Talk Cocktail

Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University at the age of 17 wanting in. What he found, as he recounts in our recent California Sun Podcast and in his new book “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University,” was a machine: venture capitalists scouting freshmen, “pre-idea funding,” yacht parties, and a secret elite — all riding on a culture of cutting corners that influenced everyone from his classmates to the university president. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Emily Hoeven expected the towns hosting America’s new data centers to be the angry. She found the opposite. In a recent column — titled “‘We were a dying little town’: How Silicon Valley data centers are reshaping rural America” — she maps a strange disconnect: the dread over data centers looms large in the Bay Area, cradle of the artificial intelligence boom, while places bearing the weight, like Ellendale, North Dakota, have made their peace. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

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

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