Miriam Pawel, author of the definitive Cesar Chavez biography, "The Crusades of Cesar Chavez," joins me on this recent California Sun Podcast to reflect on the shattering of the Cesar Chavez myth — and the harder questions beneath it: what was known, what was ignored, and why movements so often need saints. In this wide-ranging conversation, Pawel explores Chavez’s charisma, control, contradictions, and the challenge of holding both his historic achievements and the harm he may have caused in the same frame.

China loses two oil partners to US action in Iran. Their response? Strategic patience. Are we watching restraint or preparation for what’s next?

There’s an old saying: When your enemy is digging himself a hole, the smart move is to hand them a bigger shovel. China appears to be doing exactly that — watching, waiting, keeping its powder dry while America commits massive military resources to the other side of the world.

On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, USC professor of international affairs David C. Kang returns to examine whether China’s restraint vindicates his contrarian thesis, or reveals something more calculated.

On this recent TalkCocktial podcast I’m joined by Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper, who has spent a decade studying when corporate scandals force actual change—Dieselgate, Cambridge Analytica, Goldman Sachs—and when they just fade away. His book Billionaire Backlash argues scandals briefly overwhelm corporate lobbying when they tap simmering public resentment. He pushes back hard on whether billionaire wealth reflects value creation for society or corruption, and whether making policy through outrage is democracy working or failing.

Chef Geoff Davis opened Burdell in Oakland to cook the soul food his grandmothers made — a distinct American cuisine rooted in migration and adaptation rather than Southern tradition. In 2024, Food & Wine named Burdell the “Restaurant of the Year.”

On our recent California Sun podcast, he expalins how it was a 20% service fee at the bottom of Burdell’s receipts that recently started a national conversation about labor, class, and whether we’ve ever really reckoned with the racial history of tipping.

We imagine the internet as invisible—wireless, ethereal, everywhere and nowhere. The truth is far more precarious. Nearly 95% of global data moves through 900,000 miles of fiber optic cable lying unprotected on the ocean floor, controlled increasingly by four American tech giants. When Tonga's single cable was severed in 2022, ATMs went dark and the country vanished from the world. That was an accident. Samanth Subramanian, author of The Web Beneath the Waves, reveals that what comes next might not be.

Jeff Schechtman 03/06/26

Iran didn’t ask for regime change. It asked for bread. How a protest movement got hijacked — and turned into a war nobody planned for.

And the man who saw all of this coming has been saying so, loudly and at personal cost, for 20 years.

My guest on this very recent WhoWhatWhy podcast is Hooman Majd, the grandson of an ayatollah, the son of a diplomat who served the shah, a contributor to NBC News and The New Yorker, and the author of four books on modern Iran — most recently the memoir Minister Without Portfolio. He has spent his career as the voice in the room insisting that Iran is always more complicated than Washington wants to believe. He has never been more right, and the moment has never been more dangerous.

The guardrails weren’t real — they were simply norms. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall. And the Madisonian dream? Always more myth than reality. So now what?

The Federalist Papers, argues our guest, University of Maryland law professor Maxwell Stearns, belongs in the fiction section of the library. And after watching the Trump years dismantle everything we were told would hold, it’s getting harder to disagree.

Back in 2024, we asked the hypothetical question of Stearns whether American democracy had reached its sell-by date? It’s no longer hypothetical.

Stearns, author of Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, returns to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast to talk to me about what’s been lost — and more provocatively, what might still be salvageable. His diagnosis is clear: We have thrived in spite of our constitutional structure, not because of it.The guardrails weren’t structural; they were customary. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall; it was a framework held together by norms that turned out to be entirely optional. And the Madisonian dream of competing institutional jealousies keeping power in check? That, Stearns says, was always more mythology than reality.

For decades the conflict between Israel and Iran lived in the shadows—proxies, sabotage, and covert strikes. Not anymore.

According to my guest, Michael Oren—historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States—what began with Hamas’s October 7 attack has spiraled into a widening regional war stretching from Gaza to Tehran.

Oren shares his view of how a long-building confrontation suddenly burst into the open, drew in the United States, and what it may mean for the future of the Middle East and the world.

Can democracy survive computerized vote counting? Systemic and man-made vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure may threaten integrity.

My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jonathan Simon, senior editor at WhoWhatWhy and author of CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy, has spent more than two decades tracking the fault lines in America’s computerized voting infrastructure. What he’s found raises uncomfortable questions about whether our elections truly reflect the will of the people — or something else entirely.

Last November’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia showed that democracy still can work. Against the authoritarian tide, voters showed up and democracy delivered results that mattered.

But before we celebrate, ask yourself: What happens when those in power today realize they’re losing ground? What happens when 2026 looms as a potential reckoning?

When California legalized recreational cannabis, Silicon Valley envisioned a new Gold Rush. Tushar Atre — a tech entrepreneur, surfer, and disruptor — thought he could bridge two worlds: venture capital and the black market. On Oct. 1, 2019, he was shot execution-style on his own property, hands bound.

Investigative journalist Scott Eden, author of “A Killing in Cannabis,” joins me on the Califorina Sun podcast to discuss the four years he spent unraveling what happens when ambition meets an industry that never forgot its outlaw roots.

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.