If you’ve ever had a 10-year argument with a friend about whether all the world’s bananas could fit inside all the world’s churches, Randall Munroe’s newest book, What If 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, might be for you.
Besides settling that very specific debate, Munroe dives into other pressing mysteries, including why humans have yet to build a billion-story building, how many people a tyrannosaurus would need to eat per day in New York City, and the optimal playground swing-set size.
Munroe, a former NASA roboticist turned internet cartoonist and author, will visit Santa Cruz for a conversation with author and illustrator Raina Telgemeier at Hotel Paradox on September 22 in an event cosponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz and KAZU 90.3 FM. They will discuss the release of Munroe’s newest book, which is full of silly questions answered using serious science.
Munroe got his start posting stick-figure comics on his website, xkcd.com. People started sending him questions, and he eventually compiled the answers and comics into the #1 New York Times bestseller What If. The new sequel, What If 2, keeps the same spirit, embracing absurdity, irony and sheer curiosity.
Stick Figures
“When I hear a question that really sparks my curiosity, it’s like getting a song stuck in your head. I can’t quite focus on anything else until I figure out the answer,” says Munroe.
He compares his process to nodding off and waking up 12 hours later surrounded by PDFs of old studies, books and calculations. Munroe tries anything he can think of to get a reasonable answer to unreasonable questions.
Once he finds a satisfying solution, Munroe imagines going back in time to save himself the effort.
“I think of it like writing up Cliff’s Notes for my past self instead of trying to translate it for someone else,” he says.
Munroe grew up reading newspaper comics like Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side and Fox Trot.
“I think I read every Garfield strip published up until sometime in the ’90s,” he says with a chuckle. His humor comes through in easy reading, punchy stick-figure comics and witty diagrams.
Even the footnotes include jokes, often pointing to rabbit holes tangential to the original question.
“I have to limit myself and not make endless digressions and never actually get to the point I was trying to get to,” says Munroe.
The footnotes and comics break up the pace and add to comedic timing, turning what could easily be overly technical into an entertaining read.
Serious Science
And although most of the questions sound ridiculous, Munroe and his readers learn surprising facts about the weird world around us.
One reader asked what might happen if you stood next to an object super-cooled to absolute zero—the lowest temperature possible.
At first, Munroe thought you might just need to wear a winter jacket in the room. But digging deeper revealed a surprising danger.
“Really cold stuff can have oxygen condense out of the air onto the surface,” he says. That liquid oxygen is highly flammable and unstable.
“So really, really cold objects can actually start fires,” says Munroe.“Engineers who work with cryogenic equipment have to look out for this.”
Some of the questions lead to active areas of research and problems that still need solving.
“It’s hard to tell what’s going to be a complicated question when you start,” says Munroe.
One such question was, essentially, “Where does the rubber go as tires wear down?” It seemed simple enough at first, but the road to the answer was windy and confusing.
“It turns out it goes everywhere,” says Munroe. “We’re not sure how it’s carried around. It seems to be showing up in the water and the air and the soil. There’s nowhere good that it’s going, and it’s actually a huge problem. No one has figured out what to do about it.”
He includes these types of uncertainties in the book, reminding readers that the world is still full of solvable mysteries.
“I think it’s encouraging when you’re reading all this stuff, especially as a kid, to realize that we haven’t figured everything out yet,” says Munroe.
Using math and science, “you can transform questions that seem unanswerable into things that actually have a concrete answer,” he says. “And then you can go find it. I think that’s really cool.”
Randall Munroe will discuss ‘What If 2’ Thursday, Sept. 22, 7pm. Hotel Paradox, 611 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. $35; $5 for additional attendee (includes book). bookshopsantacruz.com.
Nearly everyone here agrees that housing costs and the related homelessness is our biggest local problem.
Unfortunately I’ve seen several letters in the GT during the last few weeks that, while well meaning, have been tragically naive about the solutions to the problem.
Most annoying was the person complaining that they could barely afford a shared room and therefore supported “just start building—get it done!”
The sad fact is that Santa Cruz has about 1% of the SF Bay Area population of 7 million residents. Therefore even if we doubled the housing units here, the increase in supply would have very little change in the housing costs. We live near a very large metro area, and the large majority of new units are affordable only to those with salaries from the tech world, and just serve to bring more people to our town.
What are often ignored are the livability issues coming with large and unplanned growth. Where is the transportation infrastructure and water service supposed to appear from?
Another idea I take issue with was expressed in the letter saying, in effect, “we need to get rid of all those RV dwellers on our streets.”
Well, it’s obvious that there are undesirable side effects of unhoused people living in the streets. However the “just run them off” mentality ignores the fact that the question of where to run them off to doesn’t deal with the problem being far from unique to our area.
How about some proposals for solutions for the situation? Other areas have done much with many innovative programs that we could emulate, but Santa Cruz has gone through many millions of dollars with little visible progress.
As an example, a recent million-dollar grant to Santa Cruz was used to fund a $300K consultant study and two $15K a year “homelessness worker” positions!
As to suggestions for progress:
1. Hire several social workers with successful experience elsewhere to do outreach and help people get on programs that help generate income and solutions for them, such as SSI, GI benes, drug rehab programs, etc.
2. With such funds available, beneficiaries could fund their own costs for living in tuff shed villages, SROs, etc. Many folks aren’t capable, for various reasons, of pulling their lives together and thus end up on the street, but with a little support the issue could be greatly alleviated. This isn’t pie in the sky—numerous examples already are proving very effective in the U.S. and Canada.
3. Create RV parks that could also fund their operation by charging just a few dollars a day and provide structure, security and centralized plumbing facilities.
These could be in appropriate areas—such as industrial zones—and greatly reduce the impact of RV campers on the public.
Re: “Drawing the Line” (GT, 9/14): I grew up in Watsonville, and have lived and worked in the Pajaro Valley all my life. I have been an agronomist, scientifically analyzing agricultural soils in California and throughout the United States. I have studied thousands of different soils, and I can say unequivocally that the Pajaro Valley soils are the best in the world.
People who advocated paving over some of our farmland to create housing or tax benefits do not understand how valuable this land is. No one is making more soil; we are losing arable land all over the country, and it is imperative that we protect ours here in Watsonville.
Measure Q helps the city develop the resources they have within city limits, while Measure S weakens the urban limit line and opens up our city to urban sprawl and paving over this valuable farmland.
Gene Spencer
Watsonville
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For all the talk about Silicon Beach over the last couple of decades, agriculture is what built this area, and continues to be one of its biggest economic engines. In fact, Santa Cruz County’s neighbor to the south, Monterey County, is still one of the top 10 agricultural counties in the U.S. There’s a letter in this very issue from an agronomist who calls Pajaro Valley soil “the best in the world.” And yet, the workings of the ag industry are invisible to most people here.
Maybe that’s why we love farming cover stories so much here at GT. There are so many interesting ag and land-use related stories that don’t get the attention they deserve in this county; our historical cover story last week on the Bracero Program is one example. This week’s piece by Mark C. Anderson is a very different kind of ag story, but it also has deeper cultural and political implications. If you’ve never heard of David Blume or Whiskey Hill Farms, I think you’ll be surprised to discover the kind of innovation that’s being engineered right here on our local farmland. The ecological impact of what’s being pioneered there could be huge not just for Santa Cruz County, but also for the planet.
STEVE PALOPOLI | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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SKYWALKERS Bandaloop performs outside the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. Photograph by Esther Hill.
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GOOD IDEA
TALKING THROUGH IT
The Resource Center for Nonviolence (RCNV) has officially opened registration for its antiracism book circles. RCNV started these book circles in response to the social justice protests happening around the country, and as a way to foster interconnectedness. Register at rcnv.org
GOOD WORK
BEACH COMBING
With the help of 1,361 volunteers, Save Our Shores tackled 64 beach cleanup sites during its Annual Coastal Cleanup Day last Saturday. In the largest beach cleanup of the year, 896 community volunteers came out in support of Santa Cruz County oceans. They removed over 3,506 pounds of trash and 326 pounds of recycling from beaches and waterways.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Here’s to alcohol, the cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems.”
Way out off a rural road in Watsonville, a full-on tropical forest bursts with life. Hundreds of fruiting plants, 450 all told, fill a large greenhouse. The jungle pops with passionfruit blossoms, big bunches of bananas, mountain papayas, tropical spinach and multiple types of South American “tree tomatoes” (aka tomarillos).
But it’s just one of the fascinating elements at Whiskey Hill Farms. So many eye-catching things are thriving here, in fact, that it can be easy to miss the big picture—even if the big picture involves preventing war, food waste, hunger and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Some species in the tropical forest are so rare Whiskey Hill owner David Blume and his team share cuttings with conservation groups worldwide.
“If it wasn’t for us protecting them, there would be no way to recover from the devastation of their habitats,” he says. He does add that it’s not a purely altruistic endeavor, as they want to bring a number of the curated fruits to market.
Another wonder is the zero-emission research-and-development distillery that can convert food scraps, crop surpluses, Halloween candy and eventually plastic into alcohol that cleanly and cheaply fuels ovens, cars, boats and buses—or can be made into things like organic sanitizer and vodka. The distillery is technically the work of WHF sister LLC Blume Industries, but they’re so integrated they’re essentially inseparable.
It’s about as far away from burning coal or oil as it gets. As one Whiskey Hill/Blume Industries slogan goes, “Real environmentalists don’t burn dinosaurs.”
Around the corner sits a permaculture nerd’s fever dream, a slick and multi-functional ecosystem that closes the bio refinery’s loop by transforming potential waste streams into more positives.
Carbon dioxide from fermenting in the distillery feeds into another huge greenhouse, boosting the yield of Skittles-colored cherry tomatoes, sweet bell peppers and broad-leafed wasabi.
Whiskey Hills and Blume Industries can convert everything from walnut husks to surplus candy into fuel, pharmaceutical-grade ethanol and spirits of varying proofs. PHOTO: Mark C. Anderson
Hot water from the distilling process and compost-heated water pipes provide radiant heat beneath grow beds.
Additional effluent from making alcohol runs into a methane digester that spits out natural gas that powers the biorefinery’s boiler. The system also sends nutrient-rich water into a marsh, which in turn filters the water for the adjacent catfish pond (aka bonus sustainable protein)—while growing starchy cattails perfect for making more fuel.
The pond’s fish poop can be used as fertilizer for crops. Other plant juice runoff from the still can also be converted into fertilizer.
In short: zero landfill, more synergy, maximum production. It all vibrates with another one of Whiskey Hill’s mottos: “There is no such thing as waste.”
“Everything that comes out of that system gets used,” Blume says. “There’s no leftovers.”
Andy Martin of Pajaro Valley-based A&A Organic Farms has been helping Whiskey Hill find a buyer for its turmeric and tomatoes for 20 years, so he is well-acquainted with the wonderland.
“It’s like the Winchester Mystery House of farms,” he says. “David’s our mad scientist and always has something groovy-crazy going on.”
That’s why it would be understandable if visitors missed the bigger reality. Tom Harvey, executive vice president of Blume Distillation and spokesperson for the farm, helps provide perspective.
“We want to solve fuel scarcity, energy shortages, lack of local jobs and environmental remediation challenges,” he says. “That’s what our work is really about.”
Each of those issues presents pressing challenges. And recent events and rule changes are only adding to the urgency.
PLANTS INTO FUEL
As a kid in the 1960s, Blume helped his dad tend crops on a San Francisco city lot.
“It’s not what I thought about doing for the rest of my life as an occupation, though I knew I wanted to grow vegetables for myself,” he says. “Being a teenager is really hard, and growing my own food taught me I could put energy in and get energy out. I was getting through angst by growing food for my family. Besides, it was quiet in the garden.”
He would go on to study ecological biology and biosystematics at San Francisco State, teach similar disciplines and even do gig work on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. For NASA, the goal was to determine if it was possible to sustain an island hotel on purely solar energy—processing sewage, distilling water, generating electricity.
As Blume says, “To prove it can be done, as if the hotel was in outer space.”
When the 1970s energy crisis descended, he developed the nonprofit American Homegrown Fuel Co., teaching thousands how to make and produce alcohol fuel on the cheap at home—from waste streams like food scraps—or on the farm, with enough land.
When Bay Area radio station KQED invited him to participate in a series called “Alcohol as Fuel,” he wrote a companion manual called Alcohol Can Be a Gas!, with a foreword from legendary architect and systems theorist R. Buckminster Fuller, who would call Blume to discuss designs.
The original collaboration call came when Blume was 26 years old and dead asleep in the middle of the night.
“The guy on the phone says, ‘I’m Buckminster Fuller, and I want to talk about something I’m designing,’” Blume recalls.
His response: “If you are who you say you are, tell me the net primary productivity of the Earth.” (NPP is the amount of biomass or carbon produced by primary producers per unit area and time, obtained by subtracting plant respiratory costs from gross primary productivity or total photosynthesis.)
The man Blume still calls “Bucky” nailed the figure. Then they talked for four hours, into the wee hours.
“He told me he liked the way I thought,” Blume says. “Then he said, ‘I think we’ve got it,’ and hung up. I wondered, ‘Did I just drop acid?’”
The discussions went on for years. Today, the updated Alcohol Can Be a Gas! fills 640 pages, 8-1/2-by-11 inches each, with 514 charts, photos and illustrations. It dives deep into how alcohol isn’t a new fuel, but one that predated oil as a primary option, buried by Prohibition and oil’s cutthroat-competitive (and effective) messaging. It also reveals how easy it is to use alcohol with existing combustion engines after simple adaptations.
Amphibian habitats called “frog condominiums” by farm staff provide homes for frogs that eliminate pests without chemicals. PHOTO: Mark C. Anderson
Like the thriving stimuli at Whiskey Hill, the information can be a lot to take in, but it boils down to some fundamentals: You can turn plants into fuel—“liquid sunshine,” Blume likes to call it—which means with enough sun you’ll never run out of gas. You may make fuel from carbon dioxide-sequestering plants, reversing greenhouse effects. You need no new technology. You end up with byproducts that are clean and useful. You can do it with abundant food waste.
To simplify further: One person’s trash can be everyone’s treasure.
TIME HAS COME
As another gas crisis surfaced this year with the war in Ukraine, Blume found new motivation to leverage his knowledge to make a case for alcohol.
Another bit of motivation in 2022 goes right back to Blume’s waste-free ways: California Senate Bill 1373 went into effect in January, mandating counties to do something with their organic scraps other than chucking them in the landfill. Suddenly, cities from Arcata to Artesia are sussing out ways to deal with waste wisely.
Meanwhile, as part of a bold plan to fight climate change, state regulators approved a policy last month stopping the manufacture, sales and use of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 in California, the largest car market in the country, with interim reduction goals along the way.
This month, lawmakers followed that with a record $54 billion in climate spending and passed extensive new limits on oil and gas drilling. That came paired with a mandate that California stop contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2045. Currently, more than 60 percent of the nation’s electricity is generated from burning fossil fuels like coal, natural gas and petroleum.
Much of the resulting media coverage has focused on electric alternatives, which has some experts questioning where that surge in power will come from—whether nuclear, hydro, wind or fossil fuels.
Blume has different ideas.
“I think the car companies will take advantage and carve out a profitable niche for high-mileage clean-alcohol-only cars,” he says. “They will produce less climate change gasses and pollution when compared to [what generates] our current electricity.”
SCALING UP
Blume’s decades-long education efforts hint at what Whiskey Hill Farms cultivates as much as anything: knowledge. That takes many forms.
Whiskey Hill Farms holds regular farmer workshops, some underwritten by a grant from U.C. Davis’ Sustainable Ag Program. NASA staff have swung by for a learning day and organic lunch. Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D—Carmel Valley) took home turmeric root as part of his tutorial. Open Farm Tours and visits from EcoFarm Conference attendees—and forthcoming farm stand sales on property in 2023—will further enlighten Central Coast residents and visitors.
Meanwhile, WHF and Blume Industries have received multiple grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s sustainable division to teach underserved area growers closed-loop and regenerative ag. That helped inspire the USDA to recently dedicate funds to developing a regenerative curriculum—in Spanish—that can be exported around the country.
As this goes to print, a Calabasas Elementary School Victory Garden program is starting to sprout things at Whiskey Hill like radishes, bok choy, tomatillos and turnips.
Blume is willing to walk anyone interested through his closed-loop techniques. He’s happy to detail ways to adapt gas-powered vehicles to run on alcohol, or how electric and solar energy present costs and challenges alcohol doesn’t, though he advocates hybrid designs using ethanol and electricity.
Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker received a starter course in how alcohol can help a municipality while at the same post in Watsonville. He collaborated with WHF and school district officials on a pilot to run two school buses on farm-grown fuel, a project currently on hold while awaiting additional support.
“Whiskey Hills’ process reminds me of the scenes from Back to the Future, when Doc Brown was stuffing banana peels and garbage into his DeLorean for fuel,” Huffaker says. “The future is now, and we’re fortunate to have this disruptive technology in Santa Cruz.”
Obeying his default setting, Blume is aiming to go bigger than local government. On his website, he has published a “14-Point Plan for U.S. Energy Independence.” He has given it to several Congressional representatives while encouraging citizens to share it with their reps and friends. Among its key provisions are taxing oil companies fairly to create a Fueling Democracy Fund that supports local production of alcohol, increased alcohol use and the stockpiling of alcohol reserves to prevent energy crises; reducing crop certification time so surplus and/or high-energy plants like recently approved sugar beets don’t take forever to become a fuel source; and providing food-waste-to-fuel production credits.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D—San Jose) ranks as the second most senior member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, and is among those who have received the plan and visited Whiskey Hill. While acknowledging obstacles, she sounds optimistic Whiskey Hill lessons can serve as a starting point.
“Any time you make a change, somebody is upset—people who are wedded to the status quo don’t want the status quo to change—so how do you overcome the institutional barriers to get something done?” she asks. “You have to prepare to act when opportunities exist. Some of this may be holding hearings, so the concept is not unknown, [and] introducing bills for pilot projects. Nothing changes without people pushing for change.”
She admits the solutions to complex problems don’t frequently come from within the government or in a sweeping fashion, and that replicable models are vital while the public is primed to receive them.
“If you can prove a concept, you can scale,” she says. “Sometimes, you have to have incremental progress before you make everything happen. Given the state of climate emergency, voters are aware we have a very serious problem: Our children and grandchildren are going to face climate extremes we’ve never had.”
When asked if the plan can seem overly optimistic—particularly given the power Big Oil deploys with what Blume calls “bare-knuckle capitalist fighting”—she pushes back.
“If you don’t have aspirations, then you never get anywhere,” she says. “Maybe we couldn’t do all 14 points, but [we] can do proof-of-concept stuff. It’s important.”
When Blume hears these thoughts—and fields questions as to whether he feels dismayed that little has changed since the late 70s energy crisis—he provides pushback of his own.
He notes alcohol fuel production was a big fat zero back then, compared to over 15 billion gallons of alcohol produced annually. He reminds anyone who will listen that 50 countries worldwide are engaged in converting to ethanol on some level—and Brazil has converted completely.
“It’s not fair to say we haven’t made progress,” Blume says. “It’s normal for struggle to occur early in the implementation of a new idea. Then, all of a sudden, everyone knows you have the right answer, and it happens overnight. And it seems like magic.”
PERMACULTURE PARADISE
Palatial palapa suites. Curving white sand beaches. Sweeping views of flamingos flying over turquoise seas.
Necker Island looks like what you’d imagine Sir Richard Branson might develop with a private 74-acre paradise.
Addis Ababa, on the other hand, represents a different reality. Ethiopia’s sprawling capital brings on urban intensity, inspiring architecture and vibrant culture, with a heavy overlay of smoke from locals burning wood—indoors—to cook or stay warm, on the outskirts, at its center, everywhere and often all at once.
That sets off cascading problems that feel like the opposite of Blume’s looping benefits. Disease-causing smoke and carbon monoxide inhalation are common. Complications result before and after birth. Wood demand drives deforestation. In fact, as half of the world cooks and heats with wood, the burn has become the third largest source of carbon dioxide emissions on Earth while taking out the trees that would absorb them.
But it turns out that Branson’s remote hideaway in the British Virgin Islands and population-3.7 million Addis Ababa have more in common than most would think.
In both places, alcohol provides a novel solution.
Blume visited BVI recently as part of a group presenting eco-investors with ways to fund technology-driven innovation that benefits the environment. Branson directed his staff to learn more about Blume’s systems, and now they’re in preliminary talks to try converting the island’s watercraft to ethanol engines. Meanwhile, Blume hopes a Necker’s Nectar flavored vodka, made with passionfruit from the island, might sell at its on-site bars.
“We could sell it all over the island,’” he remembers Branson saying.
Blume’s tech has implications for less luxurious islands everywhere—they typically depend on big diesel generators that spew greenhouse gasses at costly rates. Less shipping, soot and stink is within reach.
In Ethiopia, meanwhile, the presence of a Blume-designed micro-distillery has a macro impact.
Working in concert with Project Gaia—whose mission is to prevent energy poverty with safe and efficient alcohol fuels—a local women’s association feeds the distillery molasses from local sugar cane and makes clean-burning ethanol and a potent fertilizer. The fuel then goes into special Cleancook stoves that burn the equivalent of 17 pounds of wood with 1 liter of ethanol, without the lung poison.
“This is the way of the future: All of the resources available can be used and reused,” says Gaia Executive Director Harry Stokes, who has worked with Blume for 15 years. “Africans key into this immediately. It’s not ‘bigger is better’ like in the U.S. If they had better access to capital, David’s plants would be all over the continent.”
Together, Necker Island and Addis Ababa indicate how widely alcohol can apply across geographic and socio-economic boundaries.
A lot falls between those extremes. Farms here and abroad can turn bigger profits by raising energy crops over traditional crops, earning tax credits and creating their own fuel and high-grade fertilizer. Consumers can use alcohol blends in existing vehicles and limit payout and emissions. Preppers can grow their own fuel. Permaculture fans can create their own closed-loop systems. Cities can transform food waste—now mandated by California law to be kept out of the landfill, ramping up need—into alcohol to run municipal vehicles.
“People assume when we talk about gas replacements, we mean cars,” Blume says. “It goes far beyond that.”
He believes alcohol can affect not just farm, transportation and energy policy but international policy. (Blume and company prefer “alcohol” over “ethanol” because the latter comes with preconceived views after decades of oil industry messaging, though they’re the same thing.) He imagines a scenario where the U.S. and European countries stockpile easy-to-make and renewable alcohol, so they feel less dependent on, say, Russia.
To that end: The war in Ukraine triggered more than a reckoning on oil dependency, including a fertilizer shortage—and a corresponding spike in prices. Alcohol’s got you there too, Blume adds, pointing to the super juice fertilizer he makes with outflow from his alcohol still.
“The bottom line: If God ever wanted to create a clean fuel for humans, it would’ve been ethanol,” Stokes says. “We better get busy and use it.”
FUEL FACTOR
Last fall, Blume set sail for the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (aka COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland.
He was invited to COP26 by an eco-tech nonprofit, Innovation 4.4, partner to the organizing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as part of a pavilion featuring advanced regenerative technologies.
He and long-time collaborator Chris Patton described how evolving their combined systems—including a solar-powered thermal reactor that can transform plastic and even nitrogen in the air around us into fuel—is not far off.
Like many of Blume’s undertakings, plastic-to-alcohol sounds outlandish. It is, and it’s also true—which Blume says had government ministers swarming their pavilion for more info on what they can do.
“We had so many people coming to our booth saying, ‘Everyone else is talking about measuring and legislating our problems; you’re the only guys in the conference who have solutions,” he says. “As a farmer, I don’t talk; I get out there and build it. The world needs to stop talking and do it.”
On the surface, San Jose mayoral candidate Matt Mahan’s image coincides with the trappings of wealth and influence. He went to elite schools—San Jose’s Bellarmine College Preparatory and Harvard University—and has ties to technology industry luminaries like Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, as well as the support of San Jose Mayor, Sam Liccardo. His political adversaries have tried to frame him as a Republican out of step with progressive San Jose.
His origins, however, don’t suggest a silver spoon upbringing or conservative roots.
The mayoral candidate grew up on the outskirts of Watsonville, just off Amesti Road near Pinto Lake, in the 1980s and ’90s. His mother taught at a Catholic school in Salinas, and his father was a letter carrier in Pebble Beach.
“I remember waking up at the crack of dawn, and farm workers were already out there working,” Mahan says. “That always left an impression on me.”
Mahan, a first-term San Jose City Councilmember elected in 2020, is facing off against Cindy Chavez, a longtime Santa Clara County politician who has previously served on the San Jose City Council and as the city’s vice-mayor, as well as a county supervisor, a position she has held since 2013.
Mahan’s campaign released a poll this week showing that while Chavez enjoys much higher name recognition and a 1-point lead among likely voters, 25% of the electorate is still undecided and shares Mahan’s view that San Jose is not headed in the right direction.
“You can see that in terms of sprawling homeless encampments, concerns about public safety, blight and trash, lack of affordability, high cost of living particularly due to housing—the list goes on and on,” Mahan told me in the leadup to the June primary, saying that San Jose politicians’ “culture of complacency” is the biggest issue the state’s tech hub faces.
Even though he’s declared himself a pro-choice Democrat, mailers by the labor-aligned independent PACs suggested he might not be a reliable ally on reproductive rights. Mahan called the accusation a “distraction” to draw attention away from the political establishment’s failed policies on homelessness and public safety.
Mahan, who held prominent roles in tech startups before delving into politics, has been cast as the political outsider heading into November. It’s a role that he’s very much accustomed to.
South County Kid
“What I love about Watsonville is that it has that small-town feel where everybody knows everybody, and it has incredible access to nature,” Mahan says. “Where we lived on the outskirts of the town, we had access to a creek on the hillside and I spent much of my childhood outside. I have a great love for nature.”
Despite the beauty of the surrounding area, life in Watsonville had its challenges.
“It is a small town, with a strong sense of community, primarily agriculture—people work hard. It has that small-town culture,” he says. “On the other hand, it struggled quite a bit. We had a high unemployment rate, high crime rate, a lot of gang activity and a lot of violence. It ended up being that two people in my neighborhood were drug dealers.”
Mahan stops to reaffirm his fondness for Watsonville. His mom still lives there, and he regularly visits; as a teenager, however, he felt some growing pains.
“When you turn 13 or 14, you start to wonder about your place in the world, and it felt kinda restraining at the time,” he says. “I don’t mean anything negative—it is just the nature of a small agricultural town.”
His parents encouraged Mahan to take the entrance exam to Bellarmine College Prep, an all-boys Jesuit school that most South County natives will know as Watsonville High School’s bitter rival in soccer.
“I will never forget, my dad took me over and we got lost in East San Jose and barely made it in time for the test,” he says. “I was late, and everyone had already gotten started. I remember walking in and sitting down. They were all San Jose residents and knew each other. I was one kid from Watsonville that came in late to take the test.”
After a grueling examination, Mahan was accepted into Bellarmine, but faced the realization that the entrance exam was just the first test. The next hurdle was figuring out how his family could afford the private-school tuition. Luckily, the answer came in the form of a 200-hour work-study scholarship in which he spent the summers before each school year working with the maintenance crews watering plants, landscaping and joking with the permanent crew members.
“When I showed up on day one, the only people I knew were the grounds crew,” he says.
Now able to attend Bellarmine without worrying about tuition, he still faced a four-hour round trip bus ride on Highway 17 each day of the school week.
“My dad would get me up in the dark at 4:45 in the morning and I would be so tired he would pick me up off the bed and put me on the cold floor just to wake me up,” he says.
Despite being a self-described awkward kid—and, for all purposes, an outsider—Mahan found himself not only welcomed at Bellarmine, but also able to attain a leadership position as the student body president. The position was not always about shaking hands and being a pep leader. Sometimes it was talking about uncomfortable topics or standing up for others.
“Being in an all-boys Catholic high school at that time, talking about homophobia wasn’t the most comfortable thing, but it was important to me. Two of my best friends there were not fully accepted by many of my classmates,” says Mahan.
He used the platform to disclaim bigotry through speeches in front of classmates and faculty, and in a column for the school newspaper.
“That was where I became interested in social justice,” he says. “I ended up getting involved in student government. I pushed the campus to move away from sweatshop labor for its apparel.”
Crafting His Future
Mahan says that on most mornings, the first thing he would see when waking up from the cold floor his father placed him on was a photo of Georgetown University.
“I had a picture of Georgetown on the ceiling, because my dream for years was to get into a great university,” he says. “Because I wanted greater opportunities. I didn’t want to live paycheck to paycheck like my parents did.”
But after visiting both Georgetown and Harvard while on a trip to the East Coast with a friend visiting family, he “fell in love with Cambridge and Harvard.”
“It is a place driven by ideas and people interested in thinking about what’s right, should be, and what the future is like,” he says. “I saw a lot of my core views challenged in a really productive way. I kinda see myself as a centrist or a moderate who tries to take what is most true of the progressive and conservative traditions in our country—because Harvard and my interactions with fellow students and professors made me realize that no ideology has a monopoly on the truth.”
Harvard at this time turned out to be a powder keg of innovation mixed with opportunity. Mahan succeeded in his economics program and became student body president once again. While later graduating magna cum laude (and also meeting his future wife), he also rubbed some influential elbows.
Mahan arrived at Harvard precisely at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg.
“He and Mark [Zuckerberg] lived in the same dorm,” says longtime friend Katie O’Keefe. “I think some of the reasons he got into tech later was because he was offered the opportunity to help with the original Facebook. He turned it down because he wanted to do the class president thing. He was constantly volunteering, working on political campaigns, and then it [Facebook] took off.
A 2005 article in the Harvard Crimson noted Mahan’s disillusionment with Harvard’s career track system. “They’ll, you know, live in a beautiful suburb where they never have to confront homelessness and poverty, and all end up in the same retirement home where they’ll play golf until they die,” he was quoted as saying about his classmates.
The article also noted his volunteer work with Democratic nominee John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, and his activism with the campus’ Black Men’s Forum president to create a fund to protest Harvard’s investment in a Chinese state energy corporation linked to the Sudanese genocide.
Political Shift
Two years after graduating from Harvard, he volunteered for two weeks as an early supporter of Barack Obama’s nascent presidential campaign.
“I was in Iowa in 2007 before the caucuses and spent two weeks knocking on doors and getting people out in the snow. It was freezing cold,” he says. “I’ll never forget how cold it was.”
Mahan became a public school teacher at Joseph George Middle School on San Jose’s East Side while working for nonprofit Teach for America, and being a “card-carrying member” of the teacher’s union.
He made his shift to the tech industry in 2008 when he joined Causes, a social platform for users to share fundraisers and raise awareness for nonprofits that was co-founded by Sean Parker and Joe Green. The app aligned with what O’Keefe describes as Mahan’s “North Star” of social justice. Mahan eventually became the company’s COO and then its CEO. The experiences Mahan picked up at Causes allowed him to extend his business ventures with his old dorm mates into Brigade, a successor social advocacy platform that was later sold to Pinterest.
This incursion into tech eventually did come to an end, and Mahan turned his eyes back to his ultimate goal: becoming mayor of San Jose.
“I always thought it would be the best job in the world. I am more into action and getting things done. You get to champion initiatives and push the bureaucracy to deliver results. I like the idea of trying to organize people around solving problems,” says Mahan.
“The city [San Jose] has given me incredible opportunities. I just fell in love with it when I came here. Maybe it is a little bit of nostalgia from my youth, but I came here in the ’90s and it just felt like a city on the rise.”
Only time and the voters will tell if he will reach that North Star.
“Matt has always wanted to be mayor of San Jose. It wasn’t a stepping stone; it was specifically for San Jose,” says O’Keefe. “I think growing up in Watsonville, San Jose was the big city, and he wanted to be part of it.”
The Footbridge Services Center—which maintains the only storage and laundry services for unhoused people in the area, and the only low-barrier women’s shelter and warming center in the county—will be closing most of its services in the upcoming weeks.
Since it opened a decade ago, Footbridge Services has provided shelter for nearly 200 people a night during winter days when temperatures dropped below freezing. In the past five years, the center has also provided storage for more than 1,000 people who are unhoused, and completed more than 10,000 loads of laundry. Every Sunday, people in the Benchlands have been able to use its shower service, and access dozens of free hygiene and clothing items. Most recently, in 2021 the program opened up a women’s shelter for 12 people in its makeshift building.
Outside of the warming center, all these services will be coming to an end within the next few months.
Brent Adams, the founder and program director of the center who has been running its various programs for the past decade, says a combination of increasing financial limitations and personal frustrations led to his decision to close all of Footbridge Services’ programs by November, with the exception of the warming center. The latter will continue to operate this winter, but Adams suggests that beyond this year, the future of the warming center is uncertain, as well.
Homeless-service experts are worried about the deficit of resources this closure will leave behind. Many of Footbridge Services’ programs are the only ones of their kind in the county.
There’s also the timing of the closure, coming as the City of Santa Cruz shuts down the Benchlands encampment, where an estimated 300 unhoused people are residing.
“Footbridge closing these services is going to prolong peoples’ homelessness,” says Evan Morrison, who has worked in the homeless services sector for the past five years and is now the executive director of the Free Guide. “That these services are not going to exist during the Benchlands’ closure will really hinder people in that transition,” he says.
Financial Strains
Financial constraints aren’t the whole reason for the services closing, but they are a large part of it, Adams says.
Organizations like Kaiser Permanente, Sisters of the Holy Names and Community Foundation Santa Cruz County all contribute financially to various Footbridge programs. In total, between October 2020 and November 2021, Footbridge received around $90,0000 from organizations and foundations. The program also relies on individuals giving charitable donations; the largest donation a Footbridge program received in that same time period was upwards of $53,000, gifted from one person. Individual contributions in totality accounted for $80,0000 of that year’s budget.
The program runs on these donations and volunteer time. Between October 2020 and November 2021, Footbridge programs received just over $218,000 in total funding, with operation costs coming out to around $161,000, according to records reviewed by GT. That left just around $56,000, money that Adams says gets eaten up quickly by Footbridge’s ongoing programs.
The rent for the building that Footbridge calls home is unbeatable, a price cut especially for Adams. The location is ideal for the services Footbridge is providing—the center is located at the end of Felker Street, right at the head of the San Lorenzo River trail. But recently Adams’ landlord informed him that in the next year or two, the building will be renovated into a condominium, which means Footbridge will have to relocate. Finding another deal like that will be impossible, Adams says.
There’s also the personal financial burden that is, and perhaps always has been, unsustainable. For years, Adams has been paying himself a meager salary, while also running the entire suite of services that Footbridge provides. In that same financial year, Adams lived on a salary of $19,000.
“I myself have become a singular tentpole. It depends solely on me to continually raise funding, manage the program, direct the program; you know, all elements of it,” says Adams. “It’s classically unsustainable.”
Adams laments the financial strains of the organization, and assigns blame in part to the city and the county.
“Our needs-oriented services—storage, shelter, laundry, showers, everything you have in your hygiene cabinet, Qtips, razors, deodorant, toothbrushes, feminine products—is a complete suite of homeless services under one roof,” says Adams. “We do the lion’s share of work out here, and the city and county arrive for free on our backs.”
According to Adams, the city has made empty promises to work alongside Footbridge. The only funding provided in the last fiscal year from the city went toward the program’s shower program at the Benchlands. Adams has applied for other funding aid, and even though city officials say they support his work, he says it’s largely lip service.
As a recent example, Adams says Larry Imwalle, the city’s Homeless Response Manager, personally asked him to submit a proposal to work with the city as it creates its own storage program. Adams shows the proposals the program submitted, along with a proposal requesting funding from the city for the Women’s Shelter he operates.
Adams never heard back about his requests.
Imwalle confirmed that Adams’ application was reviewed and denied for the storage program, but says he is not at liberty to go into detail on why it was rejected, given the city is actively reviewing other proposals for a storage program. He cites a similar reason for not confirming whether the city received a proposal for the Footbridge Women’s Shelter.
At the county level, Adams says the Watsonville warming center had previously received funding in $15,000 quarterly increments for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 winter seasons. But since then, the county has ceased that funding, with officials saying they are moving in a different direction. Adams declined to apply for the Collective of Results and Evidence-based (CORE) Investments program in recent years, as the funding available for the number of organizations applying would mean less money than the hassle was worth.
County spokesman Jason Hoppin says these types of critical services are under constant re-evaluation, and noted that Adams failed to apply for CORE funding during the previous funding cycle.
It’s this combination of financial strife with a lack of recognition at the city, county and community level that ultimately led Adams to make the difficult decision to shut down most of his services.
“What I’m doing is I’m literally going to use the closing of these programs to highlight and to try to revamp the citizen orientation around homelessness,” Adams says. “But it really is painful. It’s extremely painful for my clients.”
What’s Next
The city has officially closed the northernmost portion of the Benchlands, as it moves to shut down the homeless encampment in stages, and a reported 29 individuals living there faced eviction.
Footbridge ending its storage program will have significant detrimental effects on the unhoused population in the Benchlands, says Morrison.
“Storage is an absolute necessity,” he says. “It’s just as high of a priority as food and water and shelter. Not being able to secure your stuff keeps you from being able to take more positive steps forward in your life.”
At the moment, the city has no plans for additional long-term storage options. What officials are working on now, as the encampment closes, is a temporary storage unit that will hold people’s belongings that were left behind.
As for the potential closure of the warming center in future years, or the women’s shelter that Footbridge provides, the city will not necessarily be stepping in to fill those roles.
“Trying to expand shelter options is one of our primary strategies,” says Imwalle. “That doesn’t preclude funding a warming center type project at all. But the focus is on expanding shelter opportunities, and that’s our priority.”
But Morrison worries about this focus on shelter. There are people who will not choose to use a shelter, but who will use a warming center on especially cold nights, and will also use supportive services like storage and laundry. The women’s shelter closing, and it being the only one of its kind in the county, is also cause for concern.
“The women’s shelter is just a handful of beds, but that’s a handful of beds more than nothing that help address a serious need,” says Morrison. “And then the warming center, the idea that the warming center might go away is scary. If the warming center doesn’t exist, we’re going to see a direct correlation between cold nights and people who are homeless and die.”
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Even when your courage has a touch of foolhardiness, even when your quest for adventure makes you a bit reckless, you can be resourceful enough to avoid dicey consequences. Maybe more than any other sign of the zodiac, you periodically outfox karma. But in the coming weeks, I will nevertheless counsel you not to barge into situations where rash boldness might lead to wrong moves. Please do not flirt with escapades that could turn into chancy gambles. At least for the foreseeable future, I hope you will be prudent and cagey in your quest for interesting and educational fun.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In 1946, medical professionals in the UK established the Common Cold Unit. Its goal was to discover practical treatments for the familiar viral infection known as the cold. Over the next 43 years, until it was shut down, the agency produced just one useful innovation: zinc gluconate lozenges. This treatment reduces the severity and length of a cold if taken within 24 hours of onset. So the results of all that research were modest, but they were also much better than nothing. During the coming weeks, you may experience comparable phenomena, Taurus: less spectacular outcomes than you might wish, but still very worthwhile.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Here’s a scenario that could be both an invigorating metaphor and a literal event. Put on rollerblades. Get out onto a long flat surface. Build up a comfortable speed. Fill your lungs with the elixir of life. Praise the sun and the wind. Sing your favorite songs. Swing your arms all the way forward and all the way back. Forward: power. Backward: power. Glide and coast and flow with sheer joy. Cruise along with confidence in the instinctive skill of your beautiful body. Evaporate thoughts. Free yourself of every concern and every idea. Keep rambling until you feel spacious and vast.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): I’m getting a psychic vision of you cuddled up in your warm bed, surrounded by stuffed animals and wrapped in soft, thick blankets with images of bunnies and dolphins on them. Your headphones are on, and the songs pouring into your cozy awareness are silky smooth tonics that rouse sweet memories of all the times you felt most wanted and most at home in the world. I think I see a cup of hot chocolate on your bedstand, too, and your favorite dessert. Got all that, fellow Cancerian? In the coming days and nights, I suggest you enjoy an abundance of experiences akin to what I’ve described here.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): For 15 years, Leo cartoonist Gary Larson created The Far Side, a hilarious comic strip featuring intelligent talking animals. It was syndicated in more than 1,900 newspapers. But like all of us, he has had failures, too. In one of his books, Larson describes the most disappointing event in his life. He was eating a meal in the same dining area as a famous cartoonist he admired, Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family. Larson felt a strong urge to go over and introduce himself to Addams. But he was too shy and tongue-tied to do so. Don’t be like Larson in the coming weeks, dear Leo. Reach out and connect with receptive people you’d love to communicate with. Make the first move in contacting someone who could be important to you in the future. Be bold in seeking new links and affiliations. Always be respectful, of course.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “Love your mistakes and foibles,” Virgo astrologer William Sebrans advises his fellow Virgos. “They aren’t going away. And it’s your calling in life—some would say a superpower—to home in on them and finesse them. Why? Because you may be able to fix them or at least improve them with panache—for your benefit and the welfare of those you love.” While this counsel is always relevant for you, dear Virgo, it will be especially so in the coming weeks.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Tips for making the most of the next three weeks: 1. Be proud as you teeter charismatically on the fence. Relish the power that comes from being in between. 2. Act as vividly congenial and staunchly beautiful as you dare. 3. Experiment with making artful arrangements of pretty much everything you are part of. 4. Flatter others sincerely. Use praise as one of your secret powers. 5. Cultivate an open-minded skepticism that blends discernment and curiosity. 6. Plot and scheme in behalf of harmony, but never kiss ass.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Poet Mary Oliver wrote, “There is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.” During the coming weeks, Scorpio, I will be cheering for the ascendancy of that self in you. More than usual, you need to commune with fantastic truths and transcendent joys. To be in maximum alignment with the good fortune that life has prepared for you, you must give your loving attention to the highest and noblest visions of your personal destiny that you can imagine.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Tips to get the most out of the next three weeks: 1. Use your imagination to make everything seem fascinating and wonderful. 2. When you give advice to others, be sure to listen to it yourself. 3. Move away from having a rigid conception of yourself and move toward having a fluid fantasy about yourself. 4. Be the first to laugh at and correct your own mistakes. (It’ll give you the credibility to make even better mistakes in the future.) 5. Inspire other people to love being themselves and not want to be like you.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn poet William Stafford wrote, “Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.” Those ideas are always true, of course, but I think it’s especially crucial that you heed them in the coming weeks. In my oracular opinion, you need to build your personal power right now. An important way to do that is by being discriminating about what you take in and put out. For best results, speak your truths as often and as clearly as possible. And do all you can to avoid exposing yourself to trivial and delusional “truths” that are really just opinions or misinformation.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You are an extra authentic Aquarius if people say that you get yourself into the weirdest, most interesting trouble they’ve ever seen. You are an ultra-genuine Aquarius if people follow the twists and pivots of your life as they would a soap opera. And I suspect you will fulfill these potentials to the max in the coming weeks. The upcoming chapter of your life story might be as entertaining as any you have had in years. Luckily, imminent events are also likely to bring you soulful lessons that make you wiser and wilder. I’m excited to see what happens!
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In a poem to a lover, Pablo Neruda wrote, “At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined.” I suspect you Pisceans could have similar deepening and interweaving experiences sometime soon—not only with a lover but with any treasured person or animal you long to be even closer to than you already are. Now is a time to seek more robust and resilient intimacy.
Homework: Fantasize about an adventure you would love to treat yourself to in the spring of 2023. Testify: Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com.
Silver Mountain owner Jerold O’Brien has been making wine for over four decades. After serving in the United States Air Force, he entered the wine business. To say that O’Brien knows how to make excellent wine would be an understatement. When we recently visited him at his 2,100-foot-high estate in the Santa Cruz Mountains, he and his rambunctious dog Cooper came to greet us.
O’Brien’s 2012 Tondré Grapefield Pinot Noir ($50) is a dynamic force. Lush, velvety and chock-full of red fruits, this 2012 Pinot has aged exquisitely. Grapes hail from the much-respected Tondré Grapefield in the Santa Lucia Highlands. Started by Tondré Alarid in the 1950s, it is now run by his son Joe, who strives to grow premium fruit with “distinctively intense flavor.”
Silver Mountain’s wines are in high demand, so if the Pinot Noir is sold out, try the 2013 Alloy ($40), which won Best in California Bordeaux Blend at the California State Fair in July.
O’Brien now has one of the largest solar arrays in the area—a “Triple Green Canopy” that reduces energy requirements, saves resources and collects rainwater. It makes Silver Mountain entirely energy self-sufficient—a sustainable philosophy that O’Brien has always practiced.
Silver Mountain Vineyards Winery, 269 Silver Mountain Drive, Los Gatos. The tasting room: 328D Ingalls St., Santa Cruz. 408-353-2278. silvermtn.com.
Bell’s Cookies
I ordered a box of Bell’s Cookies recently. Made in Seattle but delivered all over, they’re top-notch and delicious. “If you’re looking for a ho-hum oatmeal raisin or soft vanilla cookie, you’re not going to find it at Bell’s Cookie Co.,” says the company. “Instead, think Columbian Corn, Red Velvet and Lemon Blueberry Shortbread.” Also available are classic favorites such as Snickerdoodle, Chocolate Chunk and more. Oh, and they sell cookie dough by the pint! bellscookieco.com.
Born in England, Andy Hewitt came to California in 1981 and found a job as a bartender at Britannia Arms in Cupertino, where he quickly became manager and then bought in as a co-owner. In 1995, he opened an Aptos location, and 11 years ago, he and his wife Sydney, the chef, moved to their iconic Capitola location right next to the beach. “Every day is a Saturday in Capitola,” Andy says. He defines Britannia Arms as an authentic British pub, explaining that “pub” comes from “public house,” which means that everyone is welcome. Some traditional English fare favorites on the menu include the beer-battered fish and chips and the homemade shepherd’s pie. They also offer sandwiches like burgers, cheesesteaks, Reubens and ribeye steak with baked potato and veggies. They also serve breakfast—classic American and traditional English—until 3pm daily. Hours are 10:15am-2am daily (kitchen closes at 10pm). Recently, Hewitt gave GT the scoop on his journey to America and the traditional British breakfast.
How did you come to California?
ANDY HEWITT: I was a young man at age 23 traveling the world, and I ended up in San Francisco and never went back to London. I got the job at Britannia Arms almost right away, soon after bought in, and so I stayed. I had traveled all over parts of Africa, Asia and Europe, but fate had me end up in San Jose, and I bought into a business, and here I am. I never looked back; I saw an opportunity and took it. And it’s such a small world now; I got soccer on TV, and own a pub. I meet a lot of people from the United Kingdom and still feel like a part of British culture.
What is an English breakfast?
It starts with two eggs and a British banger, which is a traditional English sausage. It also has Irish bacon, more of a loin cut that is thicker and meatier than American bacon, as well as grilled tomatoes, mushrooms and English beans in a heavy tomato sauce. It also comes with a choice of toast, and upon request, we also serve Irish black pudding, which is very traditional and something you don’t usually get in America.
Britannia Arms, 110 Monterey Ave., Capitola, 831-464-2583.
