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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

30:57

Beyond Doomism: Why Climate Progress Is Happening...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/05/09

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 correctly? Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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34:44

Power Without Ideology Is Doomed

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/05/06

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 apparently does not: People need a reason to go along. Not necessarily a good reason, or even a true one. But

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41:36

L.A.’s Air Was Once A Punchline. It Could Be Again

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/05/02

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 threaten the air in L.A. and everywhere else. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at

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49:49

Iran, Hungary, Ukraine: The World Is Running on...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/04/29

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 are better positioned to make it than Bianka Banova. Bulgarian-born, Switzerland-based, she runs the

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42:01

How Rolling Stone shaped a social revolution … at...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/04/22

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 revolution while simultaneously creating it. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at

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46:11

AI Is Humans, All the Way Down

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/04/18

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 safeguards the moment competitive pressure intensifies.On this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I talk with Sebastian

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39:30

Social Media Had Gun-Level Immunity. That Just Ended

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/04/16

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 it anyway. Legal experts are calling it social media’s tobacco moment.On a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I

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31:06

Understanding Global Oil Shocks

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/04/11

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

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43:25

The Unexplained War: Stumbling Toward World War III

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/04/04

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 fails, where World War III stops being theoretical.Today, those scenarios are no longer simulations

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37:50

The Chavez Myth Comes Apart

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/04/01

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, contradictions, and the challenge of holding both his historic achievements and the harm he may have caused in the

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31:10

We Cut Off Its Oil & Attacked Its Partners; China...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/03/28

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 other side of the world.On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, USC professor of international affairs David C

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44:52

The Brief Life of Public Outrage: Why Corporate...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/03/25

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 whether billionaire wealth reflects value creation for society or corruption, and whether making policy

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19:58

The Service Fee That Sparked a National Firestorm

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/03/21

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 conversation about labor, class, and whether we’ve ever really reckoned with the racial history of tipping

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32:55

Hidden Cables—Global Risk

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/03/19

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 accident. Samanth Subramanian, author of The Web Beneath the Waves, reveals that what comes next might not

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42:40

The Iran Nobody in Washington Wanted to Listen To

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/03/14

Jeff Schechtman 03/06/26Iran 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, a contributor to NBC News and The New Yorker, and the author of four books on modern Iran — most recently

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45:52

American Democracy Isn’t Broken… It Never Worked as...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/03/11

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 harder to disagree.Back in 2024, we asked the hypothetical question of Stearns whether American democracy had

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24:09

A View From Israel: A Conversation with Ambassador...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/03/07

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 suddenly burst into the open, drew in the United States, and what it may mean for the future of the Middle East

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56:22

Democracy’s Pulse Is Beating — But For How Long?

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/03/04

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 voting infrastructure. What he’s found raises uncomfortable questions about whether our elections truly

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25:04

Silicon Valley Meets Outlaw Cannabis Culture

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/02/28

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 Califorina Sun podcast to discuss the four years he spent unraveling what happens when ambition meets an

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37:07

Worse Than Losing a Hockey Game: Living Next Door to...

Talk Cocktail ·

2026/02/25

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 for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, and my guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast.When Canadian Prime Minister

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