Talk Cocktail

Longtime Senate staffer and historian Adam Jentleson thinks that sometimes a big win is the least interesting thing that could happen to his party. His question is what comes after: whether a midterm won on backlash lasts, or evaporates the way every majority of the past decade has.

The answer turns on a distinction candidates blur at their peril.

Jentleson spent two decades inside Democratic politics, as chief of staff to former Sen. Harry Reid (NV) and, for a brief time, chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman (PA). His new book is Supermajority: How...

Christian nationalists are no longer trying to win democracy, Rep. Jared Huffman argues. They want to replace it with religious rule — and control American life.

Something has changed on the American religious right — and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) tells me in this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast that we are making a dangerous mistake by continuing to describe it with the old vocabulary of politics.

The movement Huffman examines in his new book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism, is not simply seeking greater influence in elections or a louder voice in the cult...

Can we defend democracy without sacrificing the friendships and human connections that make it worth saving? The paradox of political obsession.

In this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, I talk with political philosopher Roger Berkowitz — founder of Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center and author of A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. He explores a provocative idea: Perhaps democracy’s survival depends as much on our capacity for friendship as on our political convictions.

What if one of the greatest threats to democracy isn’t political extremism itself, but the...

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...

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...

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 everyt...

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.

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.

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 w...

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...

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 m...

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.

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.

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 winni...

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: 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.

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?

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 18...

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 An...

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 th...

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.

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 decisions, controlling the most valuable assets, dominating elections, and shaping the country’s future are getting older, n...

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 frightening?

In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, economic policy expert and futurist James Pethokoukis argues that America...

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 trillion-dollar IPOs, before the data centers and the doom, before “Silicon Valley” became shorthand for unaccountable power and...

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 "Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims" on depletion, endurance, and what...

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 generations has fundamentally shifted.

The cohort of people making the biggest political decisions, controlling the most valuable assets, dominating elections, and shaping the country’s future are getting older, not younger.

We’ve spent years arguing over whether this politician or that president is too old. B...

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 modern world. Then came DOGE, swinging a...

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.

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.

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 the Middle East, to whatever is consuming the news cyc...

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 any po...

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.

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 conversation.

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 billions of people who will never meet, across timescales no single human life can fully...

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 in the New York Times.

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 suggests the technology will save lives.

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 corporate prediction market in 1990 — decades before...

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?

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 something they can tell themselves — some story, some larger purpose, some ideological cover that...

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.

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 Waronomics Substack with what she calls Balkan candor and s...