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PODCAST

Talk Cocktail

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

news & politics

All Episodes

33:45

The Age of AI Will Require Intuitive Leadership, Not...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/08/13

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 to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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35:25

Does Fascism Have American Roots?

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/08/08

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 Kelly says we’ve got it backwards.Kelly, a professor at the College of Charleston and author of The Biggest

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35:25

Can Code Have a Conscience?

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/07/30

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 one can tell you whether the thing you confided in last night was good for you or not.My guest on this

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37:43

Design as an Act of Inclusion

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/07/25

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 lawyer who won talking ATMs and accessible banking without ever filing a lawsuit, has gathered thirty-nine

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40:26

The Real California That Gavin Newsom Will Have to...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/07/22

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, contradiction, and self-deception. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at

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44:09

As America Becomes a Gerontocracy, Its Future Keeps...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/07/18

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 between generations has fundamentally shifted.The cohort of people making the biggest political

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40:28

Progress Should Be Our Most Important Product

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/07/16

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 is tackling problems that seemed beyond our reach just a decade ago.So why does the future feel so

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39:37

Before the Trillions, There Was Once Joy in Silicon...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/07/11

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 “enlightened AI” — walks us back through the Valley’s reinventions and asks what each one cost.Before the

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16:40

The Water Knows Something

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/07/08

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 birthday, after caregiving and motherhood and a dissolving marriage had emptied her out. The author of

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35:14

AI May Be the Tool That Brings Government Back to Life?

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/06/25

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 have been told government is the problem: slow, bloated, hopeless, a relic that could never keep pace with the

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47:16

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, And The Music That...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/06/20

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 Wilson quietly pushed pop into uncharted territory for the whole country. Get full access to Talk Cocktail

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39:13

New York, the 1980s, and the World It Created

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/06/13

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 living inside it. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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34:00

Russia’s Descent Into Madness: Slowly, Then All at Once

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/06/11

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 disappear.Russia has fallen off the front page. The global conversation has moved on — to China, to trade wars, to

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35:24

No Rules, No Order: The World on a Knife’s Edge

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/06/06

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 major war within the next 10 years at 1 in 3.He argues that the world is more dangerous right now than at

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32:02

The Democracy of Grief

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/06/04

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 from a country we think we're prepared for, until we arrive. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at

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32:59

California's Generic Governor's Race and the End of...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/05/30

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 around generic national talking points and anti-Trump messaging, Mathews explores the growing nationalization of state politics, and why the actual mechanics of governing barely seem to be part of the

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45:36

How Civilizations Lose the Signal

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/05/27

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. Something older and more fundamental than either: the mechanism by which civilization itself coordinates

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38:48

Teaching Students to Navigate Algorithms and Deepfakes

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/05/21

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 world of influencers, algorithmic manipulation, and artificial intelligence, an effort recently profiled

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33:17

Why Do We Fear Waymos More Than We Fear Bad Drivers

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/05/16

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 human drivers while holding self-driving cars to an impossible standard, even as the data increasingly

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43:15

Betting on Reality

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/05/14

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 Hanson, an economist who saw this coming.A professor at George Mason University, he started the first internal

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