PODCAST · news
Talk Cocktail
by Jeff Schechtman
Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, newsmakers and opinion shapers, and sheds light on the issues of the day, from local stories to national and international headlines and ideas. jeffschechtman.substack.com
Episodes
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AI Is Making Work Sadder: And What Happens When Everyone Shares the Same Brain?
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…
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The Gold Rush That Never Ended
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…
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Why We Can’t Outrun Our Own History
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...
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The Bond Market Always Gets the Final Vote
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…
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Our Cosmic Quest Ends at the Server Farm
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…
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A Timeline of Western Decline
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 recentWhoWhatWhy podcast, Bianka Banova, says they’re off by decades. The disorder people feel now — the cost of living that won’t fall,...
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The inversion of AI’s discontent: Looking at the Myth of the Bad Data Center
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...
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How Silicon Valley Buys Its Future: The Stanford Within Stanford
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...
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The Cruelest Game
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...
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An Inversion of AI’s Discontent
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Emily Hoeven expected the towns hosting America’s new data centers to be the angry. She found the opposite. In a recent column — titled “‘We were a dying little town’: How Silicon Valley data centers are reshaping rural America” — she maps a strange disconnect…
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The Age of AI Will Require Intuitive Leadership, Not More Data
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...
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Does Fascism Have American Roots?
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...
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Can Code Have a Conscience?
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,...
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Design as an Act of Inclusion
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...
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The Real California That Gavin Newsom Will Have to Defend
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,...
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As America Becomes a Gerontocracy, Its Future Keeps Getting Delayed
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,...
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Progress Should Be Our Most Important Product
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...
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Before the Trillions, There Was Once Joy in Silicon Valley
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…
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The Water Knows Something
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...
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As America Becomes a Gerontocracy, Its Future Keeps Getting Delayed
What if the real crisis isn’t aging leaders, but an aging democracy where power never seems to change hands? My guest on this recentWhoWhatWhy podcast, Yale historian Samuel Moyn, believes America has quietly become something few of us have recognized: an aging society where the balance between...
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AI May Be the Tool That Brings Government Back to Life?
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...
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Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, And The Music That Called Us West
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...
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New York, the 1980s, and the World It Created
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…
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Russia’s Descent Into Madness: Slowly, Then All at Once
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.…
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No Rules, No Order: The World on a Knife’s Edge
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...
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The Democracy of Grief
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...
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California's Generic Governor's Race and the End of Local Politics
With just days to go before the June 2 California primary, Joe 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...
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How Civilizations Lose the Signal
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...
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Teaching Students to Navigate Algorithms and Deepfakes
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...
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Why Do We Fear Waymos More Than We Fear Bad Drivers
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...
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Betting on Reality
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...
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Beyond Doomism: Why Climate Progress Is Happening Without the Panic
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...
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Power Without Ideology Is Doomed
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...
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L.A.’s Air Was Once A Punchline. It Could Be Again
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...
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Iran, Hungary, Ukraine: The World Is Running on Outdated Legacy Software
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...
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How Rolling Stone shaped a social revolution … at least for a while
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...
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AI Is Humans, All the Way Down
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...
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Social Media Had Gun-Level Immunity. That Just Ended
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…
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Understanding Global Oil Shocks
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...
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The Unexplained War: Stumbling Toward World War III
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...
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The Chavez Myth Comes Apart
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...
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We Cut Off Its Oil & Attacked Its Partners; China Seems Willing to Wait...Why?
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…
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The Brief Life of Public Outrage: Why Corporate Scandals Matter—Until They Don't
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...
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The Service Fee That Sparked a National Firestorm
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…
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Hidden Cables—Global Risk
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...
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The Iran Nobody in Washington Wanted to Listen To
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...
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American Democracy Isn’t Broken… It Never Worked as Advertised
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...
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A View From Israel: A Conversation with Ambassador Michael Oren
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...
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Democracy’s Pulse Is Beating — But For How Long?
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...
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Silicon Valley Meets Outlaw Cannabis Culture
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...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Talk Cocktail have?
Talk Cocktail currently has 1000 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Talk Cocktail about?
Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, newsmakers and opinion shapers, and sheds light on the issues of the day, from local stories to national and international headlines and ideas. jeffschechtman.substack.com
How often does Talk Cocktail release new episodes?
Talk Cocktail releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 1000 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Talk Cocktail?
You can listen to Talk Cocktail on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Talk Cocktail?
Talk Cocktail is created and hosted by Jeff Schechtman.
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