We’re leaving San Francisco next month and decided to record an episode about Haight-Ashbury, where we’ve lived for the last year and a half, and about the neighbors we’ve gotten to know here — the local homeless. We’ve developed a strange, maybe parasocial relationship with them — but it’s a relationship that’s still more real than the nonexistent one we have with our housed neighbors.

We talk about Philip K Dick’s book Clans of the Alphane Moon, where he perfectly captures our society through a mental illness metaphor. We also praise Richard Gere for his role as a homeless man in Time Out of Mind, and Yasha shares insights he got form playing a homeless man in my short film Changemaker.

— Evgenia

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