California Sun Podcast

Lila LaHood discusses her work as the Publisher of the San Francisco Public Press, an online, radio, and streaming news outlet. Her efforts are part of a growing group of nascent but thriving local news initiatives in the San Francisco Bay Area. From time to time we have taken a look at these efforts and how they are contributing to community news and cohesion. 

Mark Rozzo, journalist and the author of " Everybody Thought We Were Crazy ," shares with us a glimpse of the cultural and cinematic revolution that defined Los Angeles in the 1960s. Rozzo acts as a time machine, taking us back to the era when Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward played significant roles in birthing a new cultural and Hollywood movement. One that would ultimately shape both Los Angele...

Peggy Orenstein, the Bay Area author, took advantage of her time during the pandemic to embark on a unique adventure at a ranch in Sonoma County. During this conversation and in her book " Unraveling ," she shares her story about learning the art of sheep shearing, wool dying, spinning, and even creating a sweater from start to finish. As she recounts her journey, she weaves together themes of fre...

John Gedmark thinks California can still be a center of aerospace innovation. The founder and CEO of Astranis is building satellites in a building that once produced war ships within walking distance of Chase Center in San Francisco. Gedmark explains how he set out to solve what he sees as one of the world's great problems, bringing broadband internet to the most remote and rural parts of the worl...

Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham, two Bay Area investigative journalists, discuss the systemic corruption and brutality in Oakland's police department, and the more than two-decades-long saga of attempted reforms and explosive scandals. In their recent book,  Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-up in Oakland, they examine the notorious group of sadistic Oakland cops known a...

Lee Herrick is California's newly minted Poet Laureate. The former Fresno Poet Laureate, he also teaches at Fresno City College and the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of three noteworthy collections of poetry, " Scar and Flower ," Gardening Secrets of the Dead " and "T his Many Miles From Desire ." Born in South Korea, Herrick discusses his upbringing in Danville and Fresno, his appr...

Erica Gies returns to the California Sun podcast to talk about the water crisis we face today...one of too much water in all the wrong places. Flash flooding and storms in one part of the state, massive droughts in others, climate change, and a growing concrete-built environment, have all impacted our plans for water control. Gies explores other options in her recent op-ed in the New York Times an...

Erica Hellerstein, a Bay Area journalist, talks about " Grieving California ," her moving story about the grief of living in a state often on fire. She talks of our changing landscape, driven by climate change and natural disasters, and how it drives a feeling of nostalgia for a past that no longer exists, and a psychological toll heightened by fear for the future. As we look for solace in old mem...

Mark Thompson was, for over 25 years, one half of the team of Mark and Brian, hosts of the iconic morning radio show on KLOS-FM in Los Angeles. Their show was a mix of comedy and music, and their personalities quickly became woven into the fabric and car culture of the city. Despite initial resistance from the audience, their show became number one in L.A. and was widely imitated. They earned a st...

Zev Yaroslavsky, served 20 years on the LA City Council and 20 years on the LA County Board of Supervisors, a distinguished career unmatched in recent memory. Now a faculty member at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Yaroslavsky recently saw his daughter-in-law elected to a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. Yaroslavsky reflects on his institutional memory of Los Angeles, comments on th...

Leighton Woodhouse, a Bay Area journalist and filmmaker, looks at homelessness, fentanyl, and the streets of our California cities through the lenses of our recent elections, his experiences growing up in the Bay Area, and his recent eye-opening visit to Portland. He wonders if there can ever be a policy solution to our urban problems, if Los Angeles will be the new San Francisco, and whether we'v...

Stephen Galloway is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, producer, and dean of Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. He spent nearly three decades in writing, editing, producing, and leadership roles at The Hollywood Reporter, where he also created and produced the television series " The Hollywood Masters. "  Today, at Chapman, he sees a dedicated and talented group of students...

While homelessness and crime appear to be the issues most driving our elections in California cities this year, it's fentanyl that is really on the ballot. My guest, journalist and author Sam Quinones, details how fentanyl changes everything we know about what's happening on our streets. Tents, shelters, jail, and death are all connected to fentanyl.  We discuss how we got here, how bad it is, and...

Rabbi Noah Farkas serves as the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. A long-time civic leader, he has not been surprised by the recent outbreaks of hate speech on the City Council, or by the anti-semitism of Kanye West. He shares his thoughts about the response to West, the culture of the city, the increasing fear he sees among the Jewish community, and the power of d...

Alex Shultz, a long-time reporter for SFGATE, has been looking at how San Francisco Giants owner Charles Johnson seems to only be pitching to the right side of the plate. The billionaire owner of the Giants has made large donations to some of the most far-right candidates and election deniers in the country, including Cindy Hyde-Smith, Herschel Walker, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, and Ron Joh...

Los Angeles Times columnist Erika D. Smith looks at the current implosion of the L.A. City Council, the mayoral race, and the city's place in the pantheon of systemic political mismanagement. She speculates that the city will have to go through all the stages of grief before it comes out the other side, where perhaps something positive can emerge. Until then L.A. politics may provide more drama th...

Joe Mathews returns to the California Sun podcast to examine what he sees as the folly of Gov. Gavin Newsom's national political ambitions. The longtime California journalist and academic thinks Newsom will never be president, in part because California is so politically and culturally disconnected from the rest of the country, but also because Newsom himself is just too peculiar. He suggests News...

Some days it seems that the problems of housing and homelessness offset all the good things about California.  People and companies are leaving the state at an alarming rate, and the problems continue to grow. Governance, in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, appears paralyzed. Maybe we need to start over with all new leadership? So says our guest on this week's podcast, a professor of eco...

Katherine Blunt, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has led much of the coverage that has revealed the repeated failures of Pacific Gas and Electric. In her new book, " California Burning ," and in this week's podcast, she looks at the unique structure of public utilities and how PG&E went from an innovative company run by engineers to a culture of dollars first, safety last. She examines wha...

Lydia Chavez and Joe Eskenazi see their independent news site Mission Local as covering a microcosm of San Francisco from their base in the Mission District. It's a place they think is reflective of the issues of the whole Bay Area, and allows them to dig deeper on stories. Reporting everything from police reform and government corruption to housing and the local economy, Mission Local began as a...

Long before we knew him as a comedian or comic actor, Cheech Marin started collecting Chicano art. The result of that passion is now on permanent display at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, known as "The Cheech," in Riverside. T he story of how the museum came to be, of Marin's deep understanding of the links between Chicano art and culture, and of how his interest and knowledge...

Severin Borenstein is a professor of Business and Public Policy at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and the director of the Energy Institute at Haas. One of California's premier experts on energy policy, his research focuses on business competition, strategy, and regulation in the airline industry, the oil and gas industries, electricity markets, and the economics of renewable energy. In this...

Matt Doig was the assistant managing editor of investigations for the L.A. Times when Paul Pringle pursued his story about disgraced USC medical school dean Dr. Carmen Puliafito. Doig takes issue with some of the assertions in Pringle's recent book " Bad City ," and wrote about them several weeks ago in a Medium post entitled " Sex, Meth, Lies and Journalism ." Last week on the California Sun Podc...

Paul Pringle is a long-time investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. His series of stories uncovering the drug use and criminal behavior of the dean of USC's Keck School of Medicine shifted the tectonic plates of both USC and Pringle's employer, the L.A. Times. It's a story of the power of investigative journalism, and the role of powerful institutio...

Erica Gies is a Bay Area native, a National Geographic Explorer, an independent environmental journalist, and the author, most recently, of " Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge ." Gies details how we have over-engineered and mechanized water delivery in California. She explains how both our agriculture and our built environment have done almost irreparable damage to the fu...