believe is the brink of insurrection. But should we be surprised?  Insurrection, riots, strikes have long been an instrument of policy for the disaffected.  It was a central form of prote...

A Scottish writer, back in 1915, coined the phrase “think globally, but act locally.”  While it was about grassroots movements, it could just as easily have been about our understanding of the universe. The fundamental laws of physics which govern the workings of the cosmos, are not some abstract untethered set of rules. They have a direct impact on how we live and on the very meaning of human exi...

For better or worse, particularly for those of us here in the Bay Area, we have come to think of science in rather utilitarian terms.  A better phone, a better app, or a better car. In fact science, especially theoretical physics, is or should be the real lens through which we see the world.  It is our understanding of the larger universe that shapes how we see our place in it and that more than t...

Think about our built environment and how much of it is designed around safety and security.  The gated communities, the numbers on top of office buildings, the entrances and exits, garages and elevators. eyes on the street.    Now imagine seeing our daily landscape through the eyes of someone that wanted to break into our homes and our offices.  Suddenly architecture takes on a whole new dimensio...

Ask any of the 20 and 30 somethings working in tech in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and I assure they think they are inventing the world.  But the fact is that most, including some that have become household names, are merely leaving footprints in the shadow of David Sarnoff. David Sarnoff born in 1891, had a visionary understanding of everything from the telegraph to the future of the interne...

It’s hard to believe from the rhetoric coming from both sides of the campaign trail this year, but there once was a time when policy mattered. When candidates on both sides talked about programs and public policy. Perhaps it was Reagan wanting to shrink the size of government and drown it in a bathtub, or Bill Clinton declaring that the era of big government is over.  The fact is we have stopped l...

How many times have you experienced an even mild form of depression, or anxiety or obsessive fear and wondered “how you got this way.”  It turns out the answer may have as much to do with your ancestry as with your circumstances. While today with things like 23andme and the vast array of genetic testing and sequencing we can do, we look for every clue to our health.  What diseases we may carry and...

We hear it in all the loose talk about health care.  About the wonders of medicine, about how we are living longer and about the advances of our doctors.  The fact is we are mostly still in the dark ages. The standard treatment for cancer today, poisoning the body, is a little like how we once viewed leaching. As for diagnostics, a huge percentage of today's sickest patient go through a multi year...

There is seemingly nothing in our society today that has not become politicized. From what bathrooms we use to the soda we drink, to the food we eat.  Sometimes if feels as if common sense and good judgment have gone out the window. We forget there are some absolutes.  There are some facts that are irrefutable. Sometimes to ignore this, is to do irreparable damage.  One of the areas where this is...

American history shows us that amidst election season we are often divided.  That partisan rancor is often high and it is a healthy part of the passion of democracy.  But today we seem to have something worse.  While we’ve been here before as a county, we are at one of those historical inflection points where the bitterness spills over into every aspect of life.  And while history shows us other b...

As they have done in so many other areas, the millennial generation has picked and chosen which parts of their social and sexual legacy they want to inherit.  Particularly for millennial girls who were handed a legacy of sexual revolution, increased efforts to promote self esteem, Title 9, several waves of feminism and the ability to Lean In, they have made some interesting choices and compromises...

If I gave you all a quiz and asked you to name five tech visionaries and entrepreneurs in the US, you’d all pass.  If I asked you to name even one visionary entrepreneur in China, the world's largest market, you’d probably come up empty.  If you didn't, you’d probably name Jack Ma, the founder and leader of Alibaba. The company recently went public in the largest IPO in history. It’s the largest v...

It’s funny how history often pokes its head out in the framework of contemporary events.  Remember during the government shutdown a few years ago, commentators said that the radical elements of the GOP were acting like terrorists from the 60’s and 70’s?  We heard similar criticism of occupy Wall Street years ago. And who can forget the President being accused of paling  around with terrorist becau...

The debate that raged between Apple and the Federal Government was on the surface about security, privacy and encryption.  However, in a larger sense it’s about the balance between our liberty and right to privacy vs. what some perceive as the greater good of the nation. When we put up with the indignities of the TSA, we are agreeing that the greater good of security, check makes certain individua...