California Sun Podcast

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 share their story.

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 land use policy.

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 editor and author of the new Thiel biography "The Contrarian," about the entrepreneur's influence in California and beyond.

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, mental illness, and even potholed streets, being a big city mayor is a uniquely challenging job.

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 only spend money and check-the-boxes.

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 shown us a new dimension of California.

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 Joints, Restaurants & Fast Food that Changed America" shares his thoughts about these native culinary institutions.

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 alarm about the water usage and the lack of any long or short-term plans to mitigate it.

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 or curtail public employee unions.

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 educational inequality, and the prizing of personal freedom over what’s best for the community.

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 pipeline.

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 to Survive an American Wildfire," Johnson shares the minute-by-minute events and aftermath of the fire.

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 have exposed misdeeds by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the California Farm Bureau, and the University of California.

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 framework for the beneficial uses of psychedelics in the treatment of mental illnesses, including PTSD and long-term depression. Rick is also a licensed psychedelic therapist. Ismail Ali, who joins him in this week's podcast, directs legal and legislative policy for MAPS and is the former board chairman of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

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.