O, and so whya, what a, what motive at are you to write the book about san francisco? Well,

i mean, write a book like that, it there's a lot of diffrent motivations, but certainly the most basic one is just, i'm upset at what's going on out here. And i'm upset by the impact on the people that are on the streets, who are mostly attics and suffering mental illness. And i'm upset at the ways in which it's dehumanizing to everybody. And i'm upset about the way that it destroys our cities. And i wanted to understand why this was happening and what we can do about it.

Yes, are you from san francisco, or you from the bay area? I

grew up ina ano, super small towny ore, medium sized town in colorado called greeley, and went to college at a little quaker school in indiana, and moved out to california after college in 19 93. O,

yes. I mean, i've been to san francisco maybe, you know, maybe two or three times, just for conferences, and, ah, its. It's really shocking. I ma n't come from, i come from a suburbs of chicago. And there are parts of chicago that are, ah, pretty bad. They tend to, they tend to be separated from, you know, the nice parts of the city. If you're going to go for a conference of chicago, you now, in chicago, realy, maybe in the downtown area, it's going to be mostly nice, and you're not going to see anything, know, that that bad. A. But san francisco, i mean, ou know, i was int i think the american political science association, e the main political science academic association in the united states, had their conference there. And, you know, you can go one one, two blocks down, there's just rows and rows, you knowof homeless people camping in the street. I mean, people are yelling at you. I mean, theirthers, there's, you know, there's fegal matter in the streets. It's really shocking experience i been. So i don't blame you for wanting to know how this happened. Ah, it was, that was your experience too, right? You had adingba, business out therei've

um, i've been doing, basically, you know, a progressive political advocacy in journalism for almost 30 years here. Now, a lot of different activist causes over the years, i'm best known for my work on the environment, but in the nineties i worked on a issues around liberalizing drug laws, particularly around needle exchange, which is giving people, giving harrowing users, or other injection drug users, clean needles so they don't transmit h f aids or other diseases. I advocated for maranity, criminalization and and what we call broadly alternative sentencing, which is different alternatives to just putting people in prison for decades, which all of which, i still support it in many ways. But my oner stay, when i got out of it in the early two thousands, was we were looking to do more of a treatment model where, you know, i thought it was ged by everybody, and it wasn't really. Is that some amount, if you're going to treat a diction, you can't end any coercion, that you're going to either get coercion through prison or, you know, through some other drug treatment. But it's the withdrawal of all, of all, really enforcement of laws against people whose addictions are clearly driving, you know, self destructive and other destragt and destructive behaviors in public. And so at bottom, it's just this withdrawing of the enforcement of laws including, ah, ones that, you know, ones that address both superficial behaviors and also ones that address the underlying causes.

Yes.