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 Democrats Can Build Lasting Power.We spoke on my WhoWhatWhy podcast just before the election which now give his thoughts added relevance. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 culture. Its most committed factions, he argues, have concluded that democracy itself no longer serves their purposes. What they seek instead is dominion: political and religious control over American institutions and, ultimately, American life. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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 disappearance of the human relationships that make democracy possible? What if, in our determination to defend the country, we’re slowly destroying our ability to share it?We live in an age when political convictions increasingly determine whom we trust, whom we love, even whom we’re willing to speak to.Outrage has become a measure of moral seriousness, and every disagreement seems to demand a verdict on someone’s character. But is this constant state of political mobilization making us better citizens, or simply making us less capable of living together? Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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