Is that is that your sense that.

Yeah, I think it is.

I mean, certainly the San Francisco's had a very strong tradition going back to the to the 1800s, the city, the early moguls of the gold rush and the silver bonanza and they took a lot of pride in the city and wanted to kind of rival New York as a great cultural capital and so they always invested a lot in the opera and the museums and the symphony and all these kind of high arts institutions.

So the city has always punched way above its weight on that top flight institutions in all these areas and the big old money families supported those institutions very heavily.

With the new generation, there's a key thing I think that has changed is that the wealthy people are not attached to the city in the way that that they used to be so the in the older generation of moguls like they lived here and they cared about the city because they lived here but now the super rich don't quite live anywhere sometimes right you know they might have a house here but it's one of their six houses and they live on their jet you know and so you know but they so they don't have ties in in the same kind of way so they're not motivated to support some of these institutions in the same kind of way.

Larry Ellison has a house, or I guess he just sold it, but he had a huge mansion in Pacific Heights, but he's there two weeks a year.

He doesn't care about the symphony.

And are we at the end of the Burning Man era? Do you have I mean, you just you just became a burner, right? Well, I went to the

Yeah

... and never quite managed to do it.

And then I thought I wanted to maybe write about it in the book, and I felt like it was one of those things that you really can't write about if you haven't been there.

So, uh, so I went for that reason.

And, um, and it was very interesting.

Uh, I had a great time.

Um, but I also found it very fascinating.

Yeah.

And I was just going to have, yeah, Jonathan, just your viewpoint from what it might look like for everyone that doesn't know on any structure or same kind of subject matter on that in your neck of the world.

Yeah, I think we've always had the advantage across all levels of patient care and resuscitation of teaching the public compressions and breaths throughout.

Just data published a few weeks ago, we have 81% bystander CPR rate, which is really good.

And on advanced life support courses, which goes to the point around not having any equipment, although you're there to learn your medications and manual defibrillation, all of those ACLS aspects, most of us who work on the beach have had off-duty doctors, nurses, all sorts of people turn up and offer to assist.

So we have the advantage on our ALS training that every single participant must blow into a mannequin.

It's a course requirement.

It's an adult mannequin, a child mannequin, And we are moving away from the term basic life support to essential life support because we know that all of the advanced life support interventions have very little efficacy unless we have that foundation.

Why is that important?

Earlier on ABC 7 at 7, he talked about his decades-long career chronicling the rise of the tech industry and how it changed the Bay Area.

So I think the book covers a period that I refer to as the internet era in the city, essentially from 1990 to about 2024.

And so the pandemic and all the problems that came with that and the doom loop narrative and all of that So that has very much now been kind of reversed with AI.

And so I think now we're kind of on the cusp of a new era.

So the Internet era is kind of over.

And now we're entering the AI era, which will have very different kinds of dynamics.

than the previous one.

Do you think that those are at risk as AI continues to take over?

Yeah

... and never quite managed to do it.

And then I thought I wanted to maybe write about it in the book, and I felt like it was one of those things that you really can't write about if you haven't been there.

So, uh, so I went for that reason.

And, um, and it was very interesting.

Uh, I had a great time.

Um, but I also found it very fascinating.

Yeah.

Why did you move there, but also what was tech like back then? I mean, this is pre-email for most people.

Yeah.

Well, tech was starting to be a thing.

The personal computer arrived in the early 1980s.

Through the 1980s, a lot of people bought PCs, but mostly they were used as word processors.

The tech revolution as we know it today hadn't really started, but clearly there was a lot going on.

And Marty Baron, who was the business editor of the LA Times at the time, and he was the one who had originally hired me at the paper as an intern, actually.

So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that story and how that fits into this kind of countercultural tech ethos.

Can you push back on the, on this sort of Trumpified tech lord world? How did San Francisco deal with this takeover by tech?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's, um, I mean, it's not an easy thing.

Uh, San Francisco itself is a relatively small city and, and one of the, one of the challenges for any cities, and especially a sm- a geographically small city, is that the, there's only so much you can do within your borders.

So for example, um, one way that San Francisco deals with, with these issues is to tax the companies.

So, uh, San Francisco has a lot of business taxes that, that most cities don't have.

And the, and so that seems to make sense, right? That's the companies are wealthy.

Right.

Talk about Ed Lee's election when he finally ran for office, how that played out, how it changed or moved or shifted the politics of the city a little further to the right and what happened after his death.

Yeah, well, so when he was, as I mentioned, he was appointed interim mayor and part of the deal actually for him getting the board votes to be the interim mayor is that he promised that he was not going to run for a full term in the fall.

And most of the people who were close to the situation thought that was nonsense and that he was obviously going to run in the fall.

And, you know, that was a bunch of BS.

You know, probably the only person who actually believed it was Ed Lee himself.

So, you know, Ed really didn't want to.

Again, you know, he didn't want to be mayor.

With New York, it has gone in the other direction as time has gone on.

Can you point to a tipping point where it started to no longer be about those ideals? Yeah.

Well, that's a very good question that points to a very important theme in the book.

So in the 90s, there was a lot of optimism, as you note, around the power of the Internet to make the world a better place.

And that was a big, big motivator for a lot of the early entrepreneurs.

And so even in the dot-com boom of late 90s when I was running the industry standard and we were both a magazine that chronicled the business of the rise of the internet and we were also a company that exemplified the bubble nature of that particular moment.

But At that time, even at the peak of the bubble, so people were interested in the money, so it was exciting that, oh, maybe we could make money.

But it was also, we're going to change the world, then we're also going to make money.

What made that a key moment to you in this second tech boom?

I'm not suggesting that the Lehaines or the Newsoms or the Pelosi's are corrupt, but it is slightly troubling, isn't it? in the way in which it's become a democratic fiefdom of one kind or

another? Yes, I would agree with that.

I mean, to the extent that it kind of distorts the terms of the political competition in a way that's not very helpful.

So, you know, you can't, you know, if you have, everyone's a Democrat, but then you have the moderates who are kind of like Republicans, and then you have the progressives who are more left-wing.

Like, why can't we just have Democrats and Republicans? It would be easier, right? And I do think that the dominance of the Democratic Party has led to kind of some indiscipline, I would say, by the party.

That's a euphemism.

That is a euphemism.

Why do you end with Burning Man?

How did that happen? And what does that say about San Francisco's evolution in the internet era?

Yeah, well, I think that, let's see, to unpack a few different things there.

So in terms of the city itself, I think that the problems that he refers to around downtown that came up, you know, in the pandemic, and those are definitely a product of misgovernance of the city by the Democratic establishment was certainly a big part of those problems.

And And the conflict, so the money in the second boom in the 2010s and the money got really big.

The city had a very pro-tech mayor in Ed Lee, pursued a lot of policies to kind of curry favor with the tech industry.

A lot of companies, even companies in Silicon Valley actually moved to San Francisco.

So San Francisco really became the headquarters in the 2010s.

Yeah, but I would say that some of this hostility towards San Francisco by like Elon and others in the valley that was building before the pandemic now.

Because it was such a good job?

What? Well, 'cause the, in the '90s, you know, the LA Times was, was among the top papers in the country.

You know, big newspapers were the place to be if you were an ambitious journalist.

There were three or four top papers, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times.

So if you were an up-and-comer with a good job at the LA Times, you were kind of on the top track of the profession, so why would you leave that for a weird startup trade thing, huh? What? You know.

Um, but it was somewhat obvious to me, honestly.

Um, I was, had the chance to build a, build a magazine and I could... and I knew f- that tech was a big story.

I don't know, what, what is your core critique? What has been the failure of San Francisco?