Talk Cocktail

They’re booing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Toronto. At hockey games. In Canada.

Not because Canadians have suddenly turned anti-American, but because for the first time in 150 years, they’re genuinely afraid of us. And that fear, says Andrew Coyne, is reshaping everything — their politics, their economy, their identity, their future.

Coyne is a long time Canadian political observer and columnist for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, and my guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast.

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood at Davos and declared “the old order is not coming back,” Coyne heard something most people missed. Not a speech — a death notice.

The assumption that had anchored Canada’s international strategy for 150 years — a stable, democratic United States to the south — was gone.

Iran on the brink.

On a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I spoke with Shay Khatiri who insists that the real question isn’t what happened on January 8 and 9 — it’s what comes next. Because this wasn’t an economic protest that got out of hand. This was the maximum force Iranian civil society can muster on its own. And it wasn’t enough.

Khatiri — a leading Iran scholar expalins that every previous uprising (2009, 2019, 2022) left a residue of unfulfilled promise and mounting rage. This time, the pattern breaks. What Khatiri heard from every source inside Iran was the same plea: We’ll do everything we can, but we need help from outside.

Now Iran poses an enormously difficult choice with nuclear stakes: a tottering but still powerful theocracy that has exported revolution and brutality for 47 years, facing an uprising that can’t succeed without US help.

While America now fully abandons climate action, the world races ahead—and watches in dismay. A look at the cost of US denial and how good things happening without us.

Mads Christensen, the executive director of Greenpeace International, has spent three decades on the front lines of environmental activism. In my conversation with him on a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, he brings a perspective that cuts against the prevailing American narrative of climate despair.

He explains that while climate change vanishes from American political discourse, something remarkable is happening in the rest of the world: Beijing, a city once choked by smog, has transformed into an electric metropolis with blue skies. Pakistan has gone from minimal renewable energy to over 25% in just five years. The UK just became the largest economy to end new oil and gas exploration. And in the real world, the intellectual argument about the reality and the existential danger of climate change has been won.

The numbers coming out of Iran stop you cold: 12,000 to 20,000 dead in 48 hours. Not across months of civil war or years of grinding conflict, but concentrated into two January nights of systematic slaughter.

My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Shay Khatiri, insists we’re focusing on the wrong horror. The real question isn’t what happened on January 8 and 9 — it’s what comes next. Because this wasn’t an economic protest that got out of hand. This was the maximum force Iranian civil society can muster on its own. And it wasn’t enough.

According to Khatiri — a leading Iran scholar at the Yorktown Institute focusing on US foreign policy toward Iran and Russia – every previous uprising (2009, 2019, 2022) left a residue of unfulfilled promise and mounting rage. This time, the pattern breaks. What Khatiri heard from every source inside Iran, from overworked surgeons to furious shopkeepers, was the same plea: We’ll do everything we can, but we need help from outside.

Diversity has become a political weapon—but what if it was never meant to be political at all? UC Berkeley law professor David Oppenheimer argues in our conversation that diversity is an intellectual principle, not a moral slogan or corporate checkbox. Drawing on history, law, and hard science, he explains why diverse perspectives drive better thinking—and how the idea got lost along the way.

Daniella Mestyanek Young escaped a notorious sex cult, then joined the Army where she studied terrorists—and recognized the same coercive tactics everywhere.

The author of The Culting of America, she reveals in our podcast how cult dynamics pervade American life, from MAGA's authoritarian tribalism to corporate culture. We're obsessed with AI threats, she argues, while missing the real danger: human manipulation operating at scale through social media and political movements demanding absolute loyalty.

On this recent California Sun Podcast, I spoke with Los Angeles-based artist Laurie Lipton about creating massive political works in chaotic times, her obsessive cross-hatching technique learned from Dutch Masters, and returning to the US after 36 years abroad to find America rolled back to 1955.

A relentlessly productive artist, Lipton described drawing as an almost physiological need. “I use my work to deal with life. … I have very, very strong emotions, but I need the illusion of control,” she said. “Otherwise I think I’d start running through the streets screaming.”

It started with Rodney King—eighty-two seconds of video that should have changed everything but didn't. Thirty-four years later, after George Floyd and now events unfolding in Minneapolis, we're still asking: what happens after the cameras capture undeniable truth?

Danny Goldberg was there in 1991 when an unlikely Los Angeles coalition fought to hold the LAPD accountable. His book Liberals with Attitude raises the question: is such cross-ideological cooperation even possible today?

While this conversation touches on how communities can come together to demand accountability—issues dominating headlines—it was recorded just before the recent Minneapolis shootings.

Esther Mobley, the senior wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, joins me on the California Sun podcast to talk about California and the world’s wine industry crisis — In California alone, nearly 5,000 wineries competing for declining demand, 38,000 vineyard acres removed in 2025, mounting closures. She discusses why younger generations aren’t drinking wine, what happens to tourism-dependent communities when vineyards close, and whether wine’s romance can survive its greatest challenge yet.

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 recycle and what actually happens, between industry promises and courtroom battles that reveal decades of lies.

You think you know about plastic pollution. You’ve heard about ocean gyres, you recycle diligently, maybe you switched to a reusable water bottle. But here’s what they haven’t told you: Two garbage trucks worth of plastic enter the ocean every minute. Recycling? It’s a lie — only 5-6 percent of plastic actually gets recycled, and the industry has known this since the 1970s.

Chemical recycling, the new salvation, doesn’t work. And those microplastics aren’t just in fish anymore — they’re in your brain, your heart arteries, your kidneys, with no known way to get them out.