The burgers are so good that they’re causing traffic jams. At least that’s what’s happening in Culver City, where the line of cars at spots like In-N-Out Burger spills beyond the parking lot and into the street. Now officials there are trying to ban new drive-thrus outright. These bans are not an entirely new phenomenon — San Luis Obispo banned drive-thrus back in 1982 — but they’re getting newfound attention as recent pushes gain national attention. We’ll look at California’s role in the rise of fast food drive-thrus and examine whether the current moment could be the beginning of the end for a fast food staple.
Guests:
Shawn Hubler, Los Angeles bureau chief, The New York Times
Adam Chandler, food columnist, The Wall Street Journal; author of “Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom”
Colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer-related death for Americans under 50. And, for people in their 20s and 30s, the rate of incidences is expected to increase 90% by 2030. We explore what’s causing this alarming trend, the warning symptoms everyone should know, and what’s being done to improve treatment, advance research, and advocate for patients nationwide.
Guests:
Dr. Chloe Atreya, medical oncologist, UCSF; co-director, UCSF Young Onset Colorectal Cancer Center
Molly Roberts, vice president of advocacy, Fight Colorectal Cancer!
Amanda Webb, colorectal cancer survivor and advocate
What would happen if a top-secret Russian lab released a deadly, weaponized, pathogen? That’s the nightmare possibility that author Annie Jacobsen presents in her new book, “Biological War: A Scenario.” Drawing on hundreds of interviews with former defense secretaries, CIA and FEMA officials, scientists and counterterrorism experts, Jacobsen shows how we might respond hour-by-hour, and the outlook is grim. We’ll talk to Jacobsen about why we can’t ignore the existence of biological weaponry.
Guest:
Annie Jacobsen, author of “Biological War: A Scenario” and other books including “Nuclear War” and “The Pentagon’s Brain”
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum, I’m Mina Kim. When news broke last week that Stanford scientists had trained AI to create 16 new viruses in hopes of driving medical advances, alarm bells also rang over how this could be used by bad actors to create novel viruses as weapons and wipe out populations. Journalist and author Annie Jacobsen says that even without AI’s help, nations for decades have been genetically engineering pathogens in malicious ways. And in her new book, Biological War: A Scenario, she considers what would happen hour by hour if a U.S. adversary released one of those weaponized germs. Annie Jacobsen joins me now. Welcome to Forum.
Thank you for having me. You know, I honestly could not put your book down, which I did not expect with a topic like biological war, but it really is a testament to your ability to write something this complex, this extensively.
Annie Jacobsen: Well, thank you very much. And I think what I show is the mechanisms behind the veil of this kind of a catastrophic event. And ultimately, not only is it dramatic, but it actually is so impactful to us as individuals. Certainly with bio, we can all relate to it because we all just lived through a pandemic.
Mina Kim: Yeah, exactly. So walk us through, in your book, the scenario that you crafted, how this initially unfolds, because it’s Russia that has released this weaponized pathogen, and it has done it inadvertently with an accidental explosion at a Siberian lab.
Annie Jacobsen: That’s right. I take the readers essentially from outbreak to anarchy in the United States in six days. And I typically begin the scenario with that accident you refer to. It’s also called a lab escape or a lab leak among scientists. Lab leaks are very common, unfortunately. They present an extraordinary danger. And I did that very specifically because I was shocked, having written about national security for 20 years and looked at countless war games and studied countless battles and operations. It’s always an attack that gets a counter-attack. And yet, in biological war, it doesn’t need to be an attack. It can be an incident that triggers all of this. And that means an accident or a lab leak.
Mina Kim: So, one of the mechanisms by which it spreads is that this scientist, you know, has essentially felt guilty about his research, has tried to incinerate the virus that he’s developing, it goes wrong, causes the explosion, he’s infected and knows he’s going to die, and goes to confession, thereby infecting other people, right?
Annie Jacobsen: That’s absolutely right. What a truly human archetype of behavior.
Mina Kim: And then there is — so one of the ways it gets to the U.S. is that one of the people he infects is like a Russian student studying abroad at UCLA. But how does it get out to multiple continents very quickly?
Annie Jacobsen: You know, I looked at the 14th-century bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, that killed one-third and one-half of Europe, to get a real foothold on the question you asked me, how I would answer that and how I’d present that dramatically, but realistically in today’s world.
And it was very interesting, in reading contemporary reports by survivors of the Black Death, that it was often noted that the plague traveled at the speed that humans traveled. And back in the 14th century, that was at about one mile a day by caravan or by ship. It’s such an image. And then when you think about today, we can — we, any of us can, and many of us have — gotten halfway across the planet in half a day.
And when you realize that, now you have a real nightmare scenario with any super-dangerous pathogen that has a high case-fatality rate. You can just spread that disease on an airplane. That is a super-spreader event. And then you have generation one becomes generation two, three, and four. And suddenly the pathogen is seeded in the entire world at scale.
Mina Kim: Right. So generation one, the initial people, then the people that they infect affecting the other people around them, and then so on and so forth. So talk about the U.S. government in the meantime. It has caught this explosion on their satellites and all the agencies are springing into action. But because Russia is an adversary, they’re not being forthcoming about what happened. So they have to figure things out on their own. Can you talk about what you learned about how our government is set up to respond? And why those measures essentially are likely to be inadequate in the face of a biological weapon and are in your scenario?
Annie Jacobsen: Exactly. I mean, you know, coming on the heels of all the reporting I’ve done on national security and specifically on my previous book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, I am incredibly interested in learning about and then conveying to my readers how the national security apparatus here in the United States responds to something.
And I was shocked when I was reporting Nuclear War to learn that nuclear war begins when an ICBM launches halfway across the world. In other words, those first 33 minutes while the ICBM is traveling to the United States, the Defense Department knows not only that it has happened but knows exactly where it is, essentially. And so the whole system moves into high gear without any of us having any idea of what is going on.
Bio had a completely disarming — disquieting, let me just say terrifying — sort of mirror to that, which is that in the event of an explosion-type event at a BSL-4 lab in Siberia, in Russia, which was the inciting incident in the book, I learned the Defense Department has eyes on that facility. So they know about the explosion in minute one because they see it from space with the satellite system, the same kinds of systems that look for nuclear launches.
But unlike nuclear, there’s no way to precisely detect what happened surrounding that explosion. Was a pathogen released? Is anyone dying? And so in the first act of the book, I take the reader, as you said, hour by hour through the Defense Department, the intelligence community — these are all our agencies, NRO, NSA, DIA, CIA. I interview people from all those organizations working over time to try and figure out what happened.
I mean, it’s this incredible shark-in-the-water feeling. As you said, State Department officials are trying to get Moscow to pony up and tell the truth. What happened? Were there dangerous pathogens in this lab that exploded? And of course, Moscow won’t talk, because that, I learned from all State Department officials, that’s the world in which we live right now, because communication has just been absolutely stunted.
And so I’m trying to convey to the reader both how serious it is that you cannot determine in the first hours whether a pathogen has been released. And at the same time, I learned from subject matter experts that that is precisely the only window of time in which you could mitigate this, which you can keep an outbreak from becoming an epidemic and then becoming a —
Mina Kim: Pandemic. Right. At one point, they even contemplate, you know, the officials, the government officials from all these different agencies, just nuking the area, right? Which is pretty shocking to learn is even a potential option when people are panicked in these situations about whether or not something gets out, right. But what’s incredible is that even if they took such a catastrophic action around the site of the explosion, people have already gotten on planes and left the area and brought it here. So it’s already too late.
Annie Jacobsen: It’s exactly right. You know, there was an interview I did with a Pentagon wargamer named Colonel Thomas Erhardt, and he worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under this very famous, legendary wargamer named Andrew Marshall, who led the Office for Net Assessment.
And when I was asking Erhardt, kind of like what you’re asking me, like, wait a minute, is there really nothing that can be done to mitigate this problem? And he’s the one that said to me that there’s actually no real homeland defense against a catastrophic pathogen. All that we can do is mitigate extermination. Those were his words.
Mina Kim: We’re talking with Annie Jacobsen about what might happen if a biological weapon escaped from a lab in Russia, how the U.S. government might respond hour by hour in a ticking-clock race to stop the spread of a deadly biological weapon.
And listeners, I want to invite you to join the conversation. What is your reaction to what you’re hearing? What questions do you have for Jacobsen about the threat and impact of biological war? You can email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram at KQED Forum, and you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.
So part of the reason that you envision a scenario that it does take six days from the release of the engineered virus to the U.S. devolving into anarchy in just six days is because of the effectiveness of this pathogen. Could you just describe its features?
Annie Jacobsen: You bet. So one important thing to know, and I love that part of this learning experience ends up becoming sort of a powerful tool for people, not just for a reporter, but for all of us in dealing with these kinds of realities for ourselves and our families.
And I’m talking about, like, threats when people suddenly panic and they say, is there going to be an Ebola epidemic in America because there’s one in West Africa, et cetera. There are, for starters, a pathogen — there are two kinds of pathogens that can be deadly to humans. One is a virus. COVID was a virus. The other are bacteria. And that is what I use in the book as a pathogen. I use the plague.
Plague bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. And plague is precisely what the Black Death was predicated on. But that was bubonic plague. And what I learned from subject matter experts is that bubonic plague has a far more nefarious sort of uncle or grandfather, if you will, which is called pneumonic plague.
And of course, pneumonia means it involves the lungs. So pneumonic is airborne. It’s transmissible from person to person through the air. COVID was airborne, and that’s what makes it pandemic.
Mina Kim: Mm-hmm. And this pathogen that you create for this scenario is also airborne as well. We’ll dig into more about the pathogen right after the break. Stay with us. You’re listening to Forum.
“I’ve not gone back to any of the old places,” reflects the protagonist in the new novel “A Tender Age.” But that is just what the author Chang-rae Lee does, in this, his most personal book yet. Set in the 70s, the story follows an eleven-year-old Korean American boy caught between his doting immigrant parents and a roving pack of neighborhood kids — until one summer changes everything. Lee, a Stanford professor and Pulitzer Prize finalist joins us.
Guest: Chang-Rae Lee, author, “A Tender Age,” He is also the author of the award-winning novel “Native Speaker” and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated “The Surrendered,” among other works. He is a professor of creative writing at Stanford University
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Grace Won: This is Forum. I’m Grace Won, in for Alexis Madrigal. Chang-Rae Lee’s latest novel, A Tender Age, centers around Jung Gi, an 11-year-old son of devoted Korean immigrant parents. J.G., as he’s called by friends, is at an age when he, quote, “had no yearnings to grow up or know anything more.” It’s the summer of 1976. Kids in his neighborhood go out after breakfast and come home when the streetlights come on. Free-range wasn’t a parenting style. It was just how kids were allowed to be.
It’s also a summer when a rash moment will mark J.G.’s life forever. Lee himself is the son of Korean-American immigrants. He attended Exeter and Yale and worked on Wall Street before quitting to become a writer. His 1995 novel, Native Speaker, about a Korean-American man hired to spy on his own community, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Six books followed, no two alike. And his novel The Surrendered was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He says that this, his latest book, is the closest to home he’s ever gone, and he joins us now. Welcome to Forum, Chang-Rae.
Chang-Rae Lee: Well, thank you so much, Grace.
Grace Won: Well, tell us about Jung Gi. Who is this boy at the start of the summer that the book covers? What is his world like?
Chang-Rae Lee: Well, as you partly described, you know, and it’s, of course, period in that sense. You know, as most kids were back then, and I was, even at the age of 10, even younger, in fact, you know, probably from the age of five or six, we were allowed to, by necessity and by choice, to wander, to explore.
And luckily I lived in a place where, much like the tenement complex described in the book, that had a yard, you know, had a kind of property with a playground and a little ball field and kind of dusty tennis courts that no one ever used. But it was really, for me, I mean, people talk about, you know, are talking about the Odyssey so much today, but it was like that for me. Those were my Greek islands, my Thracian islands.
You know, because you saw, you knew, every day, even though, of course, you had your little set of friends. There were other little groups. And there were lots of kids at the time, at least where I grew up, and this is what J.G. is seeing in the novel, is you just had all these kind of colorful characters from all different kinds of backgrounds, all certainly different expectations for what might happen that day. And so, you know, you tilted a little bit, you had a little swordplay.
Grace Won: Yes.
Chang-Rae Lee: There were, you know, loyalties, promises made, promises broken. And everything, of course, seemed so intense and huge. And maybe that’s every childhood, but it was certainly mine, and certainly for J.G.
Grace Won: Well, you’ve noted that there are moments of childhood that are kind of laser-etched on us. And I think probably setting this in the 1970s, when there were few distractions and also more of a monoculture, kind of helped titrate what this moment was about.
Chang-Rae Lee: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, he’s stuck, in a way, in both a wonderful way and eventually what becomes of it is a difficult way. You know, it’s so intramural, this world. And so he’s testing, you know, and this is what I think all kids do, and certainly a blank slate, but he’s also someone who has some kinds of impulses, yearnings, that don’t really hew to the kinds of programs that his mother particularly wants for him, to be a good, decent, successful little boy.
He wants all those things. He, you know, it’s how he’s been raised and it’s in his programming, and yet certain moments will come up, just as they do in life, where his urges or his impulses come out a little bit darker, a little less decent, and it begins to, I think, inform him about who he is.
I guess that’s maturation. I think that one of the propositions of the book early on is that, you know, we think childhood is a time when you are totally formed, but of course it’s also a time, perhaps only on looking back, that were revealed. That were revealed as maybe how we really were, you know. Yeah.
Grace Won: Yes, yes. I mean, the book took me back. I mean, as a child who grew up in the ’70s, even the small details like Toughskins, which some of our listeners may remember were a brand of jeans from Sears, which some other listeners may remember was a department store that we all lived for and went through that catalog.
But that was the most ’70s moment. And I thought also, kind of, you know, metaphor — it’s like you’re tough and then you’re not, you know? That’s what the ’70s felt like it was about.
Chang-Rae Lee: Yeah, well, I remember my Toughskins. They always split, and I suppose they were designed that way, so you bought cereal, went to the store all the time, but my mother would be furious at me.
But again, that’s a testament to, of course, how exuberantly we played and what we were doing out there, right? It’s, you know, at that time, too, you know, ’76 was a kind of special year, of course. It was the bicentennial. And you remember those quarters that the Mint issued. And we’re all kind of in a mood, I suppose, about ourselves.
And particularly, as an immigrant boy, I remember marching in the town parade. And because I was on the baseball team, we all got in our baseball uniforms, and I felt so patriotic and I thought, boy, this is what a place this is, you know, and how intimately and I hoped inextricably belonged to, you know, this place.
Grace Won: Yeah, you’re probably thinking, this America is one big party, this is amazing.
Chang-Rae Lee: Yeah, yeah. And that’s the part of the book that I did want. It’s a book that’s ultimately quite serious, but I hope that I could capture some of that wonder and some of that color, some of the glee, really, of not just childhood, but that time.
And it’s funny because I saw the book was kind of listed in some, oh, here are the books of the summer. It was listed as one of the outlets listed it as a historical novel. So I guess Toughskins is sort of like a hair shirt or something in a different way.
Grace Won: That’s got to make us all feel old. Just because I know what Toughskins and Sears are doesn’t mean it’s historical. Although I think some of my fellow producers are like, “What? Sears again?”
Well, the narrator of this book is J.G., who tells the story as an adult. And I wondered if you could read a short passage from the book from his perspective.
Chang-Rae Lee: Sure. This is just very early on, when he’s kind of setting things up for the reader.
“And yet we can’t help but keep going back to old times, futilely scratching at a spot. It doesn’t matter how significant a certain event or instance was. Sometimes the barest irritation will draw incommensurate attention, and the skin can go raw before you realize it. Lately, I can’t seem to help but linger on this time or that. Those tender ages, rife with curiosities, and go over in serial fashion what I might have done or said to diffuse a tricky situation or take a more principled stand or else assuage my frustrated heart. So many chances seeded. What remains are these disparate patches of existence that end up knitting vaster and less randomly than you would have ever imagined.”
Grace Won: That was Chang-Rae Lee reading from his new novel, A Tender Age. And, you know, the narrator, J.G., talks about a tender age in that passage. And, you know, tender age, it’s such an interesting title because tender can mean sweet and kind, but it can also mean sore and painful.
That age, the time right before adolescence, what we modern people call tween years — I mean, tell me how you see it as a tender age.
Chang-Rae Lee: Yeah, I thought a lot about the title, and when I came up with it, I thought immediately, yes, this fits. As you say, it’s both those things, and essentially it’s also an age of vulnerability.
And so I thought that before, of course, before the big flush of the hormonal flush of true adolescence, pubescence, you know, J.G. is at an age when he’s still very much a child. He wants to cling to his mother, he wants to be in the nest, but he also has enough intellectual capacity, as 10-year-olds do going on 11, to really see things and to begin to form ideas about them.
So he’s at that moment when there’s so much possibility and yet there’s so much confusion as well. And so he’s — but in his particular situation, he’s, even though he’s very close to his family, even though there’s a lot of love in the home, and probably it’s because he’s an immigrant kid and he has immigrant parents, they live very separate lives.
There’s a private world of the home where mother has sway and dominion, and then there’s a world outside, which is really, you know, anything goes, again, filled with all these characters and situations that, you know, couldn’t be expected.
And so he has to, you know, in one world, he has a certain role, and in the other world, particularly the outside world, he has a little bit more reach, he has a little bit more sway, he has a little more agency. But of course, with agency at that age comes a lot of confusing and difficult moments when you have to decide, as the narrator said in the passage I just read, what you might do and what you should do, and those things don’t always align.
Grace Won: Yeah, that’s an age where you think you know everything, but you know nothing.
Chang-Rae Lee: And then you have to go with it. Yes, yes. And that’s the thing. And especially with J.G. out in the wilds of the playground in 1976. That’s all he has.
Grace Won: Well, we’re talking with the author and Stanford professor Chang-Rae Lee about his new novel, A Tender Age. It comes out tomorrow. Lee is the author of Native Speaker, A Gesture of Life, and The Surrendered. His new novel tells the story of an 11-year-old Korean-American boy growing up in the ’70s and the moments, big and small, that shaped his life.
And we want to hear from you. What do you remember about growing up in the ’70s, and how did that shape you as a kid? Give us a call, 866-733-6786. I’m Grace Won, in for Alexis Madrigal. More Forum after the break.
“We all need to act more childish,” says professional child interviewer Julian Shapiro-Barnum, the YouTuber behind the viral series Recess Therapy. He’s interviewed thousands of young kids to get their takes on love, family, adulthood — and corn. And he says he’s learned from kids about how adults can better listen to their emotions, instincts and imaginations. Shapiro-Barnum’s new book is “How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up.” He joins us and we hear from you: What has a kid taught you?
Guests:
Julian Shapiro-Barnum, comedian; interviewer for online shows “Recess Therapy,” “Celebrity Substitute,” and “Outside Tonight;” author, “How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up: Big Lessons from Little Kids”
Bosnian Muslim funeral practices, Togolese views on mental illness, traditional Chinese medicine and postpartum depression among African American women are some of the topics addressed by Oakland High students in their publication, “Cross-Cultural Medicine, Volume 8.” It’s the latest installment of an annual capstone project for juniors in Oakland High’s public health academy, the essays in which – written by students, drawing from interviews they conducted and research they analyzed – both celebrate their own cultures’ approaches to medicine and examine mistrust of Western medical institutions. And it’s taught annually at the health sciences-focused Samuel Merritt University as part of its culturally competent care curriculum. We’ll hear from the students about the work they published and from the project’s creator, Jessica Forbes, who teaches at Oakland High School.
Guests:
Skili Richardson, incoming senior, Oakland High School; author, “How to Care for a Woman Who Has Postpartum Depression;” illustrator, “Cross-Cultural Medicine, Volume 8″ front and back covers
Charlene Kwan, incoming senior, Oakland High School; author, “Warmth from the Root”
Nzubechukwu Ugo Egeonu, incoming senior, Oakland High School; author, “African Distrust of Western Medicine and Practices”
Jessica Forbes, teacher, Oakland High School
Sarah Koster, family nurse practitioner; professor, Samuel Merritt University
Actor and screenwriter Danny McBride has built his career portraying immature men. From “Eastbound and Down” to “The Righteous Gemstones,” McBride weaves satire and profanity to comment on American culture. In his new book, “Thrilling Tales of Modern Men,” McBride offers a collection of short stories about complicated men, and asks whether we can empathize with deeply unlikeable characters. He joins us to talk about what his new book has to say about modern American masculinity.
Guests:
Danny McBride, author, “Thrilling Tales of Modern Men;” writer, producer, and actor, “Eastbound & Down,” “Vice Principals,” and “The Righteous Gemstones”
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.
Actor, screenwriter, producer, and now author Danny McBride has a debut collection of short stories about men who are insecure and the things they’ll do to prove that they’re not. And if that sounds very McBride to you, you’re probably familiar with the TV characters he’s created, like Jesse, the preacher with an inflated ego in The Righteous Gemstones, or Kenny Powers from Eastbound & Down, a major leaguer who was once great and has now become his hometown gym teacher.
Clip: My dad said you ruined baseball.
Danny McBride (clip): You know what? I can already tell that I don’t like you, and I’m probably not gonna like you no matter how many pull-ups or push-ups you do. Or if anybody wants to pick on anybody in class, aim for him, because I ain’t watching.
Mina Kim: McBride’s new book is called Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, and he joins me now. So great to have you on Forum, Danny McBride.
Danny McBride: I appreciate you having me on. Thank you.
Mina Kim: So you and your publisher, I think, told The Hollywood Reporter that your new book explores the darker afflictions of today’s man. So what are these afflictions that you speak of?
Danny McBride: You know, I don’t want the book to sound like it’s homework, but with a lot of these characters that I’ve portrayed or told stories about, it’s just sort of trying to find a clown to center a story around. Classic comedy always has a clown at the center, and so when I wanted to create my clowns, I just kind of looked around at the world around me and tried to pinpoint the exact types of dudes that annoyed me.
So I started kind of just taking notes and seeing that inflated egos and an inflated sense of self are fun things to take aim at.
Mina Kim: Yeah, fun things to take aim at. Yet you also play them with a lot of sincerity. So what did you learn about what makes them annoying that you could sort of sympathize with?
Danny McBride: You know, I think with everything, whenever you write anything, you always want to try to find the version of a character that feels the most realistic, even if they’re doing outlandish things.
For me, that’s maybe a little bit of writing and also performing — trying to find their point of view. I don’t think it’s necessarily to find empathy for them, but it’s just to understand how they operate, how they function, and ultimately, hopefully, to make a character that has more dimension so that the places the character can go are more interesting.
That’s just what I’ve always wanted to do. And when I’m on these shows like Eastbound & Down or The Righteous Gemstones, I work with actors like Walton Goggins, who demand that sort of exploration of their characters. They don’t want to portray just a buffoon. They want to have something to sink their teeth into. I think that has always pushed me to try to achieve that with any of these characters.
Mina Kim: Yeah, you’ve often said that your characters are realizing that they’re often less special than they thought they were, or were brought up to think.
Danny McBride: Exactly. I think being a kid who grew up in the ’80s, movies, video stores, blockbuster movies — they played a massive part in my evolution and growing up. And I think for a lot of people my age, it was the same thing.
When you see those stories, in the classic Hollywood story there’s a main character, there’s someone all the events revolve around, and everything works out for them. I do think, if you’ve grown up looking at life that way, it can be devastating when you realize that that is just in the movies.
Mina Kim: Who were the characters from TV and film that really defined masculinity for you?
Danny McBride: I don’t know if there was one. Growing up in the ’80s, that was obviously the height of the action hero. So guys like Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
I guess when I was a kid, it was anyone who could fight, with a tinge of martial arts. That was what it took to be a man — and maybe solve crimes. Maybe Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I. Those were what you needed to be able to do if you wanted to be a real man.
Mina Kim: Well, your characters in your book are certainly dealing with this realization that they’re not as special as they think they are in sometimes really hilarious, sometimes really violent ways. You have a guy who decides to live in a glass cube suspended from the ceiling of a mall for a month.
Danny McBride: You know, it’s something relatable. Everyone has wanted to be an escape artist at some point.
Clip: Yeah, that’s not magic. If he can do it without eating and drinking, it’s not magic.
Mina Kim: And then in the story that’s on the book’s cover, there’s a man who deals with the death of his wife in a tiger-mauling incident by burning copies of a book he thinks is based on the incident.
You also have these other smaller, relatable things, like a guy who revenge-pees all over his neighbor’s boat because he doesn’t like it blocking his view.
I couldn’t help but wonder if they were based on real-life people or incidents or news stories — like this guy who burns the author’s book because he thinks the author stole the story from news coverage of the tiger-mauling incident. Did anything like that inspire these characters?
Danny McBride: Nothing is really inspired by anything that’s real or that I’ve seen in the real world — at least not consciously.
With all of these stories, I was coming off writing The Righteous Gemstones for seven years. We had COVID and the strikes that elongated that period, but through that it was four seasons, almost 40 episodes of that show.
I loved writing on that show, and I loved writing for those characters, but every day when you sat down to write, it became a story in this world about these characters.
To jump to a short story collection, where suddenly you could create stories about any character in any situation with anything going on, there was something really appealing about that after writing for television.
So how I would start with all of them was just kind of messing around, doodling around, and figuring out which ideas kept me coming back for more. Most of them were really inspired by me being creatively selfish and trying to make myself laugh.
Mina Kim: So then you often didn’t sit down to write one of these stories knowing how it would end. It was more an exploration of where this character would go if things got absurd.
Danny McBride: Yeah, and that’s kind of how I write everything. I’ll start from a place where I don’t know where it’s going, and that’s what’s fun about the process.
Eventually, sometimes you’ll end up in a place that’s terrible, and that’s what rewrites are for. Then suddenly you understand what story you were trying to tell, even if you didn’t know where it was going.
In the preliminary steps, I love not knowing. I don’t outline things. I don’t plan them out. It’s fun to get caught up in that momentum. Then, as you get deeper into it, you start thinking, “All right, where is this going?” That just becomes another fun part of the process.
Mina Kim: We’re talking with Danny McBride, author of Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, a collection of short stories.
He’s a comedian, writer, producer, and star of the HBO comedy series The Righteous Gemstones, Eastbound & Down, and Vice Principals.
Listeners, you’re invited to join the conversation. Are you a fan? What do you want to ask or tell Danny McBride? What are your favorite shows, movies, or characters from Danny? What character in TV, film, or books was your model of masculinity? And I’m curious what you would say is a healthy model now.
You can tell us by emailing forum@kqed.org, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at @KQEDForum, or by calling 866-733-6786.
We were talking earlier about how you play your characters with a lot of sincerity because your protagonists are not typically heroic. Some can even be repulsive. Yet you make them relatable.
How do you accomplish that? Can you walk me through the way you like to approach storytelling and characters?
Danny McBride: For me, even growing up, comedies weren’t necessarily my favorite type of film. I think I got into comedy because that’s just the way I see the world.
I always felt that the downside of a lot of comedies was that you’d laugh a lot in the first act, continue to laugh — but not quite as much — in the second, and then by the third act you’re checking your watch and ready for the show to be over.
I felt that was because sometimes comedies keep everything on the surface. If they’re just punchline-driven, after an hour and a half you’ve kind of gotten what you’re going to get.
For me, I wanted to make sure that even if you’re laughing, it’s all adding up to something. Hopefully there’s something unexpected or a depth to it that you might not have anticipated from the start.
So it’s all about telling a compelling story. Then I’ll use the comedy and these ridiculous characters as tools to tell that story. I ultimately want it to add up to something, and I think the way you do that is by creating layers and finding truth in all of these strange morons.
Mina Kim: Do you ever worry that people didn’t get the joke?
The reason I’m asking is because it feels like right now the fragile masculinity that you poke fun at or satirize — though you also make it relatable — feels like an inescapable part of our lives. Even just the things Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says, it feels like we’re living in one of your creations.
Danny McBride: Well, whether people get the joke or not, I think my job is just to speak to whatever I’m seeing in the world around me and the types of people I’m seeing, and translate that through my art.
However that lands with people, I think it can be interpreted lots of different ways. I don’t often think about what the social commentary will be afterward.
I just try to satirize human nature and find what I feel is alive and well in the world, and then find my take on it. However people interpret that is up to them.
I don’t want to tell people what to think. I just want to present them with a story that maybe ends up being thought-provoking.
Mina Kim: Yeah, we’re coming up on a break, but have you been surprised by how beloved people like Kenny Powers and Neal Gamby have become?
Danny McBride: Yes, for sure. But I’m glad they are.
That was the whole point of those characters. Eastbound & Down especially was trying to challenge ourselves to create a vile character and see if we could make people feel for him by the end of the day.
Mina Kim: We’ll have more with Danny McBride after the break. You’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.
The Bay Area’s homelessness crisis is one of the most acute in the nation, and it has concentrated in the region’s biggest cities, like San Jose. Many communities have adopted new policies aimed at mitigating the crisis – from checks aimed at stabilizing vulnerable renters to making it illegal to refuse shelter beds. We examine the causes and potential solutions being implemented around the Bay Area, with a special look at a series of controversial new policies being implemented in the South Bay, including an effort to redirect funding from permanent housing projects to build more forms of temporary shelter.
Guests:
Dr. Margot Kushel, director, Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative; professor of medicine, UCSF
Luis Melecio-Zambrano, journalist covering Cupertino, Milpitas and Sunnyvale, Bay Area News Group
Ethan Varian, accountability reporter, Bay Area News Group. Luis and Ethan’s recent reporting examines why homelessness is so severe in the Bay Area, what sets the region apart and what could help.
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Guy Marzorati: Welcome to Forum. I’m Guy Marzorati, in for Alexis Madrigal.
The Bay Area has experienced something of a shelter shift in recent years. Some local leaders, most notably San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, have invested heavily in building short-term shelter for people experiencing homelessness. But a new analysis from the Bay Area News Group finds our region still has a massive shortage of shelter beds, and for most people living in shelters, they’re not serving as an immediate jumping-off point for permanent housing.
Joining us to discuss their reporting are the co-authors of the series: Luis Melecio-Zambrano. Luis covers Cupertino, Milpitas, and Sunnyvale for the Bay Area News Group. Hey, Luis.
Luis Melecio-Zambrano: Hey.
Guy Marzorati: And Ethan Varian, accountability reporter for the Bay Area News Group. Thanks for joining us, Ethan.
Ethan Varian: Thanks for having us.
Guy Marzorati: Also joining us, Dr. Margot Kushel, director of UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. Dr. Kushel, thanks so much for taking the time to be here.
Dr. Margot Kushel: Thanks for having me.
Guy Marzorati: So, Ethan, maybe I’ll start with you. In San Jose, they’ve arguably gone further than any other city in the Bay Area in focusing on building out a shelter system. What does that actually look like?
Ethan Varian: Yeah. So San Jose, starting under the previous mayor, Sam Liccardo, and really under current Mayor Matt Mahan, has invested a lot in building out a shelter system — a specific kind of shelter. It’s different than the group shelters with bunk beds that you may be imagining. It’s a lot of tiny homes with locked doors, more privacy, as well as converted motel rooms, which was a push that started a few years ago, really during the pandemic, to start converting these motel rooms into places for homeless people where they can stay temporarily. They don’t have to pay rent, and the goal is to connect them with services and, for most sites at least — and when you talk to most officials — to help them into permanent housing.
San Jose has added hundreds of these types of shelter units. They’re referred to as interim housing units, including these tiny homes, motel rooms, and some other modular housing developments. San Jose has, according to the last count, about 2,000 of these beds that it’s currently operating.
Guy Marzorati: And Dr. Kushel, do you see a meaningful difference in terms of maybe health outcomes or housing outcomes between what we traditionally think of as shelters — these larger congregate facilities — and these newer models that Ethan is describing in San Jose?
Dr. Margot Kushel: There’s no question that one of the most important things for people in deciding whether to accept shelter are really what we call the four Ps: having privacy, being able to bring their possessions, having their partner be with them, and being able to bring pets with them.
These single-occupancy units — or, if people are in a partnership, units for two people — can really provide a lot of those things. They provide protection from some infectious diseases, but more importantly, I think, psychological safety, the ability to sleep, and all of those things.
Guy Marzorati: Yeah. And Ethan, I know for this series you spent time with a man named Fernando Alcantara, who had been living in one of the largest homeless encampments in San Jose. Tell us a little bit about his story.
Ethan Varian: Yeah. Fernando was living in an RV at Columbus Park, which had been one of the largest — almost certainly the largest — encampments in San Jose, down by the airport.
It was a very dangerous encampment, frankly. Fernando did not feel at risk there, but it was not a great place to be. It’s not a place he wanted to stay. So when outreach teams with the city found him and offered him a space in one of these interim housing units, he really jumped at the chance to take it.
One of his biggest worries living on the street in an RV was constantly worrying about being ticketed or towed and losing his housing in his RV. So getting into one of those tiny homes really gave him the stability to not have to worry about that and then work with city outreach teams to eventually find housing in an affordable housing complex in San Jose.
So it was a real success story, but it took a lot of work to get him there, a lot of effort on the city’s part, and they had to find the housing for him, which, as our reporting shows, is often quite a challenge to get everyone in a shelter into housing.
Guy Marzorati: Yeah, let’s talk about that. Luis, as part of this project, you took a look at the wider shelter inventory across the Bay Area and also where people who were exiting shelter ended up. What did you find?
Luis Melecio-Zambrano: Yeah. So we looked at shelter data from HUD from across the country, really, and compared it to the Bay Area. The brass tacks here are that, in the United States, about two in three homeless people are in shelter. But in the Bay Area, that’s just over one in three. So we have a serious shortage here of shelter.
And what that shelter is doing is often not getting people into housing. This actually isn’t unique to the Bay Area. Both in California and in the United States at large, it’s also about one in three people who, in a given year, go from shelter to housing. A lot of those people who aren’t going into housing end up either back on the streets or in another shelter situation.
So that goal of transitioning someone from the street to a shelter to housing is not as clean a transition as we might expect or hope, really.
Guy Marzorati: Yeah. And on that first point, why is it that the Bay Area has ended up in a place with far fewer shelter beds than these other cities that you looked at?
Luis Melecio-Zambrano: So this isn’t a question we dove into too deeply, but my understanding here is that it’s a difference in policy priorities.
New York City and Washington, D.C., for example, both have some form of right-to-shelter law. These are largely tied — in D.C. explicitly — to freezing temperatures. All of these other places in the Northeast, which is kind of the other large concentration besides the West Coast of homeless populations, have much harsher winters, whereas here there isn’t as much of a drive to avoid loss of life by keeping people off the streets in the winter.
So it’s, in my view, based on my reporting, a policy choice based on that climate reality.
Ethan Varian: I’ll add that there are often court orders in those cold-weather cities enforcing a right to shelter, or more or less requiring cities to offer people shelter if they’re on the street or don’t have a place to go.
Guy Marzorati: And when you all looked at this data across the Bay Area — both the count of shelters and these exit rates, where people are going from shelter — did you find differences within our region? Are some places doing better than others as far as developing a system that is pushing people toward permanent housing?
Luis Melecio-Zambrano: The data is really messy and varies from year to year, sometimes really dramatically.
One thing we did notice — and this is based on an independent analysis of San Mateo County’s shelter system — is that there is a really significant difference between transitional housing —
Ethan Varian: Or interim housing.
Luis Melecio-Zambrano: Or interim housing, thanks.
Ethan Varian: The tiny homes and the motel conversions.
Luis Melecio-Zambrano: Yeah. And these congregate shelters — these groups of bunk beds. In San Mateo County’s case, they saw that three times as many people were able to transition from this interim housing to permanent housing than from these congregate shelters.
A hint as to why that might be is that a lot of the experts we spoke to talked about this revolving door between shelter and what we classically think of as homelessness, like living on the street.
The median amount of time someone was spending in these congregate shelters — these group shelters — was only three weeks. So if you’re in and out of these shelters, it’s a lot harder for someone to get you hooked up with a social worker, get you connected to services, and get you into housing.
Guy Marzorati: Yeah. Dr. Kushel, what do these findings say to you?
Dr. Margot Kushel: Yeah, I think it’s not surprising.
I think we know, for instance, that it is true that it’s easier to stay longer in these tiny homes. They’re often better staffed, and so people have more access to do the things that they need to do — in some ways, the minimum needed to get into housing: get their paperwork together, a driver’s license or some form of ID, certification of their income, all of those things that we make people do to get into housing.
But the bottom-line problem is that we just don’t have enough housing.
In the Bay Area, if you look in San Jose or so, the housing wage is about $67 an hour. That’s what someone would need to earn to get a one-bedroom apartment that isn’t subsidized. And we only have a very limited amount of subsidized housing.
So in a way, it is very helpful and necessary to have people get all their paperwork together so they can get into one of these subsidized units. And it’s easier to do that when you have your own tiny place. But if those subsidized units aren’t there, at the end of the day there’s really no place to go.
Guy Marzorati: It also strikes me, looking at this data about the lack of shelter beds, that it almost suggests the debate we often hear about what to do with people who are refusing shelter might be a little premature. Is that fair?
Dr. Margot Kushel: I think that’s absolutely fair.
We found in our studies that the vast majority of people would accept a shelter bed, but there just isn’t one.
And if people don’t accept a shelter bed, it’s really important to understand that does not mean they wouldn’t accept housing.
When I talk to people who refuse shelter, it’s people who are being asked to go into rooms of 400 people. There might be someone they’re afraid of there, someone they’ve had a conflict with. They might feel frail. There are often only top bunks, and much of our homeless population is aging and can’t get up there.
But the truth is, for every rare person who says no, there is a long line of people waiting to get in. So in some ways, exactly as you said, it’s the wrong conversation to be having.
Guy Marzorati: This is Dr. Margot Kushel, director of UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
We’re also talking with Luis Melecio-Zambrano and Ethan Varian, reporters with the Bay Area News Group, who have a new analysis about shelter capacity and homelessness in the Bay Area.
And we want to hear from you. How do you think your city is doing on this issue? Is there a policy that you’ve changed your mind about after seeing how it’s played out locally? Have you noticed a shelter or a tiny home site or a permanent supportive housing project open up in your neighborhood? Or, if you have experienced homelessness or are experiencing homelessness, what’s actually helped in your case?
You can give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can find us on our social media channels — we’re @KQEDForum — or you can send us an email at forum@kqed.org.
We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: Why is homelessness so severe in the Bay Area? Our guests found one factor that stands out above all others.
California is racing toward the ambitious goal of a 100% clean energy grid by 2045. But trading fossil fuels for zero-carbon power isn’t as simple as flipping a switch—it means overhauling the appliances, vehicles, and energy systems we’ve relied on for decades. We’ll talk with state and local leaders about where we’re making real progress and where we’re falling short. And we’ll hear from you: how is California’s green energy transition impacting your daily choices and utility bills?
Guests:
Siva Gunda, vice chair, California Energy Commission
Merrian Borgeson, California climate and energy policy director, Natural Resources Defense Council
Lori Mitchell, director, San Jose Clean Energy
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Laura Klivans: This is Forum. I’m Laura Klivans, in for Alexis Madrigal.
I read a lot of Richard Scarry books with my kids these days. You know, Lowly Worm and pickle cars and families of pigs just kind of doing their thing. One of my favorite parts of these books are the pages that peel back the mystery of how things work, like a cutaway beneath a road where we see gas lines or a power plant pumping electricity to homes through poles and wires.
This is the kind of infrastructure many of us rarely think about. But right now, California is smack dab in the middle of overhauling these crucial systems. We’re phasing out one — oil, gas, and the machines they power — and expanding the other: clean energy, the system that delivers it and the end products it sustains, like heat pumps, ovens, and electric cars.
The challenge, of course, is to do this skillfully at a time when we’re feeling the consequences of a warming world and our electricity bills are climbing. So how do we actually pull off this massive transition fairly, reliably, and without breaking the bank?
Joining us today, we have a wonderful panel to talk about it. We have Siva Gunda, vice chair of the California Energy Commission. Welcome. Thank you. And Merrian Borgeson, California climate and energy policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Merrian Borgeson: Great to be here.
Laura Klivans: Yes, thanks for joining us.
Okay, so we are in this place some call “mid-transition.” Siva, give us a sense of where we actually are. We’re transitioning to a grid that’s 100% carbon-free — at least we’re trying to. That’s a state goal, right? Written into law. And it’s to have a grid that runs on renewables and zero-emission sources by 2045. How are we doing?
Siva Gunda: Yeah, thank you, Laura, so much for having me in this conversation. And wonderful to be here with Merrian, a colleague. We both work on these issues very closely.
I think it’s helpful for us to contextualize this conversation in decades and decades of work in California. Whether we are trying to address the smog in L.A., the health impacts and safety of communities that live alongside fossil fuel investments, or the extraordinary impacts of climate change, the North Star that the state has right now is pursuing carbon neutrality by 2045. That’s where we are going.
And as we go there toward carbon neutrality, one of the most important measures is to electrify as much of those end uses that you talked about. And the rest of it really is sourced through clean molecules. That’s the premise and the organizing principle of all state agencies, local governments, and others together.
So as we go through that, I think it’s really helpful for us to think about: How do these transitions happen? And is there some kind of framework that we could use to discuss the transition?
Some of the scholarly work — I want to give a shout-out to Dr. Emily Grubert out of the University of Notre Dame — really talks about four phases of transition. You’re talking about pre-transition, early transition, mid-transition, and late transition.
And each one of them comes with different policy goals and different investment strategies from the marketplace. When we talk about early transition, this is where a legacy system — or even a new system — is seeing positive growth in the marketplace.
Laura Klivans: Legacy system being oil and gas.
Siva Gunda: The legacy system being oil and gas, and they see a lot of opportunity to make money. So all the policy is really doing is protecting people during that time.
But as you begin to enter the pre-transition phase, this is where policy is setting goals and saying, “Hey, we want to get here.” And what that does is gives the oil and gas, or legacy system, kind of an idea of where they are going. The investments begin to stabilize instead of going full force. And then you go into the mid-transition.
Laura Klivans: And what you just described — that’s where we were in, like, 2018, when we set this law. Is that right? Okay, we were like, “We have this goal: 2045.” Yeah, okay. But now we are in mid-transition, right?
Siva Gunda: Mid-transition, right. And as we go into mid-transition, this is where the legacy system is still substantial.
We still use oil and gas — a significant amount of oil and gas. Just for context, California is either the third- or fourth-largest user of petroleum in the world, after the United States and China and, depending on the data, either Brazil or California. So that’s the context. We use one gallon per person per day.
So when we think about the transition, we know that the oil and gas system is still substantial, but it’s declining. This is where the industry does not see a lot of opportunity, so the investments come down to safety and reliability.
And the alternate system, which is EVs — we have 2.5 million electric vehicles sold in California — is coming up, but it is not at a scale where it can replace the legacy oil and gas system. So we need to have these two systems functional and safe at once.
Precisely.
And then you kind of go into the late transition.
I think one thing I wanted to close with is that it’s important for us to think about these as three transitions happening at the same time. You have the electric grid transitioning to 100% clean, as you mentioned. You have petroleum going down. And natural gas hasn’t even begun fully in terms of coming into a mid-transition. So you have the electric system in late mid-transition, petroleum just entering mid-transition, and natural gas hasn’t yet really come into mid-transition.
So how do you harmonize the timing of those three systems? That’s the complexity we face.
Laura Klivans: Ah, I see. I see. Okay. Yeah, wow. Okay.
Laura Klivans: And so one thing that you say — and that I get as a reporter on these issues a lot — is, you know, you’re talking about how we’re trying to electrify everything. That’s a state goal.
Merrian, if you can answer this one, I think a misunderstanding people have is that a lot of people will say, “Well, that’s just putting oil and gas in from a different source. It’s just from a power plant.”
Why is it that the goal is to electrify everything in California?
Merrian Borgeson: Yeah. So electricity is going to be the place where we’re able to get all of our renewable resources — wind, solar, et cetera — from clean sources.
And we’re actually replacing huge amounts of the fossil fuels, which cause both health issues but also leave us vulnerable to geopolitical risks and price spikes and all these things that we are seeing right now.
So the more end uses that you can electrify, the more things we can power with clean electricity, both from a health perspective and from a vulnerability and economic development perspective.
I would say, too, like you, I love those Richard Scarry under-the-scenes details. I don’t think that most people like to think about their gas pipelines on a daily basis.
So part of this is: How do we make this easy for people?
I think California has been really good at setting big, exciting goals. We have them, so great. We don’t need more goals right now. We need to actually have people have all the choices they need to make the right decisions that work for themselves and for their families economically.
So it’s possible to make this transition without them honestly having to worry too much about their pipelines or exactly how refineries are going to close down in the state. It’s really the role of leaders like the folks in this room to make those choices more and more available to people.
We’re starting to do that in California, and that’s where we’re going to get the real impacts: making sure everyone can be part of this transition, no one is left behind, and it’s actually affordable for people.
Laura Klivans: Yes, yes, that makes quite a bit of sense. And we’re going to get into that as we continue to talk.
I want you both — maybe, Siva, you want to answer this — where really are we now? When people say, “Oh, it’s just more oil and gas,” like Merrian, you said, the place to transition is the electricity grid. But where are we right now? What percentage of our power from the grid is zero-emission?
Siva Gunda: Yeah, great question.
And to Merrian’s point, if you go back even to 2000 or 2001, we were getting two-thirds of our electricity from fossil sources like natural gas.
Laura Klivans: Just five years ago?
Siva Gunda: Like 25 years ago.
Laura Klivans: Oh, 25. 2001. Yes. Great.
Siva Gunda: And when you look at where we were then, we were even using coal in California.
So what we’ve done over these last 25 years is get rid of coal completely. And that one-third clean energy we had in 2001 is now two-thirds in California.
Laura Klivans: Yeah.
Siva Gunda: So that’s meaningful progress because of the deployment of solar, the deployment of lithium-ion batteries — both on the bulk grid side and behind the meter with rooftop solar and home battery storage.
As you look at that transition, we are on track to get to 90% by 2035. Right? So that is the transition we are in.
And the important part here is, as Merrian mentioned, we have great goals. The work that we need to do gets tougher and tougher as we get closer to that 100%.
I think that’s where we are in terms of the integrated nature of oil and gas with electricity. You cannot silo them anymore. You have to figure out how to combine progress on one side with careful and responsible management of the other.
Merrian Borgeson: And I just want to add, on gasoline sales, we’re actually 60% below our peak usage. So gasoline sales have declined.
Laura Klivans: Wow.
Merrian Borgeson: So we’re making measurable progress.
Natural gas sales have also declined. We’re about 12% down from five years ago in terms of natural gas use.
And there’s a lot of reasons for that. On the transportation side, we’re buying EVs, we have more efficient cars, and people are making different choices about driving.
On the gas side, we are switching to things like heat pumps. We also have a warming climate. We actually need heating less, which is disturbing but true.
So there’s lots of reasons that we’re already reducing the use of these fossil fuels, and we have to plan for that transition, which is really what the mid-transition framework is about.
Laura Klivans: And then the mid-transition — it’s not a period of five years, right? It is a decades-long process.
Siva Gunda: Yes.
Laura Klivans: Okay, interesting.
And then in terms of where California is as compared to other states, are we leading the pack here, or are we behind? Where are we?
Siva Gunda: I would say, humbly, California always tries to be at the front of some of these transitions.
Looking at California and its economic might — we’re the fourth-largest economy in the world — the examples that we set here in terms of transitioning the fourth-largest economy will really become examples for the rest of the world.
Laura Klivans: Okay, all right. Thank you.
And if we fail, people will say, “Don’t do that.”
Yeah, we never want to be a cautionary tale.
Okay, I am Laura Klivans, in today for Alexis Madrigal. We will be back after a short break.
We are talking about California’s ambitious attempt to have a 100% clean energy grid by 2045. We’re joined by Siva Gunda, vice chair of the California Energy Commission, and Merrian Borgeson, California climate and energy policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
And we want to hear from you. How are you participating in the switch to clean energy? Give us a call now at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. Or email your comments and questions to forum@kqed.org. You can find us on all the social media platforms — Bluesky, Instagram, or @KQEDForum.
With domestic demand down and retaliatory tariffs from Canada hurting international sales, California’s wine industry is struggling. But beyond this year’s challenges, grape growers and winemakers are confronting the broader threat of climate change, which is already transforming places like Napa and Sonoma and could ultimately threaten the entire industry. We’ll talk to researchers and winemakers about the looming threats and what changes are necessary.
Guests:
Jess Lander, senior wine reporter, San Francisco Chronicle
Steve McIntyre, founder, McIntyre Family Wines
Ben Montpetit, Richard M. Kunde Endowed Chair in Viticulture and Enology and Professor & Marvin Sands Department Chair at UC Davis
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Lesley McClurg: Welcome to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg. I’m in today for Mina Kim.
The wine industry is under a lot of stress right now. And honestly, it’s kind of hard for me to make sense of all the changes that are confronting the industry. I mean, some growers are removing — in some cases, burning — vineyards because demand has dropped so, so sharply.
And at the same time, hotter temperatures are disrupting growing conditions so much that iconic grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon may eventually need to be grown in different places — not in California.
I’m joined by Jess Lander, senior wine reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. Welcome, Jess.
Jess Lander: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Lesley McClurg: So give us a pulse point. How critical is this moment for the wine industry? How bad is it?
Jess Lander: It’s pretty bad. You know, I don’t want to sound alarmist, but the industry is facing, as you said, a myriad of challenges. They’re kind of getting it from all sides, and it feels like there’s not one big solution to fix the problems.
I would say the biggest issue, though, that the wine industry is confronting is declining alcohol consumption — wine consumption across the country and across the globe. That’s really making it difficult for a turnaround.
Lesley McClurg: And what is driving that? I mean, I’ve heard that younger drinkers are not drinking as much wine. Are there other factors that are at play? And why are people — younger people included — drinking less?
Jess Lander: There are a lot of factors. That is one that people talk a lot about. However, I have recently seen a study that shows that younger drinkers, as they become of legal drinking age, are catching up a bit. So, hopefully we see more of that.
They also are drinking a lot of cocktails and seltzers and alternative beverages instead of wine. That’s cutting into the wine industry.
We also have this movement around health and wellness, with people cutting back on their drinking and drinking less. You have baby boomers, who really drove the boom of the wine industry in the last 20 or 30 years, starting to cut back. They’re getting older. Their doctors are telling them to stop drinking.
Some people talk about a kind of neo-prohibitionist movement happening. You have GLP-1s. There’s a lot of factors to it.
Lesley McClurg: What about cannabis? Is it a factor as more people maybe turn to cannabis for relaxation?
Jess Lander: A lot of people do bring that up as a possible factor. I did report on a Gallup poll a year or two ago about the decline of alcohol consumption, and those researchers found that cannabis is not having a meaningful impact. But it’s definitely something that people are talking about.
Lesley McClurg: And I’ve seen these headlines where growers are literally burning their vineyards. Is that one vineyard? Is that a large problem in the industry? Give us a sense of that. And why are they doing that?
Jess Lander: You know, that headline I’m assuming you pulled from the New York Times article that came out last week.
And I think one point that a lot of the industry would like to make is that they’re not just lighting their vineyards on fire. When growers pull out their vines, they make these big piles, and burning them is just a common farming practice. It’s something that’s been done for decades.
So that’s not quite what’s happening.
But California growers pulled out more than 40,000 acres of vineyards last year, and probably tens of thousands the year before. There is this big push to remove vineyards because there is an oversupply and there’s a correction that needs to be made. So that is something that is happening.
Lesley McClurg: And are people not only leaving grapes unpicked and doing what you’re saying, but also selling off land? Are they leaving the industry as well? Is it that bad?
Jess Lander: Yes. Unfortunately, there are a lot of farmers who are reporting that they’re just throwing in the towel and abandoning their land, or making it fallow and maybe considering another crop.
But it’s definitely happening, especially in certain parts of California — not necessarily Napa and Sonoma counties, but in the Central Valley. And it is sad. Farmers are struggling.
Because there is this oversupply of wine and grapes, they’re really struggling even to make a profit on their grapes or to find buyers. So this year will be much of the same. We’ll see a lot of grapes, unfortunately, left unpicked.
Lesley McClurg: And is there a thought that this may shift? I mean, do these drinking trends tend to go up and down? Is there hope that we’ll start lapping it up in the future?
Jess Lander: Absolutely. I think experts caution people that we’re probably not going to see the massive boom or the kind of growth we’ve experienced in the past.
But there are signs that we’re hitting the bottom and that the wine industry will soon start recovering and move back into a position of growth — maybe one or two percent in the next couple of years.
Lesley McClurg: Is the reason it feels potentially so bad right now — and again, I’m not right at the pulse point where you are, so tell me if I’m accurate at all — that we got real thirsty during the pandemic and then potentially kind of dried up afterwards?
Is this moment feeling particularly bad because maybe we had oversupply during the pandemic?
Jess Lander: Absolutely.
I think a lot of wineries were enjoying such great growth that now that things have slowed so much, it probably feels more dramatic than if they were comparing this to pre-pandemic times.
A lot of Americans stocked up on alcohol, and because sales were going so well, wineries increased production. Now that things have slowed, they have more wine than they can sell. The vintages are backing up, and they can’t sell it in the wholesale market.
Like I said, there’s this correction that needs to happen. It’s coming from the vineyard side, where people are removing vines so there won’t be as many vineyards supplying the industry. Then, once we move through the excess inventory, it’ll correct a bit more on the wine side as well.
Lesley McClurg: There’s some correction ahead.
I want to bring in Steve McIntyre, founder of McIntyre Family Wines.
Steve, welcome.
Steve McIntyre: Thank you. Thank you!
Lesley McClurg: Is declining demand hitting your business in the Carmel Valley?
Steve McIntyre: It certainly is. And so is it hitting our parent company, Monterey Pacific.
We farm about 18,000 acres through four different counties along the coast of California. So we understand all too well the challenges, both on the production side and the growing side.
Lesley McClurg: And then, Jess, there’s global politics also at play. So how are tariffs affecting the industry?
Jess Lander: I would say that tariffs are definitely affecting the industry. It’s probably not the biggest problem that producers are dealing with, but tariffs have raised the cost of a lot of supplies that the wine industry uses.
So corks and glass and screw caps — all those types of things have gone up because a lot of those products are bought from other countries.
And then Canada has been a big stressor because not only were there tariffs, but in retaliation they have pretty much removed U.S. alcohol from their shelves for over a year now. That is a pretty big hit to a lot of California wineries that export there.
It’s the U.S.’s biggest export market for alcohol, worth about $1 billion. So any wineries that were exporting to Canada are definitely feeling that.
Lesley McClurg: And that may not reverse, right? Because I’ve read that Canadian sales of homegrown wines have soared, which means buyers may turn to their local supplies instead. That may be a permanent change that we could see.
Jess Lander: Yeah, I hope not. I think even a lot of Canadians would like to have their American alcohol back on the shelves. There are a lot more options.
Obviously, they’re probably buying more European wines now. So we’ll see. I have faith that it’s not permanent, but I will admit I’m pretty surprised at how long it’s gone on. I thought it might only last a few months, and they’re still holding strong.
Lesley McClurg: Steve, what about you? Have tariffs hit your business?
Steve McIntyre: Yeah, they certainly have. We were getting all of our glass from China, and that tariff, of course, was one of the worst.
And to build on what Jess said about Canada, one of our biggest markets in California is Palm Desert. We see the Canadian snowbirds there, and they’re still drinking a lot of California wine, and they really miss it.
But it’s a shame we have these political barriers to contend with.
Lesley McClurg: And are those costs already trickling down to the consumer? Have you had to raise your prices because of the tariffs?
Steve McIntyre: We’ve not been able to raise prices because of the supply being so large. There’s not enough demand to really increase prices.
Those that have certainly have suffered the consequences with declining depletion. So no, we can’t pass it down. It’s nothing more than a tax, that’s for sure.
Lesley McClurg: And so you’re getting squeezed. Basically, the business itself is getting squeezed. You’re having to absorb those financial hits.
Steve McIntyre: That’s exactly right. The entire business is. Yeah.
Lesley McClurg: Well, I want to bring in Ben Montpetit, Richard M. Kunde Endowed Chair in Viticulture and Enology and Professor & Marvin Sands Department Chair at UC Davis.
Just to kind of cap what we’ve heard there from Jess and Steve, how are you viewing this moment, Ben? Do you feel like this is just a hard moment, or is this a longer trend that we’ll see?
Ben Montpetit: Yeah, thanks for having me.
In talking to stakeholders across California and what we’re seeing, it really is a bit of a change. It’s not going to be just a dip and then come back.
The change is really going to be on the industry side. They’re thinking about how to engage with the next generation of consumers, what they’re looking for in these products. They’re thinking about innovation and opportunities for change.
So that’s where I remain optimistic about the future. Talking to those stakeholders, they’re not sitting idle. They’re looking to innovate and bring new products to market.
Even the discussion we’ve been having about fields and vines being ripped out — I know many producers who are thinking about the opportunities there to plant new varieties and do something a little bit different.
Lesley McClurg: Well, we’ll talk about some of those innovations after the break.
We’d love to hear from listeners. Are you drinking less wine? Why are you drinking less wine? Maybe you’re Gen Z. Do you drink wine? Why or why not? Do you like to buy from specific California regions? Tell us about those.
You can email your comments or questions to forum@kqed.org. You can find us on any of the social platforms — Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram — we’re @KQEDForum.
Or you can give us a call right now at 866-733-6786. Again, that’s 866-733-6786.
Maybe you’re in the business. Maybe you’re feeling some of these stress points. We’d love to hear about it.
Stay with us. We’ll be right back after this break.
For decades, grassroots activists have led the way in pushing the government to regulate toxins that harm our health and wellbeing. The MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, movement has taken up some of that activism to fight the growing prevalence of environmental toxins such as pesticides, PFAS and microplastics. Though MAHA has lobbied U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and President Trump to reduce the pollutants, many have been disappointed by the administration’s inaction. We’ll talk about efforts to regulate environmental toxins and the Trump administration’s approach.
Guests:
Ken Cook, founder and president, Environmental Working Group
Craig Spencer, emergency doctor; associate professor of the practice of health services, policy, and practice, Brown University School of Public Health; wrote a recent article for The Atlantic titled, “Public Health Needs MAHA.”
Sarah Vogel, senior vice president, healthy communities, Environmental Defense Fund
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Rachael Myrow: This is Forum. I’m Rachael Myrow, in for Alexis Madrigal.
You don’t have to be all in with MAHA to worry about the chemicals in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. This hour, we’re focusing our Forum magnifying lens on three key concerns: the pesticides in our food, PFAS — those forever chemicals — in our drinking water, and microplastics now turning up in human blood and tissue samples.
Setting aside politics, there is no serious scientific case that we shouldn’t worry. The questions are: How much should we worry? Why are politicians of so many stripes failing to get their collective acts together? And what can we do in the meantime to protect ourselves and those we love?
Well, we’ve got a great panel of experts here today to talk with us about these very questions, including, in studio, Ken Cook, founder and president of the Environmental Working Group, a public-interest research and advocacy nonprofit environmental organization working on toxic chemicals and health.
We also have Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and associate professor of the practice of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University’s School of Public Health. His recent Atlantic article — you’ve got to check it out — is titled “Public Health Needs MAHA.”
And last but not least, Sarah Vogel, senior vice president of Healthy Communities at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Thank you to you all.
Craig, why don’t we get started with you? Your recent column in The Atlantic is a large part of why we’re having this conversation today. You wrote, quote, “‘MAHA’ is an opportunity, and one the public health sector, academics, doctors, and leaders of advocacy groups cannot afford to squander.”
What did you mean by that?
Craig Spencer: Well, thank you for having me on. I’m glad we’re having this conversation.
Quite frankly, it has started a discussion because I’m probably the last person you’d expect to write an article in The Atlantic called “Public Health Needs MAHA.” Most of my background has been in global health and humanitarian response, but I spent the last year and a half talking to people all throughout the country.
I’m an emergency physician. I work in public health. And what I’ve learned in that time is that many of my colleagues in health and medicine think about MAHA as a monolith. When we hear the word MAHA, we think about anti-vaxxers, and we think about the destruction that has been wrought by RFK Jr. and this administration on a lot of public health capacity in this country.
Think of the CDC, our ability to respond to outbreaks abroad and at home.
But the bigger part of MAHA is actually the grassroots people who have come under this umbrella and have rallied around a cause, bringing together concerns not just about vaccines but also things like environmental exposures, clean air, clean water, and clean food.
What I’ve seen over the past year and a half is that the overwhelming majority of people I speak to have similar concerns inside MAHA as people outside MAHA. They’re worried, first and foremost, about healthcare affordability.
I work as a physician in the U.S., and let me tell you, I understand people’s concerns with how expensive healthcare is, the difficulty of accessing it, and their ability to trust it.
So what I’ve been saying in this piece, and more broadly, is that public health needs MAHA in the sense that MAHA represents about 40% of America, according to a KFF survey that found around 40% to 41% of Americans identify with the movement.
Public health is for the public. It’s not for individuals.
For us to get 95% coverage with measles vaccines, or for public health to do the work we need at a collective level, we need to have all Americans on board. That includes the 40% who identify with MAHA and have found in the movement a passion to improve health for Americans.
We can talk more about what that looks like, what the movement has actually delivered, and how I think its greatest impact to date has not been on policy but on politics, by showing that there is a movement that can fight for people — disingenuously at some points, but in a way that is quite alluring for many Americans.
Rachael Myrow: Well, let’s get into it then.
Sarah, let’s set the table, so to speak, with some basic science, starting with microplastics. We’ve only recently started paying attention to those, although plastic has been breaking down around us for decades.
Why do you think it’s taken so long for this concern to land as a public health question?
Sarah Vogel: Well, thank you so much for having me and for having this, as Craig noted, really timely and important conversation.
There have been growing concerns about the health impacts of plastics, including the chemicals that are added to plastics, for many, many years.
I think the fact that people are now recognizing that microplastics are showing up inside our very bodies changes the story. It becomes very personal.
We’ve seen time and time again in the environmental health movement that when things become personal, they can really launch a movement. I think you’re seeing that with microplastics.
But I would say that, for decades, there have been efforts to better understand all of the different chemicals that get added to plastics, that leach out of plastics, that interact with your body, and that can contribute to a number of growing chronic diseases.
And just to add to what Craig outlined, one of the factors you see among people who are drawn into the MAHA community and narrative is rising concern about chronic disease and concern about what in the environment may be driving those diseases.
Everything from cancers to immunological diseases to neurological diseases — and not finding the answers from traditional medicine. I think that is a common theme you’re seeing among people drawn into the MAHA movement.
But it should be recognized that there is a rich body of scientific evidence around a number of different chemicals in the environment — certainly air pollution — and the linkages to serious chronic disease.
Most listeners may still be surprised that today air pollution, or particulate matter in the air, is the second-leading cause of death globally. That’s astounding.
You’re seeing chronic diseases associated with that on the rise all over the world.
So this movement is tapping into something that I think a lot of people are increasingly concerned about.
Rachael Myrow: The residue on a peach isn’t the same as on an onion. The exposure a field hand faces isn’t the same as a kid eating fruit from a roadside stand or a shopper in the city.
Is there a hierarchy of concern for you, or do you think we need to tackle all the pesticides, and stat?
Ken Cook: Well, I think we have to look at it comprehensively.
Thank you for inviting me onto the program today.
When you think about it, over many decades — and we have polling going back well before the KFF poll — there has been broad bipartisan support when you ask actual people about toxic chemicals in their food, their air, and their water, all the things you kicked off the segment with.
And yet, over time, it’s been harder and harder for the environmental community and for the public health community to make progress through regulation and law.
Politicians haven’t been stepping up, and I think part of that frustration came into flower during the emergence of MAHA at the beginning of the Trump administration, right toward the end of the campaign, in fact.
To me, the most important thing people need to understand is that we have to be comprehensive in the way we approach this, because that’s the way industry looks at it.
And here’s how the pesticide industry and the industrial chemical industry look at it.
If you ask them what the limit should be on the number of pesticides we could have on food, or what the maximum number of toxic chemicals should be in our water — or even in our babies — the answer they officially come back with is that it’s infinite.
There should be no limits as long as we make them legal. We just keep stacking them up.
The air pollution Sarah just talked about — much of the mortality happens below limits that are considered safe.
So we’ve pushed the safe limits sufficiently high that people die even though they’re exposed only to “safe” levels.
The same is true with chemicals.
When you realize that, you realize this is an industry that really needs to be taken on comprehensively.
We need to be thinking about the mixtures we’re all exposed to, as well as the individual chemicals that are regulated one at a time while industry keeps adding new ones.
As of 2003, when someone coined the term “microplastics,” these tiny particles — infinitely small — have been ending up in our bodies.
And the industry is saying — and I have to call my good friends in the plastics industry out on this — you’ve been in existence for more than 100 years. You have a trillion-dollar sales base here in the United States. You have perhaps a million scientists and engineers.
And you’re seriously saying you can’t take action on this problem because you don’t have an approved, standardized method for detecting these things in water or in our bodies?
Where have you been?
Why has it taken so long for these issues to come to the forefront?
It’s because I think the companies knew about these issues long before — just as they did with PFAS chemicals and all the chemicals Sarah and I have worked on throughout our careers.
The companies knew, and they didn’t tell anybody.
Rachael Myrow: Oh my goodness. Apologies, dear listeners, for raising your cortisol levels this morning. But we are indeed talking about activist efforts to get some kind of regulation of environmental toxins, and also talking about the Trump administration’s approach to all of that, with Ken Cook, founder and president of the Environmental Working Group; Craig Spencer, emergency physician and associate professor of the practice of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University’s School of Public Health — you’ve got to check out his recent Atlantic article titled “Public Health Needs MAHA” — and Sarah Vogel, senior vice president of Healthy Communities at the Environmental Defense Fund.
And we want to hear from you.
Do you consider yourself MAHA? What do you want to see from the Trump administration with regard to what we’re talking about today? How do you want to see the Trump administration deal with chemicals and toxins? What is your reaction to the current administration’s — and previous administrations’ — policies and actions on regulating environmental toxins?
From woodworking to ceramics to baking, people are increasingly stepping away from their devices and embracing manual arts. This desire to work with our hands may speak to an anxiety with modern technology, but professor Joshua Habgood-Coote argues that the preoccupation with ancient crafts dates back thousands of years. Habgood-Coote calls this trend “skill nostalgia,” and he joins us to discuss what happens when we long for the past.
Guests:
Joshua Habgood-Coote, lecturer in philosophy of language, School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds
Gavin Grant, Oakland designer, artist and craftsman
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Lesley McClurg: Welcome to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg. Most of the time, most of my day, I am at a desk. I’m staring at a screen. And then during the pandemic, I tried sewing to slow my mind down. It feels good occasionally to garden. But honestly, my favorite non-digitized task is washing my car. There’s something about getting my hands dirty, kind of spraying soap all over myself, that feels really good after sitting all day.
And it turns out I am not alone. Hobbies like leatherwork, beekeeping — apparently are all the rage as more of our lives move online. People want to make things, do things with their hands.
Philosopher Joshua Habgood-Coote calls it “skill nostalgia.” Joshua, welcome.
Joshua Habgood-Coote: And keep on relaxing.
Lesley McClurg: So what qualifies as a skill? I’m not actually sure that washing my car would make the cut. How do you define skill?
Joshua Habgood-Coote: Great. This is a super difficult question. Skill is one of these complicated words that marks a property that comes in degrees. You can be more or less skilled. So, in lots of different contexts, different things can count as skilled.
The thing that I think really matters for thinking about whether something is a skill or not is not how much you know. It’s not what you’re able to do. It’s the ability to answer questions about how to do something complicated while you’re doing it, on the fly, kind of creating knowledge as you’re going along.
So, in a way, there’s a bit of that kind of capacity involved in washing your car, but really we want the kind of complexity where we’re always increasing our knowledge when we’re engaged in skillful activities.
Lesley McClurg: And you coined this term, “skill nostalgia.” What do you mean by it? And why did we need to name this phenomenon, this sort of longing for the skills of the past?
Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so I think skill nostalgia is just the combination of general nostalgia. Exactly what nostalgia is is a little bit complicated. The core phenomenon, I think, is desiring something which is associated with the past, but also believing that that thing associated with the past is kind of lost or impossible to have.
I think we need this term for two reasons. One is just that there are lots of activities which are animated, motivated, by this nostalgia for skills and for crafts and for doing things with your hands. If you think about the kinds of videos that you might see on your short-form vertical video apps, the hobbies that people engage in, like shanty singing all over the place, how people work, rest, quit — this emotion is all over the place, and it kind of always has been for hundreds of years.
But the second reason we need it is because there is really an ideal, right, that we want our work to be skilled. So this emotion isn’t just a kind of longing for the past. It’s also connecting with a real and vibrant ideal for what we want work to be like.
Lesley McClurg: And it’s clear, I mean, our desire to work with our hands, it makes sense. That’s sort of a modern reaction to technology because we are faced with the screen so much. You want to kind of dig your hands in the earth.
But you argue that this is actually an ancient impulse that came way before the digital world engulfed us. Why do you think that humans tend to romanticize the good old days, and we’ve been doing that for so long?
Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so I think there’s a general phenomenon that can happen when any kind of technology is introduced. And it might be a technology as seemingly basic as writing, where the technology comes out and we’re able to do some new things, but at the same time certain capacities that were really important suddenly have less value or are less important for us.
So, in Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, which was written in, I think, the 300s or 400s BCE, Plato tells a story about worrying about the invention of writing being a bad thing. Because what writing is going to do is it’s going to lead to the atrophying of people’s capacities to think through speech and to work through arguments with other people.
He thinks there’s something really bad about replacing this kind of living word that happens in conversations with this kind of frozen word that happens when it’s written down and kind of stuck in place.
So I think that kind of impulse is very general and has been going on for a long time. I mean, there’s more specific and more pained kinds of skill nostalgia probably since the Industrial Revolution. But yeah, there is this really long history.
Lesley McClurg: What was your research process? You pull out lots of examples, like you just gave there with Plato. What was your research process to better understand the origins of skill nostalgia?
Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so I think two directions.
One is to think about my hobbies and what kind of motivates me, and this choice that turns up in lots of different hobbies that I’ve had. I tend to pick up a hobby, have it for six months, and then drop it again. In every hobby there’s a choice between doing things the old way and doing things a new way, and for some reason I kept on feeling pulled toward doing things the old way.
So that’s one part of the research process: to reflect on just what’s going on with me. And partly then that got me into thinking about a body of research in leisure studies where people think about the serious leisure perspective — the idea that hobbies are picking up aspects of our jobs, like career development and capacity development.
And then, on the other hand, I wanted to look through the history of philosophy, trying to find examples of people engaging with skill nostalgia. So yeah, we get it in Plato. You can find it in Rousseau, in Kant. Marx is, I think, also really animated by skill nostalgia. So understanding how those two things connect together was what I was really trying to do.
Lesley McClurg: And we’ll kind of get into that history later in the show. But these hobbies — baking, ceramics, gardening — what do they offer people that our current jobs do not? And why are we kind of drawn to them?
Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so I think there’s two ways to think about hobbies.
One is to think that hobbies are just kinds of leisure, and they’re things that we do just for the purposes of pleasure. They’re like reading a book or looking at a beautiful painting, right? They’re not motivated by means-end reasoning. We’re not trying to get something. And maybe some hobbies are kind of like that.
But I think lots of hobbies do look a lot like work. So it’s kind of striking if you think through the list of hobbies that you just described. Those are all activities which, 50 or 100 years ago, would have been employment. It’s a trade that someone might have had.
And so I think the thought here is that there’s something which is like work involved in these hobbies. And plausibly, the thing that we’re trying to get, that we’re not getting in the rest of our jobs and the rest of our lives, is skill development, right? It’s complex practical domains where we’re developing our capacities, generating knowledge, and dealing with difficult practical problems.
That’s the thing that I think, if you think about hobbies as work, is really motivating people to go out and get lots of different hobbies.
Lesley McClurg: And then is that at all connected to why we dream of running away to work on a farm, or to live off the grid, or even the rise of, you know, tradwives — a sort of romanticized reach toward the past? I mean, I know I created kind of fantastical versions of living on a commune in my 20s. We have this idea that life was better back then.
Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, good. So this is the moment where we want to be critical about our emotions and critical about skill nostalgia.
It’s animated by what I think is a real ideal for work — that we want skilled work where we’re doing useful things and developing our capacities. But because it’s tied up with nostalgia, and nostalgia is a really tricky emotion, you can get pulled into, “Yeah, there was something good in the past. People had skills,” to, “Oh, maybe the whole way of life was good. Maybe it’s better to live in an agrarian society than it is to live in a modern service-oriented economy.”
And maybe that’s true, but that’s a big claim, right? That’s the thing that we want to be really critical of. And this kind of reactionary slide that can happen with skill nostalgia, I think, is something to be worried about.
Lesley McClurg: I mean, what realities of the past are we leaving out when we romanticize? I mean, you give some really specific examples. Kind of walk us through why this is so dangerous.
Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so just thinking about the impulse to this kind of Georgic nostalgia — nostalgia toward an agrarian form of life — you feel the nostalgia for summer days where there’s plenty of food around and you’re outside and you’re doing something kind of worthwhile that’s going to feed you through the rest of the year.
And you don’t think about the years of famine, the high rates of malnutrition, and just how difficult it is to work on a farm. How much of that work is not meaningful and self-developing, but is just doing the same thing again and again, getting up really early and doing the same thing just to keep the processes going.
So you kind of lose the reality of work if you just get pulled along by this kind of rose tint of nostalgia.
Lesley McClurg: Do you think, though, that as we kind of reach toward these crafts that are more hands-on, that we are reaching a little bit more toward the earth and kind of our connection to nature? I mean, I know I often feel so wrapped in plastic and screens, and there’s just something very human about getting your fingernails dirty.
Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s right.
There’s something I’ve felt a lot in gardening. I’ve got a small garden back at my house, and I grow vegetables there and flowers. One thing I’ve really noticed is I think totally differently about the year now that I’m gardening. It’s all about what’s going to be coming out and flowering, what’s going to be growing at different times. What’s the time to plant the courgettes?
That’s a really rich connection that I wouldn’t have had if I wasn’t spending weekends and evenings outside with my hands in the dirt.
Lesley McClurg: Yeah, like the cycles. We’re kind of more connected to a grittier version than our digitized, sterilized lives allow us to be.
Stuart in Oakland writes, “Art dates back to cave drawings. It’s ancient, and it has never left us. We just had our national craft exhibition last month. We have museums, galleries, studios, and schools that have continually supported and encouraged the use of and making of usable objects, as well as objects of beauty. The connection between humans and creativity has never left us.”
We’d love to hear from you, listeners. Have you taken up a hands-on hobby? What is it? Tell us about it. Is it a distraction, a relief? Do you feel nostalgic for crafts and hobbies of the past? Maybe are you worried about how AI or technology is going to disrupt your work?
Email your comments and questions to forum@kqed.org, or find us on any of the social platforms — Discord, Bluesky, Facebook — or jump on the phone and give us a call at 866-733-6786. Again, that’s 866-733-6786.
A trusted press is essential to a thriving democracy, but recent studies show that Americans’ confidence in news media has hit record lows — regardless of factors like geography and political affiliation. To blame are growing perceptions of bias and a sense that news reporting that doesn’t feel applicable to everyday life. We look at why so few people trust the media — and what could be done to change that.
Guests:
Madeleine Bair, journalist, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano
John Biewen, Scene on Radio producer and host, Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Lesley McClurg: Welcome to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg. I am in today for Mina Kim.
And it is a very strange moment to be a journalist. Apparently, reporting gigs are declining faster than jobs in coal mining. And those of us in public radio have spent the last year grappling with really deep loss of funding, federal funding, really painful layoffs. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. People tell me all the time they can’t listen anymore because the news is simply just too depressing. Many Americans have more faith in podcasters than reporters because at least they offer some kind of entertainment.
So what does that all mean? What has journalism gotten wrong? And where do we go from here?
We are joined by John Biewen. He is host of Scene on Radio. It’s a podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University that recently investigated Americans’ news and information crisis.
We’re also joined by Madeleine Bair. She’s founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s a publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.
Welcome to you both.
John Biewen: Thank you. Good to be here.
Lesley McClurg: John, how do you define the news and information crisis? I have my own ideas of what that is, but how do you define it?
John Biewen: Well, I think there are a few key aspects to it. It’s multifaceted.
One is, you mentioned journalism jobs going away. Well, that’s a crisis that I think the news media itself has not done a very good job of covering. Sure, you can find news articles about local news in particular struggling and newspapers going out of business and the loss of journalism jobs. But I don’t think most people have really grasped it.
When my co-host, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and I launched this latest season of Scene on Radio, which we simply call The News, I wasn’t aware of the depth and the extent of that crisis: that we’ve lost three-quarters of the working journalists at the local level in this country in 25 years or so. It’s absolutely extraordinary. And there are a lot of ramifications for communities and for democracy that we could talk more about. So that’s one facet.
The other certainly is trust. You mentioned Gallup. In 2025, they found that less than 30% of Americans have even some trust that the news media will report the facts fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s way down from a few decades ago. And there are many reasons for that, I think, and many facets to it that we discuss.
And then there’s this general sense that there are a gazillion sources all saying very different things, so we don’t have a shared narrative in this country. And when you’re trying to run a democracy, that’s another kind of crisis.
Lesley McClurg: For your podcast, you talk to people who definitely don’t have a lot of confidence in the media. You went to the Border Belt. This is a rural part of North Carolina. Can you paint us a picture of this community?
John Biewen: Yeah. So this is a section of southeastern North Carolina along the South Carolina border, several counties where I spent time talking to a range of people.
These are counties that are historically, and still relatively, low income. They’re very, very diverse, with large white, Black, and Indigenous populations. It’s a place that has lost a whole bunch of manufacturing jobs, like many rural places in the U.S. over the last two or three decades.
It’s also a place that has gone from mostly Democratic in presidential elections, quite recently, to very solidly red, really just in the age of Trump, which is really interesting and kind of surprising.
So, yeah, we found a lot of people who have a lot of mistrust of the media.
The other really, really important thing to say about the Border Belt is that most of these counties are news deserts, meaning there is very little in the way of local news sources about what’s going on in their communities.
Most of these counties had relatively strong independent newspapers that might have had a handful of reporters covering the city council, the school board, local business, and things like that up until 10 or 20 years ago. Now they’ve been bought by chains, and the newspapers typically have one full-time person who is kind of overseeing reporting on high school sports and a couple of features. They no longer have anybody to send even to cover the basics of what’s going on in local government.
So there’s a sense of just not being able to get information about what’s going on in the community.
Lesley McClurg: And what are people in that community saying about the news? What do they think of the press and the local media, the news media in general? What’s the relationship now, given that there aren’t local reporters on the ground? What do they think of, like, The New York Times, et cetera?
John Biewen: Yeah, I think if you ask, this won’t surprise you. We talked to people who mostly get their news from Fox News and Newsmax and other right-wing sources who think that the rest of the news media — the mainstream media, TV networks, the national papers, and so on — are biased.
Particularly, they would say they are very anti-Trump, and that impression causes folks to sort of tune it out.
One of the effects is that if you don’t have a local news source telling you what’s going on in your own community, you’re probably filling the time that you might have spent reading your local newspaper or listening to a local radio station with national news sources that you already pay attention to — or, frankly, more likely, social media and things like that, which are even more polarized and feed you the things you already think are true. There have been studies showing that this actually exacerbates polarization.
Lesley McClurg: Did you get a sense or an understanding of why people swung from Democratic to more Trumpian? What sort of led or pushed them toward the right?
John Biewen: Yeah, I think you have to be really careful about attributing it to a single thing. I think there’s a combination of factors.
There were economic changes that took place. I alluded to the loss of manufacturing jobs. There were people who, after the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, lost faith in what either of the major parties were doing. Since the Democrats were in charge at that time, a lot of the frustration landed there.
But to the extent that we could tie it to changes in the media, it was some of the things I was just talking about, and the sense that we’ve had a 60-year drumbeat in this country, going back at least to Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration, of conservatives endlessly shouting that you shouldn’t trust the mainstream news media because they are left-wing or left-leaning.
That has taken on an even sharper, more incessant tone under Trump, where you have a president who, for much of the last 10 years, has dominated the public discourse and casually calls the news “fake news.” I think that has given people a kind of license to simply write off things in the news that they would rather not hear.
Lesley McClurg: Madeleine, your reporting focuses on Latino and Mayan immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. What are you hearing from them about their relationship to the press and to the news media?
Madeleine Bair: Yeah. So before really starting El Tímpano, we spent nearly a year simply listening — sitting down and talking with hundreds of immigrants and community leaders in East Oakland to ask them, “What do you want to see in local media? What do you want to change in local media?”
The biggest comment that we heard was simply, más información. People wanted more information.
When I was listening to John’s podcast and the conversations he was having with rural voters in North Carolina, it wasn’t that different. People had seen their local news decline.
For Spanish speakers here in the Bay Area, despite the fact that there are nearly two million Bay Area residents who speak Spanish at home, there are so few sources of news and information serving that community.
Immigrants were primarily referring to the big broadcast networks of Univision and Telemundo. There are great reporters there, but if that is your only source of news and information, those outlets are covering a nine-plus-county metropolitan area in maybe less than a half hour each day. There’s only so much local reporting they can do that’s relevant to people’s lives in different corners of the Bay Area.
People told us they wanted more information, more local information, more information that’s relevant to their daily lives. They also said, “I want actionable information.”
One of the other biggest pieces of feedback that we heard about existing Spanish-language news was that it only covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can use to take action.
We led this listening process during the first Trump administration, and so many people told us, “I just avoid the news because it leaves me in a panic.”
So the news was, in some ways, harmful to their own mental health.
Lesley McClurg: And how do they feel their communities are profiled or presented to the world through the media?
Madeleine Bair: Essentially as victims — very much so.
I recall one conversation that I had with a community organizer who was a leader in an organization of immigrant women in the East Bay. She told me that, previous to that job, she had worked as a lawyer and would oftentimes get calls from reporters asking to interview her for her expertise.
Yet in this role, working as a community organizer for an organization made up of immigrant women, reporters called her looking for profiles of people who were victims.
I think that’s how she personally experienced the media, and I think it’s how a lot of community members see themselves reflected in the media.
Lesley McClurg: We’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. We’re joined by John Biewen, host of Scene on Radio. That’s a podcast out of Duke University that recently investigated our news and information crisis.
And you just heard Madeleine Bair, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano.
We’ll be right back after this break. I’m Lesley McClurg. Stay with us.
You’re listening to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg. I’m in today for Mina Kim, and we’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. This is across political parties.
We are joined by John Biewen. He’s host of Scene on Radio. That’s a podcast about America’s news and information crisis.
And Madeleine Bair, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s the publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.
We would love to hear from you. Do you trust us? Why or why not? Can you remember when you potentially started to lose confidence in the media? Do you want more local news? Why or why not?
You can email your comments and questions to forum@kqed.org, or you can find us on any of the social channels — Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram. We’re @KQEDForum. Or you can jump on the phone now and give us a call at 866-733-6786.
When Claire Stapleton started working at Google in 2007 she was a true believer, becoming known as the “Bard of Google,” by spinning positive narratives of the company. But by 2018, she was so disillusioned by the company culture that she helped organize the company’s largest walkout to protest how Google handled sexual harassment cases. We talk to Stapleton about her takes on the myths and the reality of Google and her new book “Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and my Escape from Big Tech.”
Guest:
Claire Stapleton, “Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles — And All of Us”
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Rachael Myrow: This is Forum. I’m Rachael Myrow, in for Alexis Madrigal.
When Claire Stapleton was issued a Google propeller cap in 2007, the company’s unofficial motto was still, “Don’t be evil.” She wrote the speeches, blog posts, and weekly all-hands emails that helped prop up the mythology, even as the gap widened between that motto and how an advertising business actually makes its money.
But over time, the scales fell from Claire’s eyes. And in 2018, she helped organize 20,000 coworkers to walk off the job. Her memoir about how all that happened is called Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech.
Claire Stapleton, welcome. Thank you for joining us here on Forum.
Claire Stapleton: Thank you so much. As a Bay Area native, this is huge. I love KQED.
Rachael Myrow: Where’d you grow up in the Bay Area?
Claire Stapleton: Oakland.
Rachael Myrow: Oakland. All right. East Bay represent.
For the young ones out there in our listening audience, it’s hard to imagine Google was once a startup in a garage. It took a long time for it to grow into the world-dominating behemoth it’s become.
You’re a professional storyteller, Claire. Give us the short version. Bring them up to speed.
Claire Stapleton: I think what’s most shocking for the Gen Z audience is that Google, for a brief time, seemed to be able to reinvent the corporation as something really cool and fresh and innovative, and all the young people got to go work there.
They created these campuses around the world, but really Mountain View, California, was where it all began, kind of growing out of the Palo Alto garage. They had amazing food, and you could bike around. The idea was to collect all these smart, idealistic young people together, work on the world’s biggest problems, and create this sort of techno-utopia, starting with a new kind of work environment.
Rachael Myrow: Now bring us up to the aughts. You weren’t just taking a job at a Silicon Valley phenomenon. You were going to make the world a better place.
Claire Stapleton: Seems a little cringe to imagine believing that now, I guess.
But yeah, I was an English major in college, so I had no coding background. I was not an engineer. They did a big push of college recruiting in 2007. Just a bit of context: that was one year before the financial meltdown. They would never do college recruiting on that scale again, even though Google’s added so many people to its ranks.
It was this big year of young talent, and I was drawn in by the lore and the idea of, “Here’s the spaceship. Can you get a seat on the spaceship? Can you climb aboard?”
The job in the communications department was pitched as helping Google tell its story. And of course, the story seemed altruistic and exciting: here we are together, the biggest team project ever, to change the world.
Rachael Myrow: So describe one of the emails that led colleagues to dub you the bard of Google.
Claire Stapleton: Yeah, it was a very basic logistical email.
One of my first tasks and projects was working on TGIF, which was a weekly staff meeting hosted by Larry and Sergey. It was very grassroots, down-home. Imagine Larry and Sergey, the founders of Google, were already billionaires multiple times over by that point, but they were sort of folksy, approachable young guys in their 30s.
Every single week, they would go to Mountain View, stand in the big auditorium in front of employees, and talk a little bit about what happened during the week. They’d read a script our team worked on, and then they’d answer questions from employees.
One of my tasks was to send around an email sharing the logistics of the meeting and how to tune in. Google was expanding a lot, so we kept moving the broadcast around to different buildings in Mountain View and to Seattle, Kirkland, Boulder, Austin — all the new offices as they were cropping up.
It was a rote logistical email that I volunteered to send because I was the only person who wanted to do it. I was also giving campus tours, so I was really ingesting the company’s talking points, which were a mix of progressive workplace philosophy and exciting technological vision.
So I sort of riffed on it. Google was a very tight-knit, quirky culture. People made internal memes, and there was lots of chatter on email groups and that sort of thing. It was easy to become a character in the culture and lore of Google.
The emails were slightly intellectual, very much in the spirit of Google, and very weird. Not all of them hold up when I look back on them. They’re full of inside jokes and references. But something about them captured the zeitgeist of the time, and I became a bit of a company mascot.
Rachael Myrow: You worked closely with Larry Page, a man who talked about solving death as if it were something that could be solved and enthusiastically spent a lot of Google money financing scientific moonshots.
Looking back now, with the benefit of age and time, was all that techno-optimism real, or just a calculated snow job?
Claire Stapleton: I think it was an amazing time capsule.
When I was writing the book, I was fascinated to look back at this period when Larry Page — who was the founder of Google — had taken the reins back as CEO in 2011 after Eric Schmidt had served in that role for many years.
This was right as Google was becoming Alphabet, a huge, complicated holding company with many portfolio companies.
Larry was obsessed with workplace philosophy. Google should feel like a family. Everybody needed to feel like they were working on meaningful problems, solving humanity’s biggest problems.
I think it was sincere. I think he really believed Google was this unprecedented historical company with tremendous resources and all these great people who had poured everything into it.
When he said things like curing cancer was too small a goal and that we should be thinking about curing death altogether and dramatically extending the human lifespan, I think that reflected a strain of techno-bro thinking that everything can be treated as a computing problem. That conveniently erased a lot of inherent challenges in the world, as well as human complexities.
But I think he truly believed Google could make the world a better place if it simply kept pouring in people, resources, and data.
Sadly, looking back, this was also the moment Google started to become really corporate and really bloated. Internal politics and executive culture began shifting it away from the long-term, freewheeling startup spirit it had once had.
I think Larry tried to combat that by creating Google X, this moonshot factory full of ambitious technological projects. And yet the company came out of that period pretty unrecognizable. When we look back now, its defining technological innovation has really been online advertising.
Rachael Myrow: Yes, which we’re going to get to in a moment. But I still want to talk about what you describe in the book as you started bouncing from one department to another.
You transferred to the Creative Lab, which, for those less familiar with Google — or Alphabet — was an internal interdisciplinary team of designers, writers, programmers, filmmakers, and strategists. Kind of like a startup inside the company.
On the face of it, that sounds exciting. But there you found a boys’ club. What was that like for you?
Claire Stapleton: Oh, it was an incredibly painful chapter of my career because here I had been in Mountain View — again, a company mascot, writing the company mythology sort of on my own — and I’d gotten shoulder-tapped to move to this really exciting center of it all, the Creative Lab in New York.
On the face of it, it felt like a perfect fit. Here they are doing the Super Bowl ads, branding new products. It felt like, “Okay, this is the kind of thing I’ve been doing, but now it’ll be for the outside world and on a bigger scale.”
It was, I think, a very classic Mad Men-esque creative agency culture, which was nothing like the Google I’d experienced.
I moved to New York and started in this department, rosy-cheeked, ready to put pencil to paper, despite having no formal copywriting background. It was a complete nightmare from start to finish.
I had a boss who, to this day, I wonder why he hired me. I was never trained, never really managed, and was just fishing around for projects. A coworker told me, “Oh yeah, the boss really likes working with the kind of guy he can get a beer with after work. He’s a real guy’s guy.”
And I’m thinking, “What? I thought I was in the progressive workplace of the future, and here I am dealing with sexism 101.”
Meanwhile, when I was on projects or working on initiatives in this group, the job was still all about manufacturing and crafting the magic of Google and the utopia. They put everything on steroids. It was, “We’re even more of a cyber-utopia. We’re going to change the world,” all this sort of rhetoric.
The cognitive dissonance was so intense — from my day-to-day workplace, where you got 10 minutes with the boss, to having to manufacture the corporate BS. It was really intolerable.
At the same time, it helped me understand what it feels like to be excluded. What is it like to be in an environment where there’s not equal opportunity? And how does that square with the story Google is telling about itself?
Rachael Myrow: You also spent time manufacturing enthusiasm for YouTube.
Super quickly, ahead of the next break, talk about how you came to see the algorithm driving something you described as wild, endless, and untamable.
Claire Stapleton: Yes. YouTube was in a very interesting period when I moved over there in 2015. This was a year before the first Trump presidency, and YouTube was becoming a complete behemoth.
We had groups of editors and curators trying to tell the brand story of YouTube, but meanwhile YouTube was basically the internet itself. It is a wild and untamable place.
As much as we tried to control the story about the content and its impact on society, it was truly shocking to me how much impact it had and how little control the corporation could actually exert over it.
The company couldn’t really decide how much it wanted to police its content or how much it wanted to protect users from the various abuses you can find on the platform. It was just a very, very complicated moment.
Rachael Myrow: We are talking about the work culture behind the world’s most popular search engine, Google, and so much more.
We’re joined by Claire Stapleton, author of Don’t Be Evil. Have you worked at Google? Do Claire’s descriptions square with your experience?
