I first met Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s newly minted mayor, about five minutes before we walked onstage at WIRED’s Big Interview event, held in his city last week.
Lurie’s team let me know ahead of time that his window for this conversation was tight: He’d just come from announcing a new city police chief, and had about half an hour for me before he needed to be on to the next thing. Which was? “No idea,” Lurie quipped, shortly before we were foisted from backstage and into our conversation in front of several hundred attendees—a local crowd, who, judging from their boisterous reactions to Lurie’s every word, are among the 73 percent of San Franciscans who approve of the job he’s done since taking office in January of this year.
To Lurie’s credit, the story of San Francisco right now is largely a positive one. The city is indisputably the global hub of AI innovation and the billions of dollars that accompany it, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with smaller startups, investors, and plenty of young, AI-focused technologists all calling San Francisco home. Yes, that means rents are up and housing stock remains precariously low. But office vacancy rates are dropping, retail outlets are coming back to the city’s downtown, and as Lurie’s office is quick to tout, several key metrics measuring municipal crime—including homicides and car break-ins—are at historic lows.
I wanted to talk to Lurie about all of that, but I was also curious about the bigger picture: his administration’s dynamic with the federal government, particularly in the context of President Trump’s October plan to send the National Guard into San Francisco—an endeavor that Lurie managed to thwart, according to The New York Times, by recruiting a powerful coterie of technology executives to work the phones in his favor.
Lurie wasn’t exactly forthcoming there, in keeping with his diligent efforts to focus conversations on San Francisco, and perhaps avoid attracting the attention, or the ire, of the current administration. It’s a different tack than other Democrats governing progressive parts of the country have taken, from New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to California governor Gavin Newsom. But if the response in the room last week was any indication, Lurie’s local fans don’t seem to mind his “say less” strategy—at least for now.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Oh, wow. Some fans in the audience. Someone has a 70-something percent approval rating. Wow, god.
DANIEL LURIE: How are my socks? Oh, they’re black. I usually have more fun socks on.
They’re not fun.
I know. Well, if I took ’em off, there’s stripes all over.
Sure. Take off your shoes. Woo! Oh, interesting.
[Speaking to the audience] Katie told me that the director of Wicked was here earlier.
I said, “It’s a high bar.”
Then I was like, “What am I doing here? And who are you?” And she’s like, “I’m in charge.”
He said, “Who are you?” and I was like, “I’m the boss.” It was embarrassing for him.
Yes.
I was going to do a wind-up and introduce you, but you just took your shoes off and that took an entire minute, so let me fast-forward.
You spent many years working outside of City Hall. You were not in politics. You ran a first-time campaign. You were elected mayor in 2024. You’ve been in office a little under a year. You have been very publicly, in a very specific way, focused on San Francisco’s recovery. It’s the comeback story of this city from homelessness, public safety, rebuilding the city’s downtown.
You also, I’m sure many of you here know, made headlines recently for keeping the National Guard out of the city. WIRED has a huge office here, and we’ve been here for over three decades. For me, sitting in New York where I live and work, watching our team in San Francisco react to that announcement from President Trump, and watching it unfold as journalists and as human beings, was remarkable. A really stressful 24 hours. So, I want to hear more about that. But also of paramount importance to us at WIRED, you have a killer social media game, so we’ll talk about that, too.
But we always start The Big Interview podcast with some rapid-fire questions, and we’re going to do the same right here. So are you ready?
I don’t have a choice.
No. You have nowhere to run. It’s excellent. What is San Francisco’s best kept secret?
Our neighborhoods. Whether you’re talking about North Beach … oh, this is supposed to be quick answers.
It’s too late. Just keep going.
You know, we talk a lot about Union Square. We talk about downtown and the recovery. Sixty percent of our tax revenue and our jobs and our small business were downtown. That’s dropped to 40 percent in terms of our tax revenue. I stress the importance of the recovery downtown because it drives everything else in our city.
Our neighborhoods are so unbelievable. I went to the Vogue Theater on Sacramento Street last night. It’s been around since 1912. We just relit and redid the neon thanks to some great San Franciscans. We’re revitalizing some of our old-school theaters all around our neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are our best kept secret. Once we get people downtown, they go explore the Mission, they go explore the Sunset, they go explore North Beach, and they’re hooked.
If you weren’t in politics, what would you be doing instead?
Doing what I did before, which is philanthropy in the nonprofit world and/or sports.
Sports as a participant?
No.
No offense, but I was surprised.
I’ve been complimented on the social media already, but if you’ve looked at it, I actually threw a football and people were like, “Oh my God, you can throw a football decently well.” So go watch the social media.
If you didn’t live in San Francisco, where would you live instead?
My second favorite city in the country is New York.
What’s the best burrito in this city? I’m allowed to ask you. I don’t live here.
I had Gordo last night, which was a staple for me growing up. La Taqueria. If you know San Francisco, like you can’t go wrong with La Taqueria. And, La Vaca Birria is now rising in the ranks in my list.
OK. What is your social media hate-follow?
I don’t even know what that means.
It means you follow a bunch of stuff on social media, but some of the people or the companies or whatever, you follow them so that when you’re scrolling you can be like, oh God, I hate that.
My personal account, you know, I really didn’t use before the campaign. We don’t follow anybody. So I don’t get the hate stuff. I love seeing what my critics say about me. It gets me fired up.
Do you read the comments on your Instagram?
No, I don’t read the comments anymore. I used to, and that was a bad, bad thing.
What other mayor do you have the biggest professional crush on?
Oh wow. I think Michelle Wu in Boston is pretty awesome.
OK. I want to start back at the beginning. You were born and raised in San Francisco. You didn’t need to be doing what you’re doing. You didn’t need to run for office. You don’t need to be the mayor.
People always say that line, but I did. I was watching my city go in a direction that none of us …
But that’s the question: Did you just look around and think, I could do a better job? What inspired you to take that leap?
I ran an organization called Tipping Point Community for a long time. It was always in service to the community and tackling poverty, and it was my way of serving.
I ran Super Bowl 50. The mayor, Ed Lee, and [San Francisco 49ers] owner, Jed York, asked me 10 years ago to run the Super Bowl, and I had such a good time doing that. By the way, we’re hosting Super Bowl LX in about nine weeks here in San Francisco.
Yes.
I was walking my kids to school, and we were all getting more and more frustrated about the conditions that we were seeing on the streets of San Francisco. We had sort of just said, “Oh, this is just how it has to be.” We took everything for granted. Everyone took San Francisco for granted. Our elected officials took it for granted that we could just continue on and that our success would continue. That is not the case. You have to continually be relentless in fighting for your city, standing up for your city, and welcoming people to your city and saying, “We want you here, and we’re gonna create the conditions for your success.” And we forgot about that. I know what it takes to work hard every single day. I saw a moment that required somebody from outside the broken system.
Your office has shared some remarkable statistics. Crime is down 30 percent, car break-ins at a 22-year low. Overdose deaths in the city are dropping. I could go on and on. Your story as San Francisco’s mayor so far is a turnaround story. It’s a success story.
It’s a good story. But, I’m curious, you’ve been in office for 11 months. How much of that success story do you take credit for, do you think has to do with the policies that you have implemented, and how much of it is about what was happening before you got into office? RTO mandates, or the natural cycle back from Covid. How much of it do you see as success that you own as opposed to a trajectory that you inherited?
You’d have to go talk to some other pretty traditional politician for them to answer that by saying, “I did this, I did that.”
Well, that’s why I’m asking.
That’s just not how I’m wired. A year ago, 25 percent of San Franciscans thought we were heading in the right direction. Today, 62 percent of San Franciscans think we’re heading in the right direction.
That is because of so many factors. You have to count the AI boom. You have to count tech. But you also have to count our restaurateurs and our entrepreneurs in the arts and culture scene who always drive our comeback. When you have empty storefronts and you fill them with local craftspeople. San Francisco’s spirit has really shown through over the last year, the last two years, when everyone was knocking us.
Right.
Those that are true San Franciscans, we stayed. We fought and we knew that it was a bad decision to bet against San Francisco. So this is not about any one person. I do think leadership matters, and that means all of the departments. That means in our police department, that means in our—we have a fire chief who came in in February, who has done a remarkable job. We have a number of new department heads that are just bringing a renewed spirit and energy. So it’s been a total team effort.
But let me also say, I just came from a department head meeting. We have 59 different departments and we all gather once every couple months. Our large agencies, we meet every week, 20 department heads, all of ’em. They used to meet every couple of months, and I got them all in the room every single week. But we just had an update meeting, and we went through the list of all the accomplishments for the year, and I ended the meeting and I said, “I really thank you all for all of this, but I am not satisfied. I am not happy with where we’re at. We still have too many people dying on our streets. We still have too many pockets of our city where people are openly dealing drugs at night.” So we have a long way to go, and I am just going to be relentless. I am not satisfied, but I am proud of the trajectory we’re on.
We are a city on the rise, and when we are at our best this city is the greatest city in the world.
You’ve seen this city through a lot of different eras. Right now, San Francisco is indisputably the epicenter of the AI boom, right?
Right.
How has that boom and the money and the people and the startups it’s brought to the city, how has that changed the culture of San Francisco? What is different, right now, in San Francisco as a result of this moment that we’re in?
We are a city that has gone through booms and busts. For our whole history. We are constantly changing. We are constantly innovating. We are constantly the center of the world. I want to create a durable and lasting recovery. I don’t want to do what we did in the 2010s where we just fly like a rocket ship and crash-land. That’s why we’re trying to create, and support, and create the conditions so that it’s not just about AI, because it’s not.
I mean, we’re a few blocks away from one of the great health care institutions, in UCSF, on the planet. Let’s get into biotech. Let’s get into health care. Let’s get into, you know, our arts and culture, our restaurants. People forget. They always talk about AI, but our number one industry is tourism, and we need to invite people back to San Francisco. I have to tell you, during the 10-day period the week before Thanksgiving, through this past Sunday, that 10-day period was the most highly trafficked 10-day period in our airport’s history.
Wow.
Beating pre-pandemic levels. So 1.8 million people went through our airport, and that tells me that this city is on a good footing. So, we’ve seen this before, rents are going right up. Housing and affordability. We just had our major legislative win, something that has not been done in decades in San Francisco. We passed a new zoning map, it’s called the Family Zoning Plan, where we are committed to creating denser housing along commercial corridors and transit corridors.
Something that we’ve been talking about throughout this country is we need to create more housing, and San Francisco, on Tuesday, showed the nation that we care about affordability, that we are going to build more housing for families. So that the kids that are growing up in San Francisco actually have an opportunity to stay in San Francisco and raise their own kids. So this boom is creating even more affordability issues. It’s expensive to live and work in San Francisco.
There was an urgency to housing and affordability in this city years ago, right?
Yes.
Actually when I asked the WIRED staff, “What should I ask the mayor?” It was housing, housing, housing, affordability. I’m curious about how quickly you can move, and can you move quickly enough?
Well, you know, we have a political class that is ideologically opposed to things for no good reason. But we’ve changed that.
Say a little bit more about that.
We have people chirping from the sidelines. In this city always, but we had people chirping inside the building for a long time. What we have fundamentally changed in City Hall is that now we have a mayor in myself that wants to work with all 11 supervisors no matter what they say.
If we disagree on one issue, the next day I’m walking down the hall and talking to them. I’m going to their offices. I’m saying, “How do we get more housing built? How do we make life easier for our small businesses?” We’re stripping away red tape left and right through a program called PermitSF to make it easier to run a small business.
Now we have this family zoning plan. We’re working, we’re gonna build more housing, and there’s already talk of lawsuits. There’s people that are stuck in the past that don’t want our city to move forward. I have to say the Board of Supervisors is doing a tremendous job. It’s a new day there, and there’s gonna be people trying to pull them back.
I’m thrilled by the progress that we’ve made, but the housing and affordability issue is so crucial. We gotta build more housing. We gotta uplift our public schools. We have to have world-class transit. Muni does a great job, but we’re seeing a huge budget deficit next year. I’m at work tirelessly over the next 12 months to make sure that we pass a revenue measure to bring funding and support to Muni and to save Muni, because transit is crucial for our affordability agenda here in San Francisco.
Let me rewind to October, and I’m going to recap this in case anyone has forgotten. President Trump announced he was sending the National Guard into San Francisco. You deterred the president from taking that step. What was particularly fascinating to me, though, was how that process unfolded. You had technology executives who call San Francisco home, whose companies call the city home, who played a role reportedly in both Trump’s initial announcement, and reportedly in his decision to call it off, and they reportedly worked with your administration to do that.
I’m curious if you can take us behind the scenes a little bit. What prompted you to take that strategy, to leverage executives like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff to get on the phone with the president?
Let me just be clear, that it was not me calling any of those executives saying, “Do something for me.” I was clear, just in the public realm and in talking points, that I did not think that that was what was needed. I mean, we are at 22-year lows in terms of car break-ins. Crime citywide is down. I’ve told everybody that public safety is my number one priority.
What I kept hearing from the East Coast and what I heard from other leaders is [the administration was] using talking points from a couple of years ago about what was impacting our city. So I said this very clearly, and when the president asked me what’s going on in San Francisco, I said to him, “Things are going really well. We need help on the fentanyl crisis. We need help with drug enforcement and operations, especially in the overnight hours, because we’ve done an incredible job with really shutting down open-air drug markets during the daytime hours. But then with our staffing issues and shortage, we have a tough time in the overnight hours.”
Let me be clear, [we have] continued [our] partnership with the FBI, the DEA, and the US Attorneys Office, which we’ve been doing for years and years, and we are continuing that.
We have some historic numbers in terms of drugs. We’ve taken 20 pounds of narcotics off the street just in the last month. We made hundreds of arrests. Everybody thinks that there was some grand plan, but I think we just laid out the facts. We laid out that we welcome the continued partnership, and that’s what we’re doing.
It was reported, though, I think it was The New York Times who quoted the mayor of Chicago who said, “If the only way in which you can communicate with this president is to be a billionaire, that leaves out the vast, vast majority of everyday people.”
I think that comment was specific to the National Guard incident. To lead San Francisco, you are surrounded by these very wealthy executives who live here, who work here, and who also happen to have the president of the United States on speed dial. How do you navigate the power dynamics inherent in that situation?
I think what we made crystal clear, and I do in normal everyday conversations with CEOs, because I go visit these companies all the time, is that a strong San Francisco helps create a strong United States. If you start messing with that, and if you have an attack on our city, and making us feel less safe, because I think that’s what would’ve happened, we would’ve had a less safe city, and would’ve created a real crisis on our streets, instead of what people are experiencing right now, which is a surging city that is on the rise. If our community is under attack or perceived to be under attack, businesses will start shutting down. So just making sure that people understand the consequences, because you’ve seen it in other cities and it does not go well.
I’m curious what your approach is to governing San Francisco within the larger federal context. You have taken a very different tack than other political leaders at a municipal level or a state level. California governor Gavin Newsom is one example. Zohran Momani, the mayor-elect of New York City, is another example. People who have really come out swinging with regards to President Trump and the administration. What happens at a federal level obviously affects the city of San Francisco, right?
Just a few weeks ago there was an analysis which found that the “Big Beautiful Bill” could leave San Francisco with a $400 million hole in its budget, particularly with regards to health care and food assistance programs. You are very focused on San Francisco, but how do you think about your strategy at a federal level?
Let me just say this. When I got into office, when I was elected, I didn’t know who was going to be our president, and the people of San Francisco, they wanted clean and safe streets. They wanted a mayor focused on San Francisco. I think that is something that I’ve delivered on. Of course, when things rise up, I’m going to not only respond, but I’m going to be on the offensive. We’ve shown with my administration that focusing on San Francisco and focusing on public safety and focusing on the drug crisis on our streets, and stripping away red tape. That focus is what the people of San Francisco want.
Now, you referenced health care funding. That is going to be devastating to our city. So we will, of course, work with anybody that wants to help San Francisco. All of my colleagues, in terms of other mayors across the country, have said where there’s room to work together, we will work together. But I gotta focus on what I can control. I cannot control what’s happening in DC. I can’t control what’s happening in Sacramento. I can only make sure that we spend our dollars more effectively and efficiently.
We have a $16 billion budget here in San Francisco. Last year when I came in office, we had a historic budget deficit, a never-before-seen $879 million budget deficit, over two years. We closed that in terms of a two-year budget. But this year, because of the health care cuts that are coming in a year, it’s gonna be closer to a billion dollars.
So last year was bad. This coming year is gonna be worse, and I’m focused on what I can control, and of course, if we can work with our federal and state officials who can go to DC and help us, I will do that.
We’re almost out of time. I was going to ask you all about your social media game—if you haven’t checked it out, he’s prolific—but I want to close by looking ahead. You’re less than one year into a four-year term. You’ve got a lot of runway. Let’s say we come back here in three years. I’m interviewing you again, what do you hope I’m asking you about by then?
“Can you drive crime down even lower? Can you fill up the remaining empty office space downtown?” I hope that the retail space and vacancy is all full in three years in Union Square. We’re seeing such demand, and people returning to the market. We have Zara and Uniqlo and Pop Mart and all these retailers, many of whom left, that are now coming back to San Francisco. I hope that you’re asking me, “How do you maintain your status as the number one city in the world?” That’s what you should be asking me.
“Can you still throw a football? Do you have the energy left to do it?”
“Do I still have hair?”
“Will you take your shoes off again?”
That’s gonna really haunt me. I’m sorry I did that to you.
This is being recorded. It’s on video.
It’s on video? Oh my goodness.
We’re gonna clip it. We’re gonna put it everywhere. Listen, we’ll send it to your team. You can put it on your Instagram.
Now, let me just say, first off, it’s an honor to meet you. I’ve been a fan of this publication since you had the hard copy, the magazine.
We still have a magazine, OK? Spend a little more time at your newsstands.
I’m going to favorite your podcast show now, and I’m gonna listen to it. I fall asleep at night listening to podcasts, if you can believe that. It’s a problem. I’ve never admitted that before.
Don’t tell me you fall asleep listening to our podcast, because I think we would have to throw you out.
I haven’t listened to your podcast. Now I’m going to. So thank you for having me, and thank you for doing it in San Francisco. And to your employees in San Francisco: Go get involved in the community. We have weekly trash pickups in 17 different locations around the city. A city that is on the comeback needs everybody engaged in the community. Go visit your local art gallery and your art institutions and get involved in the community. It’s happening in our city. It’s really coming back, and I couldn’t be more hopeful and optimistic.
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