It’s a Beautiful Life

The day Ryan Berman graduated from college, he moved to New York City and began his career at a big New York advertising firm. He was an intern, set on getting a permanent job—and he soon had the opportunity to pitch a few jingles to a client.

“I remember writing one jingle about the bread at Subway,” Berman recalls. “It was a gospel tune, and it was, ‘It’s risen, oh, yeah.’ I’ll never forget [that] the first three [jingles] that the chief marketing officer ended up choosing were all ones that I had written, and, of course, I couldn’t tell them that, but it gave me a lot of confidence that I was on the right path.”

That path next led him to San Diego, and he continued to build his career, working at and then starting creative agencies. But then, in 2015, he took a different tack and started writing a book called Return on Courage.

“It was a three-year listening lap where I had the opportunity to sit with what I now call the brave, the bullish, and the brainiac,” he says. “The idea was [that] I was going to go around the country and interview astronauts and Navy SEALs and CEOs, founders, people that were being or living courage, and try to see why some people leap.”

The book was intended as a guide for businesses. He says his research taught him that if you don’t have a courageous leader, “good luck on selling a courageous idea.”

Berman decided to apply what he was learning to his own life. He was co-founder and chief creative officer of i.d.e.a., an integrated creative agency based in San Diego, but “when I started to take what I was learning, it pretty much gave me the courage to fire myself in 2017,” he says.

Two years later, he published his book and launched his new company, Courageous, at the same time. Berman describes the business as a “think-feel-do consultancy.” 

Berman helps companies identify how different fears are limiting growth. “There’s industry fears, there’s product fears, there’s service fears, there’s perception fears, which is marketing. And then there’s personal fears,” says Berman. “[Courageous] helps corporations fight fear and gives them the tools, the framework, the words, and the confidence to be courageous and to lead courageously. Our job is to be good listeners and problem slayers and help them get unstuck. I’ve been able to do that.”

In addition to hosting a podcast based on his book, Berman gives keynote speeches to corporate staff and runs workshops where he helps companies find their sticking points.

“[We offer] something we call Courageous Summits. It’s a three-day, off-site [program] that we’re designing for our partners,” he says. “I think we can all acknowledge that with remote work … the connection time just isn’t there. We aren’t connecting like we used to. The cultures are broken, and we don’t need more face time like Apple FaceTime. We need more real face time. So what we’ve been doing is designing these courageous summits for our partners, and we’re listening to what the challenges are from the client, where there may be fear with the team, and then we’re coming back with this three-day agenda.”

Berman has now spoken at major companies like Google, Snapchat, Logitech, and Kellogg’s. Courageous also offers consulting and has worked with businesses including OGX, MeUndies, and The Good Patch.

“We’re helping companies figure out what their tomorrow might look like and helping them build a courageous action plan for … the next three to five years,” he says.

So, how much will that insight set companies back? “When you compare us against what a Bain or McKinsey charges for similar services, we’re just a pittance for the value and ROI we’re providing,” says Berman. “It’s pretty clear that there’s a need for what we’re doing.” The fact that he’s working with such big-time players speaks for itself, he says.

“It’s been cool to just sort of be an ally and a friend of the leader,” he adds. “I think the more time I’ve spent in this arena, the more I realize how lonely it truly is to be the leader. They need … a partner that can give them the clarity and the tools so they can continue to move their organizations forward.”

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For those uninitiated, Dave Eggers has gone from breakout cult icon with his 2000 debut memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to elder statesman of the modern literary scene. He’s a New York Times bestseller multiple times over, a celebrated journalist in both the US and the UK, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and he has lent his talent and time to charitable endeavors like 826 Valencia—a youth writing center with several different locations nationwide, which he co-founded. And there’s more: He’s been featured in countless anthologies and collections, and created McSweeney’s, an independent publishing ring where writers go to live on in glory (IYKYK). 

Another fun fact? Dave Eggers loves San Diego.

“I mean, it’s one of my favorite places just because you can’t swing a cat without hitting the beach,” Eggers admits. Eggers digs beaches and us (and his two cats at home, who, he promises, he doesn’t swing). On the evening of October 9, Eggers is in our city for at the San Diego Public Library to discuss his latest novel The Eyes & The Impossible.

Take it in, SD. We’re cool. The reason may not be highfalutin’, but our sandy shores sealed in our je n’ai sais quoi.

Eggers’ love of California runs in his blood. “My dad’s side is all from California going back to 1860 … But the rest of us are from Boston,” Eggers says. “For some reason, I grew up in Chicago. So, none of it makes any sense.”

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What does make sense is Eggers’ insatiable curiosity, a driving force in why he’s drawn to so many different genres and styles of writing (case in point: The Eyes & The Impossible is written from the perspective of a roving park dog). 

Though his career is steeped in fiction, journalism is his foundation. He studied it at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “As a reporter, I always just kind of start out with a personal interest and see what’s going on and using that journalism degree as an entry point or as a bridge,” he says. “I was trained as a journalist, so I always had that sense that, every so often, there might be a way that I could explain things that haven’t been explained.”

He flexed those skills during his reporting on former President Trump’s campaign in The Guardian. “I would say 80 to 90 percent of the people I interviewed were shockingly normal,” he says. 

He preffered to talk with rally attendees who looked dressed for a major league baseball game versus the red-washed ones carrying effigies of Biden. “I always come out thinking that people are a little bit more swayable than you think and thinking things through, to some extent, with open eyes,” he adds.

Commonality can be found if you go looking for it, no matter what party you prefer. That sense of seeking finds its way into his works of fiction, as well. 

“I do toggle [or] pivot pretty hard between the two forms, because journalism is so rewarding and, you know, you have this excuse to ask questions and this way to get answers,” Eggers says. “And you can get very deep very quickly by asking the most knowledgeable people, but then, at the same time, writing up what you found out is a whole different task and sometimes very laborious and kind of a grind.” 

On the other hand, he says, “Writing fiction … is just when you get to make everything up. It is far more liberating.”

Eggers has found the ultimate liberation in his latest book, The Eyes & The Impossible, where the narrator assumes an entirely different species: a dog called Johannes. But this isn’t the first time Eggers has shape-shifted for literary purposes. In 2002, he wrote a short story called After I Was Thrown In The River And Before I Drowned, in which his narrator was also canine. “That was the most fun I ever had to that moment [in] writing,” he says. “It’s just totally untethered. And I think that you could sort of get away with a more sort of liberated kind of train of thought, and that I think a lot of us humans would be diagnosed with having some kind of, I don’t know, cognitive issue, I guess, now.”

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The Eyes & The Impossible has other quirks lending it a fantastical bend. Seeing the book’s Flemish-inspired illustrations by Shawn Harris, you’d be tempted to wonder if this is Eggers dipping his quill into the YA market. Think again.

Katie Hafner was on a bike tour through Italy with her daughter when she got to chatting with one of the guides. She asked if they’d ever had someone be such a problem that they were uninvited from future trips. Turns out, they had.

“The example was like, ‘Oh my God,’ and that’s when my daughter turned to me and she said, ‘Mom, that’s a novel,’” Hafner says. “Most rational people would just say, yes, it is, and leave it at that. But I just decided I needed to write it.” Hafner won’t reveal what that banned bicyclist did—it spoils the ending of the book—but she managed to turn the incredible twist into her first novel, The Boys, published by Spiegel & Grau this year. The book has earned rave reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Boys is a breeze to read, with characters who feel alive—thanks to small details like her male lead Ethan loving to re-engineer Furby toys and his girlfriend Barb wanting to get married at The Mütter Museum, which celebrates the oddities of the human body. The characters feel like friends you love catching up with—like when Barb can’t decide what to order at a restaurant, Ethan breaks out his impersonation of Lieutenant Columbo: “Barb, do you mind if I call you Barb? No disrespect intended, ma’am, but I’ve been watching you study this menu and I see your eyes keep coming back to the same thing.”

The plot takes you from a charming and totally believable meeting between the introverted Ethan and everyone-loves-her Barb through their marriage and eventual struggles, especially during Covid. The wife becomes a go-to expert, spending much of her time conducting Zoom media interviews, which drives her husband crazy. Plot twist: Hafner’s husband is Dr. Bob Wachter, the chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine, who became a real-life Covid media celebrity.

Hafner now lives in San Francisco but has deep roots in San Diego. She worked for a time as a business reporter at The San Diego Union (pre -Tribune) covering General Dynamics and the aerospace industry. She first moved here in 1965 when her mom was a mathematics graduate student at UCSD and lived in graduate student housing on Torrey Pines Road while going to Scripps Elementary.

“My mother had no money, so it was really a scrappy existence,” she says. Then in middle school, she moved to the East Coast to live with her dad. But Hafner returned in 1975 to go to UCSD. She says she badly wished she could instead go to Dartmouth, but her family couldn’t afford it. She studied German literature—or, as she likes to tell people, “I studied Kafka—I was obsessed,” and that prepared her for writing her own fiction. She’s previously written half a dozen nonfiction titles.

“I was completely taken by how Kafka in his diaries would go from something that was a pure observation, like, ‘I ate lunch today,’ and in the middle of a diary entry go into one of these crazy inventions of his, like, and then I turned into a bug,” she says. “I felt like a trespasser upon the inner life of this man.” While she doesn’t emulate the surrealism in Kafka’s work, his willingness to stretch the bounds of reality inspired Hafner to stretch from journalism into fiction.

“I’m very interested in when our minds go to fiction,” she says. “A lot of what interests me in fiction is you look at something and you think to yourself, what if that happened?”

“You should call this piece ‘The Not So Lonely Hedonist,’” says journalist, author, and independent book publisher Mike Sager as we look at the ocean from his home in Bird Rock. He’s referring to the title of one of his essay compilations, The Lonely Hedonist.

It’s filled with stories about other people, but the title is an apt description of Mike. If anyone else in the world tried to tell me how to title my piece, I’d have bristled. But one of the quirks of writers writing about writers (also why we typically avoid it) is that it becomes a collaborative process.

Collaboration is something the now-publisher knows well. Though if someone asked him, he’d say he’s been going it alone for years. He moved to La Jolla in 1997 from Washington D.C., where he began his storied journalism career in 1978 at The Washington Post.

“I was a rogue hire,” he says, downplaying his success, per usual. Sager was just the copy boy who freelanced on the side, but after 11 months, he broke a story on abuses in the Department of Agriculture and, instantly, famed editor Bob Woodward promoted him.

What followed is a long, still-active career writing for titles like Rolling Stone, Esquire, where he’s been a contributing editor for 20 years, and many others, including this magazine. At Rolling Stone, Sager was the rag’s contributing editor who wrote about drugs and getting paid actual American dollars to smoke crack with Rick James, among other anecdotes. But he also ghost-wrote for Hunter S. Thompson when the gonzo wordsmith was too inebriated to file copy on his own.

Sager’s since become one of history’s best chroniclers of people—often the world’s most interesting people. He has an uncanny ability to pick up on the quirky things they do, identifying the fascinating contradictions they inhabit that make them both relatable and also utterly foreign. To that point, it’s no wonder he’s especially drawn to writing about celebrities, sports, and various drug cultures.

Sager’s pieces are so vivid, the characters so alive that it’s no surprise more than a dozen of his articles have been turned into films. Ever heard of Boogie Nights? That was thanks to Sager’s Rolling Stone piece “The Devil and John Holmes.”

So was Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer, as well as 2012’s The Marinovich Project, an ESPN documentary based on Sager’s 2010 Esquire piece on the former No. 1 NFL draft pick and the disastrous effects of the all-consuming, lifelong training regimen from a young age. There are also stories about “The Pope of Pot,” who ran New York’s first marijuana delivery service, and another dispatch from the underground world of Southern California’s hash scene.

These days, he also runs his own publishing house, The Sager Group, which is HQ’ed at his oceanfront home. Sager started the eponymous press in 2012 as a “multimedia content brand” geared towards “empowering those who create.” Sager knows better than anyone that a media career these days doesn’t exactly guarantee riches, even more so with print journalism.

And though he’s made out okay—he calls his La Jolla perch the “house that Hollywood built”—he also knows he’s been lucky, and he wants to pay it forward. Plus, he likes staying in the mix.

To do so, Sager finds who he considers the best, brightest, and most underexposed writers kicking out the most interesting stories. He works with them to develop and bring to completion books and e-books. He lends a hand with heavy edits and helps with product design, and thanks to Sager’s Hollywood connections, the press also helps authors turn their books into documentaries and feature films.

Since 2012, The Sager Group has published more than 80 books, including a Women in Journalism series, which Sager claims is the “world’s only three-volume textbook or anthology of great women writers.” A cursory Google search confirms that. Many of these books are being turned into movies.

Shaman and Labyrinth of the Wind have been optioned by TIME Studios, plus Bang Bang Productions in India. They’re working with fiction and long-form journalism publisher NeoText, whose parent company recently became part of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Nine Stories Productions.

Currently, the dual production teams are creating a film, podcast, and documentary to accompany Deadliest Man Alive by Benji Feldheim, published earlier this year. It’s about Chicagoan John Keenan, a martial arts expert with a “Most Interesting Man in the World” sort of pedigree. He also ran occult and pornography shops, harbored a lively cocaine habit, and was rumored to be linked to the mob.

I joke to Sager that he could qualify as “the Most Interesting Man in the World.” A tour through his office and studio is a look into where he’s been, what he’s seen. Pictures of Sager with various celebrities line the walls next to his many books—some he wrote, the rest classic and obscure works, many penned by famous friends.

One photo shows Sager cautiously, with some distance, putting his arm around Paris Hilton. In another, he’s got fists up in a defensive boxing pose with “Freeway” Rick Ross, the crack kingpin of 1980s L.A. In yet another, he’s chatting with the second-to-last king of Nepal, King Birendra, who was later assassinated by his own son.

Life is much quieter and more consistent for Sager these days: he’s in a new relationship, he lives next door to his mom, and he spends most of his time at home, promoting the writers of The Sager Group. He’s got a few recent releases of his own. Hunting Marlon Brando, which is also available in audiobook, details Sager’s experiences across the globe trying to interview the iconic late actor (spoiler: he eventually succeeds—sort of).

A Boy and His Dog in Hell is an anthology of what Sager calls his “greatest hits.” Upcoming releases include My Father’s Con by octogenarian Pat Jordan, the great sportswriter for Sports Illustrated and The New York Times, as well as The Devil Took Her by New Zealand “off-kilter short story writer” Michael Botur.

While finishing this story, I asked Sager if there’s anything I missed, a fascinating anecdote we somehow overlooked. Over the next few minutes, I watch the text bubbles on my phone appear, then disappear, when a photo of him and a white-haired man appears. It’s Sager with Jonathan Goldsmith, of Dos Equis commercial fame.

Another text bubble, then: “One of these guys is the Most Interesting Man in the World.”

Novelist, musician, and general multihyphenate Adam Gnade misses San Diego.

Some might remember him as the editor of San Diego’s groundbreaking but all-too-short-lived alternative newsweekly Fahrenheit, while others may have caught his concerts at clubs like Space in City Heights. He’s also done well for himself as the author of moving novels  and best-selling, zine-style self-help guides.

His new novel, After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different, is something of a love letter to San Diego, albeit one filled with hardcore punk kids drowning their sorrows in booze and greasy burritos. Quite a few iconic eateries show up by name in the book (more below), but we caught up with the author himself to ask him what places he still comes back to San Diego for, and what new-ish places he’s discovered on his visits.

Old Haunts 

Pokéz

947 E Street, East Village

“Pokéz is like a 1920s Parisian salon for San Diego punks, and the Tom’s Deep Plate is their all-you-need number-one chart-topping hit with refried beans, rice, salsa, sour cream, guacamole, and great tortillas.”

Cotixan Mexican Food

4370 Genesee Avenue, Clairemont

“Just like with Pokéz, there’s a chapter in After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different set at this trustworthy, venerable place. For years I lived off the chile relleno burrito at their Genesee location, but nowadays the simple, no frills, zero-BS veggie burrito is my guy.”

Saguaro’s

3753 30th Street, North Park

“Order a beans, rice, and guacamole burrito to experience perfection. Also, the best flour tortillas in town. Go to Verbatim Books afterward, then Holsem Coffee, and have a perfect day like Lou Reed.”

Fresher Fare

El Veganito

5500 Grossmont Center Drive, La Mesa

“The lovely, picturesque burrito on the cover of my book is the eponymous “El Veganito” from this cool little gemstone in the Grossmont Center mall. Choice of adobada or carnitas, rice and beans, pico de gallo, and chipotle cream. Your heart shall be a marching horse.”

Donna Jean

2949 Fifth Avenue, Bankers Hill

“Donna Jean’s pizza will make you feel happy and wild, like Godzilla stomping his worst enemies to tiny, stupid pieces. Try the Four Horsemen pizza—fermented wheat dough, mozzarella (both hard and soft), ricotta, Parm, garlic, oregano, pesto, crushed tomatoes, and the truest true love.”

The Plot

1733 South Coast Highway, Oceanside

“Order in courses here like a fancy French restaurant. Start with the Taköyaki hush puppies, then the unbelievably good Chronic sushi rolls, followed by the Chickën & Waffles as the final boss.”