Talk Cocktail

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 1818-1915, joins me in this WhoWhatWhy Podcast to explains why fascism is less an ideology than a corruption of democracy itself.

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.

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?

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, not younger.

We’ve spent years arguing over whether this politician or that president is too old. But what if those debates have distracted us from a much larger story?

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 may be suffering from something more profound than political polarization or economic anxiety. We may be losing confidence in progress itself.

This is ultimately a conversation about whether America still believes in tomorrow — and whether progress itself remains our most important product.

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 unimaginable wealth, there was a teenager with an Atari — a gift from his NASA-engineer father — certain he could build any world he could imagine.

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 it means to surface changed.

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. But what if those debates have distracted us from a much larger story?