Talk Cocktail

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 chainsaw in the name of efficiency and cutting out much that worked along with much that didn’t, as if the whole apparatus were beyond saving. But what if we have been asking the wrong question all along? Noveck’s question is why institutions built for an age when information was scarce still cannot listen, learn, and respond in a world drowning in it.

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 cycle this week.

But Russia hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still there, still fighting a war it started, still governed by a man who controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and who, a former Kremlin adviser says, appears to be reacting to pictures in his own head.

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 point since the end of World War Two. More dangerous, in fact, than the Cold War — because at least then we knew the rules.

Today there are no rules. The old order is gone, and what has replaced it is something most of us can barely bring ourselves to look at directly: a world of permanent polycrisis, where Ukraine grinds on against Russia, where Iran has absorbed an American and Israeli strike and survived, where China watches and waits, and where a new generation of weapons — drones, AI, hybrid attacks on the invisible infrastructure of modern life — has rewritten the rules of conflict faster than the great powers can absorb them.

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 comprehend.

Simon Pearce writes the Liminal Lens Substack and is president of Emotif, a strategic consultancy that helps organizations thrive in an eara of rapid change and disruption – He has spent years mapping how that mechanism works, how it fails, and what it looks like when a civilization is deep into the failure.

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.