California Sun Podcast

Aaron Horwath, director of AI operations at a creative technology company, joined us to talk about two essays he wrote for Noema magazine: "Why Is Everyone in Tech So Sad?" and "Now Entering: The Era of Bleh." Horwath explores what artificial intelligence in the workplace really means — the strange career dread it's stirring, the sameness it breeds — and why the future may belong to deliberately human work.

Nathaniel Philbrick, a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer finalist, recasts the Gold Rush as the moment California — and perhaps America — learned to embrace greed and live at warp speed. His new book, "The Rush," explores instant wealth, immigration, slavery, and technological upheaval, then follows that same restless impulse through railroads and agriculture to Silicon Valley and the artificial intelligence boom.  

Michael Moritz, a former journalist, became one of Silicon Valley's most successful investors — and a philanthropist who has quietly backed the Booker Prize and San Francisco journalism. Yet he never escaped the terror of his family's past. The longtime Sequoia Capital leader's new book, "Ausländer," traces how his family's flight from Nazi Germany echoes in the lives of descendants who never lived it.    

David Perlis argues that a small, isolated county on the other side of the Golden Gate from San Francisco quietly helped invent modern America. Zen thinkers, the Grateful Dead, Star Wars, the loosening of the American mind, he says in his new book "Morning in Marin," ran through its foggy hills before reaching the rest of us. Then the outsiders became insiders.  

Joseph Ogilvy, an author and chef, argues that California began as a maritime frontier facing China long before it became the western terminus of the American story. In his new book "Tin Can Coast," he follows the otter, the abalone, and the sardine through three centuries of abundance and greed, and shows how even conservation became a way of deciding who belonged.

Rep. Jared Huffman, who represents Marin County and the North Coast, may be among the most unusual members of the House — and the only one who will say out loud that he doesn't believe in God. In his new book, "No Prophets," he argues that Christian nationalism has given up on democracy. He explains why he thinks the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was a religious event, and what it means when a movement decides it no longer needs to win elections.  

The Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Shaikin unravels the story of Mark Walter, the billionaire who turned the Dodgers into champions and flipped the Lakers for $2.5 billion barely a year after buying them. Now his insurance-fueled sports empire faces federal scrutiny. What happens when franchises become financial instruments?  

Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University at the age of 17 wanting in. What he found, as he recounts in his new book "How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University," was a machine: venture capitalists scouting freshmen, "pre-idea funding," yacht parties, and a secret elite — all riding on a culture of cutting corners that influenced everyone from his classmates to the university president.

Emily Hoeven expected the towns hosting America's new data centers to be the angriest. She found the opposite. In a recent column for the San Francisco Chronicle — titled "'We were a dying little town': How Silicon Valley data centers are reshaping rural America" — she maps a strange disconnect: the dread over data centers looms large in the Bay Area, cradle of the artificial intelligence boom, while places bearing the weight, like Ellendale, North Dakota, have made their peace.

Lainey Feingold has spent her career winning digital access for disabled people without ever filing a lawsuit — sitting down with the banks instead of suing them. Now the San Francisco disability rights attorney gathers thirty-nine voices into Digital Accessibility Ethics, arguing that as AI rebuilds the digital world, designing for the edge builds something better for everyone.

Greg Sarris has served as tribal chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria for more than 30 years. He led the tribe's push for federal recognition, which paved the way for the multibillion-dollar Graton Resort & Casino in Rohnert Park. Along the way, he authored six books, including the 1994 novel "Grand Avenue," which portrays Indian characters in Santa Rosa and was adapted into an HBO miniseries. His latest work, "The Last Human Bear," tells the story of an old Pomo woman who spent a lifetime refusing what she inherited.

Erika Anderson isn't an engineer — she's a writer who came to artificial intelligence and to the Bay Area asking what it means to be human. She built HumaneBench, a tool that evaluates whether AI systems actually treat us well. As we increasingly develop relationship with bots, Anderson argues that we can only manage what we measure. And once we start measuring, we have an obligation to do something about it.

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-deception.    

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 worries the wealth is turning a misfit city into a money town.

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 uncharted territory.

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, and largely uninformative campaign can and can't fix.

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 Paris, holding fast to the belief that the land, farmed right, tells you everything you need to know.

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 California barely seem to be part of the conversation.

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 impossible standard, even as the data increasingly suggests the technology will save lives.