Talk Cocktail

But what happens when two countries, two trading partners do not have parity on the production of a particular product, but have interlocking and conflicting needs, jealously, interests and misunderstandings?  The results, can create a crisis on a global level..even if the product is wine.
That’s the story my guest Suzanne Mustacich tells in Thirsty Dragon: China's Lust for Bordeaux and the Threat to the World's Best Wines.  It’s the story of China's quest to become a global wine power, France's Bordeaux region seeking to hang on to past glory and China expanding its tentacles into places like the Napa Valley.
My conversation with Suzanne Mustacich:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

How many of the candidates that are running for President today, have the depth of character and ideas that, if they were to be elected, we still might be talking about them, studying them and being surprised by them, 150 years after their death?  The answer is probably none.
That is certainly not the case with Abraham Lincoln.  150 years after his death, people like esteemed Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer are still plowing the depths of Lincoln's convictions and portraying what he accomplished.
Convictions and ideas that are, in spite of the best efforts of Lincoln’s own party today, still part of the fabric of America. Holzer displays these ideas in A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity
My conversation with Harold Holzer:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

We live in this world usually someplace between the mundane and the absurd. But regardless of which, it's one that is probably organized to the Nth degree.  Our technology is almost embedded in our personal DNA, in order to keep us on task. 
But is all this structure an impediment to creativity?  And if so, where might we get back to our youthful sense of play, of wonder and of discovery.
For some, it’s in travel and visiting strange places and the strange surroundings that take us out of ourselves.  For others, and often closer to home, it can be found in art; in what  Alve Noe refers to as the boredom of art.  
Art that unlike so much of culture, goes beyond surface and draws us in, sometimes to see the world in a brush stroke, a dance step, a well crafted sentence, or in a grain of sand.
Alve Noe takes this discussion of art to a new level in his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature
My conversation with Alva Noe:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

We think we know a lot about American history. About the events that shaped the formation of the republic. And while that knowledge might get you an audition for Jeopardy, at its roots sometimes, it's also true that everything we think we know is wrong.  
Essentially what that means, and maybe it's even a factor in what’s gone so wrong today, is that we tend to know only surface.  That when we drill down to historical events, only then do we find that the facts, the nuances, the subtlety and the psychology are what really matters. This is what really makes up the historical ripples we are living with today.
This is the story of the Salem Witch Trials, as told now by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Stacy Schiff.  She won the Pulitzer for her book Cleopatra, and now she pivots to 1692 Salem to bring us The Witches: Salem, 1692
My conversation with Stacy Schiff:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

It used to be, during the dark days of the Cold War, watching the Kremlin and trying to read meaning into every nuance, tea leaf and coming and going, was elevated to an art form.
Today, it’s the same for the Fed.  Every meeting, every utterance of the Fed Chair and Fed Governors is parsed and analyzed and poured over for some hint of what the Fed will do and what it might mean for the markets, for the economy and for the politics of the country.
But it wasn’t always so.  In the aftermath of the 1907 financial panic, Congress created the Federal Reserve.  They did so for reasons not dissimilar to the state of our transitional economy today. But they did so in a spirit of compromise and national unity that seems a very far cry from anything that might happen today.
Putting all of this in its proper perspective is Roger Lowenstein in his new book America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve
My conversation with Roger Lowenstein:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

We’ve seen that different cities often emerge as the the center of their times.  This has been true from the Greek city states, through the Roman Empire and right up until the present, here in America. It seems that every major cultural, social and political movement of the modern era seems to be anchored in its own place.
New York became a kind of capital of the 50’s.  In the 60’s places like San Francisco and Berkeley were the center of gravity.  New York and to a certain extent L.A. seemed to launch the post war economy of the 70’s.  Washington seemed to dominate the 80’s and with the decline of New York, it seemed like the 80’s would belong to L.A.
But something happened.  Something that moved the locus of the knowledge economy to San Francisco and the Bay Area.
What happened and why is at the core of the years of research done by Michael Storper and his colleagues and put forth in their book The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles.
My conversation with Michael Storper:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Everything starts somewhere.  Even very bad things.
Many of the tremors we face today had their roots in the Ottoman Empire, in the run up to the First World War.  In what’s come to be called the Armenian genocide. 
There we began to see the rise of Muslim extremism, the battle for post WWI borders in the Middle East, the plight of refugees, the competition between national and corporate interests, particularly big oil, the Israeli/Palestinian  conundrum, and even acts of heroism in the face of seemingly improbable odds.  All of these things had their roots 100 years ago in the first genocide of the 20th century.
What we have forgotten is that for those that perpetrated it, there was a price to pay.  A small band of brothers set out to avenge the death of the million-plus people killed in that Armenian Genocide.
Now Eric Bogosian captures the essence of the story in Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide.
My conversation with Eric Bogosian:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

This Sunday over 50,000 people will run in the NYC Marathon. For many participants, part of the appeal is to be part of something larger and more personal than a Facebook group.  For others it’s about achieving a personal best.  But for a much smaller group of elite marathon runners, it’s about what once seemed the impossible dream...breaking the two hour mark for the 26 miles through the streets of New York.
Why this goal is important, how long has it has hung over the sport and why is it now within reach?  All these questions and more are part of Ed Ceasar’s book Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon.
My conversation with Ed Caesar:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Most of us will go into the hospital at some point. When we do, we might be subject to anesthesia, even for a minor procedures.  What goes on while we're asleep is, at least to the patient, a complete mystery. 
At the same time, we look to the technology of medicine as the panacea to solve so many of our health problems.  Yet when it goes wrong we get angry.  Clearly, our emotional nexus with technology is out of balance with our intellectual understanding of it.  In medicine, the price we pay, often with the simplest of procedures, is fear, alienation, confusion and a degree of appropriate paranoia.
Few understand this better than bestselling novelist Dr. Robin Cook.  He has used this imbalance to scare the bejesus out of us in his book like Cell, Nano, Coma, Cure, and Fever. Now in his latest work, Host, he once again walks us through the cost benefit analysis of medical technology falling into the wrong hands.
My conversation with Robin Cook:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

In the movie Broadcast News, William Hurt asks his colleague, as written by James L Brooks.     “what do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?” Aaron Altman, played by Albert Brooks tells him, “keep it to yourself.”
Bestselling author Frederick Forsyth, has had a life that has far exceeded his own expectations.  But instead of keeping it to himself, he has used it as the basis for fifteen books that have thrilled us, delighted us and taken us to places and situations that we may only dream about, but that Frederick Forsyth has touched. He tells all in his memoir The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue.
My conversation with Frederick Forsyth:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe