California Sun Podcast

Alice Waters is among the most influential restaurateurs of the last half-century. Her legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse gave birth to farm-to-table cuisine and gave California a global culinary presence. She has nurtured talent that has spread to restaurants around the world. Chez Panisse is now preparing to reopen post-pandemic, and Waters has just touched down in Los Angeles with a new restaurant in the Hammer Museum. She shares with us a remarkable food journey that began back in 1964.

Mark Fainaru-Wada was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle when he co-authored "Game of Shadows," the definitive book about Barry Bonds, BALCO, and baseball's steroid scandal. An award-winning ESPN reporter since 2007, Fainaru-Wada talks about the ongoing debate over Bonds' rightful place in Cooperstown and in baseball history.

Marty Nemko is one of the premier career counselors in the Bay Area. The long-time host of "Work with Marty Nemko" on KALW in San Francisco, a long-time regular guest on KGO, and a contributor to Psychology Today, Nemko shares his thoughts on our post-Covid world of work in California. Topics include: why so many don't want to go back to the office, the hatred of long commutes, and lack of work structure at home.

Elizabeth Weil has had a 25-year relationship with California. She's written about it for years, and her most recent piece, "This is Not the California I Married," appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine. She's lived through many California disasters, including fires, droughts, earthquakes, and floods. But today she sees fire differently. Both in how we fight them and how we prepare for them. Right now, she says, "the state is hurting, and we need to take care of it."

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.