California is where the country comes to dream. We’re on the edge of the nation, making culture, building the infrastructure of the future, and trying, when we’re at our best, to be a beacon of progress. And for that reason, we’re also a place where dreams come to die, where cold realities greet idealism hard. We’re the sorrows of “The Grapes of Wrath” and the joys of “East of Eden.” Disaster is lurking around every sunny day: earthquakes, fire, houses falling into the sea. Life here can be too much of everything, too expensive, too shallow, too fleeting, too hot.

What happens here matters — not just to us but to the rest of the nation. California politicians love to trot out the fact that our state has the world’s fourth largest economy as a way of explaining our outsize influence on world events. But it’s more than our GDP. It’s the fact that we are a major exporter of American culture, in the form of movies and entertainment, but also iPhones and apps. For better or worse, California writes much of the code that our society lives by.

And so we’re doing the only natural thing a media organization in this state should do in the year 2025 to find a way to talk about all of this: We are launching a podcast. “Pacific Standard Time,” or PST, is a weekly show about what’s happening in California and why it matters. It’s for people living here and people elsewhere who wonder what the hell is going on here. 

Each week, we’ll bring you a deep dive into something particular going on in our state — from the insanity of housing costs to the ways local mayors are trying to protect immigrants from federal crackdowns, to fun stuff like weird sex dinner parties and whistling competitions. 

Hosted by two Californians, Emily Dreyfuss, The Standard’s culture editor, and Jesse Alejandro Cottrell, one of The Standard’s enterprise reporters, PST comes out every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to be the first to hear our show.

Emily Dreyfuss: Growing up in California, I knew I lived in a magical land. Movies were made here. The singers on the radio crooned about this place, using the word “California” as a stand-in for a feeling, a dream, a possibility. My paternal grandparents had moved here from New York to chase their dreams, and it was in California that my dad chased his all the way to the silver screen. My mom, a child of West Virginia, traveled west to pursue a career in Hollywood too. Their story was a very California one — they met at a Hollywood party, fell in love over canapes, and were engaged by morning. When, after nine years and three children, their marriage ended and I moved to Idaho with my mom, California lingered in my mind like a paradise lost. 

And it wafted off me — my Californianess, in the way I spoke, or maybe in the way I saw the world, marking me to my adoptive rural community as one of those coastal outsiders with strange ideas. I learned that California was polarizing, that people felt strongly about it even if they’d never been here. “She’s a Californian,” people would say by way of explaining me. It didn’t take long for me to join the ranks of so many others who dream of coming to California from elsewhere. 

And why? Because the weather is so temperate? The gold-rush promise of a better life so strong in the collective imagination? For me, I missed the trees, and the way the sunlight fell on snail shells moving slowly over pavement. I missed the rollerbladers on Venice Beach and the beat poets smoking cigarettes in North Beach, whom I’d only read about. I missed the way life felt full of possibility. As soon as I could, I brought my family back to California, moving to San Francisco like the poets did before us.

Jesse Alejandro Cottrell: My mom always dreamed that she’d marry a gringo, and so maybe it wasn’t a big surprise that she met her first husband on a Greyhound bus headed to California. She was on vacation, traveling to the U.S. for the first time from her native Guatemala. She met the new man as their bus departed Texas. By the time they arrived in Los Angeles a few days later, they were engaged. For their honeymoon, they traveled to San Francisco, which my mom declared the most beautiful city she’d ever seen, and moved there shortly thereafter. My mom’s telling of this story so inspired her family back in Guatemala that my earliest memories are of the tíos and primos packed into our apartment’s extra rooms, sharing beds as they pursued their own version of the California Dream.

Like many second-generation California immigrants, I love this state for making my family’s dreams come true. Mostly. Rose-colored lenses didn’t obscure the gang violence and crack addiction I saw while growing up in the Excelsior in the ’80s and ’90s. Neither do those lenses hide the endemic drug and homelessness problems that plague our state today. 

But to keep it 100, when I’m outside of California and someone engages in the fashionable act of trashing our state or my city, I will go hoarse arguing. Not that everything’s perfect, but that Californians try as hard as anyone in the world to make their dreams come true. As a reporter and as a natural born son of the state, I feel compelled to tell the stories of how these competing realities coexist in California. That’s what I hope we do on this show.