My California Sun conversation with Peter Richardson, author of the new book “Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine.” A time when the media had a different kind of power — between 1967 and 1977 — when the Bay Area’s counterculture reshaped music and the journalism. From Haight-Ashbury to the Fillmore, Hunter S. Thompson to Annie Leibovitz, the magazine documented a social revolution while simultaneously creating it.

he inside story of how greed, ambition, and rivalry destroyed AI’s safety mechanisms — and why human failings, not technology, are driving us toward catastrophe.

Despite everything you think you know about artificial intelligence — the models, the capabilities, the existential predictions — it’s simply humans all the way down. Men building things, making choices, placing bets, and abandoning safeguards the moment competitive pressure intensifies.

On this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I talk with Sebastian Mallaby, who spent three years embedded in the world of AI as it evolved from research lab to civilizational force. With over 30 hours of access to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind, alone, Mallaby was present at the creation. His book The Infinity Machine reveals the inside story you’ve never heard.

A jury recently shattered Big Tech’s legal shield. Meta and YouTube: guilty of engineering addiction. This is social media’s tobacco moment .

Two industries in America have enjoyed near-total legal immunity for their products: gun manufacturers and social media platforms. Now, juries found Meta and YouTube guilty of harming users by deliberately engineering addiction, knowing the harm, and doing it anyway. Legal experts are calling it social media’s tobacco moment.

On a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I spoke with Fordham University law professor Olivier Sylvain, a former senior adviser at the Federal Trade Commission and author of Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control — and How We Can Take It Back.

He explains why these suits, in New Mexico and California, succeeded where previous attempts had failed to hold social media platforms accountable.

Severin Borenstein, is a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and one of he nations leading experts on the economics of energy. He joins me on this California Sun podcast to explain exactly how the Iran war is disrupting global oil markets and why California especially faces even sharp price impacts.

War without strategy. Drones without limits. Data without wisdom. How the Iran conflict is stumbling toward World War III — and no one can explain why.

My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, RAND senior defense analyst David Shlapak, has for decades made a living by imagining how wars spiral out of control — war-gaming the scenarios where miscalculation becomes catastrophe, where deterrence fails, where World War III stops being theoretical.

Today, those scenarios are no longer simulations. They’re unfolding in real time over Iranian airspace, and the people running them may not have thought through what happens next.

Miriam Pawel, author of the definitive Cesar Chavez biography, "The Crusades of Cesar Chavez," joins me on this recent California Sun Podcast to reflect on the shattering of the Cesar Chavez myth — and the harder questions beneath it: what was known, what was ignored, and why movements so often need saints. In this wide-ranging conversation, Pawel explores Chavez’s charisma, control, contradictions, and the challenge of holding both his historic achievements and the harm he may have caused in the same frame.

China loses two oil partners to US action in Iran. Their response? Strategic patience. Are we watching restraint or preparation for what’s next?

There’s an old saying: When your enemy is digging himself a hole, the smart move is to hand them a bigger shovel. China appears to be doing exactly that — watching, waiting, keeping its powder dry while America commits massive military resources to the other side of the world.

On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, USC professor of international affairs David C. Kang returns to examine whether China’s restraint vindicates his contrarian thesis, or reveals something more calculated.

On this recent TalkCocktial podcast I’m joined by Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper, who has spent a decade studying when corporate scandals force actual change—Dieselgate, Cambridge Analytica, Goldman Sachs—and when they just fade away. His book Billionaire Backlash argues scandals briefly overwhelm corporate lobbying when they tap simmering public resentment. He pushes back hard on whether billionaire wealth reflects value creation for society or corruption, and whether making policy through outrage is democracy working or failing.

Chef Geoff Davis opened Burdell in Oakland to cook the soul food his grandmothers made — a distinct American cuisine rooted in migration and adaptation rather than Southern tradition. In 2024, Food & Wine named Burdell the “Restaurant of the Year.”

On our recent California Sun podcast, he expalins how it was a 20% service fee at the bottom of Burdell’s receipts that recently started a national conversation about labor, class, and whether we’ve ever really reckoned with the racial history of tipping.

We imagine the internet as invisible—wireless, ethereal, everywhere and nowhere. The truth is far more precarious. Nearly 95% of global data moves through 900,000 miles of fiber optic cable lying unprotected on the ocean floor, controlled increasingly by four American tech giants. When Tonga's single cable was severed in 2022, ATMs went dark and the country vanished from the world. That was an accident. Samanth Subramanian, author of The Web Beneath the Waves, reveals that what comes next might not be.