Interview with Daniel Lurie
Daniel Lurie is a philanthropist and the founder of Tipping Point Community. He is running for mayor of San Francisco.
Levi’s
Max Raskin: I guess the obvious place to start: what kind of Levi’s do you have?
Daniel Lurie: The ones I wear most often are 511’s.
MR: That's your workhorse?
DL: Workhorse.
MR: How many pairs of them do you have?
DL: Not as many as you might think. Probably four or five pairs that I go to. Then I'll stay wearing one pair for a week or two straight.
Contents
MR: What are the rules about washing? I’ve heard people put them in the freezer. Wash, don't wash. Telling some people you wash your jeans is like telling people you wash your cast iron with soap. I washed my cast iron with soap and I’m still alive.
DL: Yeah, but you might not be as strong as you were before.
You really don't want to wash your jeans very much. I'll go weeks and weeks if not months before washing, but maybe the people I'm trying to get votes from, don't want to hear that. Yeah, don't wash your jeans often. And if you do wash them, definitely don't dry them.
MR: Why not wash them?
DL: They're jeans. It breaks down the fabric and you just don't. They're meant to be…you’re meant to live in 'em.
The former CEO just stepped down, Chip Bergh — he said he'd go months and months without washing his.
North Star
MR: Who is your political role model?
DL: Listen, if you go way back into history, you go RFK and JFK, that's sort of a no brainer.
I like what Bloomberg did in New York. I loved what Bill Bradley stood for. Probably not the strongest candidate, but a great man. Had a North Star.
MR: What about Paul Wellstone? Did he influence you?
DL: Yes, but I only got to know him really through Bradley. I only saw him maybe once in person, but talk about having a North Star and someone that was committed to serving.
Anyone that's committed to serving the people is what gets me. Some of those people I mentioned probably had other reasons for running, also. They might have liked having the power, but they inspired people.
MR: We’ve talked about Dan Doctoroff — did you study Doctoroff? Was he important in your thinking about cities?
DL: I'm talking to him next week, so that's exciting. I lived in New York, '01 to '03, so I saw Bloomberg in his first couple of years as mayor and how he got hold of that city after 9/11 — how he kept driving us forward and helped rebuild that city.
MR: Do you like how he organized his office like an open bullpen?
DL: I love the bullpen setting. At Tipping Point, I made sure that when we moved into our new offices we were always in a bullpen setting. I would try as much as possible to be out in the bullpen.
MR: If you become mayor, would you try to incorporate that?
DL: 100%.
MR: Do you read a lot of history?
DL: I've read a lot of books on Roosevelt. I'm not going to sit here and say I've been reading a lot recently. There isn’t a lot of time on the campaign trail.
Downtown
MR: So we met through my friend Ian who is investing in real estate in the city and he always says that San Francisco is New York in the 70’s not Detroit in the 60’s. Why do you think that is?
DL: Well, first off, we just have so many other things that Detroit just doesn't have. I'm sorry. I love Detroit, but they don't have Cal, they don't have Stanford, they don't have UCSF, they don't have the human capital. They don't have the beauty that we can see outside of our windows and when we walk around this city. We have the people power; we have the intellectual power.
I’m excited about Ian’s project. I did an event last night and I met 10 different business leaders who were building their companies here. Those 10 people alone can help drive San Francisco's recovery.
Listen, when Jamie Dimon comes into town and brings the J.P. Morgan Health Conference, I'm going to make sure I'm meeting with him. Our current leadership doesn't do that. I'm going to be calling CEOs in New York and Miami and Austin and saying, "Okay, what can we do to get you back here? How can we have you come do your conferences here?”
We're going to make sure the streets are cleaned and safe. You have to go out and pitch and sell the city. We are a great city that rested on its laurels and forgot that we need to compete, and San Francisco needs to compete again. It starts with safety. It starts with cleaning our streets, but we have everything else going for us. We’ve got great values; we’ve got great people. We’ve got the intellectual horsepower unlike any other place on the globe.
Everything is happening in San Francisco in spite of how broken our government is. Just imagine if we had City Hall that was finding ways to partner with our small businesses and our big business community instead of pushing them away, which is what we've done over the last five or six years.
San Francisco is not like any other city. We're coming all the way back, full stop. We are coming back and we're coming all the way back.
MR: What's your plan for downtown?
DL: We're going to bring back public safety. We're going to clean the streets every day like we do for things like APEC and the J.P. Morgan Health Conference. We, as a city, saw that City Hall can clean up when they want to. I'm going to make it a priority 365 days a year.
Then we need to diversify what we bring downtown. We’ve got to incentivize businesses to come back. We have to reimagine our tax code. We have to work with labor and the business community to make ourselves competitive again. If you have a well-functioning police force, you clean our streets, you build some housing downtown, you diversify the businesses that come back: We come roaring back.
MR: A friend who has thought a lot about these issues turned me on to Richard Florida — have you studied his thinking on cities?
DL: Yes, I've read his books. Listen, I grew up and have lived in San Francisco for most of my life and my thinking of cities comes from seeing that this is a boom-and-bust town. We have our ebbs and flows and this is one of the worst busts we've ever had. There's just no question about it.
But then you see what leadership can do or what leadership fails to do in this case. You saw what we did when we embraced businesses coming down to Market Street. But we made a mistake with some of the stuff that Mayor Ed Lee did in the 2010s — we didn't get the buy-in from these companies to be part of the community in a real way. It was very ephemeral.
Businesses want to be here. We just mentioned it's all this human capital. It's the most beautiful city in the world. Businesses want to be here. Government should want them here.
But we started pushing them away, saying, “What can we do to nickel-and-dime small business and nickel-and-dime big business? How can we keep generating revenue from them?” Instead, we should have been saying that this is a partnership.
I learned a lot growing up from Levi's. It’s this incredible company that has San Francisco values at its core. Levi’s thought about LGBTQ issues long before it was required by law. Levi's thrived because San Francisco thrived, and San Francisco thrived because you had companies like Levi's here. We forgot that. We broke that contract over the last decade where we just had companies that were taking and a government that was just trying to take, and there was no sense of bringing people together.
When the Lights Go Down in the City
MR: Do you have a favorite song that comes to mind about San Francisco right now?
DL: We heard Journey at halftime of the Niners’ NFC championship game when we were down 24-7 at halftime, and my son and I got fired up listening to them. “Lights.” So that's top of mind. If you're a sports fan like I am, you know how important Journey was during the San Francisco Giants World Series runs. They got the particles flowing for us. Also halftime of that Detroit Lions game, but that didn't carry over to the Super Bowl, which is a little unfortunate.
MR: What about San Francisco movie?
DL: The Rock.
MR: Oh, I was not expecting that.
DL: I mean, Nicholas Cage.
MR: You could have been really pompous with that answer — Vertigo or something. That's a great answer.
DL: It's a great movie.
MR: It's a great movie.
DL: I mean, it's so bad, it's so good.
Sean Connery. They had the Fairmont, they had the Palace of Fine Arts, they had Alcatraz. They showed off all the best parts.
Those were days when we did a lot of movie shoots here in San Francisco, and we're not doing much of that these days. We gotta get that back.
MR: Are you into the Grateful Dead at all?
DL: I appreciate them. I love what they've done for our city, and I would not say I'm a Deadhead.
MR: That’s fine.
DL: I dated a girl for a brief amount of time whose stepfather was Jerry Garcia. It was a very city thing that was as close as I got to being a Deadhead.
MR: Being Jerry’s son-in-law is pretty close.
DL: I don't think we were close to getting married. I'm not sure it lasted more than weeks or months.
MR: That's still a good story. My friend is Bob Dylan’s granddaughter and she just got engaged.
Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen?
DL: I probably have listened to more Bob Dylan.
The San Francisco Treat
MR: Do you cook? Do you order in?
DL: No, we are not a cooking family. My wife works 24/7. I obviously have a crazy schedule. We can do eggs and pasta. My wife makes a mean salad, but that's about it. It's a lot of ordering out.
MR: In the last six months what do you think you’ve eaten the most?
DL: Pizza. We love Yellow Moto, and Flour + Water and Che Fico are the two go-to pizza places.
But what we order most is without question, burritos. Burritos. With our kids, that's twice a week.
MR: Do you have a place you like?
DL: Yeah, Gordo's, La Taqueria — we have campaign offices in the Mission, and so there's like 10 burrito places. It's dangerous.
MR: What's your recommendation for a date night in San Francisco?
DL: Our anniversary, we go to Cotogna. It's a great Italian restaurant in Jackson Square neighborhood.
Another restaurant I just went to is a new one on the west side run by a family that started Original Joe's, which is an old school San Francisco spot. Elena's is their new Mexican spot in West Portal. They literally opened two weeks ago. They have two or three hour waits. I went there on Wednesday night, and it was hopping in this quiet western part of town. It was awesome.
Heirs, Not Airs
MR: I don’t know how to ask this the right way, but what is it like always having “Levi’s heir” next to your name? Is that weird? How does it make you feel?
DL: I've never not known where I come from and the values that my parents instilled in me. And in this case, my stepfather, who was just a kind, decent, good man. I grew up most of the time in his house, there were no airs about him. He was humble, modest, and also never took anything for granted. Those values were instilled in me by my family.
MR: Let me ask this a different way: Why don't you have a drug problem?
DL: It is because of my parents. I grew up with four parents that were always saying, "You’ve got an obligation. You’ve got to commit to the community." They were committed to the community.
My siblings and I always knew that not many people had what we had. It was just by chance. I say this all the time, and my daughter actually used these words. It was by chance I grew up in this situation I grew up in. I'm asking everybody in this election to judge me, not by the chance of how I grew up, but the choices I've made. And the choice I've made has always been to serve the community like my parents have.
MR: Is there anything you can’t really justify with your wealth? So I’m not a rich man, but I love the already prepared pomegranate seeds which are obscenely expensive. It’s like $10 for a little thing. I can't justify it but I love them.
Do you have anything like that — watches or wine or something?
DL: You’re not going to see me with a watch or cufflinks or anything like that.
Gummy bears. I will walk into a candy store and I'll spend 15 bucks on gummy bears. There's no reason to spend that much money on gummy bears and I will.
MR: Are you a feinschmecker of anything? Scotch? Wine? Or are you pretty down-to-earth in your tastes.
DL: You'd have to be the judge of that. I have friends that are really into wine, and I appreciate when they allow me to have some of their wine. I'm not into wines.
MR: What kind of shoes do you have?
DL: Wear a lot of Nike and then I have dress shoes. I couldn't tell you the brand of dress shoes.
My wife has an incredible sense of style. I do not. I wear Levi's and white button downs.
MR: Where are your glasses from?
DL: Izipizi. They're just reading glasses though.
MR: What's the story behind the boxing gloves on your shelf?
DL: Dan Lurie was a boxer and bodybuilder and when I used to drive out to JFK there'd be billboards of him. No relation.
But years ago someone gave me those boxing gloves for my birthday.
MR: Have you ever been in a fight in your life?
DL: Yeah, in high school.
All In
MR: How do you unwind after a day at the campaign?
DL: I try to get home before the kids go to sleep — doesn't always happen. But I go give them a hug, check in with them, see how their day was. Lie down next to them, talk to them. Shower.
Sometimes I watch Netflix. I've been watching Griselda. But usually, it's a podcast in the ear and I fall asleep listening to something.
MR: What podcasts do you listen to?
DL: It can be anything. It could be Bill Simmons, it could be news, it could be All-In.
MR: What's the last song or album you listened to?
DL: “Free Fallin’” was the last song I listened to. I think that was yesterday. I take my kids to school every day, and we listen to different music. Taylor Swift has been dominating the playlists because I have a 12-year-old daughter. My son likes Eminem, and we listen to everything. We listen to country, we listen to rap, we listen to Journey. We listen to 80s music. I keep telling them that I grew up listening to Third Eye Blind and Train and all those songs — I subject them to that at times.
MR: Do you like exercise?
DL: Every day. Peloton or a workout every day. I really don't miss a day. I started meditating 138 days ago. I try to meditate twice a day, but most times it's just once a day when I wake up. Then I go work out and I get the kids.
MR: Do you have a meditation app that you like using?
DL: I use this app called Unbounded. It's just a timer app for meditation.
MR: Do you do transcendental meditation?
DL: Yes, I got a mantra. I had someone coach me for the first week and then once a month for the first three months.
MR: Would you share what your mantra is or no?
DL: You're not supposed to — no.
MR: Oh, okay.
DL: No, no. You're not allowed to.
MR: How do you pick what to wear every day? Do you have a uniform?
DL: Yes, I have a uniform. It’s Levi's and a white shirt, and I have some modified tennis shoes that double as dress shoes. Sometimes a sport coat. But it’s jeans and a white shirt. Just keep it simple. I cannot give a talk without my sleeves rolled up.
Sunday School and Curb Your Enthusiasm
MR: Now I want to ask you some Jewish questions.
DL: We’re going to talk about Judaism and Sunday School?
MR: Was Sunday school traumatizing for you?
DL: Yes. Did not like it.
MR: Why?
DL: Well, first off, I went to an all-boys school growing up and then there were girls there, so that was new for me. Then Sunday morning as a preteen and teen…you don't want to wake up and be at Sunday school at 9:00 AM.
I remember one time my dad messed up and we forgot that the clocks went back an hour. I got to Sunday school like two hours early and he says, "Sorry, you got to go anyway." I sat in the hallway for an extra hour. It was like every Sunday morning for three, four hours. I was like, "Oh God." I had school five days a week. I didn't want school a sixth day a week.
MR: Is your wife Jewish?
DL: She is.
MR: Was that important to you?
DL: I think, yes, it was. I don't think I was thinking that in my twenties deeply, but our values were obviously very much aligned.
MR: Have you heard of the Arizal — Isaac Luria?
DL: I've heard of him. I don't think we're related, but we're all related.
MR: What does your Jewish practice look like today?
DL: My dad calls me every Friday night for Shabbat and makes sure that he gives a blessing to my wife and me and our kids every Friday night. Our daughter is getting bat mitzvah'ed in April. That's important to us.
MR: Do you believe in God?
DL: Yes.
MR: Do you believe in the afterlife?
DL: That I'm probably more confused about. Unclear.
Jews aren't supposed to believe in the afterlife, are we?
MR: That's not true. That's one of those things that they tell you that sounds true. Like you can't get buried in a graveyard if you have a tattoo. Not true.
DL: Good. My brother's got tattoos.
MR: Do you floss?
DL: Yes.
MR: Every day?
DL: Yes, now. I didn't as a kid and it came back to bite me.
MR: Do you do a water pick or just a floss?
DL: Floss. Old school floss.
MR: Okay. Interesting. You're conservative in that way.
DL: Yes. Very.
MR: What's the last show you binge watched?
DL: Curb Your Enthusiasm and Griselda. It's not done yet, but-
MR: Curb…that’s the documentary about Jewish life in 21st Century America, right?
DL: Yes. Larry David speaks for many of us.
MR: Do you know him?
DL: No, I've never met him.
MR: Do you have any famous friends?
DL: Ronnie Lott was one of the founders of Tipping Point with me, and I consider him a close, dear friend.
MR: Did he endorse you?
DL: Yes, he spoke at my opening event — he was the first speaker. My position at Tipping Point and as chair of the Super Bowl host committee — bringing that to the Bay Area — I got to meet a lot of professional sports players here in San Francisco, which was a thrill.