Polycast

Polycast is an interview show hosted by Davey Kozik, and its subject is the people of Cal Poly. That covers more ground than it sounds. In a single run of episodes, Kozik sits down with a NASA astronaut, a geoecology professor, a yoga teacher, a produce broker, a journalism professor and a filmer and editor at GoPro. The school is the common thread, and the careers head almost anywhere. Kozik is an eager, encouraging interviewer who greets a good story with a 'wow' and then asks how it actually happened. Some episodes open on a line from the guest before his standard welcome. Victor Glover went from Cal Poly student athlete to Navy commander to NASA astronaut, and he returns to the show to talk about his time on the International Space Station. The details he offers are small and physical. On his first trip out the door, he kept to the handrails and connectors instead of looking around. Weightlessness, in his telling, is an exercise in cognitive adaptability: embrace it, or fight it for the whole mission. He speaks warmly about service, and says it is relationships with other people that really move mountains. Tyler Sams brings the conversation back to earth with a hiring story. He landed his job at GoPro having edited exactly one video in Premiere, and was told that the eagerness he showed by arriving early in a sport coat mattered more than his software skills. David Roth's route winds in a different way: a first job out of college on an Alaska salmon fishing boat, merchandising for a new line of organic fruit juices, an ag sales job that sent him back to Bakersfield, and finally a return to SLO. The juice job came through a Cal Poly friend after a planned job in the Netherlands fell through. Today he trades produce much as a broker works a stock market, and he is branching into real estate. The faculty conversations lean toward teaching and craft. Dr. Nishi Rajakaruna describes research as a tool for teaching undergraduates, and Kozik points listeners to the tea parties and hikes he hosts to bring the campus community closer. Kim Bisheff, a journalism professor who wrote for the Los Angeles Times and Outside Magazine, contrasts the strict who-what-when-where structure of news writing with the narrative freedom of magazine work, which once had her covering the Winter X Games. Her current focus is slowing the spread of misinformation. Tawny Sterios, one of the first yoga instructors at the Rec Center during her time at Cal Poly, describes the leap from those classes to a studio of her own, and a shift from Hatha practice toward kundalini. The closing credits name Sienna Addison and Torstein Renn alongside Kozik as the Polycast team.