Talk Cocktail

With all the buzz surrounding You Can See Everything, the new Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, it’s worth going back to where the Theranos story began. Eight years ago, I spoke with John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of Silicon Valley’s spectacular blood-testing fraud. His book, Bad Blood, had just been published. Carreyrou, now at The New York Times, was still uncovering the full extent of the deception. Before the trials, the documentaries, and the Hollywood treatment, this was one of the earliest in-depth podcast conversations about the case. A useful primer on how it all began. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Give this country a tragedy and it will have the heroes and villains sorted before the ambulance has pulled away. Americans no longer need to know what happened to know whose fault it is.The one reflex a divided country still shares is the certainty that arrives before the facts do.In May 2023, Jordan Neely, homeless and in the grip of mental illness, died in a chokehold on a Manhattan subway, held down by a former Marine named Daniel Penny. Almost before the facts were known, the argument was settled.My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Anand Giridharadas, put it this way, they got their group number and went to stand in the right line.Giridharadas, a former New York Times correspondent and author of Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, treats that subway car as a biopsy: a small incision that reveals the condition of the whole body. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

What if the most disruptive thing about artificial intelligence isn’t that it takes your job, but that it makes your company indistinguishable from every competitor — and drains the humanity out of the work that’s left?Aaron Horwath has an unusual vantage point on that question. As director of AI operations at a creative technology company, his job is to put these tools to work. But in two essays for the longform magazine Noema, published by the Berggruen Institute, he’s become one of the sharpest voices asking how much the corporate rush to “use AI for everything” is costing us as human beings.In my WhoWhatWhy conversation, Horwath explains why even senior professionals with decades of experience are feeling a strange career dread. More than fear of unemployment, it involves the loss of something human: the ownership, the craft, the pride in work that was recognizably their own before AI wedged itself into the workplace. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Nathaniel Philbrick, a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer finalist, recasts the Gold Rush as the moment where America learned to embrace greed and live at warp speed. His new book, “The Rush,” and in our recent California Sun conversation, he explores instant wealth, immigration, slavery, and technological upheaval, then follows that same restless impulse from the Gold Rush through railroads and agriculture to Silicon Valley and the artificial intelligence boom. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Moritz, a former journalist, became one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors — and a philanthropist who has quietly backed the Booker Prize and San Francisco journalism. Yet he never escaped the terror of his family’s past. On this recent California Sun podcast, the longtime Sequoia Capital leader talks about his new book, “Ausländer,” which traces how his family’s flight from Nazi Germany echoes in the lives of descendants who never lived it. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe