California Sun Podcast

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.