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With all the buzz surrounding You Can See Everything, the new Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, it’s worth going back to where the Theranos story began. Eight years ago, I spoke with John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of Silicon Valley’s spectacular blood-testing fraud. His book, Bad Blood, had just been published. Carreyrou, now at The New York Times, was still uncovering the full extent of the deception. Before the trials, the documentaries, and the Hollywood treatment, this was one of the earliest in-depth podcast conversations about the case. A useful primer on how it all began. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Give this country a tragedy and it will have the heroes and villains sorted before the ambulance has pulled away. Americans no longer need to know what happened to know whose fault it is. The one reflex a divided country still shares is the certainty that arrives before the facts do.In May 2023, Jordan Neely, homeless and in the grip of mental illness, died in a chokehold on a Manhattan subway, held down by a former Marine named Daniel Penny. Almost before the facts were known, the argument was settled. My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Anand Giridharadas, put it this way, they got their group number and went to stand in the right line. Giridharadas, a former New York Times correspondent and author of Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, treats that subway car as a biopsy: a small incision that reveals the condition of the whole body. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 AI operations at a creative technology company, his job is to put these tools to work. But in two essays for the longform magazine Noema, published by the Berggruen Institute, he’s become one of the sharpest voices asking how much the corporate rush to “use AI for everything” is costing us as human beings. In my WhoWhatWhy conversation, Horwath explains why even senior professionals with decades of experience are feeling a strange career dread. More than fear of unemployment, it involves the loss of something human: the ownership, the craft, the pride in work that was recognizably their own before AI wedged itself into the workplace. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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, and technological upheaval, then follows that same restless impulse from the Gold Rush through railroads and agriculture to Silicon Valley and the artificial intelligence boom. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 Sequoia Capital leader talks about his new book, “Ausländer,” which traces how his family’s flight from Nazi Germany echoes in the lives of descendants who never lived it. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 Federal Reserve and a bunch of f***ing bond traders?” More than three decades later, the bond traders are once again getting everyone’s attention. My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, economist Dean Baker, questions some of the conventional explanations for what’s happening — starting with the alarm surrounding America’s $40 trillion debt. “If we have a strong, growing economy,” Baker argues, “our debt’s not a problem.” Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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, he reads UFO belief as a kind of faith, disclosure as a Messiah forever late, absence of evidence folded in as proof of a cover-up. Underneath sits a harder possibility: that we may be the only minds in the universe, and meaning rests on us alone. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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, the wars that won’t stop, the ground shifting underfoot — isn’t the beginning of anything. It’s the moment the water got hot enough to feel. She argues the world came apart slowly, one comfortable choice at a time, beginning with decisions made decades ago. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 America” — she maps a strange disconnect: the dread over data centers looms large in the Bay Area, cradle of the artificial intelligence boom, while places bearing the weight, like Ellendale, North Dakota, have made their peace. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 funding,” yacht parties, and a secret elite — all riding on a culture of cutting corners that influenced everyone from his classmates to the university president. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 battleground — the head — where even the greatest lose nearly half the points they play, and the hardest thing any champion does is learn when to leave. Then there’s the money. At the top, fifty to a hundred million a year rides on winning, and every sponsor becomes one more voice in your head. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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

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 Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism 1818-1915, joins me in this WhoWhatWhy Podcast to explains why fascism is less an ideology than a corruption of democracy itself. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Erika Anderson, has stopped arguing and started measuring. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 authors from ten countries into Digital Accessibility Ethics. Their case: build for the person at the edge and everyone gets a better product. Who do we decide to build for? Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe