Gray Brechin is an historical geographer, the author of Imperial San Francisco, a frequent radio and television guest, and a popular public speaker on such topics as San Francisco history, the environment, and the New Deal. He is currently a visiting scholar in the U.C. Berkleley Department of Geography and founder and project scholar of the Living New Deal. He is known for his early work on the Mono Lake Committee, stopping the destruction of the lake by sending its water to Los Angeles. With the photographer Robert Dawson he wrote the book Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream, which has been called “a necessary reference to all California environmentalists and policymakers.” 

Nigel Calder is a world-renowned boat-systems expert and Mike’s best friend of 30 years. Nigel is best known for his Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual (now in its 4th edition) and his Marine Diesel Engines (in its 3rd edition), both considered the definitive English-language works in their field. He has written more than 200 magazine articles, many other books, and two cruising guides for sailors heading to the Northwest Caribbean and Cuba. With the German sailor and tech guru Jan Athenstädt, Nigel co-hosts classes and guides for boaters around the world at the online site BoatHowTo. Nigel keeps our boat running from a distance and provides a level of support and friendship beyond imagining — we refer you to the post "Nigel parachutes in” if you don’t believe us.

Dan Herz, Mike’s son and the owner of NIAD Productions, is an Emmy-Award-winning producer with over 20 years experience in broadcast television and video production. His work at NBC, PBS, The Discovery Channel, Common Sense Media, Brit + Co and other media outlets has taken him around the world to capture and tell stories on a wide range of topics. Closer to home, he spent nearly a decade as Executive Producer of the long-running and critically acclaimed Bay Area Backroads television series, which aired for 23 years. If we suggest a topic for the podcast, Dan has probably already done a story on it and knows all the people involved. 

Judy Irving is a Sundance- and Emmy-Award-winning filmmaker with peace and the environment as her main areas of interest. Her theatrical credits include The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a feature documentary about the relationship between a homeless street musician and a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco, Pelican Dreams, about California brown pelicans and the people who know them best, Dark Circle, a personal film about the links between nuclear power and weapons, and Cold Refuge, about how swimming in open water mitigates life's challenges. Wild Parrots is one of the 25 top-grossing documentaries of all time. In 2015 Judy was elected to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Documentary Branch. Judy is the inspiration for our podcast. It was her questions about life, work, and meaning that set us on our current quest, and her sure sense of possibility that has kept us going. 

Bernie Krause, founder of the natural sound collective Wild Sanctuary, has made it his life’s work to capture and preserve the planet’s vanishing soundscapes. Bernie is a musician, author, bio-acoustician, speaker, and natural sound artist who coined the terms geophony, biophony, and anthropophony. His soundscapes have been interpreted in ballet, symphony, film, and museum installations around the world. His TED talk, The Voice of the Natural World, has been viewed more than 1.2 million times. In 2024, in a nod to his former career, he will be inducted into the Folk Music Hall of Fame for his time with The Weavers.   

Malcolm Margolin is an author, publisher, and former executive director of Heyday Books, an independent nonprofit publisher and cultural institution in Berkeley, California. Through Heyday, he published hundreds of books and oversaw the creation of two magazines, News from Native California and Bay Nature. He also co-founded The Alliance for California Traditional Arts, The Inlandia Institute, and was instrumental in the creation of a number of Indian groups including The California Basketweavers Association and Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. Malcolm has also written several books on California natural history, cultural history, and Indian life, including The Ohlone Way, which was named by the San Francisco Chronicle as as one of the hundred most important nonfiction books of the 20th century by a western writer. He has received many prestigious awards, including a community service award from The San Francisco Foundation, Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Bay Area Book Reviews Association and the California Studies Association, a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation, and the Chairman’s Commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities—the second recipient in the United States. 

Peter Molnar is co-founder of the Ocean Genome Atlas Project (OGAP), a pioneering effort to collect, classify, sequence and map the world’s ocean genome — including the genomic information of organisms representing at least 80% of the extant marine species worldwide. He has captained the OGAP volunteer vessel SAM over 9,000 nautical miles of genetic sampling voyages across the North Pacific since 2017. A ranked competitive sailor in high school and college, Peter turned to remote kayak and small boat expeditions as an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School and also started supporting environmental projects. He trained as a pollution patrol skipper for San Francisco Baykeeper in 1995, chaired the board from 2011 to 2020 and is a board member and chair of the True Blue Leadership Circle. He serves on the Greater Farallons National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council, skippers a support vessel for Point Blue's Farallons Patrol and currently serves on the board of Adventure Scientists.