joining us now is ben kaplan, founder of we san francisco. ben, nice to have you on the program. you know this. there are plenty of other groups out there trying to do similar things you're doing to make san francisco cleaner and safer. why is your group different? >> well, thanks for having me, raj. one thing is that i don't know if you can feel it, but in san francisco, there is this palpable, creative energy of people now. and the idea is a community-led movement. so if you were here in 2017, you know, the city was bustling, it was booming and maybe you didn't have to get involved. but all of the people i talk to now, who maybe weren't engaged in the city, weren't involved in politics, now are like, we have to get involved. this is unacceptable, the current state of public safety, civic disorder, government accountability. so what's unique about if is it's purely a community-led movement of people almost, to paraphrase jfk, ask not what your city can do for you. ask what you can do for your city. and hundreds and now thousands of people are standing up and saying, i want to do

and so some of my partners, for example, ben kaplan, he owns a marketing agency and which he focuses on getting things to go viral. and i think that with his help and with his team, it's been great to be able to get things going. symmetry she's been involved within the east cut community also and that has been able to be that's been great to be able to connect some of the political friends of ours and volunteers. so you're kind of trying a different tactic, right? >> and maybe you can talk about tonight's event, right? maybe that'll help people get a sense for how you're trying to bring people together. yes, totally. >> so what we want to do is we really want to bring the asian community together. that's partly why we're doing this event. we think that with san francisco having 30% asians and a lot of them don't vote or don't want to get involved with speaking up, we thought that if we could actually bring the community together, that would help. there's a lot of great organizations that are out there, so we're not trying to do double work. we're trying to bring people together. >> a