Photo by Nicole Sepulveda.
Ian Klaus is the founding director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace California Center and a scholar on the nexus of urbanization, geopolitics, and global challenges. Before sitting on the panel for “What Makes a Great California Idea?,” part of the inaugural CalMatters Ideas Festival, he joined us in the green room to talk about his dream karaoke song, Bodegaland, and indoor-outdoor living.
What’s a city you haven’t been to that you want to visit?
Nairobi. My brother used to live in East Africa, and he adored it. I have great colleagues who work out of there who speak to its dynamism, vitality, and its tech scene. And it’s at the forefront of so many different things from urban practices to geopolitical competition on technology. So I think a lot of things come together in that place, and I’ve never been there and I look forward to going.
What’s the city you’d be OK never going back to?
Almost every place I’ve ever been there has been something amazing to learn and people to meet and so there’s some places I don’t feel the need to go back to, but there’s no place I’ve been to that I haven’t benefited from being.
What’s your go-to karaoke song?
I don’t have a go-to, but I have a song that I want to do: Stevie Nicks’ “Stand Back.” I haven’t been able to find it on a list yet. But there’s a moment where Prince comes in with a guitar. And I think it would be so great to get to do Stevie Nicks on the one side and when Prince comes in, this sort of air guitar karaoke of Prince. So that’s one I dream of.
What’s the last piece of popular culture you consumed?
Sports radio, which in the Bay Area is a fascinating thing. Someone like Tom Tolbert on KNBR can sometimes be talking about the UN Secretary-General. It is sort of a fascinating celebration, I think, of our politics in California and our local sports.
I was dropping my daughter off at school today, and they were playing on KNBR sports radio Kevin Costner talking about how he convinced George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees, to film this movie, For the Love of the Game, there, even though it ends with a perfect game [for the Detroit Tigers]. And Costner says to Steinbrenner, let the Yankees win. And Steinbrenner says “no they don’t; you throw a perfect game.” And Costner says, no, the Yankees win the pennant. They just don’t win that game. And it’s just an actor talking about an exchange with a sports team owner, but the narrative that was captured there was actually a pretty brilliant one in terms of how we explain politics and policy and bringing everyone into the same space. Another brilliant lesson from KNBR sports radio.
What is the best low-stakes California idea?
Indoor-outdoor living. You can’t do it anywhere, but you can do it here. I think that the revolution in indoor-outdoor living California design brought about continues to be our most simple and wonderful idea.
On a similar note, low stakes only, what’s California’s worst idea?
Adding more traffic lanes to highways. It’s a problematic idea everywhere, but it seems to be one that we’re doing a lot of. The thought is that if you add more lanes, there’ll be less traffic, but if you add more lanes, there’s just going to be more cars.
In this event description, we referred to California as Tomorrowland. If you could create any land, what land would it be?
Bodegaland. I suspect if we went really deep into some of the ideas about multi-use space, and how we’re supposed to build cities right now, we might be able to boil them down into what it means to have a bodega on your corner and have accessible housing around it.