California Sun Podcast

Marty Nemko is one of the premier career counselors in the Bay Area. The long-time host of "Work with Marty Nemko" on KALW in San Francisco, a long-time regular guest on KGO, and a contributor to Psychology Today, Nemko shares his thoughts on our post-Covid world of work in California. Topics include: why so many don't want to go back to the office, the hatred of long commutes, and lack of work st...

Elizabeth Weil has had a 25-year relationship with California. She's written about it for years, and her most recent piece, " This is Not the California I Married, " appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine. She's lived through many California disasters, including fires, droughts, earthquakes, and floods. But today she sees fire differently. Both in how we fight them and how we prepare for...

Sammy Potter and Jackson Parell, two Stanford University students, put their pandemic year to good use. While many of us watched too much Netflix, they took the ultimate outdoor adventure. In 295 days, they completed the calendar year triple crown of hiking — a 7,400-mile journey across the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide trails, ending in the hills of northern California. They...

Prof. Susan Handy teaches in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at U.C. Davis. With degrees from U.C. Berkeley, Stanford and Princeton, her research focuses on the relationships between transportation and land use. Handy talks about how all the federal infrastructure dollars coming to California, which everyone seems excited about, may not be the best thing for traffic, climate, or...

Peter Thiel is considered by many the "godfather" of Silicon Valley. His influence, as a venture capitalist, a political contributor, and a leading alumnus of what has been called the PayPal mafia continues to shape the culture of the valley. He mentors new leaders, uses his wealth to reshape politics, and strikes fear into those who oppose him. This week we talked with Max Chafkin, a Bloomberg ed...

Mayor Darrell Steinberg knows the levers to pull to operate state government. He was a member of the Sacramento City Council, a member of the State Assembly, and a longtime leader in the State Senate, where he rose to president pro tempore. However, no job was as tough as his current one as Sacramento mayor. Today, amid climate change, Covid, homelessness, drug use, traffic, crime, racial politics...

Bob Calhoun reminds us that while we may be alarmed by rising numbers of homicides in the Bay Area today, the region's history has been far worse. Calhoun, the writer of the popular SF Weekly column "Yesterday's Crime" and author of the new book " The Murders That Made Us ," shares how the Bay Area has been shaped by its most grisly crimes.

Dan Walters, the dean of state capital journalists, joined us in the first week of the pandemic lockdown, back in March of 2020. After twenty months, he joins us once again to offer a post-pandemic view of California's future. He opines on politicians who've become fat and lazy, an economy that's become sluggish, a public education system that can't get it right, and unimaginative leaders who can...

Jassen Todorov, a music teacher at San Francisco State, has played the violin on some of the world's greatest concert stages. But years ago he got his airplane pilot's license in case the music career didn't work out. Along the way, he became a self-taught, award-winning photographer and has combined the artistry of photography, flight, and music. Through his dramatic aerial photographs, he has sh...

Nothing defines a culture more than its food. For California, that includes not just California cuisine, but In-N-Out, McDonald's, Bob's Big Boy, Peet's Coffee, Taco Bell, Pinks, Winchels, Hamburger Hamlet, Fat Burger, and many other restaurants born in California. Restaurant historian and chef George Geary, the author most recently of " Made In California : The California-Born Diners, Burger Join...

The Palm Spring region has over 120 golf courses, all of which require irrigation, some as much as 1.2 million gallons of water each night. That's even as residential water rationing begins in response to worsening drought conditions, driven by climate change. Doug Thompson and Robin Kobaly, are long-time environmentalists who have, in a recent column by the L.A. Times's Steve Lopez, sounded the a...

Richard L. Brown is the newly elected leader of California's largest public employee union, SEIU Local 1000. Brown's controversial campaign promised to take the union, with its more than 100,000 members, out of state and federal politics, and reduce or eliminate dues. He argued that these steps would give the union more power to protect jobs, increase wages, and fight efforts underway to eliminate...

Michael Hiltzik, an award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter, has been observing and writing about business and technology in California for almost 40 years. In his recent book, " Iron Empires ," he writes about the railroad tycoons and robber barons of the last Gilded Age. Then and now, the very rich are similar, he says, and so is our reaction to them.

Gene Slater, a long-time advisor on housing for federal, state, and local agencies and the author of " Freedom to Discriminate : How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America," discusses the outsized historical influence of California's real estate industry. It helped set the stage for many of today's social problems, including homelessness, housing shortages, racial and education...

Mariam Pawel , a Brown family biographer and New York Times essayist, has some final words on the recall vote and what's next. She looks at whether any of it matters in the long run, how might it change California politics, will anyone but consultants benefit, and what happens with the critical issues still facing the state.

Woody Hastings and Jenny Blaker didn't like the idea of a new gas station in a rural area of Cotati, in Sonoma County. Their efforts launched a growing statewide movement to stop the construction of new gas stations and the expansion of existing ones. Both longtime environmental activists, deeply concerned about climate change, they see the once iconic gas stations at the last stop in fossil fuel...

Lizzie Johnson, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, covered fifteen of California's deadliest fires. However, none reached the level of death and destruction that she witnessed in Paradise on Nov. 8, 2018. Within two hours of the fire's ignition, the town was engulfed in flames and hundreds were trapped in homes and cars. In her reporting, and in her new book " Paradise: One Town's Struggle...

Daniel O'Connell, a labor scholar, and Scott Peters, a professor of global development, talk about the historic battle, from the 1930s to the present, between rural farmers and agribusiness in California's Central Valley. In their new book, " In The Struggle ," they examine what they see as the unjust and oppressive structures of the valley by looking at the many academic leaders and activists who...

Mizgon Zahir Darby, a longtime leader in the Bay Area's Afghan community, helps give voice to the large diaspora of Afghans living in California. She says they are in mourning over recent events. Families may never be able to go home again, and they are thinking about refugees that may soon arrive. Listening to her tells us the personal stories that bring these events home.

Jaime Lowe connects us with the female inmates who are battling California's wildfires. In her new book " Breathing Fire " she takes readers inside the fire camps where inmates are paid $5 a day and pay a physical and emotional price for putting their lives on the line to protect us.

Rick Doblin, Ph. D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, based in San Jose. He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana. Doblin has devoted his life to the development of both of the drugs and a legal frame...

Katie Hill, once a congresswoman and now a private citizen, has seen a lot of politics in her 33 years. In 2019, in the course of ten months, she lived through what some have experienced in an entire career. Now back home in her Southern California district, she candidly shares her personal and political story, as she contemplates her second act.

Matt Haney grew up in the Bay Area. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Stanford and is now a supervisor for San Francisco's 6th district, which includes some of the poorest and wealthiest parts of the city. He talks about San Francisco's lack of long-term planning, its resistance to change, the stubborn consistency of so many of its problems, and the sense that in a city so economically successfu...

George J. Sanchez, a USC professor and author of the new book " Boyle Heights : How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy," shares his appreciation for his birthplace, the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. He sees it as a rare living example of the great melting pot of ethnic and cultural diversity that was supposed to define America.

Rosecrans Baldwin, a novelist and journalist, adds his unique voice in trying to make sense of what he calls the "city-state" of Los Angeles. He talks about L.A. as welcoming but somehow detached from the rest of America. While Baldwin argues that no single story can possibly represent all of L.A., in his new book " Everything Now ," he adds to the canon of LA. writers trying to define 5,000 squar...