ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
Every place is a crossroads.
Produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine, Soundings uses San Pedro and Los Angeles Harbor – America's busiest port – as a lens to explore how local places reveal global forces. Each episode features in-depth conversations with authors, historians, and experts whose work connects specific stories to larger patterns: how the shipping container reshaped geopolitics, why Joan Didion saw California as the edge of the American experiment, and what a harbor town's punk rock scene reveals about creativity and class.
Hosted by Aaron McKenzie and aimed at anyone curious about how the world actually works, Soundings will change how you see your own community's place in the world.
🌐 sanpedrotoday.com
🌐 aaronmckenzie.net/soundings
Hosts:
Update frequency:
biweekly
Average audio length:
43 minutes
Guest interviews
English
United States
9 episodes
since June 13, 2026
episodic
IN THIS PODCAST 🔗
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
In 1519, two civilizations with absolutely no knowledge of each other's existence collided in the Valley of Mexico. What followed was eighty days of siege, the fall of the greatest city in the Americas, and the event that historian Buddy Levy calls the birth of modern history.
Buddy Levy is the aut…
PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
In 1963, a 22-year-old art student was paid $150 to design a poster for a low-budget surf documentary nobody expected much from. That poster — for The Endless Summer — became one of the most reproduced images in American design history, and it launched a career that would put John Van Hamersveld be…
More than a third of everything imported into the United States passes through two ports that sit side by side in Southern California. Most people who live nearby have never given the place a second thought. That invisibility, it turns out, is the point.
Bill Sharpsteen is a journalist and the aut…
This is not a story about a car.
It happens to involve a car – the Vector W8 Twin-Turbo, one of the most extraordinary machines ever built on American soil – but the car is almost beside the point.
Jerry Wiegert was a designer from the South Bay of Los Angeles who spent fifty years trying to will…
Joan Didion was the writer who made modern California matter to American literature. But over the last twenty years, she also became something else: an icon. The sunglasses, the Corvette, the memes. What if that iconography is exactly what's getting in the way of understanding how good she actually…
Rose George on Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive Into Everything They Do for Us and We Do to Them
For every ten tuna that once swam in the ocean, there is now one. One in five fish is caught illegally. And the fish on your plate may not even be what the label says it is.
Rose George is a British journ…
Early LA punk rock wasn't what you think it was. It wasn't just alienation, safety pins, and three-chord aggression. And it didn't take its cues from London or New York. It was something older — blues, country, rockabilly, Chicano folk music, rhythm and blues — filtered through a city that the rest…
In 1956, a trucker named Malcolm McLean launched a ship with fifty-eight containers aboard. He was trying to solve a logistics problem. Instead, he accidentally changed the world
Economist Marc Levinson spent a decade researching containerization and discovered what McLean couldn't see: this simpl…
Howard Sounes: The Real Charles Bukowski vs. the Myth | "Soundings"
Episode Overview
What happens when a writer's greatest creation is himself? In the debut episode of Soundings, Aaron McKenzie sits down in San Pedro with British biographer Howard Sounes to separate the real Charles Bukowski from …
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Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Aaron McKenzie, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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