Podcasts about San Diego, California

The Padres get argued about in more rooms than anything else on this page. On Padres Hot Tub a pitcher handing back guaranteed money becomes a tribute: the hosts argue Darvish is honoring the late owner Peter Seidler, recalling him turning up at Petco Park with flowers for the steps the afternoon Seidler's death was announced, and one host calls the idea that the club is broke or pushing him out projection. On Talking Friars the same winter is a ledger: Luis Arraez gone to the rival Giants on a $12 million deal, and Ben Fadden making the case for a free-agent first baseman because Gavin Sheets does not want to be the full-time DH. Same team, different rooms.

What San Diego is

San Diego is the southernmost large city on the US Pacific coast, pressed against the Mexican border, and California's second-largest city. It is a Navy and Marine Corps town known for its beaches, its zoo, a large craft-brewing industry and, each summer, Comic-Con.

The sports desk

The Padres shows differ more in sound than in subject. Padres Hot Tub is a panel that moves fast but not cleanly, interrupting itself and veering into a joke before circling back; its clips run from the Darvish argument to the fine grain of Randy Vasquez's changed pitch mix and two straight quality starts. Schaeffer & Sliwa, on San Diego Sports 760, is built like live radio, a point introduced, examined from another angle, then rephrased plainly, and it roams furthest: a walk-off grand slam that sends the hosts into a biggest-moment debate, a USA–Belgium pregame with Mark Ziegler of the UT, a complaint that FIFA will want forty thousand dollars to reverse a red card. 97.3 The Fan On Demand carries Padres titles, but the clips the feed plays are its high school football podcast, asking why Englewood planted a flag before facing a heavily favored Lincoln. John & Tammy: San Diego's Morning Show, on KSON, keeps "John's College of Padres Knowledge - July 23, 2026" in its title run, but its clips are two seasoned radio voices finishing each other's setups for comedian and wounded veteran Thom Tran, in town for The Laugh Factory, who says he would rather face gunfire in Iraq than a hostile comedy crowd.

Soccer with the club's badge on it

The Official SDFC Podcast is San Diego FC's own show and sounds like polished team access: long conversational questions, equally long answers that circle a point before landing it. Calvin Jones, previewing LAFC, says the problem is not one thing but red cards and injuries breaking lineup continuity, and that against LAFC's talent the team must be switched on in every facet. Match previews sit beside player pieces: CJ Dos Santos on a World Cup with Cape Verde, a family episode in which a floorball nickname ends up on a jersey. Inside Surf Soccer Podcast, San Diego Surf's Louis Hunt interviewing players and coaches, is the youth-development counterpart, with episodes from 2020: a sports psychologist on a player who used "relentless and dominant" as his game face in a Champions League final, and a guest recalling hours in a garage juggling toward 250 for a promised ice cream.

Reporters interviewing reporters

Most of the news is reporters talking to each other. KPBS Roundtable, hosted by Andrew Bracken, puts county supervisors soliciting over $100K in cash gifts in its titles, and in its clips Elaine Alfaro reports that North County fare revenue covered less than 8% of operating costs last fiscal year while Gustavo Solis describes Unión del Barrio patrols looking for tinted windows, clean cars and fake-looking plates. Voice of San Diego Podcast is the same idea with more attitude, "Broken Promises", "So Not Transparent", "Critter Coroner", its hosts struggling to perform Donald Trump's endorsement of Jim Desmond aloud, and a live show with John David Wicker on prop bets as an unusual risk for San Diego State athletes. Good Schools For All, from the same newsroom's Scott Lewis and Will Huntsberry, stays on schools: a district re-verifying students' homelessness as often as every 30 days when Sweetwater checks once a year. San Diego News Fix does the same for Union-Tribune stories, a water-drop volunteer explaining how three sisters' deaths changed where aid groups look for remote border trails. San Diego News Now, from KPBS, is the headlines briefing: Lawrence K. Jackson reading an Artemis II splashdown watch party at the San Diego Air and Space Museum before turning to the city's decades of ties to NASA, and a 75-year-old Iranian protest organizer in San Diego reacting to attacks on Iran. The SDLP Podcast, from the San Diego Libertarian Party, argues instead: in "Libertarian Housing" Joseph and Drew hold that third-party CEQA lawsuits can stall San Diego housing for years and that government fees add more than $80,000 before a single-family home's plans are reviewed.

Food, beer and the zoo

San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour treats dining as a trade. Jeff Rossman explains closing Terra's restaurant because the catering business needed the kitchen and calls restaurants the hardest business to be in; Tara Monsod, a James Beard nominee, argues Filipino food needs sweet acid and heat without losing its soul; Brad Wise, the magazine's 2024 Chef of the Year, explains how live-fire cooking removes pretension while demanding precise technique. Beer Night in San Diego! Presented by Three B Zine Podcast! is a table of longtime beer friends with microphones running, half-finished thoughts and a lot of casual correction, and the talk is local to the shelf: Artifex back in distribution down here, North Park Beer Company packing Chinook, Citra, Mosaic, Nectaron, Simcoe and Codename Petrine into MPBC7. The episodes here are from 2022. Amazing Wildlife: A San Diego Zoo Podcast is the zoo's show, and its clips are about the animals rather than the city: elephant teeth, giraffes as the savanna's watchtowers.

Civic interviews

Spotlight on the Community sounds like local public-affairs radio that wants to feel welcoming, plain language that drops into nonprofit and policy vocabulary when the topic calls for it. Ayano Morissette says Promises to Kids told her "you get to decide your narrative", and Agnes Barrelet explains how Alpine Acres turned dead soil into a two-acre garden. Mission: San Diego Military, hosted by Drew Schlosberg, works the military side of the same beat, with episodes from 2021, among them Rear Admiral Scott Jones going from a GED and community college to military pilot.

Where to start

• For the Padres: Padres Hot Tub's "Darvish-Gate" for the argument, Talking Friars for the transactions.
• For the news: KPBS Roundtable, then Voice of San Diego Podcast.
• For the table: San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour with Jeff Rossman, or Beer Night in San Diego! Presented by Three B Zine Podcast!
• For the club: The Official SDFC Podcast's LAFC preview with Calvin Jones.

The San Diego feed on this page plays clips from these shows.