California Sun Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...