Near the end, Mayor Reardon got pretty angry at the Times because, do you have some recollection of that? Well, I have a lot

of recollections of him being very angry at me.

So my phone, if my phone rang before seven o'clock in the morning, invariably it was Dick Reardon calling to just scream at me about something, which the strange fact is then I would see him a few hours later and he would be utterly pleasant and normal.

It's like he woke up picked the paper off the porch and his first impulse was to yell at me about it.

And it didn't really matter whether I had anything to do with the story that made him mad.

But in any event, yes, he was frustrated with the times often.

But in the context of charter reform, I think he often felt that the paper was skeptical of him, suspicious of him, probably some truth to that.

That's actually its own headline.

[laughs]

... she really struck out there.

Um, but, uh, I, uh, I went off, uh, I grew up in Northern California mostly.

My family moved around a lot, but I grew up in Mexico partly.

But I went to high school in Northern California, and then went off to Dartmouth, uh, to, to go to college.

Um, as I said, worked in the paper there.

Um, and, uh, never, nothing I ever did really distracted me from a desire to be, have a career in journalism and in writing.

[laughs]

And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that, and if you see anything today that's artistically countering what's going on at the White House.

Yikes.

Um, yeah, well listen, Reagan [laughs] it's, uh, here's, here's an impulse I have to fight, is that things are so out of control in Washington now that Reagan seems kind of appealing.

Um, and I gotta remind myself that that's a bad [laughs] instinct to go to.

Um, uh, yeah, I think to your original question I would say Reagan's idea-- when Reagan talked about freedom, he had in mind a kind of mythological, Western movie sort of idea of freedom, that it's the rugged m- m- you know, man on his own, on his horse, not relying on the government, you know, free to do, carry a gun and do whatever the fuck he wants, basically.

Um, that's Reagan's kind of idealized freedom, which bears little resemblance to the actual, uh, American experience, but it has-- it, it really relates to movies, which is kind of Reagan's philosophical underpinnings.

Um, uh, and so w- uh, that's Reagan's conception of it.

Like, how did you manage that beast?

I mean, that's a huge jumble, but it's hard to talk about it without making it so because it does have so many implications.

Well, believe me, you're preaching to the choir here.

Because, yes, I would agree with everything you said, especially the interesting thread that runs from the Grateful Dead into cyber culture and social media.

That, through the tapers, through the Dead's embrace of technology and open sharing of music.

You know, the Dead...

Looking at the Dead's influence or Jerry's influence, it's tempting to start in musical terms because that's what they were, obviously.

But in some ways, the bigger ripples are beyond that, are in the culture, in media, in business even.

like that impulse, you know, and it's not that they dismiss it, nor do I. It's just this question of which is the deeper truth and which should be the more like prominent guiding light in terms of how we think of ourselves and our reality and how we relate to one another and to our environment.