California Sun Podcast

The author and journalist Mark Arax joins us to discuss his recent sweeping essay in the Guardian, published under the headline "California: Land of Plunder and Hypocrisy." From the Gold Rush to the artificial intelligence boom, Arax explores how California's myths, ambitions, and repeated reinventions have often concealed a far more complicated history of extraction, contradiction, and self-decep...

Matthew Stepka is a product of Silicon Valley — a teenager who built worlds on an Atari, a founder of one of the first internet cafés, and a Google insider shepherding its mission projects. He offers a deeply personal account of a place that once believed companies should do good, the anxiety shadowing it now, and why he hopes artificial intelligence might yet honor those older California values.

Jonathan Weber, a longtime San Francisco journalist, is the author of the new history " City on the Edge : Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco." He explains how the internet took root in the city, how local politics transformed as tech grew from 2% of jobs to 35%, and how the artificial intelligence wave has finally made the industry indigenous to San Francisco. He wo...

One year after the death of the legendary Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, author David Beard joins us to talk about his new book, " All Summer Long : Conversations with The Beach Boys from Surfin' to SMiLE." Beard discusses how the Beach Boys didn't just make iconic music but defined Southern California itself — surf, sun, cars, the postcard invitation west — while Wilson quietly pushed pop into u...

CalMatters columnist Dan Walters joins the podcast to talk about California's strangest governor's race in a half-century: a field with no clear frontrunner, marquee names who sat out, and a billionaire's fortune that couldn't buy a finish. With Xavier Becerra now the heavy favorite and ballots still trickling in, Walters explains why the state may be ungovernable — and what the costly, exhausting...

Ivo Jeramaz grew up in the same Croatian soil as his uncle Mike Grgich — the man who made the Napa Valley Chardonnay that beat the French at the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, which recently turned 50. Jeramaz later followed his uncle to California, where he carries that legacy forward as winemaker at Grgich Hills, navigating an industry under pressure. He is still connected to that afternoon in Pari...

With eleven days to go before the June 2 primary, Joe Mathews examines how California's race for governor has become strangely disconnected from the state itself. With almost all the campaigns built around generic national talking points and anti-Trump messaging, Mathews explores the growing nationalization of state politics, the issues candidates avoid, and why the actual mechanics of governing C...

William Riggs is a professor of engineering and management at the University of San Francisco and an expert on transportation innovation. He says San Francisco — now ground zero for America's autonomous vehicle future, with more than 1,000 Waymos on its streets — is exposing a strange contradiction: Society tolerates the deadly carnage caused by human drivers while holding self-driving cars to an...

Kate Washington spent years giving everything to everyone else — caregiving, motherhood, a failing marriage — until she was empty. Her answer was cold water: 50 dunks in California rivers, creeks, and swimming holes before her 50th birthday. The author of " Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims ," she shares her story about joy and water as an act of reclamation.

Dillon Osleger has spent a decade rebuilding what America has been quietly erasing — the trails, wagon roads, and Indigenous paths that once knitted California and the West together. As a geologist, trail builder, and public lands advocate, he brings both scientific precision and moral urgency to the cause. His new book, " Trail Work ," makes the case that losing these paths means losing ourselves...

Julia Turner and Julia Wick have spent their careers covering Los Angeles — and like anyone who's lived here long enough, they couldn't always figure it out either. So they did what journalists do. They started digging. L.A. Material is their newly launched independent digital newsroom, and their obsession is simple: making sense of a city that resists it.

Peter Richardson, author of the new book " Brand New Beat : The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine," discusses the pioneering music magazine's San Francisco decade — between 1967 and 1977 — when the Bay Area's counterculture reshaped music and the journalism that covered it. From Haight-Ashbury to the Fillmore, Hunter S. Thompson to Annie Leibovitz, the magazine documented a social revolution whi...

Ann Carlson discusses her new book " Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air ." Smog was once as much a symbol of L.A. as palm trees — a bane to public health and a national punchline on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show." An expert in environmental law, Carlson chronicles the decades-long battle that transformed the air from toxic to breathable, and what today's...

Severin Borenstein, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and an expert on the economics of energy, explains how the Iran war is disrupting global oil markets and why California faces especially sharp price impacts. Beyond the crude oil disruptions affecting everyone, the state's refinery shutdowns, import constraints, and gasoline surcharge create unique vulnerabilities as supply c...

Miriam Pawel, author of the definitive Cesar Chavez biography, " The Crusades of Cesar Chavez ," reflects on the recent 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...

Caroline Tracey explores the world's threatened salt lakes with a focus on California — Mono Lake, Owens Lake, and the Salton Sea — where irrigation diversions have transformed stunning desert ecosystems into sources of toxic dust. She discusses landmark environmental cases that established California's public trust doctrine and how these seemingly dead landscapes remain vital habitats worth prese...

Joe Flint, a media reporter for the Wall Street Journal, joins us as Hollywood heads into Oscar weekend — a moment when the world celebrates the glamour of the movies even as the business faces deep uncertainty. Flint looks at the industry's economic upheaval: mergers, mounting debt, streaming disruption, and the growing question of whether the Hollywood model that built California's cultural and...

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 it the "Restaurant of the Year." But 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 re...

Valerie Ziegler, a high school teacher in San Francisco, and Joel Breakstone, executive director of Stanford's Digital Inquiry Group, talk about digital literacy in the classroom. Many self-described "screenagers," they say, can no longer tell real from fake. Together, Ziegler and Breakstone are at the forefront of a movement to prepare young people for a world of influencers, algorithmic manipula...

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 the new book " A Killing in Cannabis ," spent fou...

Danny Goldberg, author of the new book " Liberals with Attitude : The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles," was there in 1991 when an unlikely Los Angeles coalition fought to hold the city's police department accountable for the beating of Rodney King. Thirty-four years later, after George Floyd and the recent events in Minneapolis, Goldberg wonders whether the sort of cr...

David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University, discusses the findings of a recent Los Angeles Times exposé that showed how California's beloved county fairs, which generate $400 million annually, have become hotbeds of corruption where bookkeepers steal, officials rig bids, and governor-appointed boards feast on lobster and cabernet. With governance structures frozen si...

The Los Angeles-based artist Laurie Lipton shares why she's drawn obsessively since age four, how she invented her "insane" cross-hatching technique studying Dutch Masters in Europe, and how waitressing paid the rent so she could draw. After 36 years abroad, she says she returned to Los Angeles to find America rolled back to 1955. She discusses why drawing is her drug, how stepping aside lets the...

Esther Mobley, a wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, talks about California's wine industry crisis — 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 California wine's romance can survive...

Last week, MTV officially shut down, ending an era that revolutionized music, video, and shaped California's youth culture. Tom Freston co-founded the television channel 44 years ago, building a creative empire on principles that seem impossible today: hiring people with no experience, protecting creatives from corporate pressure, valuing disorientation over data, and treating loyalty as strategy....