Category Archives: Podcast

Podcast

How the U.S. Auto Industry Is Losing the EV Race

Audio

Airdate: Tuesday, July 21, 2026 at 9 AM

There was a time when U.S. automakers dominated the global car industry  with their products and innovations. But when it comes to electric vehicles, which accounted for a quarter of global auto sales in 2025, the U.S. is barely a player.  China now builds roughly three-quarters of the world’s EVs; the United States about five percent.  We’ll talk about how the widening technology gap and lukewarm federal support for clean vehicles threatens the entire U.S. auto industry with obsolescence, and what California is doing about it.

Guests:

  • Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law; host, Climate Break podcast
  • Susan Helper, economics professor, Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western University; formerly Chief Economist for the Commerce Department during the Obama Administration
  • Matthew Shaer, contributing writer, New York Times Magazine

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

In a big new story in The New York Times Magazine, the American EV has been crushed. Will it take the auto industry with it?

Matthew Shaer asks an important question about the future of the world: If the globe goes electric, but the U.S. remains wedded to internal combustion engines, what happens to our carmakers?

Already, Chinese-made cars represent 75% of new electric cars made on Earth, while U.S. companies make a small fraction of that. With that dominance comes dominance in battery and charging technologies, among other things. Already, Chinese electric cars have better range and faster charging than American ones, and they’re cheaper.

It’s almost like a rerun of the Japanese arrival on the global automobile scene, but with even higher stakes. The damage is already occurring. For example, in 2016, Ford and GM sold 11 million cars abroad. By 2024, that number had fallen 50%. That’s made U.S. carmakers more dependent on the U.S. market at exactly the moment when our country is diverging from the global norm.

So here to talk with us about what might happen to Detroit if these trends continue, we’re joined by Matthew Shaer, contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, who wrote the piece. Thanks so much for joining us.

Matthew Shaer: Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re also joined by Susan Helper, an economics professor in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Helper served as the chief economist for the Commerce Department during the Obama administration.

And we’ve got Ethan Elkind, who’s director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law and host of the podcast Climate Break. Welcome back, Ethan.

Ethan Elkind: Thank you. Good to be back with you.

Alexis Madrigal: So, Matt, let’s start with you. Your piece starts out with one of the most, maybe, tragicomic stories about electric vehicles. Ford touted this particular SUV as, quote, “your personal bullet train.” What was that car, what happened to it, and how is this symbolic, for you, of what’s going on with our car industry?

Matthew Shaer: Yeah, I spent a long time thinking about how to lead off this piece, what the perfect example for the case I wanted to make was. And I settled on this car that was unveiled at a Ford investor event a few years ago.

It was going to be a three-row EV, so a pretty big EV, an SUV. It was going to have a big battery. It was going to carry a whole family something like 350 miles, which at the time was a big claim for a battery.

Ford sunk tens of millions, hundreds of millions, into the development of EVs — this EV and EVs like it. They had hired away this guy, Doug Field, from Tesla — and before that he’d been at Apple — to oversee it.

They roll it out. They say, “This is going to change everything. This is what America has been waiting for.”

And sure enough, a year goes by: “Actually, we’re a little delayed. The costs are running over.”

Another year goes by: “Actually, we’re going to cancel it. We’re going to can this thing altogether because it’s too much money.”

Well, let me step back. The reason I use this as the example is that between when Ford unveiled the “bullet train” and the time they canceled it, everything changed.

We have guests here who are considerably smarter about this than I am, but the world changed. We went from a very rosy view of what might be possible for the American EV industry to utter chaos.

So this car gets canceled. A lot of cars get canceled. After this, in the story, I just kind of go through a laundry list of all these vehicles that have been delayed or canceled. And it brings us to where we are today.

Anyway, I’ll stop talking.

Alexis Madrigal: This all makes a ton of sense. I mean, one of the things that changed, though, right, is that basically Chinese EV manufacturing, both for their domestic market and around the world, just takes off.

Matthew Shaer: Yeah, it takes off. It’s really two things at once.

China’s business takes off. They’ve been pouring resources into this business for a while, and they’re finally achieving this critical momentum.

At the same time, in the U.S., we’re — I’m going to quote one of your other guests, who gave me a great quote about what it’s like to be a U.S. automaker. I was talking to Susan about this, and she said, “It’s like trying to turn around a warship in a tiny space.”

The U.S. industry is trying to anticipate what’s going to come out of Washington in terms of EV policy and trying to adjust. One minute we’re hot for EVs; the next minute we’re bringing back coal and gas-guzzling trucks forever.

If you’re a carmaker, that’s hard.

So yes, it’s China, but it’s also what’s happening in D.C. at the same time.

Alexis Madrigal: Susan Helper, you’ve been following the American automobile industry since, I think, 1982, when you began writing your Ph.D. dissertation on the industry. So you’ve seen several waves of innovation. You’ve seen several waves of foreign competition in the U.S. domestic market. We’ve seen the rise of Tesla. We’ve seen all these things.

What do you think is most significant about the particular moment that we’re in right now in 2026?

Susan Helper: Well, I think one thing that’s different from the previous crises in the auto industry — and I guess I was writing about the auto industry during the time of the first Japanese challenge to the behemoth of the American auto industry — is that I feel like the automakers are very aware of the challenge.

When the Japanese were coming up, it was kind of like they went through all the stages of grief — denial, bargaining, and finally acceptance.

I feel like — I mean, I have some quibbles with some of their product strategies and also their financial strategies — but I feel they are very aware of what the Chinese are doing and, unfortunately, are struggling to meet that challenge.

Alexis Madrigal: One of the things I find so interesting is that you have this big report that you released on the EV industry with some colleagues, which described U.S. automakers as existing on, quote, “a shrinking island of ICE” — ICE in this case being internal combustion engines, not immigration enforcement.

What would that future look like if the U.S. continues to pump out tons of oil and remains this petro-dominant economy and automotive industry while the rest of the world moves quite rapidly toward EVs?

Susan Helper: I think that would be bad for U.S. consumers of autos, for automakers, and for the nation as a whole.

I can say why for each.

Electric vehicles are simply a superior product. Once we deal with the range anxiety and get the charging built out, electric vehicles are quieter, they accelerate better, and they require less maintenance.

Eventually they’re going to overcome the cost differential and the range issues that we have, particularly in the U.S.

That’s bad because it hamstrings U.S. automakers in their foreign markets. It also hamstrings the U.S. supply chain as a whole.

And I think this is important for your listeners here in California. I should point out that all of my co-authors except me are in California — longtime California residents. They, like me, are very worried about the development of what we call the electric tech stack: batteries, motors, chips.

Autos are just huge volume — 16 million cars a year. Nothing else begins to approach that.

So if you have autos, you have enormous economies of scale for your products and these dynaAlexis Madrigal: Let’s bring in Ethan here. I mean, California is a place we focus on a lot, at least for us here on Forum. Can the so-called fourth-largest economy in the world just sort of make up for U.S. national policy? Can California become its own EV market?

Ethan Elkind: Well, that used to be the case, that California really was leading the country and sort of dragging the country along on the electric vehicle revolution.

We had really strong policies requiring automakers to produce and sell electric vehicles, and we had generous incentives. But we’re hamstrung at this point because we live within the borders of the United States.

We’re dealing with tariff policies. We’re dealing with rollbacks of federal policies. Specifically, the federal tax credit, which really helped bolster California’s goals, was eliminated by Congress last year, and that played a major role in decreasing demand.

We’ve since backfilled that with a new state incentive program, which we can talk about.

Also, what Congress did last year that was really devastating to California was vote to invalidate our mandate requiring automakers to produce zero-emission vehicles. That mandate was central to the rise of the electric vehicle industry.

Companies like Tesla made billions because other automakers couldn’t comply with the standard and paid Tesla for the credits it generated by exceeding California’s standard. It was such a central policy, and it’s been invalidated by Congress.

It’s being litigated now. I think there’s a strong case that the action Congress took was not legal, but we’re relying on very conservative courts to make that decision.

So California is still doing what it can with the tools it has to invest and subsidize, but we’ve lost a lot of tools because of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.

Alexis Madrigal: These federal incentive programs — how crucial were they? How cost-sensitive, how price-sensitive, is the EV buyer out there?

Ethan Elkind: Well, we saw a major shift when the federal tax credit went away. As I said, it was eliminated last year in the Republican tax bill, and it expired after the third quarter.

We saw a massive amount of demand pulled into the third quarter, and then sales absolutely plummeted in the fourth quarter without that federal tax credit.

Now, Susan, as an economist, could weigh in on this, but some would argue that it simply pulled a lot of demand forward. We still saw depressed sales in the first quarter as well, though now they’re starting to come back up.

So there is the possibility that some of these incentives were overly generous, and the automakers that are still selling EVs are able to price them more competitively.

For example, we’re seeing Rivian come out with its R2 vehicle, which a lot of people think is going to be a really big seller. Tesla has also been able to discount some of its products to make up for the loss of the tax credit.

But there’s no doubt that it made a big difference for people. Taking a few thousand dollars off a new vehicle can make a huge difference and make these electric vehicles cost-competitive with their internal combustion counterparts.

I do agree with Susan that, in the long run, the way battery technology is going, these cars are going to become so much cheaper than internal combustion engine vehicles.

We really just needed that federal tax credit to accelerate the market. That transformation will happen anyway — just at a slower pace now.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about electric vehicles and the failure of the American auto industry to come out with EVs that rival Chinese brands like BYD and Geely.

We’re joined by Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law.

We’ve got Susan Helper from Case Western Reserve University, and Matthew Shaer, contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.

Podcast

Iran Conflict Raises Prospect of Forever War

Audio

Airdate: Tuesday, July 21, 2026 at 10 AM

More than four months after President Trump predicted a short war with Iran, the conflict is intensifying and broadening. The ceasefire agreement between the US and Iran has collapsed, leaving passage through the Strait of Hormuz restricted and the two nations on a war footing: the United States has carried out days of sustained airstrikes while Iran targets American allies in the Gulf. To many analysts, it’s raising the specter of a forever war. We talk about where U.S. policy goes from here.

Guests:

  • Max Boot, senior fellow for national security studies, Council on Foreign Relations; columnist, Washington Post; author, “Reagan: His Life and Legend”
  • Vivian Salama, staff writer, The Atlantic
  • Kevin Kiley, U.S. Congressman representing California’s 3rd District

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.

Nearly five months after President Trump predicted a short war with Iran, the conflict is intensifying and broadening. The ceasefire agreement has collapsed, leaving passage through the Strait of Hormuz severely restricted and the two nations on a war footing. The U.S. has carried out days of sustained airstrikes, while Iran targets U.S.-allied nations in the Gulf, and three more U.S. service members have died over the weekend from the violence.

To many analysts, the escalation is raising the specter of a forever war.

Joining me to talk about what that means and the impact it could have at home and abroad: Vivian Salama, staff writer at The Atlantic. Vivian, welcome to Forum.

Thanks for having me. Glad to have you.

Also, Max Boot is with us, senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for The Washington Post. Max, glad to have you back as well.

Max Boot: Glad to be back.

Mina Kim: So, Max, do you think this conflict is taking on characteristics of a forever war? Would you agree with that?

Max Boot: Absolutely, because Trump knew how to start this war. It’s very easy to start bombing Iran, which he did at the end of February, but he has no idea how to end the war.

He apparently started the conflict under the extremely naïve assumption that if he just bombed Iran for a few days, the whole regime would collapse, the nuclear program would end, and he would achieve this, you know, Valhalla in the Middle East.

Obviously, anybody who’s a halfway serious analyst of warfare, of Iran, or of anything else knows that was a fantasy from the get-go. Now that fantasy has been brutally exposed, and clearly Trump desperately wants to get out of this war, but he can’t because Iran will not relinquish control over the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, is the choke point through which 20% of the world’s oil passes.

So Trump is trapped, and the entire world is trapped. My concern is that the conflict will continue to escalate with dire consequences, not only for the region but for the entire world, and in particular for the U.S. economy and the global economy.

Mina Kim: Hmm. Vivian, your latest Atlantic piece is called “The Forever Negotiation.” Tell me why you chose the word “forever” and what’s happened since the Memorandum of Understanding was signed June 17.

Vivian Salama: Well, I took it upon myself to explore the various clauses — all 14 of them — in the Memorandum of Understanding, which was signed by President Trump at the Versailles Palace last month during a dinner. It was very randomly signed.

I wanted to do a bit of an audit of the MOU to see where we were. They were supposed to be talking for 60 days in an effort to get a more concrete, long-term deal — a more detailed deal. We had hit the halfway point, and in exploring the various clauses, I found that the vast majority of them, at least those that were supposed to be either immediately implemented or implemented within a 30-day time frame, had been violated.

That included the clause saying they would immediately stop hostilities and rein in their troops. The clauses that talked about the economic incentives that were to immediately go into effect for Iran have been withdrawn by the U.S. because of the renewed hostilities.

One after another, I looked at the clauses and realized they were being violated. Yet whenever I pushed U.S. officials, Iranian officials, or officials from Arab countries that have a stake in this, they all said talks are still continuing, despite the fact that these clauses have been violated.

Mina Kim: So that’s the only clause that has not been violated.

Vivian Salama: Literally. There’s a clause in there — I believe it was number three — that said both parties would commit to talking for 60 days.

So I noted that was the only one that wasn’t fully violated, except there’s an asterisk next to that because they are taking a timeout.

That’s why we called it “The Forever Negotiation.” We’ve entered this cycle of tit for tat, although since it was published, that tit for tat has gotten a lot more intense. Obviously we’ve seen a few more casualties, including American troops who were killed.

So this is definitely getting deeper and deeper into the realm of serious hostilities again, all the while talks don’t seem to be yielding any concrete results.

Mina Kim: Let me invite listeners in.

Do you think this is becoming a forever war? Why or why not? And if you do, what do you think has gone wrong?

Email forum@kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786.

Vivian, what does that mean for the country in broad strokes? What could a lasting state of conflict mean for the country and the global economy?

Vivian Salama: The implications are enormous across the board.

First of all, there’s the loss of life. We did see at least three soldiers killed in action over the past couple of days, and of course that goes to the top of the list. The longer we’re at war, the greater the potential for more soldiers being killed in action.

We also have a president who promised that forever wars would be over, in part because he did not want to send American sons and daughters out to die in a war when the focus should be domestic. So that is definitely at the top of the list.

Then, of course, you mentioned the Strait of Hormuz being closed and the enormous global economic implications that come with it. You talk about rising food prices, rising gas prices, all of which will be increasingly under pressure the longer this continues.

There’s also the fact that the federal government is so preoccupied with events overseas. Something like this can absorb so much bandwidth within the administration, all while domestic problems continue to pile up.

As I covered President Trump’s 2024 campaign, one of the biggest things he complained about was that there was too much attention given to events overseas. He argued that this undermined the premise he campaigned on, which was that “America First” should be the priority. That was his mantra, and a number of his closest allies feel he’s betrayed that.

Mina Kim: Max, what would you add with regard to the cost of this war — the economic costs so far and in the future?

Max Boot: It could get a lot worse.

It’s already pretty severe because you’re seeing gasoline prices go over $4 a gallon. That’s hitting Americans in their pocketbooks.

It hasn’t been catastrophic so far, in part because I think the oil markets and the stock markets are all kind of operating under the “TACO” theory — that Trump always chickens out. So they assume that as soon as the economic repercussions become severe enough, Trump will make a deal.

Clearly that’s what he was trying to do last month with the Memorandum of Understanding. The problem is the Iranians increasingly look like they don’t want a deal because they don’t trust Trump.

Rather than doing a deal with the U.S., they just want to control the Strait of Hormuz and charge tolls on traffic through the strait. So it’s not clear to me that another deal is possible right now.

Unfortunately, that means the conflict could spiral. Trump keeps threatening to attack Iranian infrastructure — electrical plants, desalination plants, bridges, and so on.

He has refrained from doing that so far, in part, I think, because of the pressure he’s getting from America’s Persian Gulf allies, who are saying, “Wait a second, President Trump. If you escalate against Iran, Iran will escalate against us,” meaning the Gulf states.

You’ve already seen some attacks on a desalination plant in Kuwait, but it could get much worse. Iran clearly has a very potent arsenal of missiles and drones, so it could easily target oil facilities, desalination plants, and other vital economic and humanitarian infrastructure in the Persian Gulf states if the conflict escalates further.

You could imagine long-term damage being done to oil infrastructure that could take years to repair.

One of the most ominous developments we’ve seen this week is that the Houthis in Yemen have declared they’re going to close the Red Sea to Saudi commerce because they can control the Bab el-Mandeb Strait just as the Iranians can control the Strait of Hormuz.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait has been something of a safety valve for the Saudis because they’ve been rerouting oil exports away from the Persian Gulf through the Red Sea. But if the Houthis close the Red Sea, that’s going to remove one of the shock absorbers for the global economy.

We’re also losing another shock absorber because the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the U.S. is at its lowest level since 1983.

If this crisis continues for a few months and gets worse, I think the economic consequences are going to be very severe. We’re looking at a very real prospect of a global recession.

Mina Kim: I actually want to play a clip of the president this morning responding to a question from a journalist on the Houthi situation as he met with Lebanon’s president in the Oval Office.

Donald Trump: What is your level of concern over a blockade of the Red Sea by the Houthi rebels, opening up another front in the war?

This is what happens. So far it hasn’t happened. It might happen, but we take care of things. If something like that happens, we take care of it.

You know, we’ve done that with the Houthis before, and we haven’t heard from them in a while since we did what we did originally. That was about 45 days of very powerful action we took against the Houthis.

We’ve had no problem with the Houthis. They’ve had no problem with us for a long period of time, including during this conflict.

I think that if there is something like that, we’ll just have to take care of business.

Mina Kim: Vivian, “we’ll just have to take care of business.” What’s your reaction to how he’s approaching the potential impact that Max has laid out — the Houthis choking off yet another alternative route for oil exports?

Vivian Salama: The president, of course, in his public rhetoric tends to downplay the severity of these threats. Obviously, it goes against exactly what he had predicted, which was a swift end to a war with an adversary that would essentially be brought to its knees very easily.

He even made a comparison while talking to the press today in that same Oval Office spray, where he said, “Iran has been challenging, but it’s worked out as well as Venezuela,” referring to his military operation to remove Venezuela’s president in January.

I can tell you there’s almost nothing similar about those two operations, but he’s definitely casting this optimistic light in public.

I know for a fact, speaking to a number of people close to the president, that he’s deeply frustrated with how this is going behind the scenes. He realizes this is not going to be over anytime soon.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Vivian Salama, staff writer at The Atlantic, and Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for The Washington Post.

We’re also talking with you, our listeners, about whether you think this is becoming a forever war. Why or why not?

We’ll have more with them — and with you — after the break. Stay with us.

Podcast

Drones, Plate Readers, and AI Facial Recognition: The Surveillance Technology Watching the Bay Area

Audio

Airdate: Monday, July 20, 2026 at 9 AM

When San Francisco police drone video surveillance was accidentally livestreamed on the internet last month, it revealed how extensively, and at what great detail, the city is watched from above. The use of surveillance technology is rapidly growing in the Bay Area, with increasing drone and AI-powered surveillance networks partnering with local law enforcement and government agencies. In 2024, the SFPD launched the Real Time Investigation Center, which included major investments in license plate readers, safety cameras and a drone program and Alameda County just approved the renewal of a $2.25 million contract with Flock Safety. It’s all raising concerns about privacy, data leaks, civil liberty infringements and the use of the technology to aid immigration deportations. We’ll discuss the state of surveillance tech in the Bay Area, and what it means for public safety and privacy.

Guests:

  • Sheera Frenkel, technology reporter, The New York Times
  • Andy Greenberg, senior correspondent, WIRED
  • Dhruv Mehrotra, senior correspondent, WIRED

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

Since Measure E passed in San Francisco in 2024, the San Francisco Police Department has been beefing up its drone program, as reflected in public data about the flights. Already, SFPD drones have flown more in 2026 than in all of 2025. And what are they doing exactly?

This past week, Wired had a new report out about a set of five drone feeds that were accidentally, it seems, made publicly available. It allowed reporters Andy Greenberg and Dhruv Mehrotra to peer through the cameras of these drones as they took part in police actions.

We launch into our discussion of new and local police surveillance with that footage and those drones. Welcome to Forum, Andy and Dhruv.

Andy Greenberg: Glad to be here.

Dhruv Mehrotra: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Alexis Madrigal: So tell us what happened here, Andy. How did these feeds become somehow publicly accessible such that you could actually see them?

Andy Greenberg: Right. Well, in the middle of last month — the middle of June — I got contacted by a couple of security researchers that I know who both tend to find weird stuff on the internet a lot.

Alexis Madrigal: I’ve met those guys. Yeah.

Andy Greenberg: Yeah, you know them probably. They told me that they had found a link — basically just a web address — where the San Francisco Police Department appeared to be live-streaming a bunch of drone footage on the open web.

They were just kind of fascinated to have found this. I think maybe my tone of voice as I was speaking to them conveyed how freaked out I was by this, so they actually reported it quite quickly to the platform, the drone company that the San Francisco police use, called Skydio. Skydio alerted the SFPD, and they took this down.

By the time the link was taken offline, these two security researchers had already recorded about 40 hours of the drones’ footage. That includes both color and thermal cameras, and also all the data from the drones that was being posted to this address in real time.

Alexis Madrigal: Their flight patterns and exactly their…

Andy Greenberg: Exactly. Their geolocation, their altitude, even the names and email addresses of the pilots in the police department — all of that was on the open internet.

They shared all of that with us at Wired, and it captured some extremely sensitive stuff. I mean, people’s arrests, police interacting with all sorts of people, lots of random bystanders as well just swept up in this footage. Drones peering into people’s windows in some cases. None of it should have ever been leaked online.

That itself is a privacy breach, but it also provides us this kind of glimpse into the way the cops are using drones — this kind of modern aerial police surveillance — in a way that we’ve never quite seen before.

Alexis Madrigal: Dhruv, tell me a little more about Skydio, this drone company.

Dhruv Mehrotra: Yeah. Skydio operates DFR programs. They’re called Drone as First Responder programs.

They basically provide the drones for police departments across the country that are using drones to respond to calls for service.

The basic idea behind a DFR program is pretty simple. When a 911 call comes in, dispatchers can send a drone ahead while officers are still driving to the scene. Police departments say that gives them a faster view of what’s happening and can help them decide what kind of response is actually needed.

But the concern is that these are powerful cameras, often equipped with zoom lenses and thermal imaging, and they’re flying routinely over a city. On the way to a call, they can capture hundreds of people and pass over places like schools, pools, doctors’ offices, and backyards. Privacy advocates say these kinds of systems that Skydio is enabling need strict guardrails.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, Andy, when I was watching the footage that you included in the story, I was kind of stunned. This is quite high-resolution footage, and sometimes they zoom in and you’re really able to see individual people, individual faces, as they’re walking around on the street.

Andy Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, we posted a tiny, tiny fraction of the videos that we obtained and watched, partially because it’s very sensitive stuff, and also for copyright reasons. We don’t own them. Fair use restrictions mean we can only post a few minutes of the three hours of total flight time that we obtained.

When you watch the unredacted footage — we blurred people’s faces and tried to protect their privacy — it’s shocking to see the actual raw footage. It shows people’s cars being followed for 10 or 15 minutes at a time in some cases, when they then turn out to be apparently not involved in any crime at all.

You can see people being tackled and arrested from multiple angles, with multiple drones following single incidents and zooming in on them quite closely. It felt like a real violation.

But I should point out that some of that might sound like something you might see from police helicopter footage, which we may be more familiar with. In other cases, though, drones were peering into windows. As I said, you could see cops interacting with people inside their homes through the windows.

And on the way to these incidents, the drones are also, as Dhruv said, passing over so many homes. They’re looking, from quite a revealing angle, at patios and into the living room windows of so many San Francisco homes.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, Dhruv, one of the things you note in the story that I thought was interesting is that in these flights, when the drones are looking at all these people, no one’s looking up. No one’s going, “Hey, what is that?”

Whereas if you had a police helicopter above you, you would be like, “Hey, there’s a police helicopter up there.”

My sense is they must be flying high enough and using zoom cameras, and they’re quiet enough, that people really don’t know.

Dhruv Mehrotra: Yeah, that’s exactly right. They are fairly quiet, and they’re flying at an altitude of around 300 to 400 feet, based on some of the footage and data that we saw.

Of course, when they arrive at an incident, they’ll drop down to a lower altitude to get a better view or a better angle. But en route, they’re generally around 300 to 400 feet up in the air.

Alexis Madrigal: And Andy, has the SFPD revealed whether this kind of drone surveillance has been included in arrests? Do we know if it’s actually doing what they say it’s doing?

Andy Greenberg: Well, the SFPD does provide, on a public website, and in response to our request, the call records — essentially the codes for the type of investigation for which each of these drones was dispatched.

I guess this is maybe expected in San Francisco, but a ton of them were for auto strip/boost cases, meaning the theft of something from a car.

But then we saw, in many cases, that somebody would be followed in their car for 10 minutes under suspicion of one of these auto strip/boost cases, and then two people would get out of the car being surveilled and just go play basketball, and the drone would leave.

I don’t know if there was any real reason for suspicion at all, but those people just got followed, unbeknownst to them, for a fraction of their morning and had no idea they were being watched from above.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about how San Francisco police drone video surveillance footage was accidentally live-streamed on the internet last month, and what it says about the local state of surveillance technology in the Bay Area.

We’re joined by Wired senior correspondents Dhruv Mehrotra and Andy Greenberg.

We want to bring you into this conversation. What are your questions about how the SFPD and other local law enforcement agencies are using new surveillance technologies?

Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786.

The email address is forum@kqed.org.

I want to add one other voice to the conversation: New York Times technology reporter and author Sheera Frenkel. Welcome.

Sheera Frenkel: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: Sheera, can you bring us a little broader here? We know that the SFPD feeds this drone footage into a thing called the Real-Time Investigations Center. What’s going on there, and how does it track with what’s happening nationally with local police surveillance?

Sheera Frenkel: I think what this story does such a great job of is showing how, in this one instance, the San Francisco Police Department was operating on the basis of its needs — the data it needed to gather — and feeding it into a database that it thought would help it as a police force.

And once again, the data wasn’t secured properly. Somebody accessed it.

This is a pattern that repeats itself over and over again, not just here in California but across the country. Local law enforcement gathers faces for facial recognition programs. They gather license plate numbers. They gather footage from drones, and they use it toward their purposes.

But again and again, we’re seeing that data either get breached, hacked into, or simply accessed by federal government agencies.

Alexis Madrigal: And when we look at one police department in this entire region using all these drones and gathering all this footage, it’s not isolated, right? I mean, many cities are deploying not just drones but all these other technologies.

Sheera Frenkel: Yeah. Cities are very, very tempted by this advanced technology.

We all know that police departments constantly complain about not having the manpower to police the streets. Technology offers them cheap alternatives to traditional patrols.

It’s very tempting if you’re sitting at the head of a police force to say, “Oh, look. Instead of hiring another hundred police officers to roam the streets and gather the kind of intelligence we need, I can run a fleet of drones for a fraction of the price.”

So it’s easy to understand why these new types of technology are sold and why they’re attractive to local police departments. But there isn’t necessarily the same kind of thought and consideration put into what happens to all that data being gathered by these new technologies.

Alexis Madrigal: It’s also interesting because I think one of the things you’re noting — and we’ll get more into this later in the show — is that this data doesn’t stay where it’s supposed to stay within public agencies.

What about on the private side, though? When people have Ring cameras, or we’re going to get into surveillance in grocery stores, it seems like the same kind of slippage happens there too, right? It doesn’t just go into the database where it’s supposed to go. It goes into many databases.

Sheera Frenkel: Yeah. Something I’ve learned from the privacy advocates I’ve spoken to over the years is that data never stays where you think it’s going to stay.

Once you’ve collected data for any purpose, for any reason, you can almost be guaranteed that there’s going to be some kind of seepage — that it’s eventually going to travel elsewhere.

Data is so precious. Whether it’s your face or your travel information, whatever it is, it’s ultimately valuable. It’s a resource that the federal government wants to access, and especially under the current Trump administration, it wants that access to achieve its current goals.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about local police surveillance and how it ties into privacy concerns, public safety, and more.

We’ve got New York Times technology reporter and author Sheera Frenkel. We’ve got Wired senior correspondents Andy Greenberg and Dhruv Mehrotra.

We’re bringing you into the conversation as well. Your questions about how surveillance technology is being used by local police departments and others here in the Bay Area.

The number, of course, is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786.

Forum@kqed.org is the email address.

And, of course, you can find us on social media too, where, of course, we’re not being surveilled at all — on Bluesky, Instagram, and in our Discord community. In all those places, we’re KQED Forum.

I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Podcast

Novelist Karen Tei Yamashita on the Relevance of Japanese Internment Today

Audio

Airdate: Monday, July 20, 2026 at 10 AM

During World War II, the US government asked the Japanese American citizens it interned two questions: Would you serve in the US armed forces wherever ordered? And would you swear “unqualified allegiance” to the U.S. and forswear any allegiance to Japan’s emperor? Those two so-called loyalty questions animate acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita’s latest book, which explores that historical period of state-sanctioned violence against immigrants and citizens alike — and how this notion of “loyalty” divided, antagonized, imprisoned and expelled Japanese Americans during World War II, with long-term ramifications. Following three generations of Japanese Americans before, during and after internment, the novel is formatted as the archived letters, poetry and oral histories of Japanese Americans real and imagined. We’ll talk with Yamashita about her own family’s story and about the novel’s unfortunate relevance today. It’s called “Questions 27 & 28.”

Guest:

  • Karen Tei Yamashita, professor, UC Santa Cruz; author, “Questions 27 & 28″

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.

During World War II, the U.S. government forced the Japanese American citizens it was imprisoning to answer two questions: Would you serve in the U.S. armed forces wherever ordered? And would you swear unqualified allegiance to the U.S. and forswear any allegiance to Japan’s emperor?

The so-called loyalty questions caused division and pain and are at the center of acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita’s new novel called Questions 27 and 28. She joins me now to talk about examining internment through those two questions and the unfortunate relevance of that period today.

And listeners, how did the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans shape your own family story? What parallels do you see with our current moment?

Karen, welcome to Forum.

Karen Tei Yamashita: Thank you.

Mina Kim: So, for listeners who might not be familiar, can you first remind us what the purpose of the U.S. government’s so-called loyalty questionnaire was at the time?

Karen Tei Yamashita: Well, at the time, these folks were incarcerated, 125,000 of them, two-thirds of them were citizens. And I think, quite frankly, the government and the military realized that they had made a mistake, and they needed to release these folks, either to serve in the military or to carry on lives outside of the West Coast.

Mina Kim: So it was really a condition of release, then, to answer them?

Karen Tei Yamashita: I believe so.

Mina Kim: Yeah. How did your parents, who were incarcerated at Topaz in Utah, answer those questions?

Karen Tei Yamashita: Well, they answered yes, yes. And I believe that all of their answers to these questions — anyone who answered them — were qualified. They were qualified answers to very complicated questions, which divided the community.

So no one really answered yes, and no one really answered no if you think about their reasons for answering.

For my family, my parents wanted to leave. They wanted to get on with their lives and work outside. My father wanted to continue his education. And many chose to say yes, yes. Others chose to serve in the military. Others answered no.

But my family, by and large, said yes. And whether they believed in their answers or not, they wanted to leave camp.

Mina Kim: Yeah. And as you say, unlikely that they answered them either way with their whole being.

But for those who did answer no, reasons that have been given are that it was in protest of their unconstitutional incarceration, right? Or perhaps even that, yes, they did feel like this was a country that had betrayed them, and they felt more of a connection.

What happened to the so-called No-No Boys, which was a derogatory slur applied to them, right?

Karen Tei Yamashita: Well, the No-No Boys who were resisters were in prison for the duration of the war. And some of the no-nos were sent to Department of Justice camps. They were physically in prison also for the rest of the internment.

And then the families were sent to a place called Tule Lake, which was in Northern California. It became a segregation prison.

Many of them were forced to renounce their citizenship, if they had citizenship, or to repatriate to Japan. So several thousand of them were put on ships, and they returned to Japan.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Can you say a little bit more about how these questions divided and really antagonized the Japanese Americans in the camps?

Karen Tei Yamashita: Well, at the time, there were many discussions within the blocks about how people should answer. And I think there were movements to try to get everyone to answer in the same way.

But, of course, people wanted to answer independently, and they had different reasons for their answers.

And yes, it completely divided the camps and the folks in them. It put them at loggerheads. It put them against each other. Families were divided. Friendships were broken.

Mina Kim: Yeah. You talk about how the Japanese American Citizens League encouraged yes, yes, in the sense that Japanese Americans needed to show that they were 200% American.

And then, of course, we talked about the sort of opposite feeling and view of the people who answered no. I can imagine that must have been incredibly difficult.

Karen Tei Yamashita: Incredibly difficult, yeah.

And also, these were differences that moved through the community for generations and many years later, until the deaths of these folks.

Mina Kim: Yeah.

Let me invite listeners into the conversation. How would you answer Questions 27 and 28? How did internment shape your own family story? What parallels do you see with our current moment?

You can tell us by emailing forum@kqed.org, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or by calling 866-733-6786.

So I want to talk to you about the lasting impacts of that. As you say, what have been some of the ways that has still affected Japanese Americans and maybe even more broadly, the status of Asian Americans in the U.S. today?

Karen Tei Yamashita: Well, as you know, in the ’80s there was a movement for reparations. During that period of time, Japanese Americans worked to get reparations and an apology from the United States government, which they did succeed in doing at the end of the ’80s.

But in order to do that, they had to be politically savvy about how to convince the American government and Congress that this could be done. And so they foregrounded the loyalty of Japanese Americans, especially in the military.

Mina Kim: Mm-hmm.

Karen Tei Yamashita: At the same time, those folks who resisted wanted to say, “Hey, we resisted, and we had our constitutional rights removed, and this was wrong.”

So there were a number of movements that were working in concert to try to get reparations, but also with different political agendas. Those agendas got in the way of each other.

But I would say that those folks who had protested, who were no-nos for all the different reasons, maybe took their stories and put them aside in order that we would get a positive reaction to the possibility for reparations.

And for myself, I had a play at the time that I was putting on at East West Players in Los Angeles. It was about a nationalist position that was taken by the Brazilian Japanese, and it was pretty negative.

Mako had asked me at East West Players, “Let’s go forward with the play.”

And I said, “I think we’re going to remove it for the time being because it may show that there was a nationalist position of pro-Japan nationalism.”

Mina Kim: Yeah, so you really felt that pressure.

You have also connected these questions to the model minority myth. How so, Karen?

Mina Kim: Yeah, so you really felt that pressure.

You have also connected these questions to the model minority myth. How so, Karen?

Karen Tei Yamashita: Well, think about it. If you’re 200% loyal, you’ve got to be the best citizens in the world, right?

Mina Kim: Yeah.

Karen Tei Yamashita: So I wondered how that affected who we were in school, who we were as citizens, how we projected ourselves and reproduced our vision of who we are.

Mina Kim: Yeah.

Karen Tei Yamashita: Absolutely. We couldn’t be bad. We would be sent to Japan. It was Siberia.

Mina Kim: Yeah, for so many. I mean, being asked to forswear allegiance to the emperor when they had no connection — it just goes to show the assumptions that people made.

Tell me what exploring internment through these two questions allowed you to do, or how it made you see internment in a different way, or opened up new ways to see it.

Karen Tei Yamashita: Well, I wondered first about the questions themselves. They divided my community for years, until now.

But I also wondered where they came from. I assumed they were questions that came out of sociology and anthropology. We ask questions, we take data, and we figure out the numbers. And this is important work, right?

Similarly, in this case, you ask questions. These questions were also used to serve as a kind of database for how many Japanese were so-called loyal and how many were not, what their ages were, what generation they were, how educated they were.

The questionnaire is actually much longer. It’s not just Questions 27 and 28.

Mina Kim: Right. Those were the final — yeah, those are…

Karen Tei Yamashita: Yeah. Those are the questions that were most potent to answer.

But the questionnaire is banal in many ways. It tells us where you were born, how old you were, where you were educated, what magazines you read, whether you had spent any time in Japan, your citizenship — all of those things.

So they were able to compile very, very detailed data.

Mina Kim: Of who people were.

We’ll have more with Karen Tei Yamashita after the break. Stay with us.

I’m Mina Kim. You’re listening to Forum.

Podcast

The Battle for the Future of Burning Man

Audio

Airdate: Friday, July 17 at 10 AM

Burning Man turns 40 this year, and its changed dramatically since the first event in San
Francisco. The first gathering drew a couple dozen people who gathered to burn an 8-foot wooden effigy at Baker Beach to celebrate the summer solstice. Four decades later, it’s a multi-million dollar operation that every August draws more than 70 thousand people to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. A new HBO documentary called “The Man Will Burn” looks at the staying power of the massive pop-up commune and the struggles to maintain its founding values. We’ll talk with the directors and one of the producers for the series.

Guests:

  • Jehane Noujaim, co-director, HBO’s “The Man Will Burn”
  • Vikram Gandhi, co-director, HBO’s “The Man Will Burn”
  • Muriel Soenens, series producer, HBO’s “The Man Will Burn”
Podcast

A Historian Grapples with ‘How We Disappear’ After We Die

Audio

Airdate: Friday, July 16 at 9 AM

As a historian who teaches a class called “The History of Information,” Stanford professor Thomas Mullaney has spent decades thinking about the unreliability of archival materials in understanding the past, subject as they are to decay, disorder and obsolescence. But it wasn’t until his own father died and he scrambled to preserve the evidence of his life that he decided to write a personal history of information about how we disappear from the historical record and from the world. We talk with Mullaney about his new book, “How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information”

Guests:

Thomas Mullaney, professor, Stanford University; author, “How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information”

Podcast

Should the UCs Reinstate the SAT?

Audio

Airdate: Thursday, July 16, 2026 at 10 AM

The University of California system is considering requiring SAT or ACT scores in admissions again, after more than 3,000 faculty members signed open letters in favor of bringing back the test requirement. Professors say their students have fared worse in math since the UC system did away with a standardized testing requirement in 2020. Many of the nation’s most selective universities have already reinstated the exams after a pandemic pause, but a 2019 lawsuit — which argued the SAT and ACT discriminate against disabled students and measure race and wealth more than academic aptitude — had limited the UC system’s ability to restore the tests. We’ll discuss the debate and hear from you: Should the UCs bring back the SAT and ACT?

Statement from Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of UC’s Academic Senate:
The Academic Senate’s comprehensive review of the University’s undergraduate admissions policies will align with the Board of Regents’ timeline to deliver a policy recommendation on the use of standardized tests in admissions by the end of the 2026-27 academic year (June 2027 for our campuses based on the quarter system).

Guests:

  • Felicia Mello, higher education reporter, Berkeleyside
  • Lisa Holder, civil rights attorney; member, California’s Reparations Task Force
  • Mina Aganagic, professor of mathematics and physics, University of California Berkeley

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.

Thousands of the University of California’s 26,000 faculty members have signed a pair of open letters urging the UC system to bring back the SAT and ACT. More than 2,300 faculty members in science and math are calling for reinstatement of the mathematics test for STEM majors, and more than 900 in the social sciences and humanities are calling for the return of the verbal test.

They say that without these test scores, the admissions process lacks a sufficiently reliable indicator of readiness for college-level work.

This hour, we’ll hear from proponents and opponents of the tests, and from you, our listeners. Do you think the UC system should, after going test blind in 2020, require SAT and ACT scores again for admission?

Joining me first is Mina Aganagic, professor of mathematics and physics at UC Berkeley and co-author of the STEM faculty letter calling for bringing back the tests for UC entry.

Professor Aganagic, welcome to Forum.

Mina Aganagic: Thank you for having me.

Mina Kim: So what caused you to write this letter? What were you seeing as a science and mathematics professor?

Mina Aganagic: Firstly, starting in about 2020, we started seeing the population of students in our classrooms change.

All of a sudden, we saw students thoroughly unprepared to take math in college.

Now, when I say “thoroughly unprepared,” the level of what they were missing was mathematics taught in elementary and middle school. So we’re not saying these students didn’t take pre-calculus or calculus or haven’t mastered that. The issue is at a much, much earlier level.

Students who struggle with material that’s taught literally in elementary and middle school simply cannot learn calculus. For those students, learning calculus is literally an impossible task.

So it was heartbreaking seeing so many students struggle.

Mina Kim: That’s what you were seeing in classrooms. What effects were you seeing on the students themselves, or even on your own ability to teach?

Mina Aganagic: You’d see an enormous amount of stress on the students.

For the first time, you’d see students who tried to take the class three times and were failing again. They’d say, “I’ve done everything.” And they had done everything, but the task put in front of them was to cover a multiyear gap in one college calculus class together with 400 to 700 other students.

It is simply impossible.

It’s sort of like asking you to climb a wall with no footholds at all. A mathematical genius could not do that.

They feel like they’re failing. They feel horribly stressed out. And it’s just a human heartbreak.

Mina Kim: Right. And, Mina, you feel that a way to address this is to bring back the SAT and ACT test scores in the admissions process. You think the SAT is a reliable way to measure an applicant’s readiness for college-level work?

Mina Aganagic: I think there are two crucial things to understand.

Firstly, most of the SAT actually focuses on the kind of math that’s taught in middle school. So it’s essentially impossible to do well if you haven’t mastered middle school mathematics. I don’t mean acing it, but you will be able to do all right.

The other absolutely crucial thing to understand is how UC uses the SAT. This is essential.

The UC was never providing a linear ranking of students and saying, “We’ll take those with the top SAT scores.” No.

What we do is the following. You take two students — let’s say two students from a poor Black neighborhood. They’re going to the same high school. We have grade inflation. Both of these students ace their math class, and we have to pick one.

How are we going to pick?

Right now, if we have to pick one, it’s going to be a random choice. In fact, Berkeley doesn’t even take teachers’ recommendations into account. So we would literally flip a die.

What we’re asking for is, give us the SAT score.

I’ll look at this student from a poor Black neighborhood and this second student from the same neighborhood. It will allow us to choose. It will allow us to make an informed choice.

Mina Kim: You mentioned grade inflation. So that’s why you’re saying high school math grades are not as reliable an indicator as an SAT score.

What about the Smarter Balanced test that all California public high school juniors have to take? Would that be a reliable measure?

Mina Aganagic: Smarter Balanced would certainly be better than having nothing at all.

But practically, there are huge problems with trying to use Smarter Balanced.

One concern is simply test security — questions leaking. Right now, Smarter Balanced is intended to assess how schools are doing. It’s not designed as a high-stakes test.

Converting it into one would require huge resources just to achieve the same thing the SAT is already doing.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Mina Aganagic, professor of mathematics and physics at UC Berkeley, who wrote a piece in The Washington Post titled “I’m a Professor at Berkeley. Bring Back This Requirement for Entry,” referring to the SAT and ACT in the UC admissions process.

Now, I’m sure, as you know, Mina, critics of these tests say that SAT scores track closely with income and racial disparities and that students who have the time and money to invest in test-prep courses, for example, will do better. So using these scores as a factor in admission would only continue — and perhaps even exacerbate — inequities in access to a UC education.

How do you respond?

Mina Aganagic: Every measure we have, including Smarter Balanced — literally anything that measures preparedness — already has these inequities baked into it.

The SAT is no better and no worse than any other measure we have. There’s simply no way around that.

The crucial thing is how we use the SAT.

We are not comparing a student from an affluent background to a low-income student and comparing their SAT scores. We compare students who are alike in every other respect.

The SAT becomes one part of a student’s file. When we cannot decide between two students who are otherwise identical, it lets us make a much more informed choice than flipping a die, which is deeply unfair.

Imagine two students who are completely alike. One worked harder; the other didn’t. Because of grade inflation, you can’t tell. The SAT can help tell you which one you should pick.

Mina Kim: We have comments coming in. Listeners, you can share what you think about whether the UC should bring back the standardized testing requirement by calling 866-733-6786, emailing forum@kqed.org, or finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.

Steve on Discord writes, “Isn’t that pandemic-driven scholastic performance drop a more likely explanation than the lack of test scores for students performing poorly, or students’ poor math skills, that you’re seeing in your classes?”

Mina Aganagic: There has certainly been an overall decline in math preparedness. Nobody is questioning that.

But what we’re seeing here is a population of students at the very lowest level of preparedness.

Usually what you see is a bell curve. If you’re talking about the overall level shifting, you would expect the entire bell curve to shift.

That’s not what we’re seeing.

What we’re seeing is the bell curve becoming almost U-shaped. You see students who are acing our classes and students who are hopelessly failing, with very little in the middle.

That’s the issue.

Mina Kim: Could the UC system, though, use math placement tests for admitted students, for example, or SAT scores after they’re admitted, to place them into the correct level of courses instead of making them a factor in admissions?

Mina Aganagic: You could use that, but it does not address the fundamental injustice that we cannot tell two otherwise similar students apart.

The student from a poor Black background who studied hard and another student from the same background who didn’t study as hard — we cannot tell them apart.

Mina Kim: Doesn’t the UC also offer courses to help students who seem like they’re struggling? Maybe remedial…

Mina Aganagic: We’re pouring a lot into remediation.

However, there are certain gaps that you simply cannot fill. They become too large.

If you’re asking someone to fill a gap from elementary and middle school, it’s just hopeless. For those students, it would take years of work in college to catch up.

California has this beautiful Master Plan for Higher Education, with community colleges, the CSU system, and the UCs, and real pathways between them.

A student who is not as well prepared could have a real path upward. They could go to a community college, take remedial classes, and then transfer to a UC.

They’re not placed into a classroom where they simply have no way of succeeding because the task is impossible.

It is not their failure. It’s the failure of the whole system, and we should not perpetuate this.

We should use the SAT as a placement tool to put students in the right places, to give them ladders they can climb.

Mina Kim: We have just a minute left before the break.

You’re talking about your concern for the students and the enormous stress they experience. The UC Student Association has come out against restoring the standardized testing requirement.

I’m wondering how you make sense of that.

Mina Aganagic: I think there is a vast amount of research showing that, if the SAT is used in the way UC uses it, it actually advances equity because it lets us identify those students who can thrive given their socioeconomic background.

Mina Kim: I was wondering how you make sense of the fact that the students themselves seem to be saying they don’t want it.

Mina Aganagic: The only way you can make sense of that is to say we should simply have open admissions. We would not have to choose.

In a situation where you do not have to pick between those two students from the same poor Black background, you really don’t need additional data.

But we can’t.

There is something that can help, though, which is community college. Every student in California gets access to community college.

Mina Kim: Well, Mina, I really appreciate you coming on to lay out how you feel about this. I can see your passion, and I encourage listeners to read your Washington Post piece, “I’m a Professor at Berkeley. Bring Back This Requirement for Entry.”

Mina Aganagic, thank you so much, professor of mathematics and physics at UC Berkeley.

We’ll learn more about how standardized testing ended in the UC system and hear from an opponent of bringing back the tests for admission after the break.

Stay with us.

Podcast

Peptides: Miracle Molecules or Marketing Hype?

Audio

Airdate: Thursday, July 16, 2026 at 9 AM

Peptides are everywhere in the healthcare zeitgeist. On social media, you’re likely to encounter an influencer claiming that injecting or ingesting peptides can improve your skin, build muscle,
increase focus or help you lead a longer and healthier life. Peptides are short chains of amino acids that are fundamental building blocks in protein and our bodies make them naturally. While some synthetic peptides like insulin and GLP-1s are widely used and approved, the off market use of other peptides have raised concerns among scientists. We’ll talk about the promise, dangers and hype of peptides.

Guests:

  • Dhruv Khullar, physician at Weill Cornell Medicine; associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College; contributing writer, The New Yorker
  • Zara Stone, tech culture reporter, The San Francisco Standard

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

It is a brave new peptide world out there. In one remarkable scene from Dhruv Khullar’s article in The New Yorker, “Why Are People Injecting Themselves With Peptides?,” he relates how a doctor’s kid got injured in cross-country. Immediately his mom was like, “Oh, hey, Dad can inject you with peptides.” And the kid is like, “Absolutely not,” but is then convinced, and perhaps the injections even helped his healing.

Has the FDA approved a lot of this stuff? No. Are people doing it anyway, ordering stuff from labs somewhere in the world or from doctors who are actively promoting these off-label medical tactics? Yes, definitely. They definitely are, as we will hear.

So here to help us explore this strange new world of peptides, we’re joined first by Dhruv Khullar, who is a practicing physician at Cornell Medicine and an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. His piece on peptides is in The New Yorker. Thanks so much for joining us.

Dhruv Khullar: So good to be with you.

Alexis Madrigal: So let’s just talk about the real basics of this. What is a peptide, and why are people hearing about them so much more right now than they were, say, five years ago?

Dhruv Khullar: Well, peptides are basically microproteins. So everyone’s heard about proteins, and they are strings of amino acids. If a string of amino acids is more than 50-ish long, then people tend to think of it as a protein. If it’s less than 50 amino acids or so, it’s a peptide.

And the human body actually makes thousands and thousands of peptides. So these things are in our bodies, and they’re circulating all over the place, and they send messages. They’re regulating systems inside the body.

Researchers have known about them for decades, and dozens of them have actually been turned into safe and effective drugs. So everyone’s probably heard about insulin. Insulin is a peptide. It moves sugar from your bloodstream into your cells.

These days, the most famous peptide is probably GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide-1, which, as we know, has all sorts of beneficial effects in the body.

So this is a really exciting area of science.

Now, what we’re talking about here is not any of these types of peptides, but unapproved peptides — peptides that have not gone through rigorous testing, that sometimes may have shown some interesting effects in mouse models or might have some theoretical reasons they might work.

These things have just exploded all over social media and online over the past couple years. They’re being marketed with basically claims of tremendous benefits — things like enhanced strength and better energy and more endurance, better recovery after you work out, even better tans or better libido.

So this is what we’re talking about. It’s a group of probably a dozen or so peptides that are really popular, and people are ordering them online and injecting them into their bodies.

Alexis Madrigal: Okay, Dhruv’s sold. Where do I get them?

No, I’m just kidding.

I am curious, though. How does this fit into our sort of theory of human biology? I think people oftentimes say, if you open a basic biology textbook, it’s like proteins are the body’s machines, you know, and things like that. Are peptides just the micro-machine version of this? Or do they have some other role in signaling and communication or something like that in the body?

Dhruv Khullar: So these are very small proteins. They’re called microproteins, so they’re primarily involved in signaling and regulation of other types of processes, although some of them can carry out processes by themselves.

If you think about insulin, it is signaling to the body that you should move some glucose, or sugar, from the bloodstream into cells.

There are all sorts of other peptides. Think about something like a growth hormone-releasing peptide that, as the name suggests, releases growth hormone. Growth hormone then carries out the effects that it does.

So some of these peptides do carry out activities themselves, but for the most part, scientists usually think about them as signaling molecules and regulatory molecules.

Alexis Madrigal: Why do people, generally speaking, inject these things?

People may know that from Ozempic, of course. Now there have been a million GLP-1 drugs that are being developed with different kinds of modes of ingestion. But why do people inject them?

Dhruv Khullar: Well, a lot of these peptides are broken down in the stomach. The stomach is a pretty hazardous environment for a lot of proteins and peptides. Stomach acid and digestive enzymes split these chains of amino acids into parts before they can actually enter the bloodstream and do what they’re supposed to do.

So when you inject them directly into your body, you can bypass that breakdown function of the stomach and get them directly where they need to go.

That’s the big idea around why. Even GLP-1s are injected. There are some oral versions of them that are not quite as effective, and the thought is that a lot of the peptide is being broken down and only a small proportion is actually getting into the bloodstream.

A similar thing is going on here.

Because people are injecting them, I think that also speaks to the idea that people are much more open to and comfortable with injecting things into their bodies because they’ve gotten so used to seeing people do it — or doing it themselves — over the past couple years with the rise of GLP-1 medications.

So now injecting these other compounds into their bodies might not seem as foreign as it did a decade ago.

Alexis Madrigal: Talk to me a little bit about the scientific background here. What’s the sort of potted history of this current generation of peptides?

Dhruv Khullar: Well, a lot of this has come out of very rigorous scientific work that was done maybe 20 or 25 years ago.

What scientists started to recognize was that, in the past, people thought a lot of these peptides were just fragments of larger proteins. So insulin is generated by the body as a much larger version of the molecule, and then it’s chopped up until you have the final version that goes around and does its work in the body.

One of the researchers I interviewed at UCLA, Pinchas Cohen, and others in his lab found that the genetic code actually codes for many more small microproteins, or peptides, than we initially thought.

There are all these parts of the genome that were previously thought of as junk DNA. We didn’t know what they did, but obviously, if 98% of your DNA is quote-unquote junk, it’s probably doing something. Evolution doesn’t conserve that type of thing.

What a lot of the so-called junk DNA was doing was encoding these other types of molecules.

So Cohen and others have discovered many, many peptides. Some of them have very interesting effects in the body, particularly in animal models.

For instance, there’s a peptide called MOTS-c, which in mice seems to help middle-aged mice run twice as long as mice that don’t take MOTS-c.

Cohen himself took it into Phase 1 clinical trials and ended up running out of funding before they were able to move it forward.

I want to make clear that there’s very interesting science behind a lot of these peptides. There’s also the potential for harm.

Another peptide Cohen discovered was something called Humanin. That was probably the first peptide discovered in this new age, and it also seemed really interesting in promoting longevity and reducing negative effects in the body.

Ultimately, though, it was found to be linked to certain types of cancer.

Those are the kinds of things that become apparent only when you study these compounds rigorously, which is why people shouldn’t simply inject themselves with peptides that haven’t been studied in the way we study other drugs.

Alexis Madrigal: How many of these peptides have been approved by the FDA for one thing but are now being used for something else, like the route that GLP-1s took? And how many really are just a researcher wrote a paper about them and people started synthesizing the drug?

Dhruv Khullar: Well, it’s both.

There are some peptides that have been approved for other conditions and are now being used off-label.

When we talk about off-label use of medications, that’s a very common thing doctors do. It means a drug was formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration for one indication, but doctors discover it also helps with other illnesses or conditions and prescribe it for those reasons. That’s totally accepted and done all the time.

So there are some peptides being used that way. Even then, though, we don’t always have the level of study we’d want before prescribing them for those other conditions.

One example is tesamorelin. It’s a growth hormone-releasing peptide that’s used to reduce abdominal fat, primarily in people who experienced side effects from HIV medications and developed excess abdominal fat.

Now people who don’t have HIV and haven’t taken those medications are starting to use it.

There are many other peptides that have nowhere near that level of evidence. They’ve shown promise in animal studies or theoretical work, and people are using those too.

People get them in all sorts of ways. You can order them online. Many come from overseas, primarily China. Some compounding pharmacies will prepare them and supply doctors’ offices, longevity clinics, or directly to patients.

Then there’s the other big area: research chemical companies. These companies make compounds for research purposes. They’re technically labeled “for research use only,” but they’ll often sell them to you, throw in some sterile water and a couple of syringes, and it’s kind of a wink-wink situation where everyone knows they’re actually being injected into people.

Alexis Madrigal: Big-picture question here, kind of setting up the next segment of the show. Does all this suggest to you that we need a new approach to drug regulation, or even medicine more broadly, to account for the fact that people want to use these substances even if they’re not sick, quote unquote?

Dhruv Khullar: I think this is a really open and interesting question.

Historically, medicine has been very good at treating disease. Someone gets sick, and we develop treatments.

To a lesser extent, medicine has been okay at prevention — trying to keep people from getting sick in the first place.

What medicine has had almost nothing to say about is optimization. And that’s what we’re talking about for a lot of people here.

People want peak performance. They want benefits related to longevity, even though those are very difficult to prove.

So I do think medicine needs to start thinking about how it can contribute to that conversation around optimization. Otherwise, it leaves a vacuum where other people are going to…

Alexis Madrigal: Well, that’s where TikTok comes in, no?

Dhruv Khullar: Yeah, exactly.

Alexis Madrigal: Dhruv Khullar is a physician as well as a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He’s got a piece there called “Why Are People Injecting Themselves With Peptides?”

We are talking about this world of peptides, and we’re going to turn in the next segment to peptide-tasting parties, clubs, and the kind of Silicon Valley-ization of all these things.

We want to hear from you. Have you explored or taken a peptide for an off-market use? What did you use it for? What are your questions about peptides, their dangers, and their health benefits more generally?

The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786, or email forum@kqed.org.

We’ll be back with more right after the break.

Podcast

Why California Wants to Block the Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger

Audio

Airdate: Wednesday, July 15, 2026 at 10AM

A coalition of 12 states, including California, has filed a lawsuit to block Paramount’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. California Attorney General Rob Bonta argues the merger of the two entertainment “behemoths” would lead to higher prices, lower quality and less content for consumers. Meanwhile the federal Justice Department, which has already approved the merger, says it believes the deal won’t hurt competition. Bonta joins us to explain the multistate effort seeking to stop the merger.

Guests:

  • Rob Bonta, California Attorney General
  • Daniel Miller, reporter, POLITICO

This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

California is leading a coalition of 12 states in suing to stop Paramount Skydance’s more than $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Attorney General Rob Bonta says the merger would lead to higher prices, fewer movies, and lower-quality, less diverse content. But Paramount says the deal would allow for stronger competition against dominant streaming giants that have disrupted the entertainment industry.

President Trump’s Justice Department has already approved the merger. So can — and should — it be stopped?

Listeners, what do you think?

Joining me now is Daniel Miller, a reporter at Politico who covers the intersection of entertainment and politics, among other things. Daniel, welcome to Forum.

Daniel Miller: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Mina Kim: Attorney General Bonta joins us later in the hour. I’d love to get from you the context that will help us understand how we got to California’s lawsuit Monday to block this merger.

So first, why does Paramount want to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery? What would it allow them to do?

Daniel Miller: Sure. So, Warner Bros. Discovery is widely seen as a crown jewel of the entertainment and media industries. It has very strong assets, such as CNN, HBO Max, and, obviously, a namesake film and television studio.

Acquiring this company would allow Paramount to really scale up. What we’ve seen in Hollywood in recent years is a quest for scale. Companies have grown so that they can try to win things like the streaming wars.

Five or six years ago, peak TV was all the rage, and you had companies making the decision, “Look, if we don’t get bigger, we’re going to die.”

I think it’s fair to say that a splashy purchase like this one would give Paramount a ton of momentum. Also, at the same time, David Ellison acquired Paramount last year. His company, Skydance Media, acquired it last year. And I think by buying Warner Bros. Discovery, it would really signal to the world that he is here in Hollywood as a mogul to be reckoned with.

Mina Kim: Yeah, and also take out a major, major competitor. Can you talk about how fierce competitors Paramount and Warner have been?

Daniel Miller: Yeah. Look, I think it’s important to note there are five traditional film studios here in Los Angeles. We all know the names: Disney, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Universal.

These studios have been in competition for something like 100 years, right? Whether it’s fighting over which studio gets which release date in the summer for a big blockbuster or poaching talent, they are rivals. They compete fiercely.

And I think for many people, because of that, it’s strange to think of these two companies being joined.

Mina Kim: So what did Ellison have to promise to win over the Warner Bros. Discovery board of directors, especially after Netflix dropped out of bidding for it?

Daniel Miller: Well, look, I think it’s important to note that the deal is quite lucrative for Warner Bros. Discovery, and that’s perhaps why its shareholders overwhelmingly approved it this spring.

The stock was trading below $10 before this deal was announced. It was trading below $10 last year, and now this deal would value the company at more than $30 a share.

So I think we need look no further than that to get a sense of why this makes sense for shareholders of Warner Bros. Discovery.

At the same time, there are many in Hollywood who are wringing their hands over this transaction and what it might do to the industry.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Talk about those concerns coming from Hollywood. Almost immediately, many started raising concerns about the merger — about job losses, about so many things. Walk us through some of them.

Daniel Miller: Sure. And look, the important context is this: the local entertainment industry economy here in California, and in Southern California especially, has been bludgeoned over the last couple of years.

We had a labor stoppage in 2023 that really hurt the business and derailed some of the momentum it had. We’ve seen production depart the state for years now, and there’s really a crisis in that area.

L.A. County has lost something like 42,000 entertainment industry jobs in the last few years. So when people heard about this prospective merger, I think many worried — and perhaps rightly so — about the prospect of major layoffs at these studios.

There’s a long history: after consolidation, the job cuts come. And I think many would simply point to Skydance Media’s purchase of Paramount just last year. After that occurred, layoffs ensued.

Mina Kim: Yeah, layoffs ensued. And also, it sounds like Paramount and Warner Bros. in many ways have similar assets, so it feels like there are going to be redundancies that would lead to job losses.

Daniel Miller: That’s right. They do have similar assets.

One good example is they both have streaming services. Paramount has Paramount+, and Warner Bros. Discovery has HBO Max. Under this transaction, if it does go through, those services would be combined to create a new service with something like 200 million subscribers.

That may be good for the merged company and its fight against Netflix, but perhaps you’re going to see some cuts.

Mina Kim: So, Daniel, what has Paramount said in an effort to assuage those fears of job losses and other concerns about the merger?

Daniel Miller: Sure. David Ellison, who I think it’s fair to say is a film buff and a lover of cinema, has been very vocal in saying that this newly combined company is going to make at least 30 films a year.

He said that releasing so many films will lead to an economic uplift, that workers are going to get back to work, and that it’s going to be a boost to the Hollywood economy.

The company has also signaled that it would increase television production. So these are areas where I think the company is trying to assuage some of those concerns about cuts, consolidation, and losses.

I will say there is some skepticism in the industry about the company being able to release 30-plus films a year. Studio output over the long term has been decreasing, so 30-plus films is a big number.

Mina Kim: Yeah, that was my question: whether 30 movies a year, theatrically, was realistic.

And also, it sounds like, as you say, there is such a high price for this merger that whether or not they can invest that much in making that happen is also a question.

Daniel Miller: I think that’s fair to say because, as we’ve said a few times now, consolidation often leads to cuts, and economies of scale mean that there’s just a smaller output.

At the same time, Paramount has really been banging the drum on this one. I saw David Ellison speak at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this spring. This is a gathering of exhibitors from all across the country, and he was very steadfast in his commitment to that number.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Daniel Miller, reporter at Politico, who covers the intersection of entertainment and politics, and whose recent piece is “As California Tests Its Antitrust Muscle in Hollywood.”

We’re talking about the lawsuit filed by a dozen state attorneys general to block Paramount’s more than $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. And, of course, this lawsuit is led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Listeners, we want to hear from you. What are your questions about this potential Paramount-Warner merger? What concerns do you have, or do you support it?

If you have concerns, do you think the merger would lower the quality of films and television, as Bonta has said, or create large-scale job losses? Or do you feel like the streaming market needs more robust competitors?

You can tell us by emailing forum@kqed.org, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. We’re @KQEDForum. Or you can call us at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786.

And Annie from San Jose writes, “Stop the MAGAfication of our media. Stop the merger.”

Daniel, another concern about this merger is that it’s financially backed by Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s father and a prominent ally of President Trump, whose Justice Department, as we’ve noted, has already approved the merger.

Can you lay out the concerns about what that relationship could mean? And obviously, from Annie’s comment, there have definitely been concerns raised in the journalism space.

Daniel Miller: Sure. So yes, Larry Ellison is a longtime friend of President Trump. That’s not the case for David Ellison, although he has worked to develop a relationship with the president. He hosted a dinner in D.C. earlier this year that honored President Trump.

I think we can talk a little bit about what’s happened at CBS News since David Ellison took over Paramount. This has been a real flashpoint and has, I think, led to concerns among many everyday Americans and, of course, people in the media about what might happen if CNN and CBS are brought under one roof.

There have been very notable changes at CBS News. Bari Weiss has been brought in as the head of the organization. She’s a well-known conservative. And there’s been a big shake-up at the prominent television news magazine 60 Minutes. We’ve seen veteran correspondents and producers leave. We saw Anderson Cooper leave. That was a name that got many people’s attention.

So I think people are wondering: if David Ellison is able to combine these two studios and bring CBS and CNN under one roof, could we see similar changes at CNN that we’ve seen at CBS News?

I think that’s a cause for concern in some corners, for sure.

Mina Kim: And, of course, Trump has repeatedly attacked CNN and says he wants to change that network as well, which is raising concerns.

Also, there was reporting today from ProPublica that found that during the Skydance merger with Paramount, members of the FCC accepted pricey tickets to the Kennedy Center — basically expensive gifts — during that merger as well. So there’s some concern about Paramount trying to get the FCC to approve this merger through unethical means.

Daniel Miller: Yeah. I saw that report just before we came on air, and I think what I would say is this: there are concerns in many corners about the Trump administration and the Justice Department not scrutinizing this deal and perhaps even cheerleading for it to be approved and concluded.

I think we need only look to the comments of California Attorney General Rob Bonta to get a sense of that. He said at his press conference earlier this week — and I’m paraphrasing — that effectively his office and the offices of the other attorneys general had to step in because the federal government wasn’t doing its job.

I think if you read between the lines there, you have a sense of why people are frustrated and perhaps angry.

Mina Kim: California Attorney General Rob Bonta said that the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for consumers, and that it violates antitrust law.

President Trump’s Justice Department says the deal won’t hurt competition and has already signed off on the merger.

We’re talking about it with Daniel Miller, a reporter at Politico, and with you, our listeners, at 866-733-6786.

You can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at @KQEDForum. Or you can email forum@kqed.org.

Tell us what you think of the merger, the concerns that you have about it, or whether or not you support it, and why.

More after the break. I’m Mina Kim.

Podcast

What Does the Federal Housing Bill Mean for the Bay Area?

Audio

Airdate: Wednesday, July 15, 2026 at 9AM

A landmark bipartisan federal housing bill became law this weekend. The package includes 56 initiatives, regulatory tweaks and reforms designed to improve housing affordability nationwide — and local housing policy experts say it could have a material impact on the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis. We’ll learn more about the local impacts.

Guests:

  • Ben Metcalf, Terner Center of Housing Innovation managing director, University of California, Berkeley; former director of California Department of Housing and Community Development
  • Adhiti Bandlamudi, housing reporting, KQED
  • Sam Moss, executive director, Mission Housing Development Corporation in San Francisco

This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

It’s not as if the state of California has done nothing to try to address our housing crisis. Many bills have made their way through the state legislature. In fact, I counted more than 25 in the last decade. But building houses takes time, and, well, housing production on a statewide basis has not really gone up.

Tucked inside this somewhat bad news, locally there’s actually worse news. The Bay Area’s housing production has declined very substantially from a 2018 peak. The standard analysis of the situation is simply that higher interest rates, rising construction costs, and worries about our downtown cores swamp the legislative changes happening in Sacramento.

Still, sheesh.

In that context, can this new federal bill help? Let’s ask some people.

We’re joined first this morning by Adhiti Bandlamudi, who is a housing reporter at KQED. Welcome.

Adhiti Bandlamudi: Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: And we’ve got Ben Metcalf, managing director with the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. He’s the former director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Hi.

Ben Metcalf: It’s a pleasure to be on.

Alexis Madrigal: So, Ben, your organization called this bill the most significant housing legislation in a generation. Why is that? And is it also just because we haven’t done anything for a generation, or is it actually a big deal?

Ben Metcalf: Yeah. Well, I think both are true. I mean, Congress has not been doing a good job of just basic legislating over the last couple of decades on any topic, right? It’s been a lot of partisan gridlock.

And I think, depending on how you count it, it’s really been a few decades, maybe arguably since 1990, that Congress actually passed a comprehensive set of policy changes that received the kind of support and comprehensiveness that it did here.

So that is one answer: it’s been a long time. But the other answer is, I think, in part because it’s been so long, what we’ve seen is a whole bunch of stuff that’s been backed up in the legislative pipeline finally seeing daylight. And although we don’t really have any one silver bullet, we have 45 different sections of this legislation that each tackle a different piece in a reasonably significant way. So if you take all those 45 pieces together, then I think you get to something that is pretty meaningful.

Alexis Madrigal: Hmm. Adhiti, you’ve been looking at the application of the bill to California’s housing crisis. What would you say people have told you are the most significant provisions of the bill?

Adhiti Bandlamudi: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. As I was looking at the provisions in the bill and talking to folks about it, some of the people I spoke to were saying that it’s actually inspired somewhat by legislation that California has already passed.

Last year, Governor Newsom signed a bunch of legislation that streamlines environmental reviews. In Congress’s bill package, you see similar reforms that streamline NEPA reviews. That’s kind of the national, or federal, version of CEQA for certain projects.

You see other things when it comes to pre-approved designs. I think one element of this package that seems to be generating a lot of excitement, especially for local legislators, is manufactured housing, like factory-built housing. The federal package included quite a few pieces of legislation to boost that industry along, and some of the folks I talked to said it could work well in tandem with some of the things that the California Legislature is looking at this year.

Alexis Madrigal: You know, Ben, at the highest level, this is bipartisan legislation, like you said. And of course, that means that everyone sort of got on board — conservatives and more liberal folks.

In part, though, isn’t that because a lot of what’s in here is sort of tweaks to the market, right? I mean, these aren’t really massive changes in the way that we think about housing production in the U.S., right? This is just trying to get what feels like a market that’s under-delivering to work a little better.

Ben Metcalf: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, I think one way to think about this is that the only things that made it into this bill were the things that didn’t get screened out. And the things that got screened out were usually really big, really controversial, or really partisan.

So, definitionally, the only things that could survive in this process and stay in this bill had to have bipartisan support. They had to be essentially the consensus of both minority and majority leadership in both chambers.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I mean, what did that leave on the table? What’s a big idea that could have been in here but didn’t make it?

Ben Metcalf: Well, first of all, I want to say there’s no new funding. And so I think one of the big concerns is just what’s happening with federal funding for housing.

Although we see some tee-ups for funding to follow later, which is important — actually quite important — what we don’t see in here is anything that would come through the appropriations process. And we don’t really see any big new programs.

What really is happening here is that Congress is looking at the existing suite of tools that it already has and figuring out how to make them work better, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively.

Alexis Madrigal: You know, there is — people now are familiar with the term YIMBY, right? “Yes, in my backyard.” These are people who’ve been calling for building more homes, building more housing. And some people are saying this bill out of Congress is sort of a victory for that.

Adhiti Bandlamudi: I think that’s fair. I mean, I think this bill package includes a lot of carrots for cities and municipalities that want to build housing and that are already taking steps to do that.

I think on the flip side of that, some of the folks I talked to said this bill package doesn’t have a lot of sticks. It doesn’t have mechanisms that hold cities and counties accountable if they aren’t building housing.

So I think it’s very YIMBY-focused, but not necessarily on the other side of that.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah.

We’re talking about the massive bipartisan federal housing bill that became law on Saturday. We’ve got Adhiti Bandlamudi, housing reporter here at KQED. We’ve also got Ben Metcalf, managing director with the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. He previously worked in government as the director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

We’d love to hear from you if you have questions about this bill, you’re interested in specific provisions, or things that it might or might not do.

How do you think local leaders should work to address our housing affordability crisis here?

Give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media — Bluesky, Instagram, Discord, etc. We’re KQED Forum there.

You know, Ben, when the big climate bill was passed — the Inflation Reduction Act, back in the Biden administration — people tried to parcel out, like, “Okay, here’s where the carbon reductions are going to come from. This percentage comes from this, this percentage comes from this.” They did this with all the provisions of that similar kind of omnibus bill.

Can that be done with a bill like this, where you could say, “Okay, this is going to add this many units. This is going to add that many units,” or not?

Ben Metcalf: Oh, that would be hard. I don’t think anybody’s going to try and do that, simply because it’s got, as I said, 45 different sections of law that are each doing pretty weedy, specific things.

There’s just a lot of conjecture, also. I think it’s important to acknowledge that just because Congress passes a bill doesn’t mean something happens tomorrow.

One of my colleagues at the Turner Center, Ernst Reiter, did an analysis that identified 124 follow-on actions that federal agencies will now need to do to implement the bill. It’s not actually self-implementing. It’s going to take the administrative state, mostly HUD, to come up with the regulations, the guidelines, and the programs to actually execute on that.

So I think there are also just a lot of TBDs on what the Trump administration actually does, how seriously they take this, and how expansively they view the charge from Congress as to how impactful it will be, and then how long it will take for all that stuff to get fully implemented.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, because President Trump didn’t sign this bill — sort of as a protest, I suppose — and HUD itself was gutted by DOGE during this administration.

Adhiti Bandlamudi: Yeah. I mean, that’s a really interesting wrinkle of this. Even though President Trump had talked a lot about this on the campaign trail and had talked about housing a little bit when he entered office, this really hasn’t been something that he has full-throatedly stood behind.

He did not sign the legislation when it passed Congress.

It is kind of interesting because, earlier this spring, when Congress was starting to negotiate consolidating — because it was originally two bills. There was a House version and a Senate version, and they consolidated it into one mega-package. When those negotiations were happening, Trump announced two executive orders that were trying to approach supply and demand.

One was to remove regulatory barriers, like green building mandates and permitting requirements, and the other loosened mortgage lending regulations for community banks.

But he was kind of doing his own thing. And that is really interesting when you think about this idea that this bill was, I think, for some Republican lawmakers, supposed to be kind of a victory.

Alexis Madrigal: You know, Ben, one of the things that I’m curious about: all these streamlining measures and legislative changes have been made over this last decade, both in California and now in this bill nationally.

If interest rates were to drop, is the expectation that there would be a little bit of an unprecedented boom in housing production because those macroeconomic constraints would go away and the path has been cleared through all these legislative efforts?

Ben Metcalf: I think so. I mean, unfortunately, at this point it’s not just interest rates, right? There are also other things that have complicated the economics of building, even if you have all the policy in place.

I’d point in particular to construction costs and also the fees that municipalities are charging in places like California. Both of those have unfortunately been going up at rates faster than inflation. Materials prices, labor costs, and the impact fees developers now are up against have all grown quite a bit too.

Yes, if you could get the interest rate down, it would help a lot. Unfortunately, there’s also another cost issue that has crept up on the marketplace over the last five or ten years that will continue to be a drag.

Some of this — Adhiti mentioned the manufactured housing language in here — is actually very responsive to the cost issue. So if we can really see the manufactured housing, factory-built sector get to scale, if this can help with that, if you could do that, plus you could get interest rates down, plus maybe a little Prop. 13 reform, then you’re out of the way. Now we’re talking, and we’re good.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the massive bipartisan federal housing bill that became law on Saturday with Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Turner Center for Housing Innovation, and, of course, our own Adhiti Bandlamudi, housing reporter here at KQED.

We’re going to get to more of your questions about the bill after the break. 866-733-6786, or forum@kqed.org.

I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.

Podcast

The Fallout From The Supreme Court’s TPS Ruling

Audio

Airdate: July 14, 2026 at 10 AM

The Supreme Court ruled last month that the Trump administration could eliminate temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria, a decision that affects some 350,000 people who had been living and working legally in the United States for years — and leaves even more immigrants in legal limbo. We’ll talk to an immigration reporter who’s been following the case, an ACLU lawyer who represents TPS holders, and a Bay Area man who moved to the U.S. from Honduras as a toddler who’s now in a precarious legal situation.

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum, I’m Mina Kim. When the Supreme Court ruled in June that federal courts did not have a role in reviewing the executive branch’s decisions to end temporary protected status, it applied to hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in the U.S. And the ripple effect is even greater — more than a million TPS holders could be affected by the high court’s decision to allow the Trump administration to end TPS more easily, in addition to their employers and the people they care for. We take a closer look at this impact.

And listeners, have you or a loved one been affected by recent changes to temporary protected status? You can tell us by calling 866-733-6786, posting on our social channels, or by emailing forum@kqed.org.

Joining me this hour is Jazmine Ulloa, national reporter covering immigration for the New York Times. Jazmine, so glad to have you here.

Jazmine Ulloa: Thank you for having me.

Mina Kim: Also, Emi MacLean is a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, who has argued before the Supreme Court for TPS holders. Emi, really glad to have you too.

Emi MacLean: I’m glad to be here.

Mina Kim: So, Emi, can you first remind us what temporary protected status is?

Emi MacLean: Yes. Temporary protected status is a form of humanitarian immigration protection for people whose countries are in crisis. So these are people who are in the United States and cannot safely return to their home countries because their countries are at war, there’s a humanitarian crisis, or there’s a natural disaster.

There’s a 1990 law, a 35-year-old law, that is intended to limit executive discretion and create rules for when countries can be designated for TPS and how countries’ designations for TPS can end. This was a law that was signed by President George H.W. Bush.

Mina Kim: I understand.

Emi MacLean: Yes. And it ended a period where there was complete executive discretion. It was Congress’s intent at the time to create rules that govern how countries can get TPS and how individuals who cannot safely return to their home countries can be protected against deportation and detention, and be provided work authorization while they’re living in the United States and their countries are in crisis.

Mina Kim: Now, I understand that TPS foreign nationals basically remain in the country for up to 18 months if their home countries are in the types of situations that you describe. But why are many TPS holders here much longer than that?

Emi MacLean: Each individual designation is up to 18 months, but the law is clear that at the end of a period of a country’s designation, the government must review the conditions in the country. And if it’s still unsafe for individuals to return to that country, their TPS designation must be extended.

And we know that wars, natural disasters, humanitarian crises don’t come in 12- or 18-month intervals. Sometimes countries can be in crisis for five years, 10 years, or more. The law is clear that TPS must be extended if the country’s conditions remain unsafe, and may be terminated only if it is safe for individuals to return to that country.

Mina Kim: Jazmine, the Trump administration is seeking to — or has said it’s seeking to — terminate the program entirely. Though for now, it seems like it’s gutting it, essentially. Tell me what they’ve said about it and why they say this program needs to go.

Jazmine Ulloa: Well, they have talked more about — I think this falls more into this broader shift away from these international commitments that the United States has held for decades. These were international commitments that the U.S. took on in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

So we have to really understand it as the Trump administration pushing to take another step in remaking the role the United States is holding in that global order. They haven’t necessarily said they want to terminate the program altogether, but they’ve suggested it in the way that they’ve approached it. They’re making it harder for refugees to enter, they’ve cut the number of refugees to record lows, and they’ve made it much harder for asylum seekers to seek asylum in the courts.

So this is part of that much broader movement, this broader shift away from establishing those humanitarian protections for people. For now, more than a dozen countries have now been eliminated. Only a few remain standing — El Salvador and Ukraine among them — so I keep saying this is part of a broader shift away from that commitment.

Mina Kim: Yeah. One of the things the Trump administration is doing is ending temporary protected status, right, Emi, for people who currently hold it. And you have been arguing before the Supreme Court that this is not something the executive branch can do unilaterally.

Emi MacLean: Under the law, the administration has the authority to terminate TPS designations for individual countries, but only where they follow certain criteria. One of the central issues that was before the Supreme Court is: does the government have to follow the law?

Essentially, the government’s argument was, in no uncertain terms, there’s nothing the courts can do about it. In response to a question from a Supreme Court justice, they said: if the secretary made a decision relying on a Ouija board rather than evaluating country conditions, would we be able to have any review? The solicitor general, one of the top lawyers in the United States, said there would be no judicial review in that case.

So the law is clear that there are processes that must be followed for a TPS designation to be terminated, where hundreds of thousands of lives are at risk. And a central question now is: can courts do anything about it when they completely violate the law?

Mina Kim: And the Supreme Court, in its decision to say that essentially the federal courts need to stay out of it — tell me what that essentially does. Does it essentially say, absolutely yes, that the federal courts really have no say when the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security says, “I am ending TPS for this particular nation”?

Emi MacLean: It doesn’t completely eliminate all avenues for judicial review, but it severely constrains the avenues that are available. And it essentially gives the administration what it was asking for, which no other court had allowed.

There are more than a dozen cases across the country before all sorts of judges where TPS holders are challenging the Trump administration’s illegal terminations of TPS. Every single judge in every single case had recognized that there must be checks and balances, that there must be oversight — otherwise the TPS statute is just advisory. And the Supreme Court endorsed the extreme position that the government presented, which is that it is effectively advisory.

What the Supreme Court did say is that there may still be constitutional claims, including claims related to the unconstitutional termination of TPS, because the TPS terminations were motivated by racism.

Mina Kim: That was one of the arguments that was being made — that this was motivated by racism — and it seemed during oral arguments that the liberal justices were agreeing with that particular argument. How did the Trump administration respond to that?

Emi MacLean: The Trump administration essentially asked the justices to close their eyes and their ears to the clearly racist statements by President Trump and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

Mina Kim: Which statements were specifically noted?

Emi MacLean: The constitutionality of the TPS termination question was related directly to the termination of TPS for Haiti. We’ll all remember that during the campaign, and while Trump was president, he talked about Haitians and Haitian TPS holders in particular as eating the cats and dogs of their neighbors. He talked about Haitians as poisoning the blood of the country. And he described Haiti, in the context of talking about TPS, as a — quote — “S-hole country.” I won’t use the word here.

Essentially, what the solicitor general was saying is that those are just statements of policy differences. And in an egregious majority decision, the supermajority, in a six-to-three decision, the Supreme Court agreed and said this is heated language and an expression of policy differences. They essentially ignored the very clearly racist statements, but they did not prevent TPS holders from continuing to bring constitutional challenges.

We should remember that this case arrived at the Supreme Court in a completely irregular fashion — a very preliminary case where there was no evidence in the record. So all the court was really looking at was these statements by the president and the former DHS secretary. That doesn’t mean there would not be a case, but it’s deeply concerning that the Supreme Court, in its supermajority, was endorsing these extreme statements, which really ignore very clear evidence of racism from the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Mina Kim: Jazmine, you reported that the Supreme Court’s decision — that federal law prohibits courts from second-guessing an administration’s determination of which nationalities no longer have TPS — could have implications for all 1.3 million TPS holders in the U.S. You touched on this earlier, but help us understand why.

Jazmine Ulloa: Yeah, I want to correct something I said earlier — it’s actually four nations that still have TPS: El Salvador, Lebanon, Ukraine, and Sudan. The Trump administration remains locked in litigation over whether it can end protections for more than a million people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Venezuela, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen.

I’ve been talking to TPS holders from many of these nations who are scrambling to find other forms of protection and trying to make life-and-death decisions right now about whether to stay in the country or be forced to return to countries that they say are still very unstable. Some people are having to make the hard decision of whether to stay here and live in the shadows. And they’re doing so at a time when the administration is ramping up surges in arrests all across the country.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Jazmine Ulloa, a national reporter covering immigration for the New York Times, and Emi MacLean, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, who has been part of the defense team arguing before the Supreme Court for TPS holders. We’ll have more with them, and with you, listeners.

What questions do you have about the impacts of the Supreme Court’s TPS decision? And how do you feel about the Trump administration’s efforts to limit TPS? Stay with us — this is Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

Podcast

California Has Extreme Income Inequality. Why Do We Treat It As Normal?

Audio

Airdate: July 14, 2026 at 9 AM

California is one of the most unequal states in the country with extreme disparities between people living in poverty and those at the top of the income spectrum. Given the visibility of the problem, with homeless encampments and multimillion dollar houses populating our landscape while the middle class shrinks, UC Berkeley professors Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel set out to find out why Californians are “aware of inequality but not incensed about it.” They interviewed 136 Californians in the state’s “precarious middle class” — people who were getting by, but barely – and surveyed thousands more for their book, “Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide.” We’ll talk with Mora and Paschel about why income inequality is on the rise in California, and the perils of accepting it.

Guests:

  • G. Cristina Mora, Chancellor’s professor of sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley; author of the book, “Making Hispanics”; coauthor of the book “Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide”
  • Tianna Paschel, associate professor of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley; coauthor of the book, “Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide”

This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. We all tell ourselves stories about the way the world works. Some of it’s based on education or some set of facts we’ve learned, but a lot of it is just personal experience — things we’ve heard from someone, vibes. Our world is wildly complex, and so we make sense of it with imperfect information. So how do you get at those beliefs?

G. Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel have co-authored a new book, Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide, and it uses deep interviews and a big survey to understand how Californians in the precarious middle class make sense of the inequality they see all around them. Mora is a professor of sociology and the co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. Welcome.

G. Cristina Mora: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Alexis Madrigal: Great to have you. And Tianna Paschel is associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at Berkeley. Welcome.

Tianna Paschel: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: So before you were professionals who studied these things, before you were professors at Berkeley, when you were just growing up, how did you make sense of the inequality that you grew up with? Cristina, you want to start us off?

G. Cristina Mora: Yeah, I’m from northeast LA, a small little part of LA called Pacoima. And if anyone knows it, they know that in the ’80s and ’90s, and even now today, it’s a highly segregated small segment of LA, mainly Latino working class. And I think part of my everyday life was just seeing people that looked like me, people that knew my parents, people that came from the same town as my parents and worked in manufacturing or gardening or any sort of the service sectors.

The first time I started thinking about inequality at a broader level — I turned on Beverly Hills, 90210. I turned on Saved by the Bell. That was supposed to be Southern California teenager life, and it’s like, that is an awesome show — nobody looks like me. Where are we? And so it was that great disconnect between what was going on in my everyday life and what I saw around me, and how that was sort of a hidden secret, at least in the media. And what was wild to me is that these shows were being filmed maybe 10, 15 miles from where I was, and so thinking through what does this mean about whether we are truly American, whether this is truly the U.S., whether I’m just a part of LA but not a part of this larger picture of who we are and what Southern California is.

And I think that’s what started it. And then, of course, when you become more mobile — middle school, high school — and you start going out to the west side, you’re like, hey, that high school looks a lot better than my high school. Those stores, the police aren’t there as much, they’re not going to sleep with the helicopters. And that’s very starkly juxtaposed — the way California and many of its major cities can be so diverse and yet so segregated in its diversity, both class and racially. That was just sort of hard to put together, and it opened up a lot of questions about who’s really American, who really belongs here, and who’s living on the winning side in some ways.

Alexis Madrigal: Tianna, you grew up in a slightly different place. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?

Tianna Paschel: So I grew up mostly in Sacramento, but I also spent a lot of time growing up in Fresno and in Bakersfield. In Sacramento, I feel like I had the exact opposite of your experience on some level, but a similar one in another. I grew up in apartment buildings, kind of working-class neighborhoods in Sacramento. I feel like they’re kind of the epitome of the kind of Northern California — racially integrated but not quite white — places. So I grew up in blocks and blocks of apartment buildings with Vietnamese folks, Salvadoran folks, Mexican folks, Black folks, where white folks were hard to find, right? It felt really racially integrated amongst us folks of color, and at the same time, kind of a world apart from where all the wealth in the city was.

I think the moment where I realized that whatever I was living was not what other people were living was when I was bused out of my neighborhood to go to school — what felt like the other side of town, but recently I looked on a map and it’s like a couple miles away. It felt a world away. I remember the first time being on the bus on the other side of town, going to a school that had an International Baccalaureate program. I had been in kind of GATE and honors — all these segregated spaces, actually, within my school so far. And I get to this school, and on the way I see airplanes in people’s driveways.

Alexis Madrigal: That would be shocking even now.

Tianna Paschel: So there’s a private airport by the school in Mira Loma that I went to in Sacramento, and that was the first kind of moment of, like, what is this? First it’s all houses — where are the apartments? And then, okay, this is normal, this is the neighborhood around my school. And if there were people of color at that school, they were largely not in this program — I think there were like one or two my freshman year of high school.

So going back and forth between my neighborhood, where folks that I grew up with went to very different schools than the one that I went to, was jarring. And I would say, as I’ve experienced social mobility, there is this way in which the inequality in this place is a dizzying phenomenon, because of course we’ve experienced — we are really fortunate, and we’ve worked hard too, but we’ve been fortunate to experience a lot of social mobility. And yet our families haven’t all experienced that same mobility. So we’re constantly both seeing inequality around us but also kind of experiencing it within our familiar relationships as well.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, one thing about the Bay Area that’s really true is that the inequality is really close together, right? If you drive not 10 miles, one mile, in any part of the Bay Area, basically, you can see homeless encampments, $3 million homes, and oftentimes separated by a block or two streets. Well, let’s get at how the people you talked to started to make sense of this. A lot of the people you interviewed were sort of upper working class or lower middle class — in a little band around the average median income, right? This is like, “How did I end up here?” — is basically the question, right?

G. Cristina Mora: Yeah, and I guess we had a few questions when thinking about how do everyday people make sense of this. If you think about the way we think about inequality in the United States, in the globe, but especially in California, which is one of the most unequal states in America, you might think that you’ll study inequality by looking at big shifts in the economy at some macro level, or you might think that you’ll study it by looking at the everyday lives of some of the poorest of the poor — those with no safety nets, perhaps those that are being evicted or unhoused. But where we wanted to come in is to really understand how average, everyday working people make sense of this crazy rat race and these larger trends.

And the larger trend is that you’re seeing an increasingly shrinking middle class. We don’t know if it’s an exodus, but we do know that it’s shrinking. And yet they’re also not witnessing the promises that original paths to mobility have promised young folks — especially if you go to college, get a degree, become a teacher, you’ll be fine; become a social worker, you’ll be fine. We were finding teachers that are moonlighting as delivery drivers, or those renting out rooms, and many, many more who couldn’t think about ever having a home, even though they had stable homes, many of them had college degrees.

So from that perspective is where we wanted to think about how they’re making sense of all this. And you might think that, on the one hand, they just don’t see it — they’re blind to it. We’re all in our own social media worlds, we’re all in our echo chambers, perhaps they don’t see it, or they don’t care about it, or they just don’t know about it. And I think the biggest finding for us is: no, they know. They see it.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, right.

G. Cristina Mora: They are not blind to this at all, and they can often talk about it in some eloquent ways. They talk about the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. They talk about the racial underpinnings of a lot of this. They know the good neighborhoods.

Alexis Madrigal: Like the cross-race is people face.

G. Cristina Mora: Exactly, exactly. They see this.

Tianna Paschel: But yeah, I mean, they can talk about even policies, right, and why it is that the tax code is rigged in a particular way. They understand structural inequalities, for the most part, and this was across racial groups. I think the part that surprised us is that they would very quickly, after kind of reciting these things about structural inequalities, fall back on kind of good old-fashioned American liberalism, on individual ideas, on ideas about merit, on ideas that maybe if they just work hard enough, or they bide their time, they’ll be okay, or that this place is okay if certain things happen.

So I think that was the part that surprised us a bit — that they had the language, but they also fell back on things. And there was this tendency to kind of — California, specifically — to lean into certain myths. In the book, we talk about the myth of opportunity here, the myth of multiracial promise, and the myth of sanctuary. We don’t want to say that there aren’t ingredients to California that make it special, but in a way, our book is really highlighting the fact that California is almost like America on steroids, in its inequality and in the stories that it tells itself. And I think storytelling, as you know, is so important to our everyday lives, but it’s also important to the reproduction of the status quo, right?

Alexis Madrigal: What story do you tell yourself about that inequality that you just mentioned, that is so close? You have to tell yourself something. You have to tell your kids something, right?

Tianna Paschel: And we think that it’s really important, the stories, because we know that there’s no power regime, there’s no inequality that operates purely by force. It requires storytelling. So storytelling is happening always. And so what do we tell ourselves about the world around us? Do we naturalize it? Do we normalize it? Do we dismiss it? Do we minimize it? And so that is part of what we wanted to get at. And if we do, what do we do that with, right? What are the ingredients of our storytelling? Where does it come from, and how do we get out of it?

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking with the authors of the new book Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide. We’ll be back with more right after the break.

Podcast

John Green and Daniel Alarcón Break Down the 2026 World Cup

Audio

Airdate: Monday, July 13 at 10 AM

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has shattered the tournament’s attendance record, with over 6 million fans showing up for matches across the United States, Mexico and Canada. The tournament has delivered for international visitors, pairing big games with viral moments of tourists trying American foods like Texas barbeque and ranch dressing for the first time. But President Trump’s intervention reversing a U.S. player’s suspension may have soured some enthusiasm for the American team, with some spectators calling out FIFA corruption. John Green and Daniel Alarcón, hosts of “The Away End” podcast, preview what to expect from the final week of the World Cup.

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum, I’m Mina Kim. Some are calling this week’s World Cup semifinal one for the ages, as the top four FIFA-ranked teams in the world and their biggest superstars face each other — Spain versus France tomorrow, England will face Argentina Wednesday. Daniel Alarcón and John Green, hosts of the Away End podcast, are here to preview the World Cup’s final week and break down some of the biggest moments from the historic tournament, including a magical run by Mexico and a painful exit for the U.S. We’ll look at what it could all mean for the growth and popularity of soccer in America, and hear what the 2026 World Cup has meant to you.

Listeners, what moments will stay with you, whether in the games or with the people you watched them with? 866-733-6786 is the number. You can email Forum at kqed.org, or find us on Discord, Blue Sky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.

Daniel Alarcón and John Green are longtime friends, in addition to co-hosting their pop-up podcast about the 2026 World Cup, The Away End. Daniel is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, co-founder of Radio Ambulante, and a professor at Columbia Journalism School. Welcome to Forum, Daniel.

Daniel Alarcón: Good morning. I’m John.

Mina Kim: Yeah, good morning. John is also with us — a YouTuber and author of several books, including Everything Is Tuberculosis and The Fault in Our Stars. John, welcome to you.

John Green: Thanks so much.

Mina Kim: So, John, I know both of you are dreaming of some different teams making it to the semifinal stage, but now that the teams are set, tell me what you’re looking forward to in these semifinal matchups, starting with the one that will be played first, I guess — France versus Spain.

John Green: Sure, yeah. I think we all wanted an underdog to make it to the World Cup semifinals — this happened last tournament with Morocco — but this time around it’s the big four. France versus Spain, probably the two best teams in the world right now. France, though, is overwhelmingly the best team in the world, I think. Just talent from top to bottom — they have some of the best strikers in the world, players like Ousmane Dembélé and Kylian Mbappé — and it’s hard to see them losing that game. That said, Daniel and I are notoriously bad prognosticators, so the fact that we both think France is going to win is a great sign for Spain.

Mina Kim: What do you think, Daniel? What’s interesting to you about this matchup?

Daniel Alarcón: I just want to reiterate, so the listeners know how bad I am at making predictions — I’m 119 out of 125 in the bracket that I made with friends. So, no, I’m really bad. Having said that, I agree with John. It’s hard to look past France. They’re so strong, it’s almost like they’re in another league. I think John said it was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters at times, because they don’t even seem to have to try that hard to win games — at a canter.

Mina Kim: If Spain does pull it out, though, how do you think they’d be able to do it? How would they pull it off?

Daniel Alarcón: Well, I think they’d pull it off by boring France to death with a thousand tiny little passes, and then bringing Mikel Merino on in the 87th minute to score with his first touch. I’m joking, obviously — Spain is an incredible team. But I have been on the record saying they are not my favorite team to watch, as much as I admire them technically. And I’ve said this before, but I think it’s worth noting, and I think your listeners will agree, those of you who’ve watched games — the best teams don’t always make for the most entertaining games. Like Iran-New Zealand, all day long — two deeply imperfect teams going at each other, and it ends up 3-3 or 4-3, or something absurd like that. Whereas teams like Spain, like France — I could easily see that being a 1-0, one way or another.

Mina Kim: Wow, all right. Well, the second semifinal matchup, on Wednesday, England will face Argentina in Georgia. John, tell me what you’re looking forward to, or what you find interesting about this potential game — what could happen given the players.

John Green: Well, it’s a very historically fraught game. In 1986, England and Argentina played a famous game, often known as the Hand of God game, because a great player, Diego Maradona, scored with his hand. He tried to head the ball, but then he lifted his hand above his head and knocked it in with his hand. When asked about the goal after the game, he was asked if there was a hand involved, and he said, “If there was a hand, it was the hand of God” — which is notably not a denial. So it’s a very fraught game, also for geopolitical, historical reasons — the Falklands War and so on.

It’ll be really interesting. I think it’ll be a tempestuous game. I think there’s some real venom on both sides of the ball. And of course, you have the greatest player probably ever to play the game in Lionel Messi, in what is almost certainly his last tournament. I was very moved when the Argentine players were singing, after the quarterfinal, a song about doing it for Diego and for Leo’s last tournament. This is Leo’s tournament, and he’s a very special player. We’ll see if he’s special enough to overcome an extraordinarily stacked England team.

Mina Kim: Yeah, it’s been interesting, because Argentina has shown some weaknesses there. But does this mean, John, that you’re rooting for Argentina?

John Green: I wouldn’t go quite that far. I’m not sure that I have a strong rooting interest in the World Cup at this point. I root for good games. Now that all the underdogs are out, and my friend Daniel’s Colombia is out, and so on, I remind myself that there are children in all of these countries who will be very happy if their team wins the World Cup.

Mina Kim: Aww.

John Green: That is so sweet, John.

Mina Kim: Yeah, that’s a really nice way to think about it — especially if you have a specific team that is your team, or if there’s a team that has been your team that is out of it now. Daniel, is there anything you would add, or say differently, about what John has said about England-Argentina?

Daniel Alarcón: I just admire that John is for the children, but he’s not being specific about which children. This has been a difficult tournament for me, because, generally, Mina, I’m pro-Latin-American no matter what. Argentina, shall we say, has gotten the rub of the green on a lot of controversial calls, which has made it a little bit harder to take, and a little bit harder to cheer for them. Messi is an extraordinary player — I agree, probably the greatest of all time. I find myself tilting toward England, thinking that they’ll pull it off, and also kind of weirdly rooting for them, in a way that I find surprising and, honestly, kind of personally troubling — making me question my entire identity.

John Green: I will say that England hasn’t won a World Cup since 1966, and it would be a huge deal for the country if they did. So I’d be happy for those kids too.

Mina Kim: Ha! I think it would also be pretty surprising if they do come out of this group, but yes — they have been playing, as you say, John, really demonstrating the fact that they have so much experience, that they’re stacked, as you put it, and have so much composure when they’re playing their games.

I want to hear from listeners: who has been your team, and who do you hope will win it all, in addition to some of the moments that will really stay with you in this 2026 World Cup — when you cried tears of joy or tears of agony. And also, whether you’re a longtime soccer fan, or if this year’s World Cup turned you into one. Again, 866-733-6786 is the number, email Forum at kqed.org, or find us on our social channels at KQED Forum. I’ll get to your calls and comments in just a moment.

First, I just want to hear what this World Cup has been for the two of you personally, too. I’ve heard you note, I think, Daniel, that this is a way you count time. What do you mean by that?

Daniel Alarcón: I mean that, in very real ways, every time a World Cup rolls around, I feel like I’m nine years old again. The first World Cup I remember was Mexico ’86. I remember the game John referenced — the Maradona hand-of-God goal, which I saw. He didn’t mention what’s often called the Goal of the Century, the single greatest goal ever scored in a World Cup — Maradona dribbling past the entire English defense, basically one-on-seven, and scoring. I remember my father saying, “Yes, the second goal was a handball, but the first goal was so beautiful, it counts for two. So it’s okay.”

I love all the rituals around the World Cup — collecting the Panini stickers, teaching my kids about the history of the tournament and the teams, and the anticipation. I’ve been living here in Bogotá, Colombia, for the year with my wife and my family, and Colombia had a great run. Every single game was special — it was an event, a social event, and something that I don’t think I, or my kids, will forget.

Mina Kim: How did Colombians in Bogotá react when they exited the World Cup?

Daniel Alarcón: With a mixture of sadness and a little bit of anger, I think. We could have done better — we just didn’t have a striker, we didn’t have anyone. And I say “we” — I’m Peruvian, I should clarify, but I married into a Colombian family, so I choose to say “we,” with that little asterisk. But yeah, we didn’t have anyone to put the ball in the net, and unfortunately that’s how the game is scored — that’s the metric by which we decide who wins. So, in the absence of a scored goal, you’re going to have a lot of trouble.

Mina Kim: John, who has been your team for the World Cup — the one you were rooting for and following until they exited?

John Green: Well, I’m a U.S. men’s national team fan and have been for a long time, and it was great to see the U.S. men win a knockout-round game. But I think the winner of this year’s World Cup will be whoever wins, and then the second winner will be Cape Verde. I thought their run was incredible — they almost beat Argentina. It was one of the greatest World Cup games I’ve ever seen. I was with friends and family, and everyone was hanging on the edge of their seats. It was such a special moment for me.

Like Daniel, I also measure my life in World Cups — I think about where I was during each one. For me, this will be the World Cup I watched with Daniel, and it will always be special for me for that reason.

Mina Kim: Yeah. How you watch it really matters, doesn’t it, in terms of people’s experiences of the World Cup. That’s been such a piece of this, I think, for so many people I’ve talked to about what this World Cup means. John?

John Green: Yeah, it’s about who you watch it with, and how you watch it, and where you watch it — whether you’re in a bar in Bogotá, or whether you’re in Indianapolis, like I am, watching with friends and family. Those are the actual memories. You remember the football, but what you actually remember most are the human connections that you make through the football. That’s what football is actually about.

Mina Kim: Yeah. We’re talking about the 2026 World Cup as we enter the final week — what to expect in that final week of what has been a historic tournament with 48 teams. We’ll also break down some of the biggest moments and best performances, and we want to hear them from you, our listeners. We’re breaking it down with John Green and Daniel Alarcón, co-hosts of the Away End podcast. We’ll have more with them, and with you, after the break. Stay with us — this is Forum, I’m Mina Kim.

Podcast

The Ukraine War Is in Its Fifth Year. Is Peace Possible?

Audio

While the Iran war occupies domestic headlines, Russia’s war in Ukraine has entered its fifth year. As the Trump administration retreats from peace negotiations and Ukraine’s drone strikes reach deep into Russia, European allies are scrambling to fill the security vacuum. We’ll discuss the state of the war and how it has changed the face of modern conflict, U.S. policy, and NATO’s future.

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Grace Won: Welcome to Forum, I’m Grace Won, in for Alexis Madrigal. When Russian troops rolled into Ukraine in February 2022, many thought that conflict would be short-lived. Ukraine would surrender, and Russia, with its awesome firepower, would prevail. Five years later, the war continues at a cost of more than a million lives, but now the tide may be turning in Ukraine’s favor as it continues to bring the war to Russia’s doorstep. On Monday, Ukraine hit Russian oil depots, crippling shipping in the Sea of Azov. Two weeks earlier, it launched a drone attack that hit Moscow. Russia has responded in kind, but many, including President Trump, have opined that Ukraine’s new aggression may be the way toward peace.

Here to talk about the current state of the conflict, how it has changed modern warfare, and the impact that it’s had on alliances, including NATO, we’re joined by Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary general of NATO and a former undersecretary for arms control and international security at the State Department during the Obama administration. She’s now at Stanford University, where she’s the William J. Perry lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She’s also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Rose, welcome to Forum.

Rose Gottemoeller: Thank you so much, it’s great to be here.

Grace Won: We also have Simon Shuster, a staff writer for the Atlantic Magazine, and he’s the author of The Showman: Inside the Invasion that Shook the World and Made a Leader of Vladimir Zelensky. Simon, welcome to Forum.

Simon Shuster: Thank you. Pleasure to be with you.

Grace Won: Simon, I wanted to start with you and the death of Senator Lindsey Graham, who died from a heart attack over the weekend. Graham was a vocal defender of Ukraine and had just returned from Ukraine hours before he died. Lindsey Graham seemed to have Trump’s ear when it came to Ukraine. What does his death mean for Ukraine and its relationship with the U.S., specifically the Trump administration?

Simon Shuster: Yeah, it’s a major blow. I talked to a few senior Ukrainian officials who interacted a lot with Lindsey Graham over the years during the war, and they all had trouble naming anyone on Capitol Hill who was more of a useful guide, a friend, a tough ally for Ukraine than Lindsey Graham. So they are now thinking about who could fill those shoes, especially when it comes to pushing for stronger sanctions against Russia — to put that additional pressure on Vladimir Putin to try to get him to come to the negotiating table and negotiate a peace deal in good faith. Lindsey Graham was really instrumental in doing that, and he actually sponsored a bill that would impose very severe sanctions on Russia last year. And those officials I talked to in Kyiv yesterday all said that they really hope that, partly to honor his memory, the Senate would push that legislation through.

Grace Won: Well, this morning, Senator Jeanne Shaheen from New Hampshire said that she’d like to see that bill passed. What’s in that bill, and why would that be such a great weapon for Ukraine against Russia?

Simon Shuster: Well, it would complement a lot of the drone and missile strikes that Ukraine has been launching at Russian energy infrastructure — oil refineries, and sites like that — because these sanctions particularly target the Russian oil industry, energy industry, Russia’s ability to sell its oil, and in so doing finance the war. The hope in Ukraine and among many of its allies is that if you apply that pressure and cut off Russia’s ability to finance the war, then Putin will have no choice but to sit down at the negotiating table.

Grace Won: Well, many will remember that the Trump administration has had, sometimes, a very tense relationship with President Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Let’s hear from the White House conference between the three — Trump, Vance, and Zelensky — from last year.

JD Vance: And do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?

Volodymyr Zelensky: A lot of questions — let’s start from the beginning. First of all, during the war, everybody has problems. Even you — but you have a nice ocean, and don’t feel it now, but you will feel it in the future. God bless, God bless, you will not have a war. God bless, God bless you, you will not have war.

Donald Trump: Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. I’m not telling you — because you’re in no position to dictate that. Remember that. You’re in no position to dictate what we are going to feel.

Grace Won: Well, that exchange last February resulted in the U.S. pausing all aid to Ukraine for a week. And now that Lindsey Graham is no longer with us, who in the administration, Simon, do you think will take up that role of being not only a whisperer to Trump, but somebody to help Zelensky navigate the Trump administration?

Simon Shuster: Honestly, I can’t think of anyone who really had Trump’s ear who could play the same role. Around the time of that clip that you just played, that really contentious meeting in the Oval Office, Lindsey Graham was trying to coach Zelensky about how to behave toward Trump and Vance in that meeting. And Lindsey Graham watched as it all went off the rails. So he was really instrumental in setting up that meeting and then trying to help the Ukrainians recover from it, with various overtures and offers to the Trump administration to try to get Trump interested again in helping Ukraine and supporting Ukraine. It worked eventually, but really that kind of role — there’s no one who has the trust in Kyiv and the ear of Trump who can really try to bridge those two administrations and make them work together effectively.

Grace Won: Rose, the war in Ukraine is now in its fifth year. And as we’ve talked, there’s some possible momentum on Ukraine’s part, but can you give us a quick explainer of the current state of play when it comes to the war itself? Where are the boundaries? Who’s winning? Who’s losing?

Rose Gottemoeller: Right. And wow, Grace, it’s still painful after all this time to hear that Oval Office exchange. It was such a bullying exchange. I do want to say, though, it wasn’t just this past February — it was February of 2025, and quite a bit of water has flowed under the bridge since then. And in particular, the momentum on the battlefield has shifted a considerable amount in Ukraine’s direction. And that is because of the really unbelievable pace of innovation that Ukraine has been able to achieve with its drone and missile developments. I think they are really leading the way now in terms of showing what defense innovation is going to have to look like in the future.

As soon as they develop a good offensive capability, the Russians develop defenses against it, and then the Ukrainians up their software game and come in with an improved offensive capability. So it’s a fast-moving cycle. The Russians have been pretty good at it as well, but the Ukrainians, I think, have led the way with that. And the effect of that, I think, has been to change a lot of attitudes around the world about who’s going to be able to win this war. In particular, we’ve heard recently, including at the NATO summit last week, President Trump being much more forward-leaning toward Zelensky himself, but also toward Ukraine and its ability to somehow prevail in this war. We still don’t know exactly how, but unlike February of 2025, when Trump said peremptorily to Zelensky, “You have no cards,” I think today Trump feels that Zelensky maybe does have some cards — and it’s really born on the back of Ukrainian self-reliance, but a good deal of assistance and aid, including from Washington, but also from other NATO allies.

Grace Won: And where do the boundaries lie right now between the two countries? What is Russia occupying? Where has it been beaten back, if at all?

Rose Gottemoeller: The two armies have been contesting a line of contact that runs through the Donbas. These are the four provinces in the eastern part of Ukraine, which Russia really began to contest back in 2014, after it seized Crimea. It seized some of the territories in the Donbas and has been pressing ever since. Putin says his basic objective is to achieve control over all four provinces in the Donbas and to control what used to be the industrial heartland of Ukraine, and really of the Soviet Union. One might think of it as a kind of rust belt, but there’s quite a bit of mining there as well, and heavy manufacturing too. It’s not the economy of the future, but it has been quite valuable in the past. So I think it has a special meaning in many ways for Putin, a child of the Soviet Union, and also just someone thinking about the future of Russian resource requirements, no doubt, as well.

But to make a long story short, they have been contesting this territory for a long time, and Russia has been pressing Ukraine for many months to take significant territory toward achieving control of the entire Donbas, but they have not been able to move — strictly, I think, because of the Ukrainians pushing back so hard and making a killing zone where the two armies are in contact, with the drone innovations I spoke about a moment ago. For that reason, Ukraine has been able to succeed in holding Russia, even with many fewer troops, and Russia, in some places, has even been pushed back in recent weeks from the territorial gains it had made.

Grace Won: Simon, you know, Ukraine has made incursions into Russia going back as far as 2024, but there seems, as Rose has put it, an elevation in what Ukraine has been able to do. Reading the press about it, the word “MacGyver” keeps being used to describe how the Ukrainians are able to get their drones not just in the air, but on the ground. Tell me a little bit about how the Ukrainian system is working. Is it organized? Is it systematic, or is this just battlefield innovation on top of battlefield innovation?

Simon Shuster: I think it’s a question of scale at this point. You know, the Ukrainians have been innovative from the beginning of the war in terms of MacGyvering together various components that they buy on the open market from China, strapping a mortar or a bomb onto them, and flying them into a Russian tank. That was all going on in the early months. What we see today, after more than four and a half years of war, is a real, massive industrial capacity to produce advanced, long-range drones at scale — thousands of them per day.

I visited a factory in February that makes some of Ukraine’s most successful long-range, deep-strike drones, and it was an incredible sight — just the scale of it, the size of it. And they’re able to continue this production despite the consistent threat from Russian ballistic missiles hitting some of these production facilities. Nevertheless, they continue to churn out thousands of long-range drones per day that are launched nightly, almost, in waves at Russia now. So it’s the scale, I think, that’s making the difference today on the battlefield and bringing the war home to Russia with these deep strikes.

Grace Won: We’re talking about the war in Ukraine, which is now in its fifth year, the innovations in modern warfare made by Ukraine and Russia, and how this is changing alliances across NATO and Europe. We’re joined by Simon Shuster, a staff writer with the Atlantic Magazine — he’s also the author of The Showman: Inside the Invasion that Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky. We also have Rose Gottemoeller. She’s a former deputy secretary general of NATO and a former undersecretary for arms control and international security at the State Department during the Obama administration. She’s now at Stanford University.

We want to hear from you. What are your questions about the war in Ukraine? Do you have family or friends in Ukraine, Russia? How are they feeling about this war? What role would you like to see the U.S. take in this conflict? You can give us a call now at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email your comments and questions to forum@kqed.org, or find us on social media — we’re at KQED Forum. I’m Grace Won, in for Alexis Madrigal. More Forum after the break.