Ryan asked me to write this intro myself since my writing gets credit and blame for a lot of things in my life. I was born and raised in San Diego, the city often written off as the souvenir cup of California. When my writing career managed not to flop and I landed a gig on Food Network, every agent or manager much smarter than me said the same thing. “If you wanna have a shot, you’ve got to move to New York.” Probably great advice. But I politely declined each time because if every creative person who had ambition moved away to “make it,” San Diego would just be a cultural wasteland, a resort with a city on it. What if some of us stayed and helped build a culture—told the stories of its people and the work being done? So in 2021 my wife and I decided to become the new owners of a 75 year-old, beloved media company, San Diego Magazine, and got to work transforming it into a modern media thing. It was a total rebuild, coming out of a global pandemic. The week we signed the papers, our son was born. We launched a massive festival. We launched a creative studio for brands. We micro-napped. Now? Thank all the gods, it’s growing. This is our story.