California Sun Podcast

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 economics at UCLA and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lee E. Ohanian.  

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 what deregulation did to the company, the companies two bankruptcies, and the risks the company still poses to citizens and ratepayers.

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 project at UC Berkeley's journalism school and struck out on its own in 2014. In this week's podcast, we talk to Lydia Chavez, the founder and executive editor, and Joe Eskenazi, a columnist, and the managing editor.

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. The 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 evolved all comes to light on this week’s podcast.  

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 week's podcast, Borenstein talks about the link between California's energy policy and its economic growth; the state's oversize role in setting and exporting global energy policy; innovation and climate policy; and why banning new gas stations is a really bad idea. 

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 Podcast, we spoke with Pringle about the evolution of his story and his interactions with Times editors. We felt it was worthwhile to give Doig an opportunity to tell his side of the story.

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 institutions in a big city like Los Angeles. He writes about all of it in his recent book "Bad City," and shares, on this week’s podcast, his anatomy of the investigation.

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 future of our water supply. Based on her observations around the world, she tells us about "slow water" and offers some solutions and limited hope for the future.  

Diane Power Zimmerman's great grandfather bought the property that would become the Nut Tree. Her grandparents founded and ran the roadside oasis that opened in Vacaville in 1921. Turning to a lighter note this week, we look at what was once the iconic stop on car journeys from San Francisco to Sacramento and Tahoe. The Nut Tree, in its heyday, reflected the intersection of midcentury design and Sunset Magazine’s western ethos. The forerunner of the roadside fruit stand, it attracted renowned guests while it spawned innovations in design, dining, and hospitality.   

When L.A. Times reporter Gale Holland and videographer Claire Hanna Collins met Mckenzie Trahan in 2018, she was 22 years old, seven months pregnant, and living in a tent above the 101 Freeway. Their recently published reporting project on Trahan, who had been living on the streets of Hollywood since she was 13, reminds us that stories about the homeless and the mean streets of our cities are more than just stories about policy: They are most importantly about people.

Journalist Jim Hinch tries to look objectively at what is and isn't working with respect to our state's policies surrounding the nexus of housing and drugs. In a recent story in Zocalo, Hinch notes the fact that 50% of America's unhoused population lives in just three states — California, Oregon, and Washington. In this week's podcast, he compares and explains policies such as "harm reduction," "housing first," "supportive housing initiatives," "drug decriminalization," and 12-Step faith-based sobriety programs. 

Gary Kamiya, a long-time San Francisco writer and journalist, in a recent article in the Atlantic, zeros in on the tectonic political shifts resulting from San Francisco's voters' recall of three school board members and the district attorney. While few cities have personified the progressive vision more than San Francisco, Kamiya says there seem to be limits to its progressive agenda.  Is it a harbinger for other "blue" cities?

David Koepp, one of our most distinguished and prolific screenwriters, turns to the novel for his latest work, "Aurora." Springboarding from our fear of over-dependence on technology, he creates a story sure to scare PG&E, Southern California Edison, and utility companies everywhere. Soon to be a major motion picture from director Kathryn Bigelow, Koepp redefines what "being prepared" really means, whether for the next pandemic, earthquake, or fire.  

​​Alexa Koenig is using Silicon Valley tech for the prosecution of war crimes. As the executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, she is proving how the device that each of us has in our pockets and which gives us the ability to bear witness to the world might be used to help secure international justice. At a time when atrocities from Ukraine to Uganda are being documented like never before, Koenig, a product of Marin, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of San Francisco School of Law, is evolving the framework for professionals to use social media and other digital tools to strengthen human rights advocacy and accountability.

In his new book "Inspired," Matt Richtel gets to the heart of why so much of the future seems to happen in California. In this week's podcast, he discusses where creativity comes from and why it gives the state a competitive advantage. Like opposable thumbs, the ability to imagine the future is what makes us human. It is the source of our creativity, our anxiety, and our fulfillment.

Fernando Guerra, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, discusses the aftermath of the primary election and the power of the homeless issue to reshape L.A. and its politics. The nation turned its eyes to Los Angeles this past week, and Guerra helps us better understand the city.

Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and host of The Times podcast, provides a personal and provocative view of Los Angeles and Southern California politics. He talks of his ongoing feud with Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, the endless ads for mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, and the future of young Latino power brokers. With California's June 7 primary election only days away, Arellano shares a perspective on the candidates, elected officials, and Latino vote that you won't hear anywhere else.

Filmmaker John Waters has long been a fixture in San Francisco. After a very rough week, a conversation with him gives us a few moments of levity courtesy of his sometimes twisted worldview. The 76-year-old writer, director, and curator of bad taste has made a career of showing us the weirdest of human behavior. In films including "Pink Flamingo," "Mondo Trash," and "HairSpray" and books such as "CarSick" he's made us laugh or at the very least taken us briefly out of the day's reality. He’s now written his first novel, "Liarmouth," which continues the John Water legacy.

Carolyn Chen, a sociologist and professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, argues in her new book "Work Pray Code" that Silicon Valley has become a “techtopia” where workplaces and charismatic leaders now provide for employees' every need. The workplace has become their community, their place of worship, and resulted in the elimination of boundaries between work and life. Remote work may have changed this, but the institutions that might pick up the slack have now disappeared.

Long-time tech journalist Tripp Mickle explains how Steve Jobs’s personality defined Apple. He was both a founder and a legend. But his successors, Tim Cook and Jonny Ive each had their own very different ideas about the company's future. Their battle was so fundamental that it deconstructed the company culture built under Jobs. Mickle tells the story in his new book "After Steve." However, the final story is still being written inside Apple’s $1 billion dollar headquarters in Cupertino.