California Sun Podcast

Dr. Jennifer Brokaw, daughter of the news anchor and author Tom Brokaw, is an emergency care physician and patient advocate. In February, she was appointed as the physician for San Francisco’s first responders. She explains how her job overseeing the health of firefighters and paramedics has taken on dimensions she never could have imagined before the pandemic.

Anthony Rendon, a Democrat from Lakewood, became California’s 70th Assembly speaker in 2016. He talks about his work with two very different governors and how the legislative focus has changed from budget surpluses, housing, wildfires, affirmative action, and the gig economy to deficits, eviction, unemployment, health care, and a no-frills future. He also shares the personal journey that prepared him for his role.

Alia Volz reminisces about growing up in the family business in the 1970s and ‘80s, where her mom baked and sold 10,000 “magic” brownies per month in San Francisco. It was a time when growing a single marijuana plant was a felony offense. The business that started selling to hippie craftspeople in Aquatic Park became a cultural icon.

David Randall, author of "Black Death at the Golden Gate," tells a story that reminds us that history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. He details how the bubonic plague overran San Francisco and the West Coast in 1900, fueling denial of emerging science, quarantines, anti-Chinese racism, and fears of a second wave.

Dr. Robert M. Wachter is a professor and chair of UC San Francisco Department of Medicine. The author of more than 300 articles and six books, he’s been ranked as one of the most influential physician-executives in the U.S. He discusses California’s original success in dodging the Covid-19 bullet, and why it now may be catching up with us. He discusses how much smarter we’ve become in four months, how much longer Covid-19 may be with us, and how medicine will be transformed forever.

Connie Rice, the long-time Los Angeles civil rights lawyer and activist, has played an important role in the transformation of the LAPD. Yet she looks at our current moment and reminds us that the police rank-and-file still have a long way to go. In minority communities, she says, police are the preeminent symbol of systemic oppression and racism further fueled by a lack of economic justice.

Lt. Ben Kelso, a 30-year veteran of the San Diego police force and the president of the Black Officers Association of San Diego, gives us an inside view of policing and race in Southern California. Sitting astride two worlds, he details the pain, anger, and opportunity of the moment. It’s a view of law enforcement from inside the squad room.

Peiley Lau a researcher at the UC Berkeley Global Lab explains a new study showing that nearly 1.7 million coronavirus infections may have been avoided in California — and many more throughout the world — thanks to policies that kept people at home. It was a collective action unlike anything that has ever happened.

Eloy Ortiz Oakley, the chancellor of California’s community college system oversees the largest education system in the country with more than 2.1 million students and 115 colleges. That puts Oakley on the front line of many of the social and policy problems we now face. At a time of growing enrollment and shrinking budgets, the college system is confronting the challenges of moving education online, training our next generation of police and first responders, anticipating the employment needs of the future, and navigating a system that is awash with diversity and racial tension.

California's chief election officer, Secretary of State Alex Padilla brings the background of a long-time politician and his training as an engineer to the challenge of ensuring safe and secure voting. From mail-in ballots to recruiting a whole new generation of poll workers, it's going to be a tough year to oversee California's next election.

The California-based journalists Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano reported extensively on the 2018 Camp Fire. Their coverage from the day the inferno began through the refugee crisis that followed gave them special access to the lives, forever changed, in the community of Paradise. In the shadow of our current pandemic, and as a dry winter gives way to the winds of fall, there is much to learn from the story they share in their new book "Fire in Paradise."

Steve Inskeep has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" since 2004. He is also a popular author and historian, and his latest book "Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War" looks at the life of the 19th-century explorer who defined westward expansion, coined the name “Golden Gate” for the strait into the San Francisco Bay, and helped shape the ideas of reinvention and celebrity and give us the legacy of California today.

Richard Rushfield has been covering Hollywood for several decades and he says has never seen it as vulnerable as it is today. Your Netflix cue is shrinking, movie theaters may not open for months if at all, production has stopped, even well-paid talent is scared. With Apple, Amazon, AT&T, and Netflix being the new Hollywood money, we are also about to see if the Northern California values of the tech world can coexist with the Southern California values of Hollywood.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin is one of the youngest mayors in the Bay Area. He is Berkeley’s first Latino mayor, and also serves as the president of the Association of Bay Area Governments. He leads a city that faced enormous homelessness and housing challenges before the pandemic, and today faces both crises, now compounded by economic turmoil that Arreguin says is closer to the Great Depression than to the 2008 financial crisis. He believes however that the caring spirit of his iconic city will prevail.

Carl Nolte has spent 60 years at the San Francisco Chronicle. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, Nolte has seen it all, and still, he says, he feels a sense of surprise on every block. The current crises, however, have made him long for a city he may never see again. As he says, he knows what's going on all over the world, but suddenly he’s not sure what’s happening nearby in Chinatown or the Mission or Noe Valley.

Randy Shaw, a longtime San Francisco housing advocate rejoins the California Sun Podcast to discuss some recent shocking scenes in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. He also looks at how homeless and housing needs in California still might get some attention after the coronavirus pandemic.

Dan Walters, a columnist for CalMatters, is the dean of journalists covering Sacramento and California government. We went to Dan to get his assessment of how Gov. Gavin Newsom was handling the coronavirus crisis and what the pandemic might mean for the state. Walters looked ahead to a mountain of future debt, stalled legislative initiatives, an underfunded unemployment insurance system, limited public health infrastructure, and a long-lasting set back for the Golden State.

Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer prize-winning technology and science journalist for the N.Y. Times, is the author of "An Elegant Defense." In this week’s podcast, he reminds us that while we search for the vaccine or the antiviral for the human operating system, we already have one. It’s not made by McAfee or Microsoft, but rather it’s our complex immune system. It’s a system that is both saving us and also killing us.

Maybe we should be trying to solve our current coronavirus crises in Silicon Valley, and not at the National Institutes of Health? This week we talk with journalist Chip Walter, who takes us inside the work of a group of well-known tech boomer billionaires trying to find a way to achieve immortality by stopping the aging process.