Episode 12: Transit, or the promise that the Bay Area briefly makes to itself before stalling between stations. We descend into Bay Area Rapid Transit, where the trains are real, the delays are spiritual, and the dream of a glass-walled Transbay Tube, equal parts aquarium and civic optimism, never quite materializes. There’s a passing nod to Star Wars—inevitable, given tunnels, empires, and the faint sense that someone, somewhere, miscalculated the scale. We surface onto the unexpectedly worldly F Market & Wharves, a rolling archive of other cities’ past lives, and revisit a historic and slightly surreal interval called the “Muni Meltdown” when San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency more or less stopped functioning, and everyone quietly recalibrated their expectations downward.

Friend of the podcast Francesca delivers a critique with edges. A friendly stranger from Reddit suggests the theme of this episode. We consider, briefly, the absence of absurdly short flights between San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport, and San Jose International Airport—a missed opportunity for both convenience and farce. Ferries, as ever, remain the only mode of transport that seems to understand the assignment. Various historical efforts to sabotage or derail BART are noted, then dismissed with the weary recognition that the system hardly needs the help. All routes considered. Few resolved.

Episode 11 moves like a coastal loop, all salt air and structural creaks, drifting through Bay Area amusement parks as if they’re unstable memories rather than fixed places.

It starts with the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and the Giant Dipper, still clattering along with a kind of stubborn physicality. No metaphor needed. It works, so it persists. Then inland to California's Great America, which feels like it’s been revised into blandness. A theme park that forgot its theme. Greg drops in a memory, a teenage kiss, and suddenly the place has more meaning as a private container than a public attraction. Wayne breaks the mood with a genuinely surprising origin story for the It's-It ice cream sandwich, which lands as exactly the kind of practical indulgence the region would invent.

From there, the wreckage. Failed 1970s parks, half-hearted visions, one oddly brushing up against the early orbit of C++ programming language. Big systems, loose intentions. The Wooz comes up as a kind of phantom concept. A good idea that never quite found form. Then Children's Fairyland, still standing by staying small and specific. The question shifts from how to why. And, briefly, a half-serious attempt to seed a rumor involving Charles Manson, just to see how easily a place can be bent by story. By the end, the parks blur. What lasts isn’t the rides. It’s the uneven way meaning sticks, or doesn’t.

Episode 10 of Hella Foggy goes animated. We talk about Pixar and the Bay Area’s down low reputation as an animation hotbed, the kind of regional oddity where world-shaping studios coexist with foggy hills, strange little subcultures, and people who casually know someone who worked on some iconic animated feature that changed the industry.

Greg debuts a new microphone, purchased after a brutally honest comment from one of Wayne’s many cousins. Unfortunately, the microphone does not fully rise to the moment. Audio technology remains humbling.

Wayne, meanwhile, spends a frankly heroic amount of time talking about Star Wars. More than warranted, probably. But that’s part of the charm.

Elsewhere: Bay Area pride during the Winter Olympics, including Alysa Liu bringing a properly Hyphy energy to the proceedings. We drift through kelp forests, Wayne’s encounters with elite Uber-nerds, and a brief marine-biology sidebar asking the important question: are cephalopods actually the jerks of the sea?

And, it cannot be stressed enough: a lot of Star Wars crap. Honestly, kind of a weird amount.