Advertise on podcast: Talk Cocktail

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 jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 Mallaby, who spent three years embedded in the world of AI as it evolved from research lab to civilizational force. With over 30 hours of access to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind, alone, Mallaby was present at the creation. His book The Infinity Machine reveals the inside story you’ve never heard. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 spoke with Fordham University law professor Olivier Sylvain, a former senior adviser at the Federal Trade Commission and author of Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control — and How We Can Take It Back. He explains why these suits, in New Mexico and California, succeeded where previous attempts had failed to hold social media platforms accountable. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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

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. They’re unfolding in real time over Iranian airspace, and the people running them may not have thought through what happens next. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 same frame. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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. Kang returns to examine whether China’s restraint vindicates his contrarian thesis, or reveals something more calculated. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 through outrage is democracy working or failing. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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

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

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, a contributor to NBC News and The New Yorker, and the author of four books on modern Iran — most recently the memoir Minister Without Portfolio. He has spent his career as the voice in the room insisting that Iran is always more complicated than Washington wants to believe. He has never been more right, and the moment has never been more dangerous. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 reached its sell-by date? It’s no longer hypothetical. Stearns, author of Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, returns to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast to talk to me about what’s been lost — and more provocatively, what might still be salvageable. His diagnosis is clear: We have thrived in spite of our constitutional structure, not because of it.The guardrails weren’t structural; they were customary. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall; it was a framework held together by norms that turned out to be entirely optional. And the Madisonian dream of competing institutional jealousies keeping power in check? That, Stearns says, was always more mythology than reality. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 and the world. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 reflect the will of the people — or something else entirely. Last November’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia showed that democracy still can work. Against the authoritarian tide, voters showed up and democracy delivered results that mattered. But before we celebrate, ask yourself: What happens when those in power today realize they’re losing ground? What happens when 2026 looms as a potential reckoning? Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 industry that never forgot its outlaw roots. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe