Former sports editor Brandon Pride at his desk in the DP office (photo courtesy of Brandon Pride).

While serving as Summer Sports Editor in 2020, Brandon Pride introduced the 15 Questions series at The DP, which allows athletes to share little insights into their lives both inside and outside of sport.

Instead of a traditional senior citizen column, the DP sat down with the former sports editor and asked him 15 questions about his time at The Daily Pennsylvanian, his experiences at Penn and life in general. Here’s what the graduate had to say.

1. Introduce yourself.

I’m Brandon Pride, originally studying Finance and Management in San Jose, California. At The DP, I worked in the athletic department for four years, holding various roles.

2. How did you decide to join DPOSTM? [The DP’s Only Section That Matters]?

Well, actually it was pretty easy. There was no newspaper in my high school, and I’ve always been very interested in sports and writing. So when I came to Penn I just saw it as a perfect opportunity and it was a great fit from the start.

3. What is your favorite memory of the DP?

This fall we took a road trip to Dartmouth [for the football Ivy opener]This was the first time the department had traveled there in nearly a decade. The round trip took almost 20 hours but in the end it was a really cool experience to see the school and cover a really exciting game at the start of the season.

And because it was parents weekend in dartmouth and [Hanover’s] With the city already being so limited in terms of accommodation, we had to stay in this shared house in the middle of the woods, about an hour from the school, with no electricity, plumbing, or cellphone signal. Of course, that sounds far from ideal, but it ended up being really funny and memorable, and now it’s kind of ridiculous to look back on.

Photo credit: Anna Vazhaeparambil Brandon Pride interviews football coach Ray Priore on November 19, 2022.

4. What should every Penn student in Philadelphia do before they graduate?

Well Philadelphia is a great city and there are a lot of things to do but I really enjoyed walking the Schuylkill Trail. If you make it to the end, you’ll see tons of cool old statues and scenic views, and it’s a great way to get some exercise that’s a little more fun than just running on a treadmill.

5. What is the most underrated restaurant on campus or in the area?

As for underrating, I don’t think Smokes’ is underrated as a bar, of course, but the food is actually pretty good I’d say. A lot of people don’t even know you can get food there, but I think they probably have the best pizza on campus.

6. What was the best class you took at Penn?

There were a lot of really good ones. “Negotiations” with Professor Taheripour were definitely impressive when I took it; You learn a lot about yourself by taking this course. I also had the opportunity to do it at TA this semester so it made it even more memorable because I was practically able to do it twice.

7. What’s on your TV show Mount Rushmore?

“Breaking Bad” would definitely be number one, and I think “The Sopranos” would have to be included there as well. Nathan for You would definitely be on the list as well. Then I say Black Mirror so I’m really looking forward to next month’s new season.

8th. What do you think is the most versatile thing about you?

So when I start and finish my year at Penn, I usually try to drive across the country back to California or Pennsylvania with my dad, and it’s always been a lot of fun, even though it’s an insanely long trip. You get to know many different parts of the country and get to know all kinds of different things. So this is definitely pretty unusual, but I always recommend it to anyone who gets the chance.

9. What’s at the top of your wish list?

My goal has always been to be able to dunk a basketball. Whether that will ever come to fruition remains to be seen. As for things that are more tangible, I’ve always wanted to travel all 50 states and I’m pretty close. The road trips help with that.

10 What was your favorite moment as a Bay Area sports fan?

The selection is definitely large. I’ve been pretty blessed with sporting achievements at home throughout my life, although my favorite team, the 49ers, has never achieved that achievement in my life. But I’d say probably the San Francisco Giants win at the 2014 World Series where Madison Bumgarner just went nuts and gave us the win in game seven for relief. I will never forget that.

11. Who are your favorite athletes and who are your least favorite athletes?

My favorite athlete is probably Michael Phelps because his eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympics really got me into the sport. Then reading his book No Limits inspired me to try to apply his work ethic not only to sports but to other areas of life as well.

My least favorite athlete – I know he’s really good – might be Chris Paul. To be honest I always found him kind of annoying, especially as a Warriors fan.

12. What did you like most and least as a sports editor?

I would say the biggest challenge was always having to be on call for breaking news because you never know when something might happen. And probably the best part was helping new writers get the hang of the basics and watch them learn, and maybe even create the weekly meeting icebreakers.

13. What is your favorite story that you have written here?

I think two come to mind first. I wrote both in 2020. The first was a partner story I wrote with Joey Piatt about why Penn students don’t go to basketball games even though we have a lot of people here who are interested in sports and that just ended up being one really relevant story that is still relevant today. It was talked about quite a bit on campus, so it was cool to make an impact and talk about something that we felt was important.

And the other — I know I’m cheating by giving two — was a profile I did on Ryan Glover, who used to be quarterback here at Penn. Upon doing some research on him, it turned out that his mother had been married to Usher for several years. So I wrote a story looking at Ryan’s background from a sports and life perspective. Of course it’s unique to have an upbringing like that, so it was really cool to just talk to him, his mother and many other people in his life to finally draw a picture of him and show that he’s more than just a man was an athlete.

14 How would you like to be remembered at DPOSTM?

I think first of all I want to be remembered as someone who was really passionate about the department. Even after my tenure as editor ended, I remained committed and wrote stories from the beginning through my senior week at Penn. And then also someone who has always tried to make it a welcoming community for all people who wanted to join the department and advance there.

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In addition, I think it will help us get through COVID[-19] and also attach great importance to road trips. I’ve had the chance to play all eight Ivies games, so I hope this tradition can continue after I graduate.

15 What are your plans after graduation?

I will be starting a financial analyst position at Walmart in August. I did an internship at the Northwest Arkansas headquarters last summer and had a great time. So I’m really looking forward to going back there and getting to work.

The post 15 questions with… Brandon Satisfaction, a former DP sports activities editor appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Here’s what the $162 million bond measure promised to do in 2010: “enhance safety, fire detection and security systems, improve energy efficiency, replace outdated electrical, plumbing and heating systems.”

So, in another eight to 10 years they’ll be back to solve the same issues … again?

They always include “tech” in the bond measures. Tech is usually obsolete in five to six years, but bonds last 25 to 30 years.

Ever buy a computer and take out a loan for 25 to 30 years to pay for it?

nuts, right? But that’s exactly what the district wants to do. Nuts!

With the loss of 697 students since the 2016-17 school year, you’d expect to see fewer teachers, but the district added eight teachers (2018-19 school year according to the latest figures).

And the number of administrators is up from 28 in 2016-17 to 35 in 2018-19 (latest figures).

The ADA spending for the district is 109% of the statewide average at $16,962. The district is above average in cost, but below average in academics … by a lot.

Around 53% of students are below grade level in English. Around 62% of students are below grade level in math. And bond money can’t be spent on hiring teachers that are more qualified/better trained.

With the $430 million bond measure, per student, comes to $52,554 plus 30 to 40 years of interest payments.

Parent are voting with their feet and removing their children from this failure of a school district.

Just say no to higher taxes.

The letter writer is the president of the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association.

The post South San Francisco Unified College District’s $430 million bond measure | Letters To Editor appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The San Francisco Chronicle is delighted to announce the hiring of Hannah Hagemann as its new Weather Science Editor.

In this role, a new position at The Chronicle, Hagemann will lead a team covering the weather and climate of the Bay Area, including forecasts that serve our local audience and news stories about developing weather events. The team will also produce smart explainers that illuminate the science behind atmospheric rivers and fire tornadoes, and data stories that place the weather outside our windows in historical context.

“Increasingly frequent wildfires, multi-year droughts and historic rain storms have already changed life for Californians,” Hagemann said. “More than ever, we need data-rich science journalism that connects the dots between shifting weather patterns and climate change. I’m ecstatic to grow a team that will fill this gap.”

At the Sentinel, Hagemann documented the real-time impacts of climate change, reporting on extreme swings from drought and wildfires to atmospheric rivers and debris flows. She carved out a beat writing on the scientific how and why behind such events and covering the on-the-ground reverberations of major incidents. At NPR, Hagemann covered everything from agriculture to education and racial injustice as a Kroc Fellow, working on the network’s news and national desks.

“Hannah’s background and experience make her a great fit to develop this new team and grow The Chronicle’s coverage of weather and climate,” said Sarah Feldberg, Editor for Emerging Products and Audio. “Our readers consistently respond to coverage of the weather events that impact their days. Hannah and her team will enable us to do more robust reporting on the climate trends and weather patterns that affect our lives.”

Before entering journalism, Hagemann worked as a geologist, tracking toxic plumes with drill crews, railroad foremen and regulators. She received her master’s in science journalism from UC Santa Cruz.

Growing up, Hagemann’s family jumped from San Francisco, to Hawaii and Colorado, before moving to Newport Beach. Being immersed in vastly different natural environments as a child inspired her love of the outdoors from a young age.

She has lived off-grid in the Eastern Sierra high desert mapping rock formations, and in a van, traveling the US and Canada.

When she’s not doing journalism, Hagemann is probably outside in the Santa Cruz Mountains — hiking, painting in watercolors or seeing live music.

About The San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfchronicle.com) is the largest newspaper in Northern California and the second largest on the West Coast. Acquired by the Hearst Corporation in 2000, The San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young and has been awarded six Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence. Follow us on Twitter at @SFChronicle.

The post Hannah Hagemann joins The San Francisco Chronicle as Climate Science Editor appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

I grew up in South San Francisco and just followed my husband’s employer.

While we currently live in Sunnyvale, I lived in South San Francisco for the first 32 years of my life (my husband was also an SSF resident). I grew up in this district.

Bronsteins was the first place I was allowed to go alone. We regularly return to “home” to see how some areas have developed and to look at the old and familiar areas (see always Bronstein Music). This area has made some changes but I would be very sad to see it (especially by the city council). I grew up on Grand Avenue and Pine Terrace. These areas are part of my life soul.

The post Single-family houses in South San Francisco | Letters To Editor appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

‘Maybe we’re having a bust right now, but it’ll boom again’

Mat Honan

OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts — edited for length and clarity — with notable figures in and around the tech industry.

To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BuzzFeed News Executive Editor Mat Honan has long covered the way society interacts with technology. He joins Big Technology Podcast this week to discuss the “Zoom Class,” the rise of NFTs, and how San Francisco may change after the pandemic.

Alex Kantrowitz: Hi Mat, Let’s talk about the “Zoom Class,” or the group of people who’ve been able to keep their jobs and work from home during the pandemic. Some have even moved to “Zoom towns” a few hours away from the cities they once lived in. What do you think the implications are of having a group of people who can do that, and a group who can’t?

Mat Honan: There’s a couple of really interesting things there. If you think about what this pandemic would have looked like 20 years ago, when it would not have been possible to have a Zoom class, or a work-from-home class, or a Zoom school, all that kind of stuff. Technology really, in a lot of ways, helped this from becoming a lot worse than it could have been. It clearly helped reduce community spread.

But it’s deeply unfair certainly that some people are basically able to ride it out at home, often all being paid very well to do that. I think it’s almost a cliché at this point — I wish I could remember who said it first because it’s a brilliant truth — about the pandemic being the black light that exposed all the problems in society.

In some ways, it was just a lot of right stuff and right time in terms of the fact that it did work. You worked on a story, when this was all starting, about video capabilities when the pandemic was getting going. So many people had gone to Amazon Web services, there was so much bandwidth, people had fiber to the house, and there’s all this stuff. But it’s just deeply unfair that so many people got to ride it out at home, and it’s deeply unfair that the kids whose families had the money to have a better computer and better internet connection got a better education, or got an education. In some families, their kids just sat alone at home all day while both their parents are essential workers.

It’s really exposed the divides in society and just what kind of inequalities we have to work on as a society; I think that’s more than anything else. “Zoom Towns,” is the most obnoxious phrase I’ve heard in a long time, it’s going to have a long-term transformative effect in society, but I hope we can make a positive one.

Let’s talk about the effect. What’s that going to look like?

Frankly, I don’t want to predict the future. Like I don’t know. I don’t know what it looks like, but I certainly hope that all these conversations that we’ve had about race and class in the past year aren’t for naught, and that all the things that we’ve learned about who has the privilege to do these things, that we don’t unlearn those.

I worry that this will just add another layer of division inside an already really divided country.

I do, too. I do hope that there is some good to come out of it and we can have some sort of realignment. I saw something recently about the massive number of people who are registered as Independents now versus four years ago, eight years ago, 12 years ago.

It’s been an increase?

Yes, I think that’s a positive thing. One of the worst things that we’ve done in American society is to divide everybody up into teams. It’s been incredibly harmful. I hope there’s a chance that we can learn from it, and people become more civic-minded, and people can get more involved.

Personally, all of a sudden I care a lot more about schools, and not just my kids’ schools, but other kids’ schools. Molly Hensley-Clancy wrote a story on schools in the spring, and about all these kids who have just been completely wrecked by the pandemic and left behind. I’m certainly not the only person talking about seeing that, but I think people are really thinking about that now, and I hope that we continue to think about that.

I hope that we can do things like make sure that all families have a fast internet at home. Why is that something that only wealthy families can pay for? Why can’t we have a more equitable distribution of broadband? Why can’t there be broadband in rural areas? Why can’t we do more to have the government create infrastructure where there’s not affordable internet that people can get?

Tech development already seemed like it was happening in a bubble, and now it seems to be further ensconced in a bubble?

Some things maybe became less bubbled, like for example grocery delivery. My mother, who’s in her seventies and lives in a rural area, and is on a fixed income and doesn’t have a whole lot of resources, had never been able to get groceries delivered. Now, she can get groceries delivered, order online, and curbside pickup, and that kind of stuff, and she’s been doing it for a year. It just wasn’t available in her area, and the grocery stores that were there then scrambled to implement it. You’ll see some things like that, where places that weren’t traditionally tech, like a rural grocery store, become happy about technology that makes them more useful to people’s lives.

But what happens if the builders of technology are less exposed to folks who don’t work in the tech industry?

I think what you’re saying is because of people’s ability to ride it out at Zooms, are they going to have even less empathy than they already did have for people who they’ve not been having any contact with. It’s definitely concerning. Did you see the “giraffe money” story?

Was it about having enough money you could buy a giraffe as a test for wealth?

Right. “Are you going to get giraffe money from this IPO?” or just fancy dog money. I don’t know. And you want to have giraffe money. Even that those discussions are taking place is messed up. The U.S. is pretty messed up. I think a lot of that is due to long-term tax policy, long-term policies around race, long-term policies around who got to get a loan to buy a home, and that type of thing. I would hope that the people who are listening to this podcast, who are the builders, are thinking about the unglamorous middle class and working class and working poor who are not living in those bubbles and are not able to be on the Zoom all day.

There’s a company that has an ad where one of their drivers says, “I’m my own CEO,” and it struck me as tone-deaf. Because yeah, you’re your own CEO, you don’t have health benefits, you don’t have unemployment benefits, you don’t have any of the safety nets that come with full employment, and actually, you’re not even your own CEO because you don’t really even set your hours.

You’re managed by an algorithm.

Yeah. But that that mindset could come out now is shocking to me and appalling. We talk about these people as essential workers, yet we treat them as if they’re completely inessential, and it’s discouraging to me that you could have so little empathy that you might not see that as a problem.

When meanwhile there’s a thing going on in San Francisco right now. There’s a driver, I believe it’s an Uber driver, maybe a Lyft driver, who was assaulted by some people because he had asked them to wear a mask in the car. People are out there scrambling and working hard and putting themselves at risk so that other people are able to be at home and sit there on Zoom and Google Docs, and get your work done and check your workflow in Asana, all that kind of stuff. You know? It happens because other people have ventured out and took risks. And I just hope we think about them.

Okay, what do you think about this whole non-fungible token craze and the fact that bitcoin is going to the moon? I think you have a mountain full of bitcoin sitting in some Wired server from your Wired days.

They burned that, actually.

We should tell the story of the Wired bitcoin server, if you’re able.

This wasn’t me, but it was while I was there and it’s pretty amazing. I believe it was Bob McMillan, who’s now at the Wall Street Journal, who had a Butterfly Labs bitcoin mine, and it was in the gadget closet, and it’s just in there churning away mining bitcoin.

What year was this?

2012, maybe 2013. And at first, it’s just in there churning out stuff at whatever bitcoin was at the time. Even when it was $100 a coin, nobody really thought about this being a big problem. Then, all of a sudden bitcoin shot up, I think it was a thousand bucks or something, and I’m not going to get these numbers right, but it became a problem, and people were like, “Wait a second. It’s a thousand bucks today. It could be 50,000 bucks tomorrow,” which I don’t think anyone believed.

Here we are.

Yeah. Here we are. And there was a big debate internally over what we should do with it. I remember Adam Rogers, who’s a longtime writer and editor there, who’s on the science desk there, making the case that we should give that money to charity, “There are people sleeping on the street. We can’t keep this and sit on this bitcoin stash because it could in some ways compromise our integrity.” At this point, I want to say it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 bitcoin. They had mined several, but not a lot. They didn’t have like a thousand bitcoin or whatever; it wasn’t that early. Anyway, at some point after a lot of arguing over it, they made the decision basically to get rid of the key, and so they burned the key; and once they did that, I mean there’s no getting it back.

How much is this worth?

Like when they trashed it. Let’s say it was 10 bitcoin. I don’t know, it would be worth what, half a million bucks now? It’s a substantial amount of money now the way that it wasn’t when they got it.

Do you kick yourself for not buying bitcoin when you knew it was happening back in the day?

You can’t just think about what could have been. You’ve got to go back to that moment in time to really think about it. But there was a point in time when, I want to say it was John Herman, maybe someone else who was there, bought some bitcoin for a story when it was still trading for pennies a coin, and they had to send a money order to somebody who literally went by the name Morpheus. Who could have seen that it became that?

I actually did buy some bitcoin, which I wish I still was holding, for a story one time, and I got beat by Kash Hill who wrote another story about living on bitcoins, which is what I wanted to do. When you think about the million-dollar pizzas or whatever, or whatever Kash spent, she spent some fortune on a bitcoin sushi dinner, I mean it wasn’t worth anything back then, and it became worth stuff because people bought pizza and sushi dinners. That’s why it’s worth something now.

Do you think it’s going to crash?

I think it’s less likely to be valueless now than it was because there’s so many institutional people in it. I have no idea where the money is going or what’s happening with it.

Can I talk about NFTs?

Let’s define NFTs first because I’m still wrapping my head around how someone could sell a JPEG for $70 million.

I think we can define it as not a JPEG that sold, but as a unique digital object; that’s the way to think about it. I think if you define it that way, that it’s a digital object that is one of a kind, you can understand why that’s exciting.

Digital stuff is replicable on pixels anywhere. If I buy a painting, at least that painting hangs in my house. If I buy a digital object, anyone can see it on the web. I can’t display it. I guess I could buy a screen and put it up there, but anyone could buy a screen and put it up there, so what’s going on here?

I can put a replica of the Mona Lisa in my house tomorrow, right? You can replicate anything, you can already do that.

Is this Beeple’s First 5000 Days thing that sold worth $69 million? I have no idea, man. Who knows? I don’t know.

Why do you think this is cool?

I think it’s cool when you start thinking about it not just in terms of art. I think it’s cool when you start thinking about the ability to have a unique digital item that is yours and yours alone that you have ownership of. I think art is an easy place to start. But I think just in the same way that you weren’t able to really use bitcoin for anything except drugs, you will at some point be able to buy and sell other things, and there’s some weird stuff.

There’s that tweet that Jack Dorsey offered up as an NFT, and so the tweet is always just going to exist on Twitter anyway. It’s the person that’s setting up my Twitter tweet, but someone else is going to own the NFT of the tweet, I think is how it works.

What prevents Jack from selling an NFT of the same tweet to someone different?

Right. But could you fork the tweet? I don’t know. Maybe.

Because it’s all made up.

Yeah. It’s all made up. But I think it’s an interesting way to transfer ownership. This is going to sound crazy, but what if all ownership became some of those transferred NFTs, not just art, but like anything that you own that you don’t necessarily have in your possession, like the title to your car? I don’t know. I possess my car, but the title lives on a blockchain somewhere? It’s just an interesting way to think about ownership. I think there’s obviously all these huge problems with the energy usage that people are talking about —

Because mining bitcoin takes the carbon of an absurd amount of computing power.

The energy involved in mining and transferring bitcoin, and transferring NFTs, is apparently quite significant. But I think being able to prove unique digital ownership is a pretty cool concept.

Do you think you’ll buy any NFTs?

Not $69 million.

But if we put this podcast up and sold the rights as an NFT, would it be valuable at all?

I don’t know, Alex. Why don’t you try it? There’s a service that you can use to sell your tweets, which is I think what Dorsey used.

Oh, yeah. I put something up on there; it didn’t sell.

One of the things I’m going to think about doing is selling. I had someone hack my Twitter a long time ago, they posted to my Twitter account, and it’s always been so interesting to me that when you look at Twitter’s — I own my account, right? Twitter owns my account, but I technically own the content and their terms of service because I created it, the content is mine. Well, I didn’t create that. I didn’t create it. I didn’t display it. Someone else did all that. I’ve been wanting to sell that tweet just to see how you transfer that, how it works to transfer ownership to something that I clearly don’t own and didn’t make.

Could people tell your Twitter was hacked? Because there was one time where you were tweeting one night like, “Oh, God,” and “No, not this,” and…

I was watching Game of Thrones and I was just reacting, I think it was a season finale or something, and I tweeted like, “Oh, shit!” something like, “Oh, my God. This looks terrible.” It’s that total context collapse thing, and then I went to bed. The show was over. And I guess Marc Andreessen saw the tweets and flagged them to Ben Smith, who flagged them to our security, who was trying to call me in the middle of the night. I had my phone turned off. I woke up the next day and there’s all these messages from Ben and our security team like, “Are you okay?” And I said, “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

Was this the moment when Marc Andreessen turned against journalists?

I don’t think so. This was before he went on the blocking spree. This is when he actually followed lots of reporters and was saying those things about how Twitter was his way to inject his thoughts directly into a newsroom.

You wrote a piece on Substack saying that you’re pretty optimistic about San Francisco coming back. What do you think is going to happen here and why are you optimistic?

I guess I see people doing interesting things in the city, especially around media. There are a bunch of small interesting media startups in the city now that I think are cool, but I also see people becoming more engaged, you know?

I do think that we’ve got so many problems to solve in San Francisco. It’s clearly got a horrible, absolutely just incredible, fentanyl crisis, not just an opioid crisis. It’s a fentanyl crisis. It’s got horrible issues with people’s authority to actually live there. Like if you want to rent an apartment, if you want to buy a house: good luck; it costs just a shit-ton of money to try and do that. I think they’re starting to do a little bit of building in San Francisco. Like even people are still fighting it, but you’re starting, for I think at least the first time since the 20 years that I’ve lived there, to see a lot more support for new construction and for affordable construction. And I’m seeing a lot more people involved in knowing what the Board of Supervisors is doing.

I think that, in some ways, having school board meetings, and board supervisors meetings, and all these other government meetings happening on the internet where people can tune in and see them, and not have to go to a building and be there in person, it encourages participation, and so that’s encouraging to me. I think it’s only encouraging though if people are willing to dive in and start doing things and trying to make a difference, and I certainly hope they are. But also part of the point of that piece was that San Francisco has always been a weird fucked-up place, right?

From the very beginning, and it’s been this kind of place that’s always attracted weirdos doing weird things, whether they’re looking for gold, or coming for the summer of love, or whatever. Certainly, there are the origin stories that are connected to Stanford and Xerox PARC, and Fairchild Semiconductor, and all that kind of stuff. But one of the reasons that there are a lot of tech people in San Francisco is that it was a place where people were trying interesting and different new things. There’s a great book called What the Dormouse Said about this, but there’s a direct line between people that experiment with drugs and experiment with technology.

And I think that San Francisco has been a town that’s had a lot of booms and busts, and maybe we’re having a bust right now, but it’ll boom again. It’s a beautiful place that’s on the ocean, you can ride your bike across the bridge and be in a national park. It’s got a lovely climate, even if we do have fire season now.

And people are going to want to live there. This myth that everybody’s vacating San Francisco for Miami — also a great city, but one that’s sinking underground and brutally hot in the summertime — it’s ridiculous. People are always talking about problems. But before 1990, San Francisco was pretty grim, and yet the tech boom happened after its grimness.

They tried to draft you to run for mayor at one point. Are you going to do that?

No. I tried to draft myself, honestly. But no, I’m not. Of course not. I could never do that. What a terrible job that’s got to be, right? Man, that’s a shitty job.

Maybe to be governor, but it’s also super interesting to me that San Francisco politics have become so dominant, in the sense that the politicians have become so dominant: Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris. All those people come out of San Francisco local politics, and it’s amazing.

If you think about the dot-com bust which happened in 2000, but it took a couple years to shake out, lots of interesting stuff happened in San Francisco in 2003-’04, ’05, ’06. Before, it was totally on its feet. If there are people who are there just for a job and they want to leave, they should be able to go.

Going back to one of your earlier questions, I do think that we’re never going to go fully back to the office, and there are going to be people who are working on Zoom, we’re going to be working from all over the place; and if they don’t want to be in San Francisco, they shouldn’t necessarily have to be. I think things will shake out, and things will change, and we’ll fix some problems, and we’ll get new ones.

I think you need to have a certain level of affordable rent to have the weird people that make a city enjoyable, so maybe this will be one of the silver linings, that San Francisco will be a place where weird can flourish again.

I hope so. And I hope it’s also a place where people who have grown up there can stay there. My wife, as you know, is a nurse, and she works with people who commute in from hours away because they can’t, especially if they’re younger, afford rent. I hope it’s a place where artists and nurses and teachers and musicians and people who are the soul of the city can live, and I think that all comes down to housing. I think when you think about the homelessness crisis, the people experiencing the homelessness crisis, that’s driven by housing. So much of what people complain about with San Francisco can be solved by starting housing, and it’s encouraging me that we’re starting to see a little bit more get built.

And it’s encouraging to see that some of the focus that’s been happening out of city hall, including today, is on livability. I think when you really start thinking about what makes a city livable, it’s people’s ability to fucking live there, right?

That sounds so stupid. But if you can’t actually live in the city because you can’t afford to, I mean it’s not going to be a lovely city. Like who cares how many slow streets you have. You’ve got to have a house.

You’ve written eloquently about the fire season here that’s become a fact of life. Are we going to have a fire season on the West Coast every year? This year was particularly brutal.

It was awful. I don’t remember how long it was. I just remember it was just absolutely awful. Especially combined on top of the pandemic, I mean it’s terrible. It destroyed some people’s homes and their lives. Peter Aldhous has written a lot about it, and everything that I’ve read that he’s written has made me discouraged that it’s going to get better anytime soon.

Yes. I mean the trend is certainly that they’re getting worse. I don’t know what the snowpack is like right now, but it was low, which is not encouraging for fire season. I think it’s a fact of life in the West. It was happening in Colorado, happening in Montana, in ways that it didn’t used to. To me, that’s the thing that’s really alarming about living in San Francisco and California and the West and the world is like, “Oh, shit. What have we done to the planet? And are we going to be able to do anything to fix it?”

My wife’s cousin was emailing us and they’re like, “Well, we wanted to come out in August, but we’re worried that it’s going to be very smoky,” and my response is, “Yeah. I don’t think you should come in August.” I wouldn’t plan a vacation in California in August right now.

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