Category Archives: Podcast

Podcast

Saving Money at Professional Baseball Games

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Friday, September 11, 2026:

  • This summer, KPBS and KQED teamed up to look at different ways that Major League Baseball fans save money when going to a game, so that maybe you can too during some of these last games, or keep this in mind for next season.
  • Governor Gavin Newsom is signing a package of bills that institute some of the strongest protections for children in the country.
  • The San Joaquin Valley air basin has long been out of compliance with federal air quality standards. That includes ozone and fine particulate matter that can be inhaled and lodged into the lungs. One often overlooked element in this regions air pollution: fast-food drive-through lanes.

A Fan’s Version of Moneyball

Major League Baseball’s regular season is coming to an end, with post season games scheduled to start later this month. This summer, KPBS (a San Diego based radio station) reporter Jake Gotta teamed up with KQED (a San Francisco based radio station) reporter Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí to look at different ways that Padres and Giants fans save money when going to a game.

Gotta spent roughly $67 to attend a Padres game at San Diego’s Petco Park. Food and drinks, specifically beer, were a large portion of the total amount spent. He said fans reccommended getting an alcoholic in the areas surrounding area, where prices are more affordable. Gotta made his experience mroe affordable by taking public transit, and not having to pay for parking. He also saved money by attending a Padres game that was less of a big matchup. Rivalries and expensive baseball clubs like the Dodgers and Yankees cost more than smaller market teams with little historic beef.

Cabrera-Lomelí spent around $76 to attend a Giants game at Oracle Park. He too said food and drinks were a huge part of what impacts the total price of attending a game. But what he learned was that Oracle Park (and Petco Park), allow people to bring food into the ballparks, which can drastically change the total. Cabrera-Lomelí saved money using public transit instead of paying for parking, and by using a summer promotion to get a ticket to the game for $22. Oracle Park also allows helps people who don’t want to spend on gas money, by having a bike valet option.

New Child Protection Bills Signed Into Law

California will now have some of the strongest protections for children in the country, following the passing of thirteen bills. Most of the bills are pertaining to children’s use of the internet and artificial intelligence.

One bill requires AI companies to disclose to chatbot users they are not speaking to a human. Another bill would prohibit social media companies from including addictive features like autoplay on accounts for people under the age of 16.

In a statement, tech giant OpenAI says they welcome the legislation, and that it will enable youth to use their tools for educational purposes.

The Air Pollution of Fast-Food Drive-Through Lanes

While people wait in drive-through lines, fuel-burning vehicles pump into the atmosphere a lush combination of hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen and other emissions, including carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

In addition to components of ozone or smog, a raft of other tailpipe emissions, such as ammonia, benzene, toluene and more, are breathed in by motorists sitting in drive-through lanes, as well as employees who work the drive-through windows and even other diners inside the restaurant.

Each day, cars line up and idle at roughly 1,300 fast-food and coffee drive-through lanes up and down the San Joaquin Valley. But the extent to which they contribute to the degradation of the region’s air quality is a mystery that appears to have so far gone unstudied by regional and state air quality regulators.

California, Podcast

Inside the SF Church Where John Coltrane is a Saint; CA Gold Fever in 2026?

Listen to this and more in-depth storytelling by subscribing to The California Report Magazine podcast. 


Inside the San Francisco Church Where John Coltrane is a Saint

If Coltrane were still alive, he’d be celebrating his 100th birthday this month. In a story from our friends at KQED’s Bay Curious podcast, Asal Ehsanipour visits the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco, where Reverend Franzo King and Mother Marina have spent 60 years turning the jazz legend’s music into a spiritual practice. What began as a living room listening clinic in the 1960s grew into a congregation that has weathered evictions and a copyright lawsuit. Still, they persist in the belief that Coltrane’s saxophone carries a divine message.

Old Timers and Newbies Look to Cash in by Panning in Gold Country

With gold prices hovering near record highs, a new wave of prospectors is showing up along California’s Yuba and American rivers, joining old-timers who’ve been panning for generations. KQED’s Katherine Monahan talks to sixth-generation miners, gold-shop owners and newcomers about whether the modern gold rush is worth the effort or mostly hype.




News, Podcast

Agave Takes Root in Central Valley Ag School Programs

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Thursday, September 10, 2026

  • In the San Joaquin Valley, Agriculture is big. So it’s no surprise ag programs are offered at many local colleges and universities. But now a new plant is taking root in ag classrooms: agave. At a test plot in Merced County, agave is becoming the primary subject of coursework.
  • A new lawsuit filed in Kern County details sexual abuse allegations by an unnamed plaintiff against the late civil rights leader Cesar Chavez. It accuses nonprofits tied to Chavez of negligence.
  • The US Department of Justice is alleging that UC Berkeley law school’s admissions policy discriminates against white and Asian applicants.

Valley Schools Like UC Merced Trying To Answer Farmers’ Questions About the Crop.

It’s a torrid summer morning on a Merced County agave farm, and UC Merced PhD student Calysta Ownby is boring into the dirt with a drill. She’s collecting a core of dry and hard-packed soil in between the rows of agave. Ownby, her professor, and a research specialist have spent hours collecting these so-called “bulk density” samples. It’s back-breaking work, thrusting a metal cylinder tool into the ground and clawing at the soil.

The team is trying to figure out if agave’s roots can loosen up the soil and keep it fertile for crops in the future.

“I think it’s one of the big issues that society needs an answer to. There isn’t one simple answer,” she said.

Agave is a large spiky succulent that can come in blue, green and yellow depending on the variety. For centuries, Mexico has distilled its core to make tequila and mezcal, but more recently, agave became more popular on California farms. That’s because it’s known to be drought and heat resistant.

Valley schools like UC Merced are trying to answer farmers’ and policymakers’ questions around it. Faculty member Srabani Das, who leads the lab Ownby works in, is part of that.

“We must make agriculture regenerative and also very economically viable for the farmers,” she said.

She’s with both UC Merced and the University of California’s cooperative extension. Farmers are dealing with increasing water restrictions from a state water law, Das says, so many are either going to try a new crop like agave, or not use their land at all.

Agave could also help the community make money, and UC Merced is not the only college focusing on agave.

Angel Reyna is the president at Madera Community College.

“This would be a temporary site until we build our own hotel, bar, restaurant, and distillery that our students run and operate, so they can get that hands-on experience,” he said as he stands in a leased-out winery that he wants to turn into an agave distillery.

He says the college wants to build careers out of agave. The college provides four-week community courses all about growing this crop, with a plan to offer credited courses and degrees in the future.

“We get state resources that are funded by the public, and so ultimately it’s their money for us to invest and educate the future workforce, but also to be an economic driver,” Reyna said.

There’s also a plan to help K-12 students learn about agave farming.

Camille Fagundes is at the Merced County Office of Education.

“We are at the heart of of the country’s produce source, so it’s very important for our students to learn about where all that food is coming from,” Fagundes said.

Calysta Ownby sees herself someday working at an agency like the US Department of Agriculture.

“Everyone that I’ve interacted with in those jobs has always been doing their best for their community, and that’s what I want is to give back to the community somehow.”

She’ll be taking these soil samples to the lab and measuring their moisture. She thinks the results might help a Valley farmer or a government leader.

“We’re not just testing things because it’s an interesting question. It’s an interesting question because it needs an answer.”

An answer that could unlock a new future.

New Lawsuit Accuses Nonprofits Tied to Cesar Chavez of Negligence

The woman in the lawsuit is only referred to as Jane Doe, and she filed a total of six claims related to alleged abuse she suffered in the 1970s. She is requesting a jury trial.

She was a resident of La Paz, the compound in the Tehachapi mountains where Chavez and the UFW ran operations.

The lawsuit filed Sept 1 in Kern County Superior Court against the Cesar Chavez Foundation and the UFW Foundation, alleges leadership at the foundations “allowed the labor union and civil rights icon to freely target women for sexual abuse,” according to a press release.

In 1973, the plaintiff says Chavez forced alcohol on her and danced with her. She hid in a bathroom, but says Chavez then pulled her onto a bed and raped her.

The plaintiff accuses the Chavez family and nonprofits tied to Chavez of negligence. The lawsuit alleges the flagship farmworker union and the Cesar Chavez Foundation “made concerted efforts to hide evidence relating to sexual harassment and sexual assaults of girls and women by UFW members and leaders, including Cesar Chavez, in an effort to incentivize survivors to remain silent or prevent information relating to such wrongdoing from becoming public.”

This is the first known lawsuit stemming from an explosive New York Times story this spring that Chavez sexually abused girls and women during his rise as a union leader.

Trump Admin Accuses UC Berkeley Law School of Racial Discrimination in Admissions

A letter from the DOJ says that it found evidence of discrimination during a compliance review of the school’s admissions process with the federal Department of Education.

The departments’ investigative findings are the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration targeting the state’s public university system — and other top universities nationwide — with threats to cut funding over antisemitism and diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

In 2023 the US supreme court ruled that schools cannot consider race in admissions and hiring decisions.

The DOJ is requesting that Berkeley’s law school enter a “voluntary resolution agreement” to ensure that its admissions process is brought into legal compliance. The university says it complies with state and federal law and does not give admissions preference based on race.

News, Podcast

Sonoma County Agency Agrees to Reel in Drone Program After Privacy Violations

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Wednesday, September 9, 2026

  • Changes are coming to a controversial drone code enforcement program in Northern California’s Sonoma County. The county’s land use planning and development permitting agency, Permit Sonoma, agreed last week to settle after being sued for allegedly spying on much more than what the program initially intended.
  • Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra has a strong lead over Republican Steve Hilton in the race for California governor. But Becerra has kept a relatively low profile since the June Primary and made few specific commitments about what he would do as governor.
  • Attorneys for Santa Clara County say they’re optimistic after a federal judge in San Jose extended a halt on the construction of a new ICE holding facility near Gilroy.
  • The clean-up effort following last year’s battery fire at Texas-based energy company’s Vistra facility in Moss Landing is moving into its final phase.

ACLU Argues Permit Sonoma Violated California Constitution With Drone Program

Permit Sonoma agreed to a settlement brokered by the ACLU of Northern California, after 3 local residents sued the agency and a number of county officials last year over the use of invasive drone surveillance.

Permit Sonoma’s drone program was started in 2019 to allegedly target illicit cannabis operations. However, ACLU attorney Nick Hidalgo says it quickly spread to more mundane issues.

“So not only were these drones being used to violate people’s right to privacy, but they were doing so without any clear idea of what they were looking for,” said Hidalgo. “And in a lot of cases they of course found code violations because no one’s perfect.

The ACLU had argued that code enforcement inspectors violated the California Constitution by spying on residents’ homes and the areas surrounding them without first getting a warrant. Hidalgo argues the privacy violations are clear cut.

“Forty years ago, the California Supreme Court said that aerial surveillance of a person’s home violated our Constitutional rights, and that was with an airplane flying at 1600 feet using a magnification lens that had a maximum zoom of 4 times.”

Hidalgo says the surveillance landscape now is very different.

“Drones today, including the ones in Sonoma and purchased by many other agencies around the state, can fly lower than 100 feet, can fly quietly, sneak up on people, peer through windows, have zoom capabilities between 56x and 200x, can be equipped with thermal imagery.”

The three plaintiffs in the case were cited for civil code violations spotted during drone flights.

A spokesperson for Permit Sonoma says the agency disagrees with the ACLU’s characterization of the case.

The spokesperson notes the settlement is not an admission of fact and says Sonoma County has successfully defended the use of drones on previous occasions, but is settling to avoid an expensive legal process.

As part of the settlement, the three residents will each receive $50,000 and Hidalgo says Permit Sonoma will change how the agency uses drones, including obtaining a warrant or a resident’s consent.

They are agreeing to not only publish their drone policy, which they had not done prior, but they are going to revise it through a public process, which will involve a meeting with the board of supervisors, a meeting that Sonoma County residents are welcome to attend and voice their concerns if they have any.

Permit Sonoma has also agreed not to hold images of people’s properties indefinitely and will produce drone flight logs to the ACLU for 2 years.

Becerra Not Showing His Hand, Holds Comfortable Lead in Governor’s Race

Xavier Becerra says California needs to build more housing by reducing permitting times and making affordable housing funding easier to access, but he doesn’t want to say how many new homes he would deliver as governor. To address inequality, he’s considering whether the public should own shares of artificial intelligence companies, but he won’t commit to pursuing that policy.

The Democratic candidate’s promises remain vague to Californians who, polls show, widely favor him for governor this November.

Sacramento State political science professor Wesley Hussey says there’s little political incentive for Becerra to take risks.

“If Becerra starts talking about issues in detail and laying out what he wants to do, all that would do is just anger either parts of his coalition or make people more uncomfortable if they don’t like what he says.”

But that strategy also means voters have fewer details about what Becerra would actually do in office. Hussey says that’s because of the large political advantage Democrats have in California and points to Governor Gavin Newsom’s housing agenda as an example.

“And I think Newsom overselling how much we’re going to shift on building housing is an example of why Becerra doesn’t want to lay out all the things he promises to do because I don’t think he wants to then be on the hook for those things as governor.”

Newsom made adding more housing a major priority with a promise of building 3 and a half million new homes by 2025. Less than half a million were actually completed. The latest Berkeley IGS poll has Becerra ahead of Hilton by 18 points.

Becerra declined to comment.

“This Should Have Never Been Proposed Here,” Gilroy ICE Facility Pause Extended

Judge Eumi K. Lee of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that for the next week, the federal government may not continue its plans to build an immigration center near Gilroy, in unincorporated Santa Clara County. 

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement was quietly developing the facility on a 25-acre agricultural parcel that was formally used for research. In June, the San Jose Spotlight, a nonprofit newsroom, discovered and published blueprints of the plans. Santa Clara county and the state of California filed suit, arguing the site is unfit and likely contaminated with hazardous waste. The federal government agreed to pause construction through September 9th.

County Counsel Tony LoPresti said, “This is the wrong place for this facility. This should have never been proposed here, and it should certainly not proceed here.”

Attorneys for ICE argued the project is exempt from further environmental review, because plans for the project would not differ greatly from its prior use by agricultural research companies.

But the judge was skeptical and extended a stay on the development until at least next week, while she considers a potentially longer pause.

Moss Landing Battery Fire Clean-Up Enters Final Phase

Crews are tearing down the burned Vistra building to reach the remaining batteries. The work comes more than a year and a half after a fire damaged tens of thousands of lithium-ion batteries. The EPA says damaged batteries will be treated and tested on site, then they’ll be sent to off-site disposal facilities.

Meanwhile, crews will continue to monitor air quality, water and battery temperatures. Dust control measures will also remain in place to protect workers and the surrounding community.

Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church says the slow clean-up is understandable because of the safety risks, but he still wants answers about what started the fire.

“The California Public Utilities Commission is still doing its investigation into this and has not determined a cause,” said Supervisor Church. “I wish that was moving along a little faster, because it’s an important consideration in all of this.”

Church says the county is being informed, but the clean-up itself is being managed by Vistra and the EPA.

Vistra did not respond to a request for comment.

The work is expected to wrap up by mid-2027.

Immigration, Labor, News, Podcast

Immigration Related Threats by Employers Spiking in California, Worker Advocates Say

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, September 8, 2026

  • The City of Fresno will soon ban A-I data centers within city limits. That’s after the Fresno City Council on Thursday unanimously approved a resolution opposing their construction. 
  • Earlier this summer, California signed off on an agreement to share state driver’s license data with a national database. Our partner CalMatters has reported the Department of Homeland Security was actively pursuing driver data from the group that manages the database, at the same time California was weighing concerns that information of non-citizens would be vulnerable in a national database.
  • As the Trump administration ramps up immigration arrests to levels not seen in years, worker advocates and state officials say some employers are taking advantage of the political climate to exploit immigrant workers in lower-wage jobs. 

Gov. Newsom Office Calls Complaints Over License-Data Sharing Overblown

California lawmakers wrestled with a difficult question earlier this summer: Could the state safely share driver’s license data with a national group, as the federal government demanded, without exposing more than a million people to immigration and law enforcement agencies? Ultimately, amid fears that state IDs wouldn’t be accepted at airports and federal buildings, they voted to let the DMV share driver data.

Non-citizens are legally allowed to obtain driver’s licenses in California, and immigration and privacy advocates worried that information would be vulnerable in a national database.

Federal agencies first requested, then subpoenaed, bulk commercial driver data from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, or AAMVA, a nonprofit that acts as a clearinghouse for information from state motor vehicle departments nationwide. That’s the same organization California plans to entrust with all its driver records by next year. 

The Trump administration’s license-data demands appear to be part of a broader and escalating crackdown on non-citizen truck drivers.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration began in May 2025 strictly enforcing English proficiency standards. The agency also in February 2026 finalized a new rule that would block immigrants with work permits, like asylum seekers, Temporary Protected Status holders or DACA recipients, who are in the United States legally, from qualifying for commercial driver’s licenses.

“Basically, the fears of some of the advocates came to fruition here,” says reporter Wendy Fry with CalMatters, who has been following this story. “So the Trump administration was already seeking access to information about 17 million commercial drivers. The Department of Homeland Security said in their subpoena they specifically want these records because they want to do immigration enforcement.”

CalMatters reports that subpoena from DHS came to light because of a recent lawsuit.

A spokesperson for the national driver database that got the subpoena declined to comment. Governor Gavin Newsom’s office, which backed the data sharing, has said the concerns from advocates are overblown — much as it did this summer after critics warned that any California data shared with AAMVA was at risk of federal subpoena.

‘Bad Faith’ Employers Taking Advantage of Workers’ Deportation Fears

Francisco has made and installed windows in the Bay Area for more than 16 years, and he’s a proud father of three. But earlier this year, he couldn’t sleep. He’d burst out crying during family meals. One day, when he saw a black suburban parked near his apartment, he rushed to lock all the doors and hide.

He says his boss threatened to report him to ICE if Francisco spoke with state regulators investigating claims the company underpaid workers. KQED is withholding his full name because he does not have a legal immigration status and fears retaliation.

“Tenía miedo. Pues es traumático todo eso. Es traumatico.”

Francisco says he was afraid and traumatized. He was so stressed out, his wife took him to see a psychiatrist. Francisco ended up finding a new job. But he’s still angry about the emotional toll on him and his family.

“Sí, me da coraje por todo eso, por todas las amenazas que estuve recibiendo ahí, que me iban a echar a Migración.”

Supervisors threatening to call ICE? That’s nothing new. But with federal agents dramatically detaining so many people under the Trump Administration, workers are taking the threat seriously. And many decide it’s not worth the risk to complain about wage-theft, harassment or other workplace issues.

“But it doesn’t have to be real, it can just be said and the people are fearful,” said Jaime Arteaga with the North Coast States Carpenters’ Union. “It can be a rumor. Somebody might say we might get deported and that shuts everything down. The workers are not going to come forward.”

State figures show complaints of retaliation involving immigration threats have spiked under the first and current Trump administration. Relatively few workers will go to the authorities, but the California Labor Commissioner’s Office reports about 200 complaints involving immigration threats since 2025. That’s nearly as many as during the entire four years of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Employment attorney Ruth Silver Taube supervises a legal advice line in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. She’s also supervising attorney of the workers’ rights practice at Santa Clara University’s School of Law.

“I do believe that this is the tip of the iceberg, and that there’s many, many more of these immigration-related threats,” said Silver Taube. “These threats are designed to deter workers from coming forward. And I think they’re successful.”

Under federal and state laws, employees have the right to minimum wage and other workplace protections regardless of their immigration status. Threatening a worker for trying to exercise those rights is illegal.

Some managers don’t know that, says Paul DeCamp, an attorney in Washington D.C. who represents employers. He’s a former administrator at the U.S. Department of Labor.

“If a manager or supervisor gets annoyed, perhaps because the workers are talking about unionizing, or they’re complaining about working conditions, or otherwise asserting their rights, the manager or a supervisor, in an attempt to try to take control of the situation may make a threat like this, which of course is illegal,” said DeCamp.

“We do not collaborate with the federal government,” said California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia Brower. She says her agency collaborates closely with advocates and community leaders to educate employers and workers.

“We do not ask about immigration status. We don’t ask for social security numbers. And it is safe for them to proceed in cooperating with us.”

That said, every worker is making an individual calculation as to how safe they actually are.

A bill that just landed on the Governor’s desk would clarify the law to say that ALL threats to call immigration – even if preemptive – are illegal, and punishable with up to $10,000 dollars in penalties per violation. The governor has until the end of September to sign or veto the measure.

Arts and Culture, News, Podcast

Native Americans in Central California Ring in Powwow Season

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Monday, September 7, 2026

“You Dance For Your Loved Ones. You Dance For Someone Who Can’t Dance.“

It’s a Saturday evening, and a steady drum is beating as dozens of people representing many Native American tribes circle a large patch of grass. Small kids dance alongside adults, each in their own tribal colors and with their own rhythm. Dozens more watch intently from the sidelines.

The grassy area is known as an “arena,” and it’s tucked into a golden hillside in eastern Fresno County. This is a social gathering known as a “powwow.” 

Although Native tribes have held ceremonial gatherings for centuries, powwows are a 19th century tradition, and late summer is California’s busy season. These gatherings are formal ways of exchanging culture, but what tribes really come here to do is dance – what they consider as “spreading medicine.” 

Waylon Burrough organized this celebration. He’s a member of the Chukchansi Indians. 

“Dancing is healing,” he says. “You dance for your loved ones. You dance for someone who can’t dance.”

He says at powwows, everyone brings something special. 

“Each different regalia has a different meaning. And each dance has a different story behind it.”

Tribal members come from all over. There’s Choctaw, Mono Indians, Seminole, Lakota, and Navajo, but Burrough says where they come from isn’t the story – it’s what happens when they get here. 

“We dance in a circular motion. And clockwise motion. And to the beat of the drum. So it’s like dancing with time.”

Everyone moves to the same beat, like a heartbeat. 

Twirling in the arena is Murphy Bear-McCloud. He’s 17 years old, and belongs to the Dunlap Band of Mono Indians as well as a tribe in Oklahoma. He’s wearing yellow and orange – with two fans of feathers called bustles that look like fireworks on his back.  

“The bustles used to be flat, not big. And they used to be a lot smaller but now they just got bigger because everyone wanted a flare,” says Bear-McCloud.  

He shares more with me after his dance… once he catches his breath. 

“I do this powwow for a living. I’ve been dancing since I was real young, when I could walk. It’s just been sticking with me my whole life.”

This time of the year is his busiest. 

“Usually I do it like weekend after weekend after weekend. Like usually I’m never home for weeks. So I’m not going to be home until November.”

One of his fans interrupts our interview. 

“This guy’s going to be a superstar in life right here. You know why? Because he’s guided by the best and he’s got the best. And this is his uncle Craig Hackett speaking. And if anybody’s got anything to say to this boy, you can find me. Just say ‘whats up.’”

That’s what you call a proud uncle.

By nightfall, it’s time to compete for prize money.

Lilliane Shakespeare Largo is waiting for her turn. 

“I’m from the Diné Nation, which is Navajo, and I’m also part of Northern Arapahoe and Mescalero Apache,” says Shakespeare Largo.

She’s 25 and came in from New Mexico. 

“We drove all night, it was about a 10 hour drive.”

She’s performing the “Women’s Northern Buckskin” dance. A large feather points up from her head and curtains of white buckskin fringe hang from her brightly colored shawl.

“My favorite color is blue. So I made my whole bead work blue. And then they’re family designs,” she says.

In the arena, Largo and the other women take one step. And then another. Their buckskin sways in the wind – almost in slow motion. Then, time is up.

The winner? Largo – she’s taking home 1,000 dollars. This is a special win for her. 

“I’m five months postpartum. So it’s a lot harder for me. But I feel happy when I do perform well.”

Her dad is holding her five month old baby as they celebrate. Here, three generations point to the spirit of these powwows. Tribal members don’t just come to dance for themselves. But also for their ancestors, and the next generation, who will one day learn to dance to their own beat. 

Sea Lions in Crisis As Toxic Algae Blooms Off California Coast

The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito is fielding up to 600 calls a day about sea lions that appear confused, lethargic, and, in some cases, dead. The center has treated more than 100 sea lions — above the yearly average of 75 to 90 — with the majority of these cases occurring since the start of July.

An algal bloom is poisoning mammals with a toxin called domoic acid, which can cause seizures and heart failure. The animals ingest the naturally occurring neurotoxin by eating fish or shellfish. 

Giancarlo Rulli is a  spokesperson for the center.

“We’ve seen a major flare-up in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties,” Rulli said. “This is highly emotional, and it can be very disturbing to see an animal that’s not in control of itself out on the beach.”

Additional rescues have taken place in San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin and Sonoma counties. The center has also treated a handful of northern fur seals. Treating a single mammal can require up to six trained responders and may involve repeated doses of anti-seizure medication.

“It’s brutal on the animals,” Rulli said. “We are seeing animals die out on the beaches. There are a fair amount of carcasses out there. We’re seeing animals pass away in transport being brought back to the hospital.”

Rulli said the cases are a sign that the toxin has worked its way through the food chain in “a short-term burst,” but said the center is also seeing chronic cases where sea lions have “brain lesions and permanent heart damage.”

Along the northern California coast, marine algal blooms are primarily caused by natural factors such as ocean upwelling of nutrient-rich water and warm ocean temperatures.

Polluted runoff from agriculture and other human activities also feed blooms, a factor projected to become more frequent and severe due to human-caused climate change.

Rulli says that already warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures, and further warming from the climate pattern El Niño, could exponentially increase the number of affected mammals. 

Initial Count of Unsheltered People by L.A. County “Obviously Low,” UCLA Researcher Says

Local officials expect that security plans for the 2028 Olympics will require unhoused people to vacate areas around competition venues, but exactly how many people is unclear.

The new report from academics at USC and UCLA indicates that potentially close to 6,000 people could be displaced. That figure is more than three times higher than an estimate the L.A. County Department of Housing and Homelessness gave LAist earlier this year.

“That just seemed obviously low,” said Randall Kuhn, a UCLA professor and demographer who co-runs a monthly survey of unhoused people in L.A. In total, there are around 49,000 unsheltered people countywide, according to the 2026 point-in-time homeless count.

Kuhn and his colleagues came up with their higher estimate using numbers from that count, which estimates the number of unhoused people by census tract. They then adjusted those figures based on how much each tract overlapped with a potential Olympic security perimeter and the length of walkable and major streets where unhoused people were likely to be located.

 ”The numbers just give us a good starting point, right? What really matters is the people in those buffers.”

California, News, Podcast

Heading Outdoors for Labor Day Weekend? Here’s Some Wildfire Safety Tips

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Friday, September 4, 2026

  • Two wildfires are raging in Big Sur – the Timber Fire to the north started in the first week of August, and several weeks later, the Plaskett Fire broke out to its south. As of Friday morning, they’ve together burned through more than 55,000 acres. Progress in slowing the fires has prompted the reopening of portions of Big Sur along Highway 1 in northern Monterey County. Earlier this week, KAZU reporter Katie Brown spoke with folks keeping the now-opened strip of the Big Sur Valley alive.
  • Labor Day weekend is here, and we’re still in the middle of fire season without much rain in sight. We know many of you will likely be heading outdoors to enjoy California’s wilderness, so KQED Outdoors reporter Sarah Wright is joining us to walk us through some ways to stay safe.

Thousands of Firefighters Join Fight Against Big Sur Blazes

This famous stretch of coast attracts millions of visitors each year. But it’s been mostly closed to the public, and thousands of firefighters from almost every state are pitching in. 

Andrew Madsen is a public affairs officer with the U.S. Forest Service. He says most of the rigs are from California. 

“There’s all kinds of LA County people here. Seen them from San Diego, Tulare…”

Just outside Pfeiffer State Park, firefighters are fueling up trucks and hooking their hoses up to hydrants sucking in thousands of gallons of water. 

Madsen says the terrain is dry and extremely steep.  

“ I mean ..it looks like an EKG readout,” he says about the topography.

It’s impossible to safely put firefighters in to go direct. So instead, firefighters are relying on aircrafts to drop water, and people and drones in those remote areas to identify the hot spots.

Madsen says the big help would be “ if we can get some rain on this thing, that’s typically what puts out Big Sur fires in the backcountry.”

Rusty Sexton is a Battalion Chief from San Diego and relies on maps to strategize the best way to fight the blaze. Big Sur residents who’ve lived through wildfires have been sharing their own maps to point out wells and streams.

“They’ve been through it,” says Sexton. “They’ve seen it, and so they’ve got more on-the-ground information.” 

Carol Shadwell is one of the folks Sexton is talking about. She owns Ripplewood Resort on Highway 1, in the heart of Big Sur. She’s talking to a firefighter and looking at a hand drawn map her sister created. Shadwell’s resort was in an evacuation zone but she never left. Firefighters were relying on the resort’s general store for basics.

“It’s my home,” says Shadwell. “I couldn’t imagine having to say, ‘Oh no, oh no, you can’t come in here. No, I can’t sell you what you need or want.'”

This is the fourth fire Shadwell has lived through. During the evacuation she extended store hours to accommodate firefighters.

When asked what she will do once the wildfire is fully extinguished, she says “Oh, I’m going on vacation.”

But firefighters say that’ll only happen once it rains.

How to Camp Safely During California Fire Season

Labor Day weekend is here, and as you’ve heard we’re still in the middle of fire season without much rain in sight. We know many of you will likely be heading outdoors to enjoy California’s wilderness so KQED Outdoors reporter Sarah Wright is joining us today to walk us through some ways to stay safe.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

BOLANOS: So what should campers know before they head out if they’re worried about a fire nearby or scared that one might start while they’re out? 

WRIGHT: I think the first thing to do is to just check in with where you’re going. So let’s say you’re going to a state park or a national park, you can check the website or usually social media as well, and they’ll have fire information posted. If you’re really worried about it, you could call up the ranger station and local rangers will usually have all of the information about any fires that are burning nearby. And then also any evacuation information you may need to know. One thing I like to do is take note of paved roads nearby or escape routes nearby. So I think if you’re extra worried, those are great precautions. If you want to be double, double secure, I would check air quality, if that’s something that tends to bother you. Bring in a mask just in case, and you can even bring a go-bag or an emergency beacon if you are really worried that you’re going to have to leave quickly. 

BOLANOS: Okay, let’s say I didn’t have time to do any of that and I’m out on the campground and it’s just too late. I didn’t know until I got there. What do I do in that case? 

WRIGHT: Well, this has actually happened to me twice, so I’m an expert in this situation. One time was in Big Sur, I was driving down to my camp spot and I literally saw a fire on a mountain while I was down there, so I turned around, I got the heck out of there. I think that’s like my number one piece of advice – just go, don’t hesitate. The second time I rolled up to a campsite, it was beautiful, everything was great, and then a couple hours later, the ash started falling from the sky. And once again, I just left. It’s not worth it to be out there in danger. Just go. You may have to leave your stuff, so be okay with that. Don’t pack up your tent, it’s not worth it. And find that road that you took note of. There’s probably going to be emergency vehicles going up and down it, so if you happen to be stranded without a car or you need help, a paved road is a great place to be to get that help. And then if you do have cell service, maybe you’re the first to spot the fire, you can be the person that calls in 9-1-1. 

BOLANOS: So what else should campers know during fire season? 

WRIGHT: I think that here in California, we have a lot of messaging about how dangerous wildfires are. That includes you as a camper. A lot of people love having a campfire camp. Totally understandable. But there are many parks and zones of the California mountains where that is not a good idea and even banned for most of the summer. So pay lots of attention to what the local fire regulations are. If you’re out there, even if it’s not banned but it’s a really windy day, just don’t start that fire. Don’t use your stove. You can bring food that doesn’t require being cooked while you’re there. And if do make a campfire in a legal, safe way, make sure you put it out before you go to bed or before you leave your campsite. What that means, and I say this literally, it should be cool to the touch. You should be able to put your hand into the fire pit safely. And so that’s gonna take a little time, but that’s really the attention that we need to pay here in California because fires can escape so, so quickly. 

BOLANOS: Sarah, thank you so much for those useful tips. 

WRIGHT: No problem, thank you.

California, News, Podcast

A Trip to the Remote Island Lighthouse in the Middle of San Francisco Bay

View the full episode transcript.

A few years ago, a friend sent me the link for a job listing that seemed like an absolute dream. The opening was for a resident innkeeper at a bed and breakfast on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Even better, the B&B was housed in a 152-year-old working Victorian lighthouse! 

From my cramped desk, I fantasized about a simpler life, spent outside in one of the most gorgeous settings I could imagine. And living rent-free while earning a salary! But reality came crashing down when I read the job required a boat operator’s license and high-quality culinary experience — both of which I lacked. Alas. 

But the fantasy of East Brother Light Station stayed with me. So I was delighted when a Bay Curious listener named Kathleen Taylor wrote in, looking to learn more about the place.

The inn at East Brother Light Station, an island just off the Richmond shoreline, on Dec. 8, 2025. The historic lighthouse sits on a small, rocky outcrop in San Pablo Bay and is accessible only by boat, and the inn provides overnight stays in the restored 19th-century keeper’s quarters. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

“We were taking the ferry from Vallejo to a Giants game and passed by what looked like a small island with an East Coast-style lighthouse on it,” she recalled. It captured her imagination, too, and she got to wondering: “What’s the history? Did somebody live on that island previously? Just how far back do we have documentation of what went on on that island?”

So we headed to the island together to get some answers.

Jump straight to:

History of East Brother Light Station

In the decades after gold was first found in California in 1848, mining activity in the Sierra ramped up. Getting supplies from San Francisco up into the mountains often meant floating things up the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. To get there, boats had to skirt around Point San Pablo, the thumb sticking out from Richmond, California. This part of the bay can be especially tough for mariners.

“The topography under the water is pretty interesting,” said Rae Colvin, one of the resident innkeepers at East Brother Light Station. “There’s a 160-foot-deep chasm right off the island. But most of the [water] off to the side averages about 15 feet deep.” 

Ships passing through this channel were constantly at risk of running aground even in good weather. Add in some dense fog, and it’s pretty precarious. So in the early 1870s, it was decided a lighthouse and fog horn were needed. Initially, the Lighthouse Board hoped to put the light station on the mainland, but landowners fought back. They delayed things so profoundly that eventually an alternative site was chosen — East Brother Island. 

Inn keeper Danielle La Vigne pilots a boat from Point San Pablo Harbor to East Brother Light Station in Richmond, California, on Dec. 8, 2025. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

It was small, less than an acre in size, but it was land the U.S. government already owned. Construction began in 1873.

The exterior of the light station features gingerbread trim, scrollwork and a generous second-floor porch. Not the standard-issue government building we’ve come to expect today. 

The six-room Victorian light station was intended to house three lightkeepers, and two of them could have families. Downstairs was a bedroom and parlor for the principal keeper. Upstairs was a smaller bedroom and parlor for the assistant keeper. There was also a third bedroom for the most junior keeper. Things were cozy, to say the least.

Stacked on top of the living quarters was also the tower that housed the light. When the light station began operating on March 1, 1874, the light’s flame was powered by lard oil and featured a fourth-order Fresnel lens. The lens rotated on a clockwork mechanism. On a clear night, this beam, which appeared to flash every 30 seconds because of the design of the lens, could be seen from about 15 miles away. 

What life was like for early lightkeepers

“Despite the romantic portrayal of lighthouse keeping in novels, poems and art, the job was monotonous, and the Lighthouse Board knew it. Pay was modest and much of the work boring,” Frank Perry wrote in his book, East Brother: History of an Island Light Station. Much of what we know about life on the island comes from Perry’s book, which was compiled using primary sources.

In 1874, the primary keeper earned $800 a year — the equivalent to about a $24,000 salary today. The assistants earned even less. Their primary responsibility was keeping the light running from sunset to sunrise every night and keeping the fog signal sounding during inclement weather.

The nightly routine would begin at sunset. Lightkeepers would fill the lamp with lard oil, light the wick, and slowly bring the flame up to the optimal size of about 1 and 13/16 inches. If they did this too quickly, the glass chimney inside the rotating Fresnel lens could crack from the change in temperature. That alone was a 30-minute job. Then the keepers had to sit in the watch room all night, tending to the needs of the light.

Historic photos hang on the wall at East Brother Light Station, an island just off the Richmond shoreline, on Dec. 8, 2025. One lighthouse keeper, John Stenmark, brought his wife and children to live on the island. They had many friends in the community and would host large gatherings on the island. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

“Because of the timing on that clockwork mechanism and how quickly the wicks would burn down, you gotta check it every half hour,” said Danielle La Vigne, one of the resident innkeepers at East Brother Light Station.

The innkeepers also had to wipe the glass panes of the lantern room with dry towels to keep moisture away.

On foggy nights, the keepers’ jobs were doubly hard. They had to run the fog signal, too, which sits in another building on the island.

“The whistle was sometimes more important in aiding mariners than the light,” wrote Perry. “In dense fog or heavy rain, East Brother’s powerful light was virtually useless. The 10-inch whistle, on the other hand, could often be heard from 10 or 12 miles away.”

It took about 45 minutes to build up enough steam in the boiler for the fog whistle to work. So in the meantime, one of the keepers went outside and struck a large bell every 15 seconds until the whistle could be sounded. 

Beyond the core responsibilities, keepers kept up with a long list of chores: cooking, cleaning, maintenance and repairs. 

The foghorn machinery at East Brother Light Station, an island just off the Richmond shoreline, on Dec. 8, 2025. The 19th-century lighthouse complex includes a restored fog signal that once warned ships navigating San Pablo Bay. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
The foghorn machinery at East Brother Light Station, an island just off the Richmond shoreline, on Dec. 8, 2025. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

When they needed food to supplement the dry rations that got delivered once a year or so, they had to leave the island for the nearest town. At the time, that was San Quentin, about 2 1/2 miles away.

“I have a 200 horsepower motorboat to get back and forth to our little harbor,” said La Vigne. “They had to row.”

A daily log was kept by the primary keeper, accounting for the day’s weather and work. Most entries are not more than a sentence, but they do give us a glimpse at the day-to-day life on East Brother. A string of entries in 1882 mention an assistant keeper named Mr. Page, who was a bit of a screw-up.

July 14, 1882 – Wind S.W., strong. Mr. Page left for San Quentin A.M., capsized off the buoy near the West Brother at 12:15 p.m. Capt. Windsor hailed the Steamer Reform passing up at the time and sent her to his relief. The Reform picked him up ¼ of a mile N.N.E. of the Light House and landed him and the boat at the dock at 1:15 p.m. Oars, rudder, mail and all the marketing – consisting of mutton, cabbages, peas, etc., etc., lost, also milk and can.

Dec. 14, 1882 – Wind N.E. Foggy from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. Mr. Page went to San Quentin for mail, returned as usual, drunk.

Feb. 8 1883 – Wind N.E. Light, clear. Mr. Page went for mail and stores, drunk, no mail.

On Feb. 10, 1883, a new assistant, Mr. Tippett, is mentioned, and Mr. Page is never spoken of again. 

The Stenmark era

Though some keepers were men living on their own, passing through East Brother for only a few years, families lived here, too. John Stenmark moved here in 1894 with his wife and 3-month-old daughter, Annie, and they stayed for 20 years.

They set up a vegetable garden and raised pigs, goats, rabbits and chickens.

“Prior to the birth of each of his two sons [Mr. Stenmark] rowed all the way to San Quentin and back to fetch the doctor,” wrote Perry.

When the kids grew older, the government paid for a teacher to live on the island for a time. 

On April 18, 1906, Stenmark wrote about one of the most infamous days in local history in the logbook.

A heavy earthquake this morning at 5:15 a.m. Lenses of the light broken and glassware broke, and everything of glass broke.
Doors open of themselves and the whole island rocking. All the lenses broke.

Over the next two days, the Stenmarks watched from their quiet island as the fire that followed the earthquake consumed San Francisco.

The end of lighthouse keepers

Over the decades, technological improvements came regularly to East Brother Light Station, most often to the fuel source used to power the light.

“The original used lard oil lamps, and then they switched to mineral oil, and then they used kerosene,” Colvin said.

A view from the inn at East Brother Light Station, an island just off the Richmond shoreline, on Dec. 8, 2025. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

One big change came in 1934 when electricity arrived on the island via an underwater cable that connected it to shore. A lightkeeper was no longer needed to keep a flame burning all night — greatly reducing their daily chore load. The steam-powered fog signal was replaced with a diaphonic horn that can still be operated today and is one of only eight like it in the world. 

To save on salaries, the U.S. Coast Guard automated everything and pulled the last resident personnel from the island in 1969. They planned to demolish all the buildings and put the light on a steel tower. But residents living in Point Richmond had other plans. They had grown attached to the charming lighthouse off their shoreline and were ready to fight for it. 

How it was converted to a bed and breakfast

“One of the first things [local residents] did was write a National Register nomination for it, which was successful,” said Tom Butt, founder and president of East Brother Light Station Inc., the nonprofit that operates the bed and breakfast. He’s also the former mayor of Richmond and a longtime city council member. “That didn’t save it, but it made it harder for the Coast Guard to tear it down because it invoked the Historic Preservation Act of 1966.”

The group then tried to find a local organization to take on rehabilitating the site, because by that point it was more than a decade behind on maintenance and needed serious work. They focused on organizations like the National Park Service and East Bay Regional Park District, but no one was interested.

“I think everybody looked at it and [thought] it was just too much,” said Butt.

He went to the island in 1978. “Looking back now,” he said, “I was a lot younger and not near as smart as I am now, and I was intrigued by it and said, ‘you know, we can do this.’”

The Marin Room, which faces Mount Tamalpais, at East Brother Light Station, an island just off the Richmond shoreline, on Dec. 8, 2025. The historic lighthouse sits on a small, rocky outcrop in San Pablo Bay and is accessible only by boat, and the inn provides overnight stays in the restored 19th-century keeper’s quarters. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
A lighthouse shower curtain hangs in a bathroom at the inn on East Brother Light Station, an island just off the Richmond shoreline, on Dec. 8, 2025. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
A room at East Brother Light Station, an island just off the Richmond shoreline, on Dec. 8, 2025. The historic lighthouse sits on a small, rocky outcrop in San Pablo Bay and is accessible only by boat. The inn provides overnight stays in the restored 19th-century keeper’s quarters. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

He and others formed a nonprofit and started leasing the site from the Coast Guard. They spent a year rehabilitating everything, mostly with volunteer work.

“All the buildings at that point were covered with asbestos shingles,” Butt said. “All of the ornamental railings had long since been taken off. We were lucky we had original plans from the National Archives, so we were able to replicate all that trim and put that back on.”

Volunteers did electrical work, plumbing, plastering and painting. It was a ton of work, but they managed to get it all done in about a year. The nonprofit began running the site as a bed and breakfast in 1980 to provide a stream of revenue to keep up with the maintenance.

Though most of the operational costs and maintenance for the B&B are now covered by the nightly fee guests pay, a major fundraising effort is underway to replace the dock and gangway on the east side of the island. It must be replaced, or access to the island could be threatened. 

Visiting East Brother Light Station today

The nonprofit B&B is open four nights a week for overnight guests, and it’s recommended you book one of the five rooms well in advance. Rates range from $525 to $575 per night. During summer months, there is once-monthly day-use access for $45, which includes the boat ride to and from the island.

At the beginning of the overnight stays, guests are taken by boat from Point San Pablo Marina by innkeepers Colvin and La Vigne. Once on the island, hors d’oeuvre and champagne are served, Colvin gives a history talk, and then comes a four-course dinner with wine.

“We try to focus as much as we can on keeping things local,” La Vigne said. “We collaborate with the little goat farm that’s in the harbor, and we tend to plan the meals around what is being harvested now, what’s in season.”

Innkeepers Rachel (Rae) Colvin (left) and Danielle La Vigne at East Brother Light Station in Richmond on Dec. 8, 2025. The historic lighthouse sits on a small, rocky outcrop in San Pablo Bay and is accessible only by boat, and the inn provides overnight stays in the restored 19th-century keeper’s quarters. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

They also try to make meals part of the historical experience, using ingredients the keepers would have received as part of their rations — like potatoes, rice and salted pork.

“We have recipes from the Lighthouse Keeper’s Manual from 1891 that had recipes for how to stretch your rations. Last night we served for the first course a corn chowder that is from that original Lighthouse Keeper’s handbook,” La Vigne said. “Although their recipe was incredibly bland, and I spruced it up a lot.”

So, historically inspired … but for a modern palate. 

Guests sleep in rooms neatly decorated with antiques. Most rooms are named after the view you see from the room, so there’s West Brother (the neighboring island), Marin Room, San Francisco Room.

A more modest room is out in the fog signal building — a popular choice for returning guests looking for a different experience, Colvin said. 

Most of the clientele are couples looking for a romantic getaway, but the house is also regularly rented out entirely by groups for birthdays, anniversaries or themed experiences.

“We had two murder mystery dinner parties in the past month,” La Vigne said. “Both parties dressed up. They were in character the whole time. It was 1920 the whole time they were here.”

In the morning, before guests depart, they offer a demonstration of the fog signal — I can attest, it’s loud!

===

Ask Bay Curious a question ...

Episode transcript

Olivia Allen-Price: I’m Olivia Allen-Price. This is Bay Curious.

sound design of the sea: waves, gulls

Olivia Allen-Price: There’s something dreamy about lighthouses.

Their striking architecture, rising high above our human scale.

Their symbolism. A literal light in the darkness.

In me, lighthouses stir something nostalgic. A time before GPS and radar — when navigation was done with charts and stars.

Today, many lighthouses across the United States have become tourism attractions, like Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and the St. Augustine Lighthouse in Florida.

But there’s a lighthouse near San Francisco that offers an experience like none other. Not just a quick trip to the top, but an opportunity to live like a lighthouse keeper of yore!

East Brother Light Station looks like it could have been plucked from a child’s storybook. It’s a charming three-story wooden house, painted a creamy yellow with white gingerbread trim. At the top, stands a tower, where the brilliant light beckons through the fog.

Kathleen got to wondering a lot of things about this lighthouse.

Kathleen Taylor: What’s the history? Did somebody live on that island previously? Just how far back do we have documentation of, you know, what went on on that Island?

Olivia Allen-Price: So today we’re on a mission for answers. 

Step one! We have to get to the lighthouse. At a marina north of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, Kathleen and I make our way toward a small boat.

There we meet Danielle La Vigne and Rae Colvin — the two keepers currently living on the island.

Danielle La Vigne: Oh, you guys can hop on board. Our insurance company does ask that you wear those.

Olivia Allen-Price: Life vests are on, and we are off. Danielle and Rae have been living at the East Brother Light Station for about a year and half. But the helm of a boat is a familiar place for them.

Olivia Allen-Price in scene: Did you know how to drive a boat, or is this a recent skill you’ve had to acquire? ‘Cause you’ve, you guys have been on the job for…

Danielle La Vigne: I’ve been a commercial captain for almost 20 years. This is the smallest boat that I’ve ever operated professionally. 

Olivia Allen-Price: As we’re making our way out of the marina, Rae spots a seal.

Rae Colvin: A lot of seals live out by the island. … we have a bunch of birds and the harbor seals and sometimes a sea lion.

Olivia Allen-Price: Danielle and Rae are the only two full-time human residents of East Brother Light Station. But they’re far from alone out there. Because keeping the light running is not their main focus. Instead it’s catering to the weekly overnight guests who join them at the Light Station. Because these days East Brother is a one-of-a-kind bed and breakfast. 

Olivia Allen-Price in scene: Oh, we just snuck around the bend, and I am seeing the light station probably 400 feet away or so.

Olivia Allen-Price: I can’t see it from up on the water, but down beneath our boat lies the answer to one of Kathleen’s questions. Why is this lighthouse here, some 15 miles from the open ocean?

Music begins

Olivia Allen-Price: In the decades after gold was first found in California in 1848, mining activity in the Sierra really ramped up. Getting supplies from San Francisco up into the mountains often meant taking a boat — floating things up the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. 

Ships had to skirt around Point San Pablo — where our little boat just departed from. Rae Colvin explains.

Rae Colvin: And they put a lighthouse out here because the topography under the water is pretty interesting. There’s a 160-foot-deep chasm right off the island. But most of the open ocean off to the side that you can see averages out to about 15 feet deep. 

Olivia Allen-Price: Ships passing through this channel were constantly at risk of running aground even in good weather. Add in some dense fog and it’s pretty precarious.

So in the early 1870s, it was decided a lighthouse and foghorn were needed. Initially, they hoped to put the light station on the mainland, but quickly ran into issues…

Rae Colvin: The people who owned the land on the East Bay there didn’t want to sell to the government to let them build a lighthouse.

Olivia Allen-Price: After years of trying and failing to get the landowners to relent, the government changed course. Just offshore was East Brother Island — a speck of land really, smaller than an acre — but it was enough. And better yet, it was land the U.S. government already owned. 

Music starts

Olivia Allen-Price: Workers blasted sandstone from the top of the island to create a level plot. A foundation went in, walls went up, and in less than a year the six-room Victorian light station was complete. The design is quite striking…

Rae Colvin: There’s a lot of ornamental woodwork on it, and it’s three stories.

Olivia Allen-Price: But it’s not exactly unique. Lighthouses with a similar design were built all over the West Coast. This is the oldest one still standing.

Music ends

Fade up on sound of boat slowing down and approaching dock. Ambi of arriving sounds.

Olivia Allen-Price: The wind picks up as our little boat approaches the island and sidles up to the dock. Once we’re off, Danielle and Rae work to get the boat lifted out of the water.

Danielle La Vigne: If we left it in the water, it would just get thrashed against the dock all day long, and this dock already needs help so.

Rae Colvin: This one’s been here since I think the 1960s, and, you know, it’s seen better days. 

Olivia Allen-Price: The dock may need work, but as we make our way up some stairs and onto the property, a tidy semicircle of three buildings emerges. The main light station to the west, a small cottage to the north, and a fog signal building to the east. All fit on about three-quarters of an acre. 

The buildings surround a low white dome covering something beneath the pavement. Danielle explains…

Danielle La Vigne: We need to collect rainwater to survive out here, this whole courtyard is set up to direct all of the rain flow down into the cistern.

Olivia Allen-Price: Across the courtyard we head into the main house, where today most of the overnight bed-and-breakfast guests stay.

Danielle La Vigne: So of course we have to do the shameless product placement. As you enter the house, the first room you see is the gift shop.

Olivia Allen-Price: OK, so, the gift shop is not original to the light station, but the mugs they sell are popular with B&B guests. Couples often come out for romantic getaways. Kathleen and I learn learn groups stay here for birding weekends or murder-mystery parties.

Kathleen Taylor: How often do you get groups that rent the whole island? 

Danielle La Vigne: Two, yeah, two to three times a month. 

Olivia Allen-Price: The house has seen some changes over its 152-year life, but it’s not hard to imagine what it once was. 

Most often three lighthouse keepers, and sometimes their families, shared the home. There’d be a primary keeper, aka the boss, living downstairs. And then the first assistant upstairs, along with a junior keeper, someone just learning the ropes.

They all lived, ate and slept beneath the tower that housed the light. Staying close because it needed constant attention. 

Danielle La Vigne: This is the parlor, which is the comfy hangout spot for the guests. Originally this would have been the junior keeper’s parlor. And the bedroom right over here, the Marin room, would have been the junior keeper’s bedroom. So it was kind of like a little apartment.

Olivia Allen-Price: Today, B&B guests stay in bedrooms with cozy beds, decorated with beautiful antiques. Historical maps and pictures of boats hang on the walls. And each room gets a name, based on what is visible outside the window.

Rae Colvin: So this is the San Francisco room, and it’s my personal favorite room. It has an arched ceiling, and it looks out to San Francisco.

Olivia Allen-Price: We make our way to the main attraction: the tower …  which is made up of three tiny rooms stacked on top of each other. We start at the base.

Danielle La Vigne: So this is kind of the prep room where they’d get everything ready, but every half hour they had to go up there and trim the wick and refill the oil.

Olivia Allen-Price: Next we head up to the Watch room.

Rae Colvin: It’s a tightly winding staircase like you would expect in a Victorian mansion.

Danielle La Vigne: We’re now 40 feet up. So you’ve got a pretty good view.  If it’s stormy out, if it seems like it’s there’s a danger of a ship not seeing the light or whatever, that’s where you’re watching from so that you can signal those people if you need to.

Olivia Allen-Price: Finally, we head to the pinnacle. 

Rae Colvin: Up here is more winding stairs up into the actual lighthouse. 

Olivia Allen-Price: I will say, the view from this room is spectacular. The light itself, a little bit of a letdown. Today a 4 inch LED sits in the space.

Rae Colvin: So the original light, it was a Fresnel lens with a little lantern torch in the middle. And originally that torch on this station was powered by lard oil.

Olivia Allen-Price: A fourth-order Fresnel lens! Imagine a magnificent orb of glass, made up of neat rows of prisms, standing several feet tall. They were designed to concentrate the light of a single flame so intensely it could be seen for about 15 miles.

On March 1, 1874, as sunset approached, three lighthouse keepers climbed up into this very tower, and lit the oil lamp for the very first time. 

The lighthouse has been operating, in some fashion or another, ever since.

[Music moment]

Olivia Allen-Price: When we return, we explore what life was like living and working at East Brother. And it might not be like you expect! Stay with us.

Sponsor messages

Olivia Allen-Price: If you enjoy stories like this one, consider becoming a financial supporter of KQED. Learn more at donate.kqed.org/podcasts.

Music begins

Olivia Allen-Price: It’s easy to get enamored by the apparent simplicity of life on an island in the middle of the Bay. I know I imagine myself reading in a hammock. Our question asker, Kathleen, loves that cell reception out on East Brother is limited.

Kathleen Taylor: It is great to decompress and turn your phone off, and we don’t have a lot of opportunities to do that.

Olivia Allen-Price: And sure, that is the experience you will get here today as a guest at the B&B. But working here is hard, as Danielle can attest.

Danielle La Vigne: The work is never-ending. Because it’s just the two of us … So we’re the phones and the emails and the booking. There’s some degree of maintenance work that is pretty much always happening. The house needs to be deep cleaned every week between guests.

Olivia Allen-Price: Working here has always been hard. Historian Frank Perry makes clear that his book, East Brother: History of an Island Light Station. Here’s an excerpt…

BOOK VO: Despite the romantic portrayal of lighthouse keeping in novels, poems and art, the job was monotonous, and the Lighthouse Board knew it. Pay was modest and much of the work boring.

Olivia Allen-Price: The nightly routine would begin at sunset. Innkeepers would fill the lamp with lard oil, light the wick, and bring the flame slowly up to the optimal size, just shy of 2 inches. If they did this too quickly, the glass chimney inside the rotating Fresnel lens could crack from the change in temperature. That alone was a 30-minute job. Then the keepers had to sit in the watch room all night, tending to its various needs.

Danielle La Vigne: And because of the timing on that clockwork mechanism and how quickly the wicks would burn down, you gotta check it every half hour.

Olivia Allen-Price: On a clear night, the tiny flame, refracted through that powerful lens, could be seen from parts of San Francisco.

On a foggy night, things got more complicated. Keepers had to run the fog signal across the courtyard too. 

Book VO: The whistle was sometimes more important in aiding mariners than the light. In dense fog or heavy rain, East Brother’s powerful light was virtually useless. The 10-inch whistle, on the other hand, could often be heard from 10 or 12 miles away.

Olivia Allen-Price: It took about 45 minutes to build up enough steam in the boiler for the fog whistle to work. So in the meantime, one of the keepers went outside and struck a large bell until the whistle could be sounded. Danielle gave us a demonstration.

Sound of Danielle whacking the bell

Olivia Allen-Price: What a job.

Bell ambi

Book VO: Since the whistle might be put in operation night or day, off-duty keepers had to learn to sleep in spite of the noise. Some keepers apparently got quite good at this.

Olivia Allen-Price: Keepers were also quite busy with chores. Cooking, cleaning, maintenance, repairs. When they needed food to supplement the rations that got delivered once a year or so, they had to leave the island for the nearest town, which at the time was San Quentin.

Danielle La Vigne: So in order to get anything, they had to go to San Quentin. And I have a 200 horsepower motorboat to get back and forth to our little harbor. They had to row.

Kathleen Taylor: So how far would the trip have been from here to San Quentin? 

Danielle La Vigne: Two and a half miles.

Olivia Allen-Price: Light Keepers also kept daily logbooks with short entries about the day’s work.

Voice Over: Feb. 14 1883 – Wind S.W. Squally, strong. Employed all day cleaning engine room and lens in lantern.

Olivia Allen-Price: …but sometimes you get a glimpse of more. 

Music start

Rae Colvin: There was an assistant keeper who got put down in the logbook as a drunken screw-up. He’s one of my favorites.

Olivia Allen-Price: Joseph Page was his name. And let’s just say the head keeper at the time was not a fan.

Voice Over: Dec. 14, 1882 – Mr. Page went to San Quentin for mail, returned as usual, drunk.

Voice Over: July 14, 1882 – Mr. Page left for San Quentin. Capsized off the buoy at 12:15 p.m. … The Reform picked him up ¼ mile NNE of light house. Oars, rudder, mail and all the marketing – consisting of mutton, cabbages, peas, lost. Also milk.

Music end

Olivia Allen-Price: Over the decades, technological improvements came regularly to East Brother Light Station … most often to the fuel source used to power the light.

Rae Colvin: The originals used lard oil lamps, and then they switched to mineral oil, and then they used kerosene.

Olivia Allen-Price: One big change came in 1934 when the lens was electrified – via an underwater cable that connected the island to shore. 

A light keeper was no longer needed to keep a flame burning all night – greatly reducing their daily chore load – and probably greatly improving their quality of life. 

But it was also the first step toward automation – and eliminating the need for lighthouse keepers altogether.

Eventually that came, of course, in 1969. To save on salaries, the U.S. Coast Guard automated everything and pulled the last resident keeper from the island. They planned to demolish the light station, and all the buildings on the island, and put the light on a steel tower.

Music end

But locals living nearby in Point Richmond had other plans. They had grown attached to the charming lighthouse out in the bay, and vowed to save it.

Tom Butt: One of the first things they did was write a national register nomination for it, which was successful.

Olivia Allen-Price: Tom Butt is the president of East Brother Light Station Inc., the nonprofit that operates the bed and breakfast. He’s also the former mayor of Richmond.

East Brother Light Station made it onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. 

Tom Butt: That didn’t save it, but it made it harder for the Coast Guard to tear it down.

Olivia Allen-Price: The local group then tried to find a local organization to take on restoring the site — by that point it was more than a decade behind on maintenance and needed serious work. They focused on groups like the National Parks Service and East Bay Regional Park District. But no one bit.

Tom Butt: I think everybody looked at it, and they just it was it it it was just too much.

Olivia Allen-Price: Tom went out to the island in 1978.

Tom Butt: Looking back now, I was a lot younger and not near as smart as I am now, and I was intrigued by it and said, you know, we can do this.

Olivia Allen-Price: He and others formed a nonprofit and started leasing the site from the Coast Guard. They spent a year rehabbing everything, mostly with volunteer work.

New concrete around the cistern.

Tom Butt: We had to do electrical work, we had to do plumbing.

Olivia Allen-Price: All the ornamental railings had been taken off, so they made new ones using the original plans they found in the National Archives.

Tom Butt: Repainted everything on the inside. 

Olivia Allen-Price: There was asbestos to remove.

Tom Butt: It was a lot of work. And you know … it took a year, but we got it done. 

Olivia Allen-Price: When the work was complete around 1980, the nonprofit began running the site as a bed and breakfast to provide a stream of revenue to keep up on the maintenance. And … well … because it’s fun!

At the beginning of the stay, guests get a boat ride out with innkeepers Danielle and Rae, just like we did at the beginning of the story. 

Rae Colvin: We do charcuterie and champagne…

Olivia Allen-Price: A history tour with Rae.

Rae Colvin: And then dinner is a four-course dinner with wine.

Olivia Allen-Price: A fantastic sunset, if the weather cooperates…

Rae Colvin: And then in the morning it’s a full breakfast.

Olivia Allen-Price: Just before heading back to shore, guests get a special demonstration that we also get to see on our tour…

Rae Colvin: So the gasoline starter engine here is what actually starts the diesel … And this one starts with a ripped cord. 

Olivia Allen-Price: In the fog signal building, Rae shows us the multistep process it takes to blow the foghorn like they did in the 1930s. The small room is packed with old mechanical equipment, some more than 100 years old. It smells like… old military? Is that a smell?

There’s a couple diesel engines, a few air compressors … and they’re all kept running today as a museum piece … because the diaphonic horn is one of only eight like it still functioning in the world.

Rae Colvin: The horn sounds cool in here, but it’s really cool out there.

Olivia Allen-Price: After 12 minutes of warming up, we head outside for the grand finale of our tour.

Foghorn blows loudly

Olivia Allen-Price in scene: You jumped.

Katrina Schwartz in scene: Well I didn’t know it was coming. I know you’re kinda counting 15, but you’re like…

Olivia Allen-Price: Despite being ready, it still startled us all. Absolutely thrilling. 

I checked in with our question asker Kathleen, to see what she made of our tour today…

Kathleen Taylor: I think that a lot of times we see us in something we see something that interests us and we do a quick Google search and we think that we’ve kind of learned all we there is to know, but it isn’t until you actually take that boat ride, get out on the island to realize that it is just such a unique experience and really such a hidden secret in the Bay Area. 

Olivia Allen-Price: East Brother Light Station is such a special place. An improbable compromise carved into stone. A beacon of safety. The sound of warning. 

For decades, keepers traded modern comfort for cold, salt air. They measured their lives in lonely night shifts spent tending a 2-inch flame.

Today this light station offers something softer – a chance to step off the boat, leave the modern world behind and sleep inside a piece of living history.

We hinted at it in this story, but the pier platform where boats dock at East Brother is in need of repair. The nonprofit is working to raise $750,000 to replace it, along with the gangway. Access to the island could be threatened if it’s not repaired. We’ll link to their fundraising page in the show notes.

Big thanks to historian and author Frank Perry, whose book about East Brother Light Station provided much of the historical information in this episode. And to Kathleen Taylor, our question asker.

We just launched a new voting round at BayCurious.org, so that means we need your help picking a question to answer in an upcoming episode. Here are your options!

Question 1: Why does this area have so many community colleges and won’t demographics result in fewer students and some needing to eventually close? How does the ratio of colleges to population compare with other states?

Question 2: Why did rogue botanists plant Venus flytraps in the Albion Pygmy Forest in Mendocino in the 1960s?

Question 3: I would love to hear about Sally Stanford, the renowned madam turned mayor. I recall my parents having many colorful conversations about her and her “Damn Bird” when we were living in Sausalito.

Olivia Allen-Price: Vote anytime this month at BayCurious.org. 

Kathleen Taylor: Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.

Olivia Allen-Price: Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale, Anna Casalme, and me, Olivia Allen-Price.

We get extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.

I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Have a wonderful week!

Law and Justice, News, Podcast

Formerly Incarcerated Advocate on Why Sexual Violence Persists in Men’s State Prisons

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Thursday, September 3, 2026

  • There are major faults in how the state tracks, investigates and prevents sexual abuse and assault in California’s men’s prison. That’s according to a recent report from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law & Justice Center. California prison officials and advocates met this week in Sacramento to discuss the ongoing crisis and work toward solutions.
  • California lawmakers have sent a slew of bills to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk aiming to increase state oversight of federal immigration detention.

Lack of Reporting, Lack of Trust in Prison Staff, and Fear of Retaliation

Host Madi Bolaños spoke with formerly incarcerated community activist Darnel Washington about why sexual violence persists behind bars, and what needs to change to better protect incarcerated people.

She started by asking him why sexual violence remains such a persistent problem in men’s prison despite the implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, over two decades ago. That’s the federal law that sets national standards for correctional facilities to eliminate sexual assault in prisons.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WASHINGTON: I think one is lack of reporting, lack of trust in staff when they’re reporting, and whether it be retaliation or what I say be confidential, and will I get the support I need or will I be punished for bringing this to staff.

BOLAÑOS: You were a PREA instructor at San Quentin. Can you tell me a little bit about what that entailed?

WASHINGTON: Well, we would bring guys into the room and basically we’d tell them about PREA, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, how to report it, who to report to, let them know it’s supposed to be confidentiality, whoever the officer is, it’s between you, him, and then they bring it to the watch commander and everything is confidential and if the officer was to bring it out, he can be held accountable as well. So that helped a lot of people and knowing that I’m a peer. For them and they felt comfortable talking to me about any questions they had.

BOLAÑOS: This report found that once somebody did make a report that the investigation itself had flaws. What was your take on why that could be?

WASHINGTON: Well, I think number one, are they taking the allegations seriously? And then, if they’re not taking the allegation seriously, of course, the paperwork is not going to be done properly. The right investigation is not going to done properly.

BOLAÑOS: Something that’s come up a lot in this conference is retaliation, not just from staff but from other prisoners. What is retaliations like and can you just describe for people who don’t have an understanding like how that can affect people’s ability to report or to want to report?

WASHINGTON: I think one of them could be like people ostracizing them, like you’re a snitch and you’re this and this and that, and not looking at them as someone who’s a victim.

BOLAÑOS: Yeah, it’s interesting, the report also mentions that there’s the social element of reporting rape and, you know, there are stigmas around that in men’s prisons. What do people risk socially when they report rape?

WASHINGTON: Well, some people think, like, oh, I’m weak now. You know, how are people going to look at me? My man had just been tooken. Or rather, I just wanted it because why didn’t I fight? Or, you know, all of these different things of why you didn’t protect yourself from this, not understanding the person was in fear. This is one of the problems we have with young men. When we talk to our daughters, we’re like, if someone ever touch you, you better come tell me. But how many of us have that same conversations with our sons?

BOLAÑOS: And we talked about this earlier, but there’s a backlog of PREA reports. There’s too many PREA report for the system to handle, and some of the answers to that question are people are creating false reports. Why would someone create a false PREA Report?

WASHINGTON: Well A lot of times in prison you have relationships that’s going bad. You know, there is a lot of drugs in prison and people with drug debts. People just don’t want to be in a certain prison anymore. They just want to get moved and like that’s one way to get moved out. And there is no consequence for making these false reports as well. So maybe if it was mentioned that there could be consequences for making false reports, maybe people wouldn’t make them as well, because you have to have some. Some type of deterrence, because if not, you’re wasting valuable resources for those who have really been victims of it.

BOLAÑOS: If California wants to go from responding to sexual assault to preventing it, what needs to happen?

WASHINGTON: I think, number one, most importantly, single man cell, getting the population down because the officers cannot watch everything that’s going on. And if they’re overworked, how are they going to pay attention to exactly what’s going on.

Bills Aim to Improve Detention Conditions as I.C.E. Arrests Record Number of Californians.

The bills come as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested a record number of Californians, and six people have died at ICE facilities in the state since the start of last year.

One measure would extend the state attorney general’s power to inspect ICE facilities. Another would create an enforceable bill of rights ensuring humane conditions in civil detention.

ICE says conditions are already humane, and says in a statement: “All detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment.”

Attorney General Rob Bonta said his inspections have actually found dangerous conditions.

“It’s wrong. It’s just not true,” Bonta said. “That’s why these bills are important because we know what the reality is. We know what immigrants who are in detention centers are experiencing because we went in there and talked to them, and we know that they need a bill of rights to keep them safe.”

The state has a right to apply its laws to federal facilities the same way they apply to state and local ones, as long as they don’t place an undue burden on the federal government.

That’s according to UC Berkeley Law School Dean, Erwin Chemerinsky.

But he expects if these bills become law, they’ll be challenged in court by the Trump administration and the private prison companies. He sees it as a calculated risk.

“What California is trying to do is to step in so as to protect the rights of people in the state where the federal government is infringing them,” said Chemerinsky.

The governor has until the end of September to sign or veto the bills on his desk.

Immigration, News, Podcast

Lawyers Say Laken Riley Act Is Eroding Due Process Rights for Immigrants

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Wednesday, September 2, 2026

“I Thought It Was Absurd When I Heard This Was On The Table.”

The first bill that Trump signed into law this term was a bi-partisan law targeting immigrants without legal status. The law was named after a college student who was murdered by an undocumented immigrant. It requires mandatory detention for immigrants who are accused of certain crimes.

“Under the law I’m signing today, the Department of Homeland Security will be required to detain all illegal aliens who have been arrested for theft, burglary, larceny, shoplifting, assaulting a police officer or any crime that results in death,” Trump said before signing the act into law.

Thirteen Democratic Senators and 46 Democrats in the House voted for the act, including San Diego Congressman Mike Levin.

Levin justified his vote by citing an increase in retail thefts in his North County district. However, civil rights organizations said the new law would deny people due process protections because Laken Riley imposes mandatory detention of people after an arrest, even if they aren’t charged or convicted.

After his vote in 2025, Levin said he did not believe the law took away due process protections or targeted innocent immigrants. But immigration lawyers say that’s what happened.

Carlos Barrios is an immigration lawyer based in Los Angeles

“And in that respect, Laken Riley has been a problem because a basic arrest is enough. Even if the person wasn’t convicted. I thought it was absurd when I heard this was on the table and then I thought it was incredibly absurd when people voted for it,” he said.

Barrios represented a man who was arrested for receiving stolen property. A county judge dismissed his case in criminal court, but that didn’t matter in immigration court, where a judge used the Laken Riley Act as justification to keep him locked up.

“But it became a major issue that this person was delayed and stuck in jail for a month and a half,” said Barrios. “This person owns his own business, now he’s at risk of losing everything because he had to shut down the business for a month and a half. Bills had to be paid. They’re backed up on their mortgage payments and everything else. It creates a major impact.”

According to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there are currently more than 65,000 people in immigration detention. More than 70% of them do not have criminal convictions.

There is no publicly available data that would tell us how many people have been subject to mandatory detention under Laken Riley. But individual cases show the law’s impact.

In San Diego, Noah Montague represented a man who was never even arrested for a crime. While not a lawyer, Montague is accredited to represent people in immigration court proceedings.

“My client has never been arrested for any kind of crime relating to assault on a police officer. However what happened, when he was picked up by ICE, the narrative that ICE wrote said that he basically resisted arrest and that resulted in assault of a police officer,” said Montague.

No arrest, no charge, no conviction. Just the words of a federal officer. Yet, the judge invoked Laken Riley.

“There’s been no arrest for this crime, there’s been no conviction, my client has maintained that he didn’t try to do this. And the only context that this came up is a report by an ICE officer that’s actually unsigned.”

Montague describes the Laken Riley Act as just one piece of Trump’s mass deportation machine. Others include courthouse arrests, travel bans, third-country deportations, and aggressive immigration enforcement raids. All with the ultimate goal of making life so difficult for immigrants that they will self deport.

“They’re kind of piecemeal pulling this policy, this policy, they just make it so unbearable that people decide they don’t want to “play the game” or go through the process,” said Montague.

Levin’s office declined multiple interview requests by KPBS. In a statement, Levin acknowledges that an arrest is not a finding of guilt and should not be allowed to become a shortcut around due process. But the text of the law he voted for specifically requires DHS to detain immigrants after an arrest.

Since voting for that law, Levin has become an outspoken critic of Trump’s deportation agenda. He’s voted to withhold funding for ICE, demanded more transparency from detention centers, and advocated for families of deported constituents.

Will Newsom Let Immigrant College Students Without Legal Status Work at Their Campuses?

The bill, AB 713, is from Lakewood Democrat José Luis Solache, and it sailed through the
Legislature to Newsom’s desk despite GOP opposition.

It says California’s public college campuses cannot disqualify students without legal
status from campus employment.

The UC, CSU, and community college systems enroll an estimated 60,000
students without legal status. While these students can get state-backed financial aid,
they’re ineligible for most federal grants and loans.

Leading the charge for this right to work on campuses are students without legal status, immigration rights groups and legal scholars. Access to safe working conditions for students without legal status is a high priority because they’re ineligible for federal Pell grants — up to $7,400 annually — and federal student loans that come with more borrower protections than ones offered by private lenders. California awards eligible in-state students tuition waivers regardless of immigration status, so many students without legal status can at least attend a public institution tuition-free.

Newsom vetoed a similar bill in 2024, echoing a chief worry put forward by the University of California: Any effort to employ students without proper status would incur the wrath of the Trump administration, which could attempt to pull some or all of the $17 billion in annual federal support the system gets.

The state’s Department of Finance is recommending a no vote on Solache’s bill. The fear of federal litigation and budget cuts are the main reasons why.

The UC itself abandoned its own review of employing students without legal status in 2024 for those reasons. 

At a hearing earlier this year, Solache said, “While California has a long standing commitment to expanding access, affordability and student success in higher education, our undocumented students continue to face significant financial and structural barriers.”

This bill and previous pushback has been rooted in an untested legal theory. That
theory says a 1980s federal law that banned employing immigrants without legal
status did not directly mention state agencies.

Detention Facility Transparency Act Heads to the Governor’s Desk

A bill that could give the public more access to information about emergencies inside private immigrant detention centers is on its way to becoming a law. It just needs Governor Newsom’s signature.

SB 423 would require local agencies to share audio of 9-1-1 calls and written reports from inside detention centers. It was prompted by questions about medical care, allegations of sexual abuse and violence against immigrants being detained.

State Sen. Lena Gonzalez, D-Long Beach, said she introduced SB 423 because the number of people in ICE detention in California has grown dramatically during President Donald Trump’s second term, to more than 6,000 people, and many are held for long periods in sometimes inhumane conditions.

“I hope Governor Newsom signs because it really gives us a signal that he means business as it pertains to really pushing back against this Trump administration,” said Gonzalez.

There’s also been six deaths inside the state’s detention centers since last September. Four of those were at the Adelanto ICE facility. DHS has repeatedly denied that any abuse is taking place inside ICE centers.

Podcast

What Happened to the Quantified Self Movement?

Audio

View the full episode transcript.

Before Apple Watches, Oura Rings and Fitbits delivered mountains of health data to the masses, a group of obsessive self-tracking enthusiasts in Silicon Valley started a movement with the tagline “self-knowledge through numbers.” This was the Quantified Self. From tracking “urges to take aspirin” to using infrared cameras to keep tabs on sleeping positions while snoring, these eccentric knowledge-seekers built a community around technical expertise and an ethos of self-discovery. Reporter Gabriela Glueck traces what happened when self-tracking went mainstream — and how the data-obsessed idealists watched their movement get swallowed up by corporate tech giants with products to sell.

Further Reading/Listening:

Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org

Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and⁠ TikTok⁠

Episode Transcript

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

Morgan Sung:  Hey Tabbies! We cover a lot on this show, but it’s basically impossible to keep tabs on everything going on online. So if there is a specific topic or story or rabbit hole you’re curious about that we haven’t done a deep dive into yet, you’re in luck! We just launched a listener question form, so you can ask us about internet trends, tech subcultures, or other online oddities you want Close All Tabs to cover! Check it out at KQED.org/closealltabs, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Or, click the link in our show notes. Ok, let’s get to the episode.

There’s a good chance you’re being tracked, by you. Nearly one in three U.S. adults uses a wearable device to track their health and fitness. I’m talking Apple Watches, Oura Rings, Fitbits. Even our phones and cars have trackers. We track our sleep, heart rate, steps, location, behaviors, habits, and so much more. Self-tracking has become the norm but it wasn’t always this way.

For much of history, self-tracking was the domain of eccentrics and obsessive academics. They were the freaks to the rest of polite society. Like in the 1600s, Venetian physician, Santorio Santorio built the weighing chair and obsessively tracked his weight. He measured everything he ate and drank, as well as everything that came out of his body. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, also a meticulous self-tracker. He kept detailed accounts of his daily activities. But these were more than just diary entries. They were detailed charts, a rubric of the 13 virtues he wanted to live up to, logged every day of the week, also known as a habit tracker. And then there’s Buckminster Fuller, the architect, philosopher, inventor, and all-around futurist. From 1917 up until his death in the 1980s, Buckminster Fuller kept an exhaustive archive of his life: newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, receipts, and all correspondence. As a lifelong journaler, I aspire to archive my life like that. But again, these were outliers.

Then, in the late 2000s, a group of self-tracking enthusiasts started a movement to create and share ways of obsessively collecting data on themselves. It was called the quantified self. Today, we’re exploring the early days of this obscure tech subculture and what changed when tracking went mainstream. And we’ll try to understand whether our mountains of self-track data are actually helpful.

Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. This week, I’m passing the mouse and the mic to KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. She is going to lead this deep dive.

Gabriela Glueck: Thanks, Morgan. I’ll start like you do, by opening a new tab: The Quantified Self Movement. We’re going back to 2007, 2008, a time, technologically speaking, that feels so far from where we are today, you could consider christening it vintage. Apple had just released the first model of something they decided to call the iPhone.

[Clip of Apple Event]
Voice Over: Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

Gabriela Glueck: Lots of people were getting online to join a thing called Facebook.

[Clip of Film The Social Network (2010)]
Mark Zuckerberg character: That’s what the Facebook is going to be about. People are going to log on because after all the cake and watermelon there’s a chance they’re actually going..
Eduardo Saverin character: …to get laid
Mark Zuckerberg character: …meet a girl. Yes.
Eduardo Saverin character:  That is really good.

Gabriela Glueck: And the first Kindle even made its debut.

[Clip of Kindle Commercial]
Voice Over: Now there’s a way to put 80,000 books, newspapers, and blogs right in the palm of your hand.

Gabriela Glueck: Complete with Blackberry-esque buttons that made it look more like a giant calculator than a book. Culturally, things were also a buzz. The final installment of Harry Potter had hit bookstores, Obama was about to get elected, and Rihanna was dropping bangers. -.

[Clip of Rihanna song]
♪ You can stand under my umbrella. You can stand under my umbrella.

Gabriela Glueck: This was the backdrop that Gary Wolf found himself in.

Gary Wolf: I was working as a journalist at that time and writing about the cultural impacts of new technologies.

Gabriela Glueck: Gary was working for Wired Magazine, and he’d been getting interested in a new tech trend – self-tracking. More specifically, he was interested in how technology was allowing people to track their lives in novel and interesting ways. Suddenly, you could do things like input everything you ate into an online calculator to track calories, or clock every single restaurant, coffee shop, and store you went to.

Gary Wolf: The very first popular geolocation systems were just coming out. So Foursquare, which is ancient now, so people were tracking where they had been.

Gabriela Glueck: And courtesy of 23andMe, you could even spit into a test tube, mail it back to a lab, and log online to find out more about your own DNA. People had begun thinking about themselves and their behaviors as data. It was all enough to make Gary wonder.

Gary Wolf: How are we going to use those tools? And what effect were they going to have on how they thought about ourselves?

Gabriela Glueck: That question fascinated Gary. It brought together both his love of new technology with his penchant for philosophizing. So he brought the idea to his editor at Wired Magazine, a guy named Kevin Kelly. Basically saying, ‘hey, this seems really interesting. Nobody is talking about it that much. I feel like we should report on it.’ Then they came up with the name for the new beat.

Gary Wolf: We put up some things on a whiteboard and I put the name “quantified self” on it.

Gabriela Glueck: Quantified self.

Gary Wolf: The self is the topic, and the quantified is, okay, what is the effect on the self of having access to data, access to new reasoning capacity, access to observational capacity through sensing.

Gabriela Glueck: When Gary told me the story about how it all went down, the quantified self, or QS, sounded interesting, but still kind of abstract and theoretical. And maybe the Wired duo were dealing with that same feeling because their next step was all about grounding their questions in the real world, finding people who were doing early self-tracking projects and trying to understand why.

Gary Wolf: We didn’t know that we would be encountering an already existing DIY culture of knowledge making, but it was there. So where did it come from? How did it get there?

Gabriela Glueck: They decided the best way to get answers would be to bring the stories to them. So they organized a meetup. It was gonna be at Kevin’s house in Pacifica, a coastal bay area town right next to tech’s epicenter. Although they didn’t know what to expect, the turnout was pretty good, about 20 or so people. Being basically right on top of Silicon Valley probably helped them draw a crowd. Anyways, they were all crowded into the space, sitting in an assortment of chairs. All pointed towards the front of the room.

Gary Wolf: And we were sitting around talking about what we were doing, very informally, and introducing ourselves, and somebody walked in late, and Kevin turned to him, his name was Ka-Ping Yee,, and said, “okay, you came in last, you go first, what are you doing? “

Gabriela Glueck: Instead of offering up a standard introduction, Ka-Ping Yee opened his computer.

Gary Wolf: And showed this detailed time diary of everything he’d done in the last year while he was working on his dissertation in 15-minute increments. And it was so fascinating.

Gabriela Glueck: After Ka-Ping, other people presented their projects. There was Berkeley psychology professor, Seth Roberts.

Gary Wolf: I think he presented something about improving his balance. He was measuring it by standing on one foot. And so he would just start a timer and he would stand on one and he would see how long he could stand on a foot for.

Gabriela Glueck: When I talked to engineer and businessman Rajiv Mehta, who was at that first meeting, he said the common reaction from people who showed up was shock, shock that there were enough people nerdy enough to care about this sort of thing at all.

Rajiv Mehta: And so it was just fantastic that there were other people interested in, just as importantly, to discover the huge range of interests in that tiny little group, which gave us all a sense of, this is much richer than any of us actually had thought.

Gabriela Glueck: And among the attendees were people who’d later go on to become famous, like Tim Ferriss, author of “The Four Hour Workweek.”

Rajiv Mehta: He’d been a wrestler in high school and college and so forth and he talked about how, like, he had these detailed records of what he ate and his exercise and so forth.  And he made the claim that even today, if he wanted to hit a certain weight that he would be able to reproduce it by going to his old notes and following them.

Gabriela Glueck: Even though everyone’s project was different, a kind of unifying undercurrent ran through the group. They were all the type of people who would spend their free time doing a QS project.

Gary Wolf: People were sort of attracted to this kind of self-tracking practice because they had two interests at the same time. On the one hand, they had a personal question that they were really interested in and they were scientific and technical professionals.

Gabriela Glueck: When they had a personal question, it made sense to use the science techie tools they were already familiar with. As Gary tells it,

Gary Wolf: Without us really even doing anything, this genre was born.

Gabriela Glueck: The Pacifica Meetup became the first of many, something called the Quantified Self Show and Tell.

Gary Wolf: Like looking back to second grade. And it was really nice and interesting because it wasn’t about pitching anything, it wasn’t about convincing anybody that you had some magic solution, which was very common in the tech world. It was really just about saying what you personally had learned from doing something that you hadn’t necessarily been able to do even a year or two ago with the tools that were available then.

Gabriela Glueck: Though they didn’t fully know it at the time, the Pacifica meeting was the start of something, something that was about to get big, or at least bigger. To get into that, let’s open a new tab: quantified self goes mainstream.

After that first meeting in 2008, QS started to generate some buzz. Gary and his Wired editor, Kevin, made a blog for the quantified self as a way to catalog their discoveries and possibly showcase their incredible tagline, “self-knowledge through numbers. “There was also a QS forum and it gained traction as people shared their idiosyncratic projects and experiences online. Gary says this kind of knowledge sharing was a big part of the early community’s ethos. Very much in line with the budding DIY culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Gary Wolf: So people were sharing information on the internet about how to do things that were part really of a professional research repertoire but had started to become available to somewhat technical people to do at home.

Gabriela Glueck: QSers began spreading the show-and-tell format nationally and then internationally. One 2014 report points to over 100 QS meetup groups in 30 countries, with about 20,000 overall participants. Clearly, they’d hit upon something that resonated.

Bob Troia: It was just a great way to just connect with a community of people all like-minded folks and really just learning from each other.

Gabriela Glueck: Bob Troia attended one of the early QS meetings in New York City, after hearing about some Bay Area folks who’d started some kind of self-research movement. He was already interested in tracking himself, and the association with Tim Ferriss didn’t hurt either.

Bob Troia: And I showed up one day and watched people get these like 10, 12 minute talks about their own self-experiments, very informal, very casual, but it was very inspirational. And then I was like, wow, there’s actually a lot of people out there just, just like me. I’m not the weird one.

Gabriela Glueck: Bob quickly got deep into QS. He even visited the Bay Area for a QS conference. After that…

Bob Troia: I set up a blog that night like while I was in a hotel room and I just started writing I think my first post and I went and got a domain name quantifiedbob.com

Gabriela Glueck: If you talk to more people in the early QS movement, you’ll hear a similar story. They were outcasts, nerds, the weird ones tracking their every move. Here’s Gary again.

Gary Wolf: I think people who have really intense scientific and technical interests, many of them are used to being outliers in some way.

Gabriela Glueck: He says this outsider identity became something like a point of pride and made the meetups that much more important. When you’re doing something that’s so far from the mainstream, community really matters. It’s kind of hard to imagine today since Apple Watches and self-tracking devices like Oura rings, a wearable smart ring, are so popular. But back in the 2010s, this was really niche stuff. And there was another piece of it. Because the technology was less advanced with way more friction. You had to put in a lot of effort to get data on yourself. Instead of just strapping on an Apple Watch and checking your phone, it was more like…

Gary Wolf: Okay I set up an infrared camera and I recorded myself as I slept and tried to figure out if my snoring was connected to my posture.

Gabriela Glueck: To understand just how intensive or well thought out early QS projects were, Gary likes to point to examples, and there are many to choose from. But for the sake of time, we’ll look at one: the story of Jakob Eg Larsen. He’s one of Gary’s friends and co-founder of Quantified Self Copenhagen. His problem? Headaches.

Gary Wolf: He took regular medication for those headaches, painkillers, and he decided that he wanted to really understand whether there was some pattern to his headaches and whether there were some things he could do besides take painkillers that would help him.

Gabriela Glueck: Step one for Jakob, figure out how to measure a headache.

Gary Wolf: And he found it surprisingly difficult. There are so many apps for recording headaches, but they require you to make a lot of subtle judgments like, ‘okay, my headache started and now I think it’s gone and now it’s back again. Does that count as one headache or two headaches?’

Gabriela Glueck: Gary calls these moments of evaluation “little frictions.”

Gary Wolf: They’re just demoralizing and they become a bother.

Gabriela Glueck: Jakob needed to come up with a better metric, narrow his focus, figure out what data he could get that could help him understand his problem. So he decided to track each time he took an aspirin. That’d mean the headache had reached a certain threshold worth noting.

Gary Wolf: So he just focused on observing. He didn’t focus on intervening. And already he started to learn a lot.

Gabriela Glueck: He learned he was taking aspirins more than he thought, and more than was recommended. One side effect of too much aspirin consumption? More headaches.

Gary Wolf: By tracking the aspirins, he sort of adjusted his willingness to sit with the headache a little bit longer before taking the aspirin, and eventually his headaches got better and his aspirin consumption went to zero.

Gabriela Glueck: But Jakob wanted to keep up his tracking, so he refined his data metric, this time to the urge to take aspirin.

Gary Wolf: So this was a wonderful example of being able to get really useful empirical data from your daily life, even though you’re not really following any kind of pre-established or vetted protocol that comes to us from biomedicine.

Gabriela Glueck: This project is a classic example of many early self-tracking efforts. It took a lot of thinking, refining, and all in all, a lot mental work. Also, it didn’t necessarily take fancy technology, just a little persistence. And for many people who were, for lack of a better word, desperate to learn something about themselves, that effort was worth it. Take Swedish engineer Sara Riggare. She’s quite famous in the QS world and has done many self-experiments, including one to help her understand how medication for her Parkinson’s was actually impacting her. Here she is in a short video from Salzburg Global.

[Clip from Salzburg Global Video]
Sara Riggare: Patients can do a lot for themselves in that I have actually optimized my own medication effect by learning about my individual responses over time.

Gabriela Glueck: As she likes to point out, many patients see their neurologist or doctor once or twice a year, maybe for an hour or less. The rest of the year is self-care.

Gary Wolf: If you have a good medical practitioner, they are gonna use a lot of trial and error with you. They’re gonna ask you, ‘how did that work?’ And you’re getting a better answer about how that worked is very helpful.

Gabriela Glueck: Projects like Sarah’s and Jacob’s helped reveal the potential of self-investigation.

Gary Wolf: So there was this feeling that there were new possibilities. They hadn’t been turned into products yet. At those very early meetings, you know, we were just meeting the people who would go on to start Oura Ring and the Fitbit and other tools that were just a few years down the road.

Gabriela Glueck: But of course, if an impulse can be had, it can be sold. That’s next, after this break.

In 2014, Tim Cook walked onto the Apple stage wearing an Apple Watch, the ad for Apple’s first watch iteration playing on the screen.

[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event]
Tim Cook: Apple Watch is the most personal device we’ve ever created.

Gabriela Glueck: Because you wear it, he says, they invented new, intimate ways to connect and communicate directly from your wrist.

[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event]
Tim Cook: And it’s also a comprehensive health and fitness device.

Gabriela Glueck: By 2014, the Fitbit had already been out for a fat minute, and the Oura ring was just around the corner. And as the 2010s climbed to their peak, Gary says something about the QS movement started to shift too.

Gary Wolf: There’s a way in which those ideas have become very mainstream. And when that happens, you don’t necessarily need a special place to work them through. Like, okay, I’m the only one doing this, I’m using these DIY tools, I need to meet some other people so I don’t feel like I’m crazy to apply scientific methods to my own questions. That stopped really being the case.

Gabriela Glueck: A blog from the time declared the quantified self-movement dead, but many QS enthusiasts online begged to differ. One commentator on the QS forum wrote, It’s a bit dystopian to think that big companies can/should/will replace the basic agency of I want to understand something in my life by handing answers to people. But of course, in some ways, that’s what happened. And the questions that first drew Gary in, ‘how people would use the technology’ and ‘how it would shape their lives’ were no longer being answered by a careful group of self-experimenters, but by everyone else. Which brings us to a new tab: Is all this tracking actually helping us?

These days, wearable tracking devices are everywhere, and they collect health data seamlessly. So what’s the impact of all this automated number crunching? Are we any healthier or happier? Have we all finally achieved self-understanding? And what, if anything, have we lost? To help answer these questions, I’m fast forwarding. From where we left off around 2017, 2018 to present day.

The term “obsessive tracker” has now taken on a different meaning. It’s for people obsessed with their Fitbits, not their infrared camera setup that helps them track their posture in relation to snoring. I figured I needed to talk to someone who had at one point been a bit of an obsessive tracker. So I called up the host of this very show, Morgan Sung. She got into the whole thing a couple years back, when she switched her ADHD meds and realized they weren’t really working.

Morgan Sung: And I was having like these really weird reactions and like, I was so sweaty and my heart rate was like kind of all over the place and I just like felt kind of sick all the time.

Gabriela Glueck: As one does, Morgan got on Reddit and came across a post from a user recounting a similar experience. That user was wearing an Oura ring when it all happened and was able to collect some data validating their symptoms. So Morgan got a ring.

Morgan Sung: I was like, for the next two weeks, I’m going to be a little bit miserable, but I can probably at least see if like what I’m feeling is real or maybe I’m just making it up. Cause I think I was, like, oh, maybe, maybe this is purely psychosomatic.

Gabriela Glueck: Turns out it was real. Her heart rate and body temperature were spiking dramatically throughout the day. And Morgan says it was kind of reassuring to have what she thought she was feeling confirmed by data.

Morgan Sung: Especially if you’re a marginalized person in any way who is maybe not often listened to by doctors.

Gabriela Glueck: The Oura Ring was also giving her insight into things she hadn’t necessarily asked for and offered up mountains of sleep data. Over time, her relationship with the device began to change.

Morgan Sung: So at first it started as a novelty, and then I think, yeah, it did kind of become a little bit of a compulsion. I don’t think it was, like, obsessive, but, you know, I would, like, wake up in the morning, turn off my alarm, open the app, and check how I slept instead of just thinking, hmm, I slept this way.  You know?

Gabriela Glueck: If the app said she slept badly, it’d put a damper on her day, even if she herself disagreed. If she went out drinking with friends the night before, her ring would clock that. If she pushed herself harder at the gym, she’d find herself wondering what her ring would say, if it would notice, if would tell her she did well. After a while, it all started to get into her head.

Morgan Sung: I think like trying to optimize my body in that way made me feel like I was having less fun in my life.

Gabriela Glueck: Then something happened that forced her to cut ties with the ring for good.

Morgan Sung: She lost the charger. I was visiting my parents on the other side of the country and I left it at their house. I was like, I’m not gonna buy a new charger. I’m just gonna go visit my parents and pick up my charger then. And it was funny because I went back home and my charger wasn’t there. And at that point, I think I just, I don’t know, it fizzled out. The novelty wore off and I guess I was, like, wow, I don’t know if this has added to my life significantly. I felt like I wasn’t missing anything.

Gabriela Glueck: Morgan likens her experience before, during, and after wearing her Oura ring to this meme that’s popular online. It has three characters in it, all at different stages of enlightenment about wearable trackers. On the far left of the spectrum is this guy who’s a total beginner. He’s never touched a wearable. He thinks the whole idea is stupid. Then in the middle, there’s a guy who has become obsessed with them, kind of like Morgan at the height of her Oura-ring obsession. And he’s like…

Morgan Sung: Oh, I wear the wearables. I know I can’t sleep without my Oura ring. I need to use my Whoop, or I need my Apple Watch to tell me if I slept well. And then on the far right is this guy who’s reached full enlightenment. Like, very sage-looking, hooded figure who’s like, you don’t need a wearable to be happy. These days, Morgan says she feels more like him. I think wearables can be really helpful, but I do kind of feel like that meme sometimes where I’m like, oh, you know, I can trust my body. I can be intuitive. You know, I can, kind of, trust myself to tell when something is feeling off.

Gabriela Glueck: Of course, this is just Morgan’s story, but take a look at the Oura Ring Forum and you’ll find similar tales. Still, I was curious if at a large scale these tracking devices are helpful for most people. So I gave Australian sociologist Deborah Lupton a call. She studied health tracking for quite a long time and she gave me a very good scientist answer: kinda, maybe, sometimes.

Deborah Lupton: I’ve done research where people have said, look I’m bored with self-tracking, I’ve had enough of it, I’m just, you know, it hasn’t helped me, so I’m stopping. I’ve had research findings where people have said, say with chronic health conditions that on the one hand, yes it gives me control over my condition, it makes me feel as I have more control, but on the other hand I’m sick of it. It’s turning my home into a clinic. It’s complicated.

Gabriela Glueck: Take some of the recent research on sleep trackers, for instance. One survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that more than half of adults who use sleep trackers say they’ve changed their sleep habits based on what they’ve learned. So on one hand, tracking can encourage healthy habits. But this effort at sleepmaxing, like so many optimization dreams, can also hurt.

Deborah Lupton: In fact, in some ways it can make things worse because we know from sleep studies and studies with people with insomnia that the more you fret and worry about your sleep, the more it can then have this vicious circle where you can’t sleep.

Gabriela Glueck: For Gary’s part, these tracking devices have kind of lost the plot of what the original quantified self-movement was all about, an approach to self-discovery, not a technology or a product.

Gary Wolf: The idea is something like I’m just gonna get the tool and something great is gonna happen. But what did you care about? That question was never answered.

Gabriela Glueck: The early days, that first meeting in Pacifica, the thousands of personalized science projects, they all took so much effort, thinking, adjustment, and reflection. Just strapping on an Apple Watch, he’d argue, can’t be a replacement for all that.

Gary Wolf: I think, thinking about what’s going on and learning about what is going on with yourself, it requires active processing, right? Being told what’s happening is not the same thing as learning what’s happening from observation.

Gabriela Glueck: The effort, it turns out, was part of the quest for self-knowledge too.

Gary Wolf: That whole process led to a kind of deeper insight, which is commercial self-tracking tools, they’re products and products are designed to serve people who have needs, specific needs. They’re fantastic if that’s your goal. What if your goal lies outside that area where all the attention has been focused? Nobody’s gonna make a product for you.

Gabriela Glueck: These days, the movement, if it should be called that, is in a limbo state. One QS member told me that COVID basically killed the last of the meetups, although apparently there are some people trying to pick them back up. Gary says that for anyone wanting to carry on the spirit of quantified self, he has one piece of advice.

Gary Wolf: Don’t start with the data. That’s often a big mistake.

Gabriela Glueck: Start with the question and work backwards. Ask yourself what it is about yourself you want to learn. Then become your own personal scientist, figuring out how you might answer it, going back to the drawing board again and again and again.

Gary Wolf: Like, scientific practice and a scientific mindset, it belongs to absolutely everybody. And if we want to solve problems, it helps to think about them.

Gabriela Glueck: It feels like an obvious takeaway, but maybe these days it’s not.

Morgan Sung: That was KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. That’s it for today’s deep dive. If you need to open more tabs on the quantified self-movement and the mass adoption of wearable trackers, check out the show notes for some further reading. And if that’s not enough, stick around after the credits for some bonus content. And if you need to close your rings or whatever, well, that’s not my problem. I’m finally free from the wearables. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.

Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. It was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor, Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.

Morgan Sung: I thought Apple Watches, and I still do, and I maintain this, I’m sorry if you get offended, anyone else, I think Apple Watches are very ugly. I’m so sorry to anyone who wears an Apple Watch, but I will not get that tan line. Like, I have yet to see a wearable tracker that isn’t a little bit heinous.

Arts, Podcast, Technology

AI, Artists, and the Future of Creative Work

Audio

View Full Episode Transcript

Generative AI is able to conjure new images, stories, and songs at lightning speed. So what does this mean for humans artists, storytellers, and musicians? In this special Labor Day episode, we speak with economists Ben Jones and Sam Goldberg, as well as artist Yevgenia Nayberg, to find out what happens when AI enters creative markets. We learn that, at least today, key bottlenecks prevent AI from replicating some aspects of creativity. But there’s no guarantee those bottlenecks will exist tomorrow, raising vital questions about what we value in human labor.

Further Reading

Research cited: Generative AI & Creative Goods: Market Expansion, Crowd-out, and Copyright

The image discussed in our brainstorm with Yevgenia can be found illustrating this article: Creating Urgency around Corporate Innovation

Episode Transcript

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

Jess Love [Voiceover]: This is Life, Automated, the show where we explore all the ways technology is changing how we live, work, and make decisions.

Think about the tractor…  The washing machine, The calculator. 

For a long time, the promise of machines that automate labor was that they would take over the repetitive, dangerous or tedious work; and leave people free to do the things humans are supposed to be best at. You know, to imagine. Communicate. Invent. Make art or music. But it seems like AI might be coming for creative work as well.

One sector on notice is the entertainment industry. The Writers guild recently bargained for contract language limiting the use of AI writing in screenplays. The Animation Guild recently projected losses of about 20% of animation and visual effects jobs. And SAG-AFTRA, a big actors and writers union,  has been in ongoing negotiations to try to prevent human actors from being replaced by AI: 

[Audio of Fran Drescher]

I don’t subscribe to putting people out of work. I think what’s happening in the entertainment industry is a microcosm of what happening throughout the United States of America whereby  workers are being replaced by artificial intelligence, and what is that about actually

Jess Love [Voiceover]: But it’s not just Hollywood. Writers, illustrators, journalists, composers, architects —  even scientists who design experiments, they’re all on alert, wondering whether and how AI will impact the work they love to do. It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with myself, as a science writer and self described “creative worker” 

So today, we’ll be tackling that question, and instead of hearing from just one guest, we have a few: including an economist who studied what happened when generative AI entered one particular creative market.

Sam Goldberg: All of this generative AI production is entering, it’s filling up those markets, and the non-generative AI artists end up having to exit the market because they’re no longer profitable.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: As well as a working artist

Yevgenia Nayberg: I think we will adapt. I’m not sure how yet. I can’t predict the future, but I know it’s your personal voice that will set you apart always.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: But first, if you listened to our kickoff episode —  back in July, you’ll remember Economist Ben Jones. Ben is my colleague at the Ryan Institute on Complexity where he studies  innovation. And, I’m going to start with a short flashback to that conversation, because something he said is really helpful for thinking about the future of creative work. 

See, Ben has been thinking about automation and its impact on jobs for a long time. He says that instead of obsessing over all the things AI can suddenly do really well, we should spend more time focusing on what it can’t do, at least not yet. Ben calls these things – bottlenecks. I’m Jess Love, this is Life, Automated. 

Jess Love: Okay, so can you talk to us about what a bottleneck is and why it’s so important?

Ben Jones:  Well, of course it’s a metaphor from a bottle and what do we know about bottles? We know that the speed at which water or wine will flow from the bottle, depends on the width of the neck. Doesn’t really depend on how big the bottle is otherwise, how much wine there is in it, or how big the base is. It really just depends on the neck and in many processes in the economy and in the economy overall, it looks like there are certain things that have to happen that act as bottlenecks. 

Much of the economy has that flavor where it’s not how good you are at a lot of things. What’s really sort of determining the rate of the economy is the things we’re quite slow at, the things we’re not very good at. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: In other words, even if some parts of a system get really, really fast and easy, it’s the slowest parts of the system, the parts most difficult to automate, that will determine just how much the system overall changes. As an example from his own job, Ben points to statistical regressions, which computers do incredibly well much better than humans.

Ben Jones: . If I were to run a regression by hand, with a large number of observations, it would take me literally my entire life. And I would make mistakes. You know, my computer can do a regression with a million data points in a-minute.

Jess Love:  Yeah. 

Ben Jones:  And so we have these technologies that basically are infinitely better than us to do these tasks that are really important to what we do. And then you can ask, okay, well, has our understanding of economics or astronomy or physics multiplied by a similar factor? And you’d say ‘no’, because although we can do certain things really, really, really incredibly well, other things are holding us back. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: For scientific researchers, these ‘other things’ might be collecting the right data, or building the instruments to collect the right data, or even waiting for the perfect set of circumstances to emerge that would let us interpret that data. Like the collapse of an economy, or the collision of two stars in a particular spot in the sky. Until scientists can push past these bottlenecks, all the statistical regressions in the world will only teach them so much.

I find Ben’s framework a useful way to think about AI’s impact on any kind of work, creative or otherwise. Most people’s jobs involve a bunch of different tasks. AI might get really good at some of them, but tasks it still struggles with – the bottlenecks, really determine the overall pace of change, as well as where humans can still contribute. And get paid to do so. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: So, the big takeaway for creative workers: Find the stuff AI can’t do. But what do these bottlenecks look like in creative markets in particular? And would they actually allow writers, artists, and other creative workers to still do that work? Well, it turns out that there’s somebody who has been studying this very thing. Specifically, how AI has impacted stock image websites. Those sell ready-made photos and illustrations that appear in ads, presentations, websites, and articles. Say you’re making an ad for productivity software. Maybe you purchase a stock image of people shaking hands in a conference room, or a woman smiling at her computer screen, or a well-dressed man gazing thoughtfully into the distance, perhaps wondering.  

Sam Goldberg:  Stock images, why do we care about these things, right? It’s not a particularly large market. It’s definitely sort of a niche commoditized good. Why is this somewhere where we wanna study AI? 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: This is Sam Goldberg. He teaches marketing at Stanford, where he also studies how technology changes markets and consumer behavior. And he says the stock-image market offers an unusually crisp view of what happens when AI-generated work begins competing directly with work made by people.

Sam Goldberg:  So back, you know, a few years ago, they were one of the first markets where we saw really capable AI come to artists, and be able to be used to produce really high-quality images.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: For years, human artists made stock images and uploaded them to online marketplaces. Then those marketplaces began accepting AI-generated work. Suddenly, images made by people were sitting beside images that could be generated by machines, almost instantly, at enormous scale. And because the platform Sam studied required artists to clearly label which images were AI-generated, he could watch the transition in really fine detail.

Sam Goldberg:  And so what that means in practice is that after the platform allows generative AI to enter the market, I can see both how non-generative AI artists respond, as well as how generative AI enters the market and what types of images it produces. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: So here’s how it used to work. Customers would comb through these websites, going through image after image, until they find one that is “close enough”. 

Sam Goldberg: I guess the right way to think about it is each individual might have a very specific taste for something, and so when they were trying to find a stock image, they would make some sort of compromise, right? So they would say, “Oh, I’m looking for an image of a tennis ball, and I want an image of a tennis ball in motion,” right? They could go to the stock image website, they’d look up that keyword, and they’d find, you know, maybe pre-generative AI, a couple hundred different versions of that image, right? Maybe none of them are perfect, but one of them’s good enough, and they took it.

Jess Love: Right. So maybe your article is about playing tennis in the rain, and so you would love to have a tennis ball that’s kind of covered in water. 

Sam Goldberg: Penetrating water droplets.

Jess Love: Right. And then that is the kind of thing that just doesn’t exist, so maybe you just get a tennis ball in isolation, and that’s good enough. 

Sam Goldberg: Exactly. And so in the pre-generative AI world, you know, you were making some compromises with respect to that, oftentimes at least. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: But along comes generative AI, with free or cheap image generators where you can literally tell it: I want a wet tennis ball, resting on a bench, with water beading on it. And it will give you a pretty good version of that exact image. So what happens when a stock image market starts accepting these hyper-specific AI-generated images?

Sam Goldberg: What actually happens in this market is, generative AI enters, the market expands greatly, so there’s a lot more images on the platform. That should probably be pretty intuitive. But not only do more images enter the market, more customers do as well. More images are being purchased and they like the generative AI images because it turns out they’re actually pretty high quality.

Jess Love: So I can see how this is good for me as a consumer. I finally have the perfect raindrop-covered tennis ball for my editorial feature. And I can see how this is good for the platform itself, at least in the short term. What happens to the artists? And I guess I would ask both the artists using generative AI and those who are not. 

Sam Goldberg: Yeah, it’s a good question, and I think you are correct in your intuition here that it does seem like it’s probably pretty good for consumers. It does seem like it’s probably pretty good for the platform, at least in the short run. The artist side I think is a little bit more complicated right? Let me walk you through what happens after generative AI enters the platform, and then we can talk about the implications for artists.

Jess Love: Yeah.

Sam Goldberg: Okay. So what happens is production goes way up. All right? By over 100% more production, so enormous increases in production here. Second, more artists participate in the market. So we see a lot of new artists enter the stock image market. Of course, that overflow of new artists hides a different fact, which is non-generative AI artists exit. Okay? So they stop producing. So we see a reduction in non-generative AI production, as well as a reduction in the number of non-generative AI artists who are participating on the platform.

What we call that in the paper is sort of a little bit of a crowding out effect. So what’s happening is all of this generative AI production is entering, it’s filling up demand, it’s filling up those markets, and the non-generative AI artists end up having to exit the market because they’re no longer profitable.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: So, pretty bad news for a lot of artists who choose to keep making images the old way. But, Sam also found a bottleneck. 

Sam Goldberg:  What the stock image market sells is not quite images. What the stock image market sells is indemnification, which is to say if the buyer of the image uses it and gets in trouble, so someone says, “Hey, you can’t use that image. That’s copyrighted,” and tries to sue the buyer, the platform says, “You can’t sue the buyer. We’re responsible.”

Jess Love: Oh, fascinating. 

Sam Goldberg: Okay, and so that’s really important here because if you were to produce that image yourself using a generative model, you could be subject to some sorts of liability for using, for example, copyrighted work in the training of those models.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Got that? AI-generated images are a bit of a legal gray area right now. For one, most of the biggest AI models were trained on data that included copyrighted works. And it’s also unclear which new AI-generated works can get copyright protection.

Anyway, given this uncertainty, you might choose to purchase an AI-generated image from this market rather than just whip up one yourself because you want the legal protection that this affords you.

And, it turns out that getting this legal protection works a little differently for images that have a human in them. When artists submit images with humans in them, they also need to fill out paperwork showing that they have permission to use those people’s likenesses. This paperwork is not something the AI can easily produce. And so voila! We have less crowding-out for images containing people than for images of, say, tennis balls. And there it is! Our bottleneck!

Unfortunately, it’s pretty uninspiring: paperwork. Still, in Sam’s study, it was something the machines couldn’t easily replace, and that did allow human creators to survive in that particular corner of the “stock image” market. 

Stepping back, Sam’s findings are stark. AI gave customers a ton more image choices. It helped the market grow. And, it pushed a lot of human artists out. 

Jess Love: So one read of your study is that AI-generated art is great for everybody but many of the artists. And I just wanna ask, is a world without artists really great for consumers? Is that really what consumers want? 

Sam Goldberg: Yeah. So I definitely do not take a strong opinion about if generative AI art is good or bad, right? I think the data suggests that consumers like the generative AI art. They purchase it, and they are willing to purchase it. And so to the extent that they are willing to purchase it, that seems an improvement basically. Now, in the long run, does that mean that we want a world with no human creativity? I don’t think so, and I don’t have, you know, good data to speak to that. 

I mean, certainly anecdotally, we hear people saying they don’t like AI content. Intuitively, I think you might expect more of that backlash in creative goods markets that are a little bit more emotional or sincere. So for example, you see a lot more of this when people listen to AI-generated music. Or like YouTube even, like creative shorts. Stock images are, are a product being used for a purpose, in a way that, I think is a little different. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: So the pressure on human artists that Sam saw in the stock image market… we don’t really know how much they’ll translate to other creative markets.

Particularly those where people could be looking for something harder to just generate on demand: a unique interpretation, emotional resonance, a point of view, maybe even a relationship with the person making the work.

So to learn more, I spoke with an artist who has spent much of her career making these other kinds of images.

Yevgenia Nayberg: There are people who are absolutely happy with elevator music and people that go to concerts. And, I think for the elevator music art lovers type, I’m sure AI could be satisfactory. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: That’s coming up. 

This is Life, Automated, I’m Jess Love. And I’m talking to the artist Yevgenia Nayberg.

Jess Love: Can you talk about the different lanes of art that you make?

Yevgenia Nayberg: Well, I started as a fine artist, so to speak. I’m a painter and so I paint large scale pieces. But also I crossed over pretty early into theater design, set and costume design, and illustration. And about 10 years ago, I also started writing my own books, picture books mostly. And so right now I’m focusing on being an author and picture book illustrator, and a graphic novel illustrator and writer.

Jess Love: Yeah, so I really should have asked that question differently. I should have said, “What kinds of art do you not make?” And then maybe we would’ve gotten through that answer more quickly. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Yevgenia is also someone I’ve worked with. Years ago, when I was working as a magazine editor, I hired her to illustrate some articles. Her work is way more distinctive and conceptually ambitious than anything you’d find on a stock-image website. But it is still commercial art: made for a client, on a deadline, to serve a particular purpose. So I wanted to know whether she saw her own corner of the creative economy as vulnerable to the same forces Sam observed.

Jess Love: What do you think about generative AI making art?

Yevgenia Nayberg: Well, I’m not afraid of AI. I know there is a lot of worry amongst artists about it, and I just think it’s probably eventually going to be another tool. I don’t necessarily think that right now AI has the capabilities real, non-artificial artists have. So not afraid at this point.

Jess Love: What about the idea that whether or not this work is as good as what a human could do, it might nonetheless be good enough to somehow compete with human art or human work, either because of discoverability, so with a, flood of lower quality AI images out in the world, it becomes harder to actually find the good ones done by humans or because some of the people who might want to hire artists are pretty comfortable, just generating something for themselves for free?

Yevgenia Nayberg: Well, I’m sure there are going to be people like that. There are people who are absolutely happy with elevator music and people that go to concerts. And, I think for the elevator music art lovers type, I’m sure AI could be satisfactory. But I don’t know if you remember in the ’90s when all of this, you know, flood of stock art happened, everyone was using this image of a little light bulb above a person’s head when they wanted to describe an idea.

If you have an idea, all you draw that bulb, and I think that’s the kind of thinking that I see from AI at this point. So it does create some metaphors, but those metaphors are very trite. If my students do this kind of work, I stop them and I tell them, “Look how many people have already done this hypothetical light bulb.”

So I think because AI sort of collects all these similar ideas and then generates as a result, it’s a very banal result, and I’m not interested in that, and I don’t think my clients, the kind of clients that I work with, are interested in those very typical, ordinary ideas. So I can do better than that at this point, for now.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Yevgenia sees a real difference between the illustration work she does, for specific clients, and the broad, commercial stock image market.

Yevgenia Nayberg: I think what illustration, conceptual illustration does is that it creates a second track to the story. So instead of illustrating something literally, it adds to the story. It can take the story and it can create this interesting creative tension between the illustration and the story, heightening the story in a certain way. So I think with stocks, you often lack that. It’s very hard to prompt an image bank to generate something like this. Even if you search for an image that will fit the story. Fitting the story is one thing. Elevating the story is a completely different thing.

Jess Love [Voicover]: Well yeah, an image that elevates a story does seem a lot better than one that merely “fits” a story. But Yevgenia’s not exactly an unbiased third-party here. So now I was curious what Sam Goldberg would make of this claim—that AI art can spray down the market with lots of images that might fit a particular need really, really well, leading to plenty of satisfied customers. But those images are nonetheless probably not going to be novel enough to elevate a story. 

“Is this a bottleneck?” I asked Sam.

Jess Love:  So you are not expecting this question. 

Sam Goldberg: Okay. 

Jess Love: I actually ran some of your results past an illustrator friend of mine. 

Sam Goldberg: Okay. 

Jess Love: And what she said was basically, “Look, you can use generative AI to come up with thousands of images of light bulbs, light bulbs in this environment, in this you know, room, in front of this person. But what you can’t do is get AI to go that one step beyond and think through, well, what is another way of getting across creativity or innovation? So it will give you a billion light bulbs, but it’s not necessarily really going to give you variety at the concept level. And I’m curious what you would make of that.

Sam Goldberg: Yeah. So I’m hesitant to disagree with the artist here, but-

Jess Love: Never disagree with an artist. 

Sam Goldberg: Never disagree with the artist. Yeah, so I actually don’t think that’s incongruent with what we see happen in these markets. So one analysis we do in the paper… 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Sam’s team actually found a way to represent the images mathematically. This let them analyze the novelty of this flood of new AI-generated images.

Sam Goldberg: And so we actually – I sort of agree with her, right? Which is to say, one thing we don’t see is – we don’t see a huge increase in novelty in the market. But essentially, what we see happen is we don’t see a lot of sort of images enter the market that look very different than the images that already exist there.

Jess Love: Interesting. 

Sam Goldberg: What we do see is that anywhere there’s a gap in the market, so where there’s two images on either side, but there’s not an image in between, generative AI is very good at filling those gaps.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: So…at least for now, AI can generate lots and lots of variations on a theme. But what Yevgenia’s describing is the ability to think beyond that theme. And Sam says, “yeah, AI doesn’t seem to be as good at that.”

Sam Goldberg: I think it’s totally reasonable to say that your illustrator friend may be correct that that is something that these models struggle with.

Yevgenia Nayberg:  I’m surprised. I was ready to fight the economist!

Jess Love: Oh no! I actually don’t think you guys would fight that much, but we won’t put you in a cage match together.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: This idea of bringing true novelty to an assignment: that new metaphor, that “second track.” This may be an important source of value that human artists bring to a project. So…what does that look like?

Jess Love: Let’s do something fun. Obviously we have worked together in the past. I have hired you to do beautiful custom illustrations for articles, on Kellogg Insight, where I was the editor-in-chief for many years. And so it’s not even hypothetical to say I would often come to you with a story on innovation, entrepreneurship, you know, how to brainstorm. And so let’s say I bring you this article, it’s about “Better Ways of Brainstorming”, and I’m like, “And also, I think I got a pretty good idea for you. It’s a group of people brainstorming, and above them, they’re, like, collectively building a big light bulb. And it’s like a hot air balloon light bulb, and it’s just, wow, you can just see this is going places. “What do you think?”

Yevgenia Nayberg: Well, Jess, I think actually an air balloon light bulb is already a beautiful idea. If I’m not mistaken, I think I did an illustration like this for you years ago. So, maybe we should try doing something different this time. We don’t wanna repeat ourselves. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Yes, Yevgenia was right about this. I tracked down the illustration from the Kellogg Insight archives. It appeared alongside a 2015 article on corporate innovation. And it featured someone riding through the sky in a lightbulb-shaped hot-air-balloon. Which is almost certainly why the idea formed instantly in my own mind.

Yevgenia Nayberg: But what it did not have is the group of people underneath it, because this, I think, is something that would spoil this illustration. Because you really shouldn’t try to stuff all your ideas into a single illustration. 

But we can go in a completely direction as well. You mentioned brainstorming, so I think maybe using those words and turning them into something visual could work, like creating an actual brainstorm where, you know, that your brain is being blown away by the wind. And, that can actually push a story into kind of a funny territory instead of keeping it very serious, because normally when we say a brainstorm, we associate it with really serious, earnest scientists developing something.

But maybe I want to make a little joke and say, you know, “Hey, you can also brainstorm. You don’t have to be so serious about that.” So it also can change the mood of your article, the mood of your story a little bit.

And maybe we don’t, maybe you want to be super serious, and then you would reject this idea. But maybe you would say, “Hey, I really like it because we’ve done so many super serious articles. Let’s lighten up.”

Jess Love: Love it. That’s great. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Okay! So Yevgenia doesn’t just take an assignment and execute it. She thinks it through: The light bulb is cliche, but the hot air balloon idea is interesting. The hot air balloon is interesting, but the people underneath are weighing the idea down. Oh yeah, and because we have a history together, Yevgenia can tell me that we’ve done something really similar 11 years ago.

Then she offers something completely different, playing off the idea of a storm. But really what she’s doing is asking a question about intent. What mood should the illustration create? Serious? Funny? Can the image change the way the reader experiences the story?

Yevgenia is much more than a picture-making machine. She has a very finely honed, very unique way of seeing and depicting the world. As much as any technical skills, that’s what I hired her to bring to the table. And that, to me, at least – sounds like another bottleneck.

So, for established artists like Yegvenia, this should be somewhat reassuring. But there’s still a problem. Nobody begins a career with fully formed artistic taste. That can take years to develop. And often, people develop it while doing smaller, more routine work. Like, maybe, selling their art on a stock image website.  And if AI-generated art takes off, even in the most routine, commercial, transactional spaces, it could eventually shape the art we encounter elsewhere too.

Yevgenia Nayberg: There is a dangerous territory when real humans, real artists will start to imitate AI if there is enough demand for AI art. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Yevgenia teaches young artists, and she’s been seeing this play out with her students. 

Yevgenia Nayberg: A lot of them are concerned with style and they all talk about style, and I couldn’t really understand what they meant because I thought– I kind of thought of style as voice, not so much as like a stylistic direction. Turns out they’re trying to pick a style and match it from what they see, let’s say, on Instagram. So there is a lot of sameness there already, and this is something that they’re trying to imitate in hopes of finding jobs maybe. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: She thinks AI could be like Instagram on steroids, sending the same images into every artist’s collective consciousness. Yevgenia says she is all for her students getting hired to make art. But this trend of homogenization and imitation – is troubling.  

Yevgenia Nayberg: My primary job is to educate an artist, I want them to work obviously, and I would like to help them as much as possible. But again, I’d like to focus on developing their creativity and their uniqueness more than anything else. I always tell my students, you know, “make something worth stealing.”

Jess Love [Voiceover]: For an individual artist, having a unique voice ‘worth stealing’ can be the difference between mediocrity and greatness.

And economist Ben Jones says that everyone benefits from having more, unique, creative perspectives in the mix. 

Ben Jones:  What we actually want is people reaching for very different types of things based on their different experiences, right? And so what’s interesting, one of the reasons that we think that, you know, a kind of a society with wide-ranging pockets of expertise, interests, cultural backgrounds, et cetera, can be extremely creative, is because people are coming at questions with different sort of perspectives and ideas. They’re even coming at different questions, ’cause the kind of questions that occur to one person might not occur to another, and that’s true in science and invention, it’s true in entrepreneurship. We don’t want everyone trying the same business model. We want people trying wildly different business models, and we’ll see which one the market takes. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: There’s real value in difference. In start-ups, in science, and in art. And if everyone begins from the same machine-generated suggestions, we could end up with more of everything—but very little that’s new, special, or unique.

So, this is the paradox: AI can generate a staggering number of possibilities, filling countless gaps in the marketplace. And yet, so much of what it produces feels… the same. 

While AI-generated images and videos and books are running rampant in some artistic markets–plenty of people are just fine with elevator music, thank you very much–real novelty, real creativity, seems to be the purview of humans. Leaving human creative workers with an important role to play. 

Whew. That’s a relief.

So… is that the end? Should we play the ending music, roll the credits? 

Well, not so fast. 

This is where we stand on Labor Day 2026 sure, but if we know anything about AI tools, it’s that they can change fast. So what happens next? Where’s this all headed? Well, based on my conversations with scholars and artists, I can see three possible futures.

In the first timeline, things continue along the lines they are now. The machines do get better at generating art. Maybe AI-generated images get even more photorealistic, or maybe AI-generated writing sheds its telltale ticks – you know, those cringy buzzwords that scream, “I’m AI-generated!” 

But the improvements are really around the margins. And so genuine creativity remains a bottleneck protecting human creatives.

But there’s a second timeline, and in this timeline, AI learns to be very creative.

Ben sees this possible future as pretty likely. Because new ideas rarely emerge out of the blue. They are often composed of existing ingredients, just combined in new ways. 

Ben Jones: In many, many fields, people have separately discovered that creativity often looks like a new combination of things that already existed. So, for example, Thomas Edison did not call the light bulb, at first, the light bulb. He called it the electric candle because he was taking the candle, which was an old technology, and electricity, which was a new technology, and combining them.

And if you look at many, many ideas, it’s very natural to decompose them into distinct components—to unleash a big insight in science, or to produce a new product or process that we can all use. So that idea is very common, you see it in the arts and music and invention and science.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: By this definition, AI should actually have a creative advantage. A single person can only encounter and understand so many possible ingredients in a lifetime. We have to specialize. AI has a much more vast palette to draw from.

Ben Jones:  What’s been interesting about AI, of course, is that AI reads everything. So anyone who’s been interacting with AI sort of sees like, “Wow, I can talk to this AI about just about anything, and right around the edges of my understanding about things I kind of understand, about things I know nothing about, and it seems to know a lot about a lot of stuff.” So in some sense, at that core level of being able to access ingredients that you can combine with seemingly some sophisticated understanding of those ingredients, AI is pretty impressive. And so in that sense, I think it has in some sense, beyond human creative potential. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Given the vast range of ingredients AI can draw from, you might expect it to already produce endlessly surprising combinations. And Ben says theoretically, it one day could. If it were trained completely differently from how most chatbots are trained today.

Ben Jones: When you talk like a general purpose, chatbot or whatever, say ChatGPT, it’s sort of trained to produce the right answer, predicting the next token in some probabilistic way that it thinks is most likely to be right. And by predicting the thing that’s sort of most likely to be right all the time, that sounds like you’re homogenizing. It’s not going for the strange answer, right? It’s trying typically to please you by giving you what you want, and what most people want is not some wildly creative answer. They want the right answer. But that’s of course very much about how they were trained. I mean, those chatbots are optimized to do exactly that. 

But there could be other algorithms that we could use to train AI. It’s like, let’s say we’re training an AI, and we’re having people rate whether it was really interesting scientifically. Not whether it was right, but whether it was novel. Or novel and right. So I think that there is a world in which AI, and it may come quickly, or not, where AI can be quite creative.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: In this world, this second possible future, where the AI companies spend millions, billions, to train up AI that’s really, really creative. In this future, the creativity bottleneck protecting human artists disappears.

Some kinds of creative work, live performances, personal memoir, handmade furniture, are probably still safe. But this timeline does leave many other artists really vulnerable, particularly those who distribute their work on digital marketplaces.

But even here, there is a bottleneck that could come into play.

Not a technical bottleneck—something the machine is incapable of doing—or even a legal one, like copyright protection or human likeness permission.

A normative bottleneck: a limit people try to impose collectively, by deciding what kinds of creative work they are willing to accept and reward, often for ethical or even almost spiritual reasons.

We’re already seeing this now. Many of my artist friends have adopted a kind of “hold the line” mentality against generative AI, in part because they sense that using AI is a betrayal to the artistic community.

Yevgenia Nayberg: Well, there is an ethical component, because AI is being trained on real artists. It’s basically being trained on us. And, of course, none of us enjoys that. None of us gave permission to have our art used by AI.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: To the extent that science writing can be considered art – I feel this. It’s pretty likely that a decade of my own science writing was scraped from the web and used to train AI models. Nobody asked me for permission, and I certainly didn’t give it. 

Yevgenia Nayberg: I would rather have this be at the discretion of every artist—if they want their work to be released into the AI world. I would not want AI to be trained on my work, honestly. Because all of us have our own little tricks and secrets, and I would like to keep them to myself.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Some artists believe that the best way to fight back against a technology they didn’t ask for is to reject it altogether, in all forms.

Other creatives draw the line differently. Maybe AI can be used for research, but not execution. Or maybe it can be used for execution, but only in a specific way, as part of a rigorous, intentional process.

Wherever this line is drawn – and I expect this to be vehemently contested over the next several years, the normative bottleneck is about process. Not just what is made, but how something is made.

Earlier this year, the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson made this argument explicit in a keynote address called “We Are the Art.”

[Audio of Brandon Sanderson]

 The machines can spit out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript. They can pile them to the pillars of heaven itself, but all we have to do is say no. If we do, they lose. Why do we make art? Well, remember, art is not just the story. It is not just the painting or the sculpture or whatever else you love to create. It’s also the process of creation and what that process did to you. We are the art. Thank you.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Whether this kind of resistance, this normative bottleneck can hold will depend on getting others on board. Getting others to agree that part of the value of human art is that it was created by another human being. Someone who felt something, or saw the world in a certain way, and labored to share it with us. 

But there’s a third possible future here, one that doesn’t solely rely on social norms around creativity. In this possible future, whether AI becomes more creative or not, people using AI become capable of doing new things that neither humans nor AI could have done alone. Maybe AI becomes yet another tool for human artists. 

You’ve seen this before: the camera. Photoshop. The electric synthesizer. All these were controversial in their time, often for devaluing certain hard-won skills, like painting in a painstaking, hyper-realistic style, or learning to play the french horn. But today most artists would probably agree that the new tools created new possibilities. 

Or maybe AI really is different. Maybe it becomes a kind of thought partner. The machine proposes new ingredients we might never have produced on our own. Not unlike a colleague emailing us an article we might find interesting. Here’s Ben again.

Ben Jones: Maybe when you’re writing, it’s, it’s a collaborator, right? I mean, maybe it’s not a replacement, it’s like another voice on your team. And suddenly you’re getting a higher quality product. And it could be that you’re making a screenplay, you’re writing an article, you’re writing a song, and suddenly it’s better for your collaboration with the AI, but they’re not actually taking full control.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: In this scenario, we humans use our own creative judgment to run with whichever combination of ingredients seems like it has the most potential. Here, you could even think of “creative judgment” as its own bottleneck.

Ben Jones: You need true expertise around the set of ingredients to understand which combinations are likely or not to be useful. You don’t just randomly put ingredients together in the kitchen. It’s not gonna taste very good. There’s some milk here, and there’s some orange juice, and how about this banana? And look, it’s all spice in the spice rack, you know? And then, oh, and is that chicken? You know, that’s not gonna go very well, right? And pretty much everyone sort of knows that.  There’s many, many, many, many possible combinations. But we kind of know instinctually not to try many of them because we know they’re probably not gonna be good.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Even Yevgenia, who I should stress continues to do all of her art by hand, can see the value in this kind of collaboration–if done right, if used as more of a jumping off point than the ultimate destination. 

Yevgenia Nayberg: You can give AI prompts and say, “Okay, give me all these variations of the light bulb in the field and in the pool.”

And once it does it, you can say, “No, this is a really stupid idea. Why don’t you try something else?” And you can see what it tries, and you can maybe find something there? So I can see using AI as this little, average-minded, ordinary partner—and then that can spark something in you, in your imagination. It can generate more ideas from us, in a way, because we are competing intellectually with something.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: So those are our three scenarios. AI kind of stalls out creatively or AI actually can do everything humans can do, but cheaper and better. And then we have to decide whether we want to preserve a role for human creativity. Or, AI and humans collaborate to do entirely new things.

Ben Jones: Let’s all level-set for a second by noting that lots of people want to be artists, and it’s really, really hard. Already. It’s very hard to make a living as an actor, a musician, an artist, even without computers. Right? And there’s something deeply human about wanting to create and be an artist. And I would say, to be an economist for a second, the demand for their services is lower than the supply of people who would like to do it. So there are many long-suffering artists out there. Does AI make long-suffering artists even more suffering?

Jess Love: Even long-suffering-er.

Ben Jones: Long-suffering-er. That’s a word. And I think it could. And it could be because it replaces their output. It’s a cheaper way to produce something people want. On the other hand, maybe AI makes artists more able to do things at lower cost themselves. Maybe it’s a tool, it’s an augmentation, not a replacement. So I think it’s an open question which way it goes. It probably does quite a bit of both. And we’ll have to see. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: A bit of both. Maybe this is the most likely possible future of all. Maybe we get all these timelines happening at once, in different parts of the creative economy. AI replacing artists, AI assisting artists, and AI just getting out of the way, to let artists do their very human thing.

I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED.

Today’s show was produced by Steven Jackson and Jesse Dukes. Music by Steven Jackson and Neutral Propulsion Laboratory. Recording help from Will Feeney, George Christensen, Laura Pavin and Big Lake Recording Company. Administrative support, recording, and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger, who we’re going to miss very much.

Health, News, Podcast

Voters in This Competitive California District Say Healthcare Is the Key Issue

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, September 1, 2026

  • As the 2026 midterm elections approach, one of the top issues for voters across the country is healthcare, following major cuts last year to Medicaid. California’s 22nd congressional district has high Medicaid enrollment, and it’s one of the most competitive seats in the country now that Democrats recently gained a voter advantage there due to redistricting. In a partnership with KFF Health News, KVPR spoke to residents in this district about how healthcare could influence their vote.
  • California lawmakers are set to vote today on changes to what happens after a damaging wildfire is sparked by utility equipment.
  • An Imperial County judge appears poised to strike down the county’s moratorium on data center development.

“I Expect Them to Campaign On Health Care. They’d Be Very Foolish Not To.”

For most of Carlos A.’s life, he received health insurance coverage from Medi-Cal. It’s California’s version of Medicaid, and it’s free.

But when he got a raise a few years ago, he made too much money to qualify, and he spent some time without coverage at all.

That’s because he has a chronic immune system condition, and he needs regular medication.

“It was a panic at first,” said Carlos. “I have to be able to afford my health insurance to go to the doctor, because if not, then there’s no peace of mind.”

We agreed to withhold his diagnosis and his last name in order to protect him from repercussions related to his health.

Now, the twenty-something gets insurance through his job at an Amazon warehouse in Bakersfield. But this still has meant navigating premiums, copays and deductibles. And his insurer recently told him he needed to switch to a generic version of the prescription he’s relied on for a decade.

“It was a slap in the face because it’s a contract. I’m going to pay my premiums, you cover my insurance, and if there’s a copay to my medicine, I’ll pay it. So why are you playing funny business with my medication?”

And this year, he’s one of many voters weighing healthcare grievances in California’s 22nd Congressional District.

This swing district has long been held by Republican David Valadao. He’s being challenged by Democrat Randy Villegas, a school board trustee in Visalia.

Carlos attended a recent healthcare rally hosted by Villegas.

“My name is Randy Villegas, and I’m running for Congress to fight for Medicare for all,” the candidate said.

Carlos wants to hear what both candidates have to say about healthcare costs and red tape.

“I do expect them to campaign on health care. They’d be very foolish not to.”

District 22 stretches from Kern County in the south to Fresno County in the north. The last time Valadao lost – in 2018 – was also a time of heated debate about healthcare. That’s partly because this district has some of the most Medicaid enrollees of any congressional district.

So who will District 22 residents support this year?

Over the summer, KVPR caught up with voters as they spent time at farmers markets, fairs and rallies in this swing district. Many remain undecided.

“We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place,” says Patreza Newton of Hanford. What she and others do know is they’d like to see healthcare become more affordable.

Today, faced with two very different candidates, she hasn’t made up her mind.

“So I want somebody that’s balanced, but I do want somebody that’s sincere about caring about the needs of everyday people.”

Matthew Depue also lives in Hanford. He says people are doing whatever they can to get the care they need.

“People go from here to Mexico to get stuff done because it’s so much cheaper,” Depue says.

David Valadao didn’t respond to KVPR’s request for comment. But last year, he voted for President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which included major reductions to Medicaid.

Valadao has said he supports making healthcare more affordable and wants to reduce fraud and waste in the industry. He also supported a rural health program that would fund hospitals in underserved areas.

Randy Villegas supports universal healthcare and has said his views were shaped by growing up on Medicaid. In a statement to KVPR, he said he’d work to reverse the cuts to Medicaid. That’s so voters don’t have to “choose between rationing their medicine and groceries.”

Newton, the voter from Hanford, says any healthcare solutions should be practical.

“I’m not saying that it has to necessarily all be free because I understand that, you know, nothing in life is free. Somebody’s going to pay for it, but I do think there should be a way that people can afford it, no matter who they are.”

Voters in House District 22 have kept Valadao in office partly because he has offered middle-ground approaches to contentious issues.

Villegas will soon test if he can win over voters who have yet to make up their mind – but want to see things change.

Newsom and Lawmakers Reach Compromise on Fire Liability Ahead of Vote

California lawmakers are set to vote Tuesday on changes to what happens after a damaging wildfire is sparked by utility equipment.

The bill, Senate Bill 492, will create a system for wildfire victims to quickly access payments from utilities, and prevent insurance companies from selling their right to sue utilities to private equity firms. That process, known as subrogation, has helped drive up the cost of electricity bills by adding massive liability costs to power companies. 

Peninsula Senator Josh Becker is the bill’s author. He said, “This is one of the most consequential pieces of legislation for victims and survivors of wildfires that we’ve ever done.”

Governor Gavin Newsom initially pushed to shift liability for fire damages from power companies to home insurers, but that idea met resistance from Democrats in the legislature. Wildfire survivor groups also took aim at elements of Newsom’s original proposal that would have limited some claims of noneconomic damages.

At the heart of the deal is the question of who pays when utility-owned equipment sparks a damaging wildfire — costs that have ballooned into the tens of billions of dollars in recent fire disasters. The plan, which comes after months of largely closed-door negotiations, seeks to protect ratepayers by stopping hedge funds from extracting massive payouts from utilities in the wake of wildfires, while also restricting utility executives from receiving bonuses when their equipment causes a fire.

The CEOs of PG&E and Edison International criticized the bill Monday, saying the potential wildfire liability they face will keep electricity prices high.

Imperial County Judge Skeptical of Data Center Concerns

In a tentative decision last month, Imperial County superior court judge Jeffrey Jones said the county failed to identify a current and immediate threat to public health, safety or welfare that would justify an emergency measure like a moratorium.

It follows the vote this summer by the Imperial County Board of Supervisors to suspend all data center development on county land until mid-2027, after months of furious public outcry over a massive proposed data center complex,

Judge Jones’s decision was part of a lawsuit brought by Sebastian Rucci, a Huntington Beach-based developer who runs Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, an aspiring data center development company.

The developer sued the county earlier this summer after the Board of Supervisors’ vote on the moratorium.

In an email to KPBS Friday, Rucci emphasized the judge’s preliminary findings. He said he would continue working with the county to respond to “legitimate concerns” and evaluate “reasonable alternatives.”

“The County’s study estimates approximately $2.95 billion in economic output over 30 years—an average of approximately $98.3 million per year,” Rucci wrote, referring to an independent economic analysis by county officials. “Each year of unnecessary delay therefore carries a substantial economic cost to the Imperial Valley.”

Data center developers are increasingly looking to rural areas like the Imperial Valley, which is also home to large renewable energy sources and major power infrastructure. The county’s moratorium has frozen all projects on county land — including Rucci’s.

Across the region, hundreds of residents have raised concerns about the possible environmental and public health effects of the giant computing warehouses. Those fears have inspired people to start petitions, attend county meetings, knock on doors and hold community town halls to discuss their concerns.

That outcry has inspired a number of the state’s cities to consider their own pauses or bans on data centers locally.

In a statement to KPBS last week, Imperial County spokesperson Eddie Lopez said they would respect the court’s decision and were reviewing their next steps.

They said the county’s broader effort to evaluate data center development will continue. The judge’s decision is not final and could still be modified, according to California’s court rules.

Education, News, Podcast

Head Start Would Be English-Only Under Proposed Trump Overhaul

Audio

Here are the morning’s top stories on Monday, August 31, 2026

  • The Trump administration wants to overhaul Head Start, an early education and antipoverty program that serves about 75,000 children in California. The proposed rules would strip away regulations on class sizes, disciplinary policies and other standards, but buried in that proposal is a requirement to teach only in English.
  • Immigration agents arrested more people in Northern California in July than at any previous time in President Donald Trump’s second term. That’s according to new data from UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project.
  • A recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California is linking a voter-backed proposition to a rise in homelessness.

Advocates Say Education For Dual-Language Speakers Will Be Undermined

Lok Yuen Early Learning Center is a preschool in San Francisco’s Chinatown that serves low-income families who qualify for Head Start.

The children enrolled here come from households that speak a variety of languages: Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish and Arabic. So to connect with the kids and get them accustomed to the classroom, teacher Jennifer Lee Yuen tries to speak a few words in their home languages.

“Even if we don’t know their language, being able to learn one or two words like, saying good morning, ‘Hola, como estas?’ or in Chinese greeting them in their language, it can make them feel welcome.”

But these practices could end under a proposal to reform the 61-year-old program led by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Earlier this month, he unveiled a plan that would remove federal requirements for class sizes, staff qualifications and other standards with the goal of cutting administrative costs and increasing access to Head Start. Within that plan to eliminate “unnecessary bureaucracy,” however, is a new requirement that programs teach only in English.

“It worried me a lot because every single year there are children who are bilingual or learning English,” said Yuen when she heard that the Trump administration wants her to teach only in English. “If they go through with it, it’s gonna be very difficult to connect with the children and meet their needs.

Head Start has long supported English learners and even has a rule requiring programs to hire bilingual teachers or aides when a majority of kids enrolled speak another language. But Trump administration officials say that kind of rule is “at odds” with the president’s executive order, declaring English as the nation’s official language. And that learning English would open economic opportunities for kids.

This creates a false choice between learning English and maintaining the child’s home language.

Martha Hernandez is executive director of Californians Together, an organization in Long Beach that advocates for multilingual education.

Education experts like her say there’s good evidence that children learn English faster when they get access to a dual language education that supports their home language.

“We absolutely want children to develop strong English. The question is whether we have to ask a 3- or 4-year-old to give up the language they already know in order to do that,” said Hernandez.

Advocates for Head Start say this proposal, if it goes through, could especially affect Head Start programs in California that serve babies and toddlers, who are just learning to talk and often in a non-English language. And it would impact Migrant Head Start, which serves the children of farmworkers.

An English-only federal requirement would take a decision away from local educators and communities, including communities that have really successfully built programs around the languages of the families that they serve.

The administration says programs can apply for waivers to specific requirements under the proposed rules, which are open to public comments until October 6th.

Back at the preschool, Jennifer Lee Yuen says recognizing children’s home language in the classroom lets them know their teachers care.

“The important thing is that we are helping children learn how to regulate their emotions and feel safe in an environment. And it’s my job to help children feel comfortable and safe and build that trust.”

She says when children feel that way, then they’re open to learning.

Northern California ICE Arrests Surged This Summer

Arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have surged all over the nation – even as the Trump administration has backed off high-profile raids.

Across Northern California, ICE arrested nearly 900 people in July. That’s 60% more than in February.

Immigration lawyers say arrests are happening at airports and green-card interviews, mostly at ICE check-ins.

Lourdes Martinez is with Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland. She says people should call a rapid response hotline to assess their risk before ICE appointments.

“In particular, parents with small children. If they are going to take a risk of being detained and not coming home that evening, what is plan B if the parent doesn’t get to come home to the children?”

But arrests are much higher in Texas and Florida than in California, where the law prevents local police from conducting immigration arrests.

Angela Chan is with San Francisco’s public defender’s office.

“California has the highest number of immigrants compared to any other state. And we’re not leading in terms of the number of ICE arrests. And that’s likely largely due to our sanctuary laws.”

ICE says anyone in the country illegally is a target for arrest.

Prop 47 Reduced Prison Overcrowding, But May have Increased Homelessness

Proposition 47 passed in 2014. It reduced certain drug crimes from felonies down to misdemeanors. The idea was to keep people out of jails and prison. But researchers say they may be winding up on the streets instead.

The PPIC is reporting Proposition 47 likely led to an estimated increase in street homelessness of about 10% between 2015 and 2019. The study suggests the measure increased drug use (as measured by overdose deaths and hospitalizations) by between 7% and 8%.

Researchers also found evidence that Prop 47 led to a 20% reduction in the number of Californians receiving drug treatment, because the courts referred fewer people into treatment programs after it passed.

“Ever since Prop. 47 was passed in 2014, there’s been a lot of critics of that particular reform,” said Magnus Lofstrom, the PPIC report’s lead author. “It’s important to have a sense of what are those potential impacts.”

This appears to be the first study to show a direct link between Prop. 47 and homelessness. The findings are sure to add fuel to an already raging debate over the causes and best ways to fight homelessness: with proponents of a tough-on-crime approach on one side arguing addiction is a primary driver of homelessness and police should crack down on drug use and encampments, and homeless advocates on the other arguing the state’s sky-high cost of living is to blame and building more housing is the answer.

While the researchers couldn’t determine exactly why homelessness increased, Lofstrom said it’s likely a result of a combination of increased drug use and people who used to be sleeping in jails now sleeping on the street instead.

The report was met with skepticism by some experts in the field. Ron Hochbaum, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and director of the Buccola Family Homeless Advocacy Clinic, said while the researchers may have found a correlation between Prop. 47 and an increase in homelessness, saying the two were directly linked appears to be a stretch.

“I think it is more likely that two phenomena happened at the same time,” he said.