Talk Cocktail

Two garbage trucks of plastic hit the ocean every minute. Microplastics are in your brain. Recycling doesn’t work. What the plastic industry never told you.

In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, former EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck pulls back the curtain on an industry built on deception. Her new book, The Problem with Plastic, connects dots most people miss — between fracking booms and plastic floods, between what you’re told to rec...

Last week, MTV officially shut down, ending an era that revolutionized music, video, and shaped California’s youth culture. Tom Freston co-founded the television channel 44 years ago, building a creative empire on principles that seem impossible today: hiring people with no experience, protecting creatives from corporate pressure, valuing disorientation over data, and treating loyalty as strategy.

He joins me on the California Sun ...

Why is America uniquely terrified of AI while the world races ahead? The arguments driving that fear often collapse under scrutiny—real concerns go unaddressed.

In this Talk Cocktail podcast, economist and author of the Noahopinion Substack, Noah Smith helps us understand what happened to American optimism—and why our fear may be built on foundations far shakier than we realize.

Somewhere between our childhood dreams of robot friends...

Eleven federal workers reveal what it felt like to be fired by Musk’s DOGE — the emails, the trauma, and the institutional destruction we’ve never heard about.

On this recentWhoWhatWhy podcast I talked with journalist Sasha Abramsky, the author of American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the US Government.

Abramsky spent six months embedded with 11 fired federal workers from eight different agencies, documenting their li...

We’re not one nation split by politics — we’re 11 regional cultures that have been at war since the colonies. And now the divisions are life and death.

What if the America we think we know has never actually existed?

The divisions tearing us apart aren’t new — they’re four centuries old, rooted in the very founding of this country. And now there’s data proving it.

On this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, I am joined by Colin Woodard, a best...

When billionaires mock the Pope with memes and fund “cheating apps,” something’s gone seriously wrong. The collapse of tech idealism; betting takes its place. Silicon Valley used to sell itself as the future. Today it often feels more like a funhouse mirror of the culture — loud, aggrieved, addicted to posting, increasingly divorced from any notion of social purpose.

In this WhoWhatWhy podcast I talk with Jeremiah Johnson, co-founde...

Arkansas legally whipped prisoners until 1968. Today, U.S. officials celebrate images from El Salvador’s concentration camp-style prisons while federal courts abandon “evolving standards of decency” for 1790s baselines. Yale Law Professor Judith Resnik, author of book Impermissible Punishments, talks to me about how prisons maintain structural ties to plantations and argues democratic governments cannot “set out to ruin people.” A ...

On this recent California Sun podcast Roddy Bottum, a founder of the alternative metal band Faith No More, talks with me about 1980s and ’90s San Francisco — a dark, overlooked era between the Summer of Love and the tech boom. His memoir, “The Royal We” recalls a vanished city of bicycle messengers and punk rock in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. It’s a poetic testament to community, loss, and the creative rebellion that defined pre...

In this recent California Sun podcast I talk with Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of the new book “Who Gets to Be Indian?“ She explores how California became ground zero for Native American identity fraud — from Hollywood’s early film lots to today’s casino capitalism and tribal disenrollment crisis.

All of it created the perfect conditions for “Indianness” to become commodified, challenging authentic tribal sovereignty and belonging ...

Families who voted for Trump now carry passports to prove they belong here. Inside the fear, resistance, and betrayal reshaping Latino communities.

Something remarkable is unfolding in American politics, and most people are missing it. The Latino voters who handed Donald Trump a historic victory less than a year ago are now turning against him in numbers that should terrify the Republican Party.

But this isn’t just about polling — it...

When the world’s richest men decide democracy is optional, we all pay the price.

They once championed marriage equality and promised to make the world more open and connected. Now Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and a tight network of Silicon Valley billionaires are bankrolling authoritarian politics, questioning democracy itself, and leveraging their control of our communication infrastructure to reshape American power.

But...

Can capitalism have a conscience? Yvonne Chouinard built Patagonia into a billion-dollar empire while trying to save the planet—then gave it all away rather than be called a billionaire. My guest NYT reporter David Gellis expalins how in an age of Musk and Bezos, Chouinard’s story reveals both the promise and paradox of doing well by doing good. A half-century journey led by a French-Canadian dirtbag who slept in the dirt, managed ...

Luigi Mangione became a folk hero after allegedly killing a healthcare CEO. “Free Luigi” merchandise. Hacked highway signs. But he’s not alone. In a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I spoke with journalist John Richardson who reveals how Ted Kaczynski’s ideology radicalized Mangione and is appealing to alienated young men who’ve reached a dark conclusion: the system won’t change without violence.

San Francisco’s underground robot fight clubs: humanoid machines in steel cages, VR pilots, roaring crowds. China builds the hardware, America stages the spectacle, AI makes them lethal.

I talk with journalist and filmmaker Ashlee Vance on my latest California Sun Podcast. He expalins how the technology is advancing at breakneck speed — raising questions about entertainment, military applications, and what happens when these machi...

On this recent California Sun podcast I talk with Todd S. Purdum, veteran journalist and author of “Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.” Purdum expalins how a Cuban refugee revolutionized Hollywood. He invented the three-camera sitcom format, shifted television production from New York to LA, and created the business model that sustained the industry and TV production for seven decades—fundamentally transforming the enter...

Political violence isn’t an aberration in American democracy — it’s a defining trait. From the Boston Tea Party to January 6, it’s how we settle our differences.

My guest on this WhoWhatWhy podcast is professor Matthew Dallek of George Washington University. The author of numerous books and papers on political violence, including the definitive history of the John Birch Society. Dallek argues we’re living through an “era of violent ...

On this latest California Sun podcast, John Freeman, author of “California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature,” talks to me about how California has become America’s new literary center, challenging New York’s dominance. He discusses the pandemic book club that sparked his journey, the state’s evolving mythology, and how diverse voices are redefining what it means to imagine America’s future.

In the theater of history, irony often plays a leading role. How did the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known — according to the World Bank lifting 1.5 billion people out of crushing poverty — become America’s most dangerous political wager?

In this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I spoke with Journalist David J. Lynch — author of The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Rig...

Minerva University, has earned the No. 1 ranking in the World University Rankings for Innovation for four consecutive years.

Founded in San Francisco in 2012, Minerva reimagined higher education — eliminating campuses, lectures, and tenure while sending students to live and study across seven global cities.

In this California Sun podcast, Mike Magee, President of the University discusses how Minerva, with only a 4% acceptance rate ...