Hella Foggy

The Bay Area is a place that has consistently, and somewhat quietly, punched above its weight as a center of visual culture. Not just tech aesthetics — but the longer, stranger history of a region that has produced an outsized number of visual thinkers and image-makers without always getting full credit for it. The episode opens with a question that turns out to be genuinely hard to answer: what e...

Episode 18 lands on Father's Day, so Greg and Wayne do what any reasonable sons and fathers would do: they talk about hair for an alarming amount of time. Baldness, combovers, Chris Mullin's flattop, and the Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop all get their due. First haircuts come up too—the trauma, the ritual, the inexplicable lollipop at the end. From there, things open up into the full archaeolog...

Greg and Wayne put each other on the hot seat with a Bay Area-adapted version of Stephen Colbert's famous Questionert — and things get weird fast. A regular listener gets lovingly roasted, a hippie named Manny makes an appearance, and the sandwich discourse gets contentious (Greg says something about Philly cheesesteaks that will not go over well with certain people). Wayne recalls a youthful...

It's trivia night at Hella Foggy, and it goes exactly as well as it needs to. Two people wander into a forest of anecdotes and find, against the odds, there is content to be found there. Huzzah! Wayne brings the questions. Greg brings the answers—some of them correct. From this modest premise, Episode 16 expands to encompass Information Theory, Bay Area geology, the actual crookedest street in...

Ghosts! The Bay Area Has Got 'Em! Apparently! It's May. And yet here are Wayne and Greg, elbows-deep in Bay Area ghost lore — which, it turns out, is extensive, varied, and deeply weird. Is this an October episode that got lost? Did it slip through some kind of dimensional rift? The uncanniness is noted. The episode proceeds anyway. The haunted inventory is impressively broad: ghosts in la...

This one circles the ‘90s in San Francisco, when the ground felt loose and everything seemed briefly possible. Wayne and Greg move through the early dot-com years, back when the job market felt strangely overripe, like it might split open on its own. Companies appeared fully funded and half-formed, stocked with free beer and vague intent, then vanished 18 months later, leaving behind dead stock op...

Restaurants, or the long, dimly lit theater of appetite, status, memory, and mild gastrointestinal regret. We settle into the cracked vinyl booths and low-stakes grandeur of old man restaurants, where time slows, portions don’t, and a chilled fork arrives like a small, unnecessary miracle. Is it luxury, or just a habit that refuses to die. Either way, it becomes a kind of thesis. Wayne, sensing an...

Transit, or the promise that the Bay Area briefly makes to itself before stalling between stations. We descend into Bay Area Rapid Transit, where the trains are real, the delays are spiritual, and the dream of a glass-walled Transbay Tube, equal parts aquarium and civic optimism, never quite materializes. There’s a passing nod to Star Wars—inevitable, given tunnels, empires, and the faint sense th...

Episode 11 moves like a coastal loop, all salt air and structural creaks, drifting through Bay Area amusement parks as if they’re unstable memories rather than fixed places. It starts with the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and the Giant Dipper, still clattering along with a kind of stubborn physicality. No metaphor needed. It works, so it persists. Then inland to California's Great America, which...

Episode 10 of Hella Foggy goes animated. We talk about Pixar and the Bay Area’s down low reputation as an animation hotbed, the kind of regional oddity where world-shaping studios coexist with foggy hills, strange little subcultures, and people who casually know someone who worked on some iconic animated feature that changed the industry. Greg debuts a new microphone, purchased after a brutally ho...

Happy Lunar New Year. Episode 9 of Hella Foggy heads into San Francisco’s celebration of the holiday, starting with a long-ago comment from Greg that Wayne has preserved like a cultural artifact—and weaponized accordingly. From Chinatown fireworks to quiet cemeteries in Colma, the City’s famously overpopulated necropolis suburb, we trace the strange overlaps of festivity and mortality that feel un...

Episode 8 of Hella Foggy is thick with Bay Area mythology. Greg and Wayne take a head-eyed, debunking walk through the stuff people get wrong about the Bay Area: wine and cheese culture, the omnipresent haze of pot, hippie residue, gothic baseball energy, burrito doctrine, and yes, snow. Call it a field guide to the regional misunderstandings we all inherit. They detour through boba tea economics,...

In Episode 7 of Hella Foggy, Greg and Wayne drift into the soft, slightly embarrassing pleasures of San Francisco tourism, both real and imagined. Along the way they encounter a mysterious time traveler named Biff, remember the late Doug McConnell, and try to make sense of the City’s wild parrots. There is bread bowl talk. There is the story of the day San Franciscans nearly broke the Golden Gate...

Episode Six of Hella Foggy and our first one of the year. We ease back in by talking about things that definitely shaped the Bay Area and possibly us as people: video game arcades, roller skating, vomiting while roller skating, and the dark arts of three-card monte. From there we wander into everything we don’t know about the South Bay, address some audience complaints, and spend a surprising amou...

Happy New Year, friendos. It’s the last Hella Foggy of the year. Granted, we’ve only been doing this for a month, but still. This time around, Greg and Wayne dive into Bay Area Auld Lang Syne–adjacent territory, then drift into desk calendars, Y2K, cursive writing, the Twist, and the nutritional downsides of Irish coffee. We also seriously entertain the possibility of Wayne wearing a blonde wig at...

It’s the special holiday episode of Hella Foggy! That time of year when it’s unusually easy to pick a theme for a podcast episode. Greg and Wayne dive into Bay Area holiday antics, and take an unreasonably long detour into topics like Kristi Yamaguchi, the Bay Area’s underwhelming version of the Hollywood sign, and the ecclesiastic politics of the Russian Orthodox Church. We also reference a charm...

In our third episode of Hella Foggy, Greg and Wayne wander through films and TV shows set in the Bay Area, drift into a few stories about local serial killers, and spend an unreasonable amount of time on the Phantom Diner saga, including the part where his real identity finally comes to light. From there it’s Mrs. Doubtfire memories, odd run-ins with George Lucas, and some of the secrets tucked in...

In our second episode of Hella Foggy, Greg and Wayne dig into the wonders of the It’s-It and try to reverse-engineer whatever went into Diana’s Meat Pie to make it both gross and unforgettably good. From there we tumble into the conceptual futility of those old TV commercial sign-offs promising “Top of the Hill, Daly City,” in a city made of hills, none of them especially definitive. Along the way...

In our first episode of Hella Foggy, Wayne (the Peninsula) and Greg (East Bay) launch into the project by trying to pin down what the Bay Area even is, drifting between earthquake memories, banana slugs, old radio jingles, and a bunch of other stuff. If the episode is any indication, future episodes will feature loose rants, half-remembered nostalgia, and randomness; as we explore this very odd, v...