What Can Be Done? | Ep. 047 Lemonade Stand 🍋

25:01Brandon Scott:and I, I agree with you and I like your presentation because I agree with that too. One more, actually one more thing I was thinking about because my, I do feel, one thing I wanted to say was this call to action of like fucking, genuinely, I do believe show up to the protest, show some sort of action, fucking register to vote and vote in the next election because this type of stuff, the way people are moving, it shows that it does, I do believe that that still matters. And it's hard for me to say that because I say it with the full understanding that I'm the guy on the show who's had the plan of like leaving the country for years.

25:48and I feel a little weird telling people that because I understand that context exists and I made that decision for myself a long time, many, many years ago for very different reasons. It's not like in reaction to this happening in front of me but I think if you genuinely, I think it's important to not just like see this happen and keel over. there's a discussion that we had on our bonus episode like a week ago before this happened and it i was kind of voicing my concern or my opinion of having seen the renee good thing and feeling so fatigued by it and being like i feel like i have grown up i have i i have grown up most of my life now in the, in the U S seeing these violent acts happen over and over again in different forms, not necessarily like it could be ice.

26:48It could be the police. It could be, uh, it could be terrorism. It could be school shootings. And I've seen so many different versions of this happening and feeling like they keep happening. And this feeling of fucking, this is fucking sick. How could this not only that it's sick, that it happens and that it continues, but also that I feel this lack of attention or care that it's happening. And I think, I don't know what it is about this one, but it's something, it's weird to say that it's even different from what happened two weeks ago. It's like, don't, don't fucking forget this. Like act and use it to fuel the way you influence the future in this country.

27:31and I, I, and even, or even if you're going to be here for a little bit, like I'll vote every time. I'll vote every time until, until I move. And cause it's still important to me. It's still important that I show up to my like local elections and my county elections and shit like that. Yeah. I don't, yeah. I don't have more to say.

27:55Brandon Scott:No, I appreciate that. I, yeah, it's funny because people saying that you know elections don't like elections i mean directly caused like if you're mad about this is the result of election and i think um

28:15i i think it'll make a difference i do um but this is not the whole thing of our episode and

28:20Brandon Scott:i don't know if you have anything you want to say um but i just i i think we wanted to cover that we do have other stuff to talk about this is an episode like what's next because that is something we talk about yeah I mean you already expressed it and I told you guys this when we were planning this episode is like I just think this shit is sad and that's I don't have much else to add exactly what you said I think it's almost it's yeah I don't know it's weird to just go on to a podcast be like it's bad this is bad you know but I think we've covered you know other angles to it and it does seem like there's a huge the polling numbers were were crazy because I also saw that on Nate Silver's thing.

28:57Yeah. Which is, you know, again, immigration is the one thing that Trump has been able to hold on to as people approve of people, even with the stock market as high as it is, people do not approve of Trump on the economy. Like he's failing on economy and affordability, all these things that was really the core of what got him elected that and immigration. Right. And now he's super losing on like the one golden goose he had. So I do think there's going to be some serious response to him. Like one thing, Trump is good at is when he senses the tide turning on a subject he changes his behavior so i think

29:29Brandon Scott:probably you'll see him i think that's why he's backing down i mean i think yeah he's gonna he's got like lizard brain instincts on like what the room is at least among his base and this is so unpopular for anyone who's even like remotely not diehard for anyone who's like on this the center-ish side of right whatever like it's so unpopular so he has he's tossed greg bovino to the wolves probably will toss christy gnome he's clearly like trying to backpedal uh he called tim walls they're pulling ice agents out of him like this there is a there is a direct reaction to people's anger which which does which means the anger has a value that's not you know what i'm saying like it was it break it might have been the book that we that everybody knows what everybody knows and breakneck but it did change my pov or from perspective a little bit and for context for people who didn't hear it on Patreon, Aiden and I hated this book.

30:25It's not a fun book to read. I think there is the premise is just what changes when people are collectively aware of something and once it becomes known that everybody knows it, then everybody's behavior changes even though they did all know it behind the scenes quietly up until that point. That's a great summary of the whole book. It's the entire book. It's that sentence repeated 300 ,000 times. I'm becoming more of a defender of the book as you guys hate it. Sometimes he puts it as a question Sometimes he puts it in analogy. It talks about, I think it was this book and Breakneck talked about why there is such an extreme effort to get rid of communication around protesting in so many countries.

31:12And what the actual value of protesting is. And I think I have changed my opinion about this over the course of maybe the past like six months. the idea because I understand the feeling I I know there are people listening who hear who latch onto the part where we said like go vote as a like a part of the solution to this and they're like fucking whatever man or like you know they're too lived up or you know and uh or protests don't do anything like peaceful protest doesn't do anything and I understand I understand where you're coming from. I get it. But what changed my mind about protesting is it's not about, it's not about like creating this magical instant change in, in getting the power that you're pushing against to just cave instantly.

32:03It's about creating a consistent, a consistent message and present presence and signal to all the other people in your community, all the other people in the country or state or whatever, they know that you feel the same way that they do and that you're all behind one another on something. And I think this is so over the line and it's so far in one direction and it's so blatantly a lie what Stephen Miller is saying. It's so blatantly a lie that finally it's like we can really, it's like an issue that that we can reach near consensus on when like the, dare I say, the establishment does so much work to make sure that we can't find consensus about fucking anything.

32:50Brandon Scott:We can't get consensus on anything. And now this is something we can find consensus on. I do truly believe that when you show most people this video, they do think it's bad. Most people do feel that way. Not literally 100 % of people, but most people feel that way. So when so many people are angry and it's so widespread across every aspect of the political spectrum and then you go out and show and demonstrate that you can still create change in this country. I, and I think this ties in later to the interview I did. One thing I was incredibly impressed about interviewing Mayor Brandon Scott is that he, at a time where everything feels so gridlocked and painful and frustrating politically, he, he, he believes that we can get things done together.

33:44He has a process by which he approaches those things and he's creating results around a problem that was so embedded in how people viewed Baltimore. That it's a place where people get murdered in a drug war. And he's like, I'm going to help dismantle that stereotype. I'm going to attack the problem as it actually is. Here's this incredibly nuanced approach to how we're going to do that. And it's not about me. that it's a citywide effort that so many people in Baltimore are participating in and we can create change. We can reduce the homicide rate in Baltimore to the lowest it's been in over 50 years, over a 60 % drop in that time and like here's how we did it and that's among a bunch of other things he's doing, right?

34:34But I think it was remarkably hopeful to speak to him and have that be the takeaway and be like, it's not hopeless.

34:44Brandon Scott:You can make things better. Yeah, and we're gonna talk about Momdani in a minute and what he's, I think people, I think in general across this guy and a lot of people, it took a while because the forces of the gridlock on our political system and social media, I think a lot of things made it very difficult to make any progress or consensus on anything. I think people are evolving. I think people are evolving to learn tactics and strategies and methods to adapt to the challenge. Like they hit really hard and they made things way worse. And I think people are crawling back. It's crunch time at work and you need to bring wings to your workday.

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36:38Rated PG-13. What time has it been? It's clobber time!

36:44Brandon Scott:So anyway, I want to get to this because one of the immediate impacts of what's going on here is that there was a Department of Homeland Security funding bill that passed the House before Alex Petty's murder, but now is very, very unlikely, almost certainly will not pass the Senate because of the absolute outrage over DHS. DHS. There was, I have a slide here of the seven Democrats who originally voted for this. Many of whom have now, of course, backed out because of insane pressure. Shout out to the one Republican who also didn't vote for it, Thomas Massey, who that guy has been remarkably principled.

37:22Brandon Scott:He probably is going to get primary though, is what I looked into. Trump is throwing all his weight behind the new guy. But anyway, so there's going to be a Senate vote, probably won't pass, which means we have a partial government shutdown. Fourth one, third one? Third, I think. In like eight months. Does this, they are voting on specifically this part of DHS or is this just the broader? This is a funding bill for DHS, which covers ICE and a number of other things. 64.4 billion in funding for DHS is not going to be provided, assuming this doesn't pass. So there is a shutdown. 10 billion of it was supposed to go to ICE.

37:57Brandon Scott:Although as I've looked into it, I think they're already funded through the Big Beautiful Bill. So in fact, it'll shut down TSA and Homeland Security and like port stuff. But ICE is like the only thing that won't shut down because they already have money. So it's not, I mean, it's an unfortunate reality. And just to set the context, we had that funny government shutdown a few months ago. And as a reminder, what comes out of that is a continuing resolution, which means we didn't actually pass like a budget for the full year. It's basically like we're going to continue off the levels we had while we debate future things.

38:29And that didn't include DHS. So DHS needs to have a separate thing, a resolution that says this is the funding. But then separately, they have mandatory funding based on big, beautiful bills. There's a weird thing. So it's not necessarily it's going to have like a massive impact on ICE specifically, but it'll be yet another mini government shutdown that we get to follow and will cause chaos. And maybe we'll cause chaos in the only thing that we want, which is TSA.

38:53Brandon Scott:and then the others all get to function great. So that'll be cool. TSA is like our only weapon of getting the government unshut down because people can't stand it. I guess that's true. People do get really, really pissed about it. So in that sense, it is effective. Every government budget should go back to, it should, we should split the TSA funding into 100. The infrastructure of flying needs to be at stake. Yeah, we just, because Trump always makes national emergencies and we make an emergency that people aren't getting on planes and then everything becomes about TSA. Yeah. Every time you have a budget issue, it's like a bunch of air traffic controllers standing up and be like, I'm Spartacus.

39:27They have to do it every week to keep our government going. I think air traffic controllers should have more votes.

39:33Brandon Scott:Oh, like each one, each person. Everybody gets one vote except for air traffic controllers. If you work in air traffic control, we're going to end up with the craziest. Every time they control a plane, they get one more vote. It's that way they're incentivized to keep working. So you can stack. Yeah. There's a guy on nine red boys. But you don't have to spend all your votes every year. So one guy has been saving his votes for like a like 40 years. He has like 3000 brother becomes president. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just sent it all in. Well, speaking of voters and how we use votes to elect people, there is a mayor in Baltimore that Aiden went and chatted with.

40:08This is Mayor Brendan Scott, who Aiden and I both learned about from a Channel 5 interview that like you just set up a second ago, he has had this remarkable change in Baltimore. So you Aiden flew out to Baltimore this past week and spoke for almost an hour. with Mayor Brandon Scott. We're going to have the full interview here that you're going to now watch. You will watch it. And afterwards, the three of us are all going to chat together. Obviously, this is something new that we're trying of one of us going and chatting with somebody and let us know what you think. I think it was a really great interview.

40:36There's obviously going to be people who we interview with when it's just one of us. We're going to keep doing the standard three. We have some actually really exciting guests coming up very soon. We have some really exciting things. So this is awesome though i don't know if you have any other context and otherwise roll the film i think my quick preface is uh the for those who don't know baltimore has seen a historic reduction in their homicides in the city even like greatly outpacing the national decline there's been in the last five years as well and the channel five video that came out a couple months ago highlighted this that was the initial interest and we mostly start out the conversation uh about that but then we dive into, I would say his broader motivations as mayor, like why he wants to do this job, how he sees his position and what his ethos is when it comes to like creating solutions in a city.

41:32Cause I think we've talked about this feeling of how much can a mayor actually do. And I preemptively, he answered that question. There's so many times in this interview where I had things I wanted to go to or asked and he just perfectly sped towards those things I wanted answers for. And he speaks so well, you can probably see in the interview, there's a couple of times where I'm almost at a loss for words of like where to go next. And I need to work on my interview. You're thinking of yard questions. You're trying to, but some of his answers, especially in the back half of this interview really blew me away.

42:04Um, I think it's a little more like approach and, uh, in the weeds at the beginning. So if you feel like the first bit is a little slow, I encourage you to stick around because it's very informational. And then I think, which is good. Like, I think it's very, very interesting to learn about from my perspective. But if you find it a little slow, I encourage you to stick around, listen to the back half, because I think he has a lot of powerful things to say about his position, who he is as a person, the city itself. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this. Let us know what you think of it. We'll come back at the end.

42:37Roll the film. All right. Well, this is a new, a bit of a new style thing for Lemonade Stand, a pop-up interview without Brandon and Doug. I have the mayor of Baltimore. Brandon and Doug. Didn't want to come to Baltimore, man. I know. I know. I'm afraid you would never leave because that's what happens. And I have Mayor Brandon Scott with me. And we're in my girlfriend's parents' home filming this interview. you. And, uh, I figured I'd, I'd get straight to it. Cause the, uh, the reason I wanted to speak with you was this historic reduction, uh, in homicides in Baltimore over the last few years, uh, an over 60 % reduction since 2021, a huge reduction in non-fatal, uh, shootings and violence as well.

43:33And in 2025, the lowest number of homicides in I think over 50 years. And there's a bunch of layers from my understanding as to why this is the case, but this has happened during your term as mayor and you're elected in 2020. And I wanted to just get your explanation behind that because just to lay some a brief context for the for the rest of the U.S., the homicide rate in the country is also falling through this time, but pretty significantly. But Baltimore way, way ahead of the curve, even compared to that decline nationally. So I just wanted to know how did this happen? Yeah, I think that before we do that, we just got to like take one step back, right?

44:26When When we think about Baltimore and gun violence, everyone thinks about TV shows, homicide, life on the street, the corner of the wire, obviously. But for me, that's real life. I was born here in Baltimore in 1984. So fortunately and unfortunately, my formative years are the years that everyone thinks about when they think about violence in Baltimore, the 80s, 90s, early 2000s. actually the reason why I before I was 10 years old decided I wanted to be the mayor of Baltimore is because of gun violence I was out playing basketball in their mouths and someone started shooting and someone got shot right the person didn't die right to be honest we didn't like we don't even know if the person went to the hospital it was a different time different time back then But pestered my parents, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, everybody about like why no one really cared about what happened.

45:25And probably to shut me up in the way in the way black mothers have this way of like making you shut up, but not squashing your dreams at the same time. Right. Like and she just said, if you want to change, you got to do it yourself. And that's when I decided I wanted to be the mayor of Baltimore. You decided you want to be the mayor of Baltimore before you were 10 years old. Yeah, well before. I was like seven, at the oldest, seven or eight years old. Did it say that whole time? Like, did you have a break when you were like 15? You were like, I'm going to be something else? If you talk to anybody that's known my whole life, including someone that's in the room that no one can see right now, it has never changed.

46:04Never, ever, ever changed. But that's the core of it for me. And when you think about that, right, we just, I calculated this recently. I'm 41. I'll be 42 in a few months. But 18 of the 41 years that I've been alive, Baltimore had over 300 homicides, right? So that's most, you know, of my life, basically. And I came to City Hall first as an unpaid intern in 2007 and then got a job getting paid. So I've been there just 19 years in that building. So in addition to that life experience of growing up in Park Heights, So the neighborhood that I grew up in, Park Heights, hosts the Preakness, the horse race.

46:46So I lived in a neighborhood that the whole world descends on for the third Saturday of May. And every other day of the year, we weren't even treated as human. Like that was the reality for us. But I'm in City Hall. I'm a staffer. I work on public safety policy. I work in the mayor's office. I work in the mayor's office of criminal justice. I spent a lot of time understanding what the police department's responsibility is. I'm in city hall and city government when CVI comes to Baltimore. So I'm growing up and maturing at a time where I can see I lived through zero tolerance when if you were black and breathing, you were walking, you could just go to jail simply for that reason.

47:27But the violent state. So throughout my time on the city council, I was the vice chair and then chair of the public safety committee and then became the chair of the president of the council. I talked about a lot of that Baltimore had to change the way we thought and operated when it came to gun violence, that we could not put the sole responsibility of making Baltimore a safer place on the back of the women in the BPD. Right. Just from a sheer math problem, anybody who's thinking with their brain and not with the motion, their emotion understands that at its heyday, Baltimore Police Department had 3000 police officers.

48:09Right. And we'll just say in a city of 600000. Right. 600000 people. Well, only about a thousand of them ever work at the same time. One thousand people can't keep 600000 people safe. It's literally impossible. But that is the mentality that we've had, not just in Baltimore, but in this country, that is just their responsibility. They play a very important part in that responsibility that government has to protect and keep people safe. But it's not just theirs to bear alone. So luckily for me, when I became the mayor, someone was smart enough to pass a law that says Baltimore has to have a comprehensive violence prevention plan presented to the mayor and city council.

48:53That person will be me. It's law in Baltimore that you have to have a comprehensive approach to dealing with gun violence. And we got to work building that first one. And we said that it's a public health issue. So we're going to think about it through a lens of public health. I, in 2021, rolled out the first one, walked out of a row home in East Baltimore, not unlike this one, and said that this is what we're going to do. We are going to commit to lowering homicides in Baltimore by 15 % from one year to the next. And people literally laugh. Impossible. There's no way. And it wasn't that they were laughing that we would set a goal like that.

49:37Yes, they thought that was ridiculous, but we weren't just saying that we were going to do that by going out and having mass arrests. We were being very intentional. We were going to change the way that we operated totally, including with our police department. We were no longer going to say like, OK, everybody that lives in Park Heights or everybody that lives in this part of West Baltimore is the most likely to be the victim or perpetrator of gun violence. We were going to actually find out who those people were and focus on them. That's where our group violence reduction strategy, our focus deterrence model comes from.

50:11We started in the Western District in Baltimore City, which is about 3.7 miles and roughly 60 ,000 people. And it was responsible for 16 % of the violence in the city in such a small area. And we know that basically 2 % of the population are the group of people that we need to focus on. So we started there. This is a partnership at that time between my office, the mayor's office, neighborhood safety engagement, the police department, the state's attorney's office, the attorney general office of Maryland. And what we do is we first, for individuals who are likely to be the victim, because this is group violence on group violence, people have to understand.

50:55And I want folks to understand this across the country. only 11 % of homicides countrywide are what we would call gang violence. The overwhelming majority has nothing to do with stuff like that. Yeah, I thought that was, this is something I'd been thinking about when I watched the Channel 5 piece that touched on a lot of this, was the disconnect between people's average understanding of gang violence being the fuel behind these statistics. That's what they've been brainwashed to be taught. Yeah, when in reality, it's something much different. And it seems to be like more like interpersonal issues between people and things like that.

51:40Yeah, so it's mostly, you know, interpersonal issues. And I think the difference, what happens here, we'll get to that. What happens though is that we, especially during my generation coming up, I'm a little older than you, not that much. we were like the drug war was at its height and this is what happens in this country we're seeing it happen right now with immigrants right we have a history in this country of deciding what the enemy is making things simple for the American people if you give the people something that is bad they'll know that it's bad and they'll support you in doing any and everything that you can to get rid of it.

52:20That's what happened with the war on drugs. It was up. It's the gangs. It's these folks. It's this. And in some cases, it's drug users. If drug users weren't using drugs, then there would be no drug wars. All of those kind of things. Instead of like what we should have done then is focusing on the core of the problem, right? And I think what we're doing here is starting to get at that. People are going to have conflict, right? So we identify those folks. We know who they are, right? There are some who are involved in illegal activity that we know we're just not going to have that. They're investigated by our police department who turn it over to our state's attorney, our attorney general for prosecution.

53:02But there are many of them who aren't yet involved in that kind of illegal activity. But because they are affiliated with these groups of people, they are likely to get into some conflict or other activity and even just being in a group will put them at risk these folks actually we go to them they get a letter directly from me that says i know who you are i know what you do i want you to change your life i want you to stay alive but you cannot continue to do the activities and be the places and with the people that you are and do that could you could you give me an idea like like day day one they were to this approach day two of you taking this approach, what is actually changing in that first neighborhood?

53:46Like what is this rolling out actually look like? Day one is not that. I mean, it's not about day one, right? Day zero. So we have to build this up. And I think it's important to know that, right? When we set out that we were going to do this GVRS model, everyone knew like, okay, because it's not just about the police. You have to have the community partners there. You have to have the moral voice people. We have to have people in the community that have the standing to go to people and talk to people that no one else can and convince them to agree to take their services and change their life.

54:21In Baltimore, most folks at the time had a different police commissioner. He's now the deputy mayor in New Orleans. Mr. Deputy Mayor, how are you? Michael Harrison. Only he and I thought that the age range would be older. Everyone else swore us down that we're going to be, we just need to go work with these, some of these organizations that already exist that have street credibility to work with 18 to 24 year old black men. We both said, we think it's going to be a little higher than that. So through the data, we were right. It was not 18 to 24 year olds. It wasn't even 25 to 28 year olds. It was 30 to 34 year olds.

54:59We actually had to work and build with an organization, YAP, to even get ready to do that work and to build GVRS. And folks who want to see how we did this, they can see it. It's all on a documentary called The Body Politic. You can get that on all your streaming platforms. We actually had a good friend of mine who leads the Baltimore Peace Movement and the Baltimore Community Mediation Center go around the city. having and starting in the Western conversations with the community about how we were going to build this to do something of this magnitude you cannot just go in and drop it into the community you have to build it with the community brick by brick and politically though what that meant is that we but really me I had to yield a lot of pressure and a lot of talk because while we're building that, things are not the way we want it to be out on the streets of Baltimore.

55:58But if you're going to really reimagine and rework the way that you're moving for public safety, you can't just start that on day one. You have to build that infrastructure up to get to the point where we're going to people with letters and they take it and they go and change their life or they don't and they end up in one of our investigations. So that's one part of what we were able to do, right? Because listen, it happened to me recently. I was out on the street corner and a young man walked up to me and said, Mr. Mayor, I got a letter from you. I don't know what it means. And then I was able to on the spot, ironically, because some of our CBI workers were there with me to get him in the right space.

56:40And when you think about the fact that over 90 % of the people that we have brought into that has raised their hands and say that they want services have not been re-victimized and over 90 % of those people have not recidivated into activity, it shows that it's working. But then the other folks, sorry, you will not continue to carry out violence on the streets. We will remove you. Okay. So when you're talking about people looking to receive services like i i think my understanding of this is there are people who are in like officially employed by the city in communities who are available kind of available available as community touch points for uh for people to go to or speak with or i like identify situations that might turn into something that could become violent down the road could you kind of like clarify or correct my understanding.

57:36We'll get to that. That's another part of our CVI ecosystem. When you talk about GVRS, you're talking about community growth. Most partners, we have YAP and Roka. They're the ones that come in. They do the case management, the life coaching, all of the behavior therapy, all of that. And then my offices, employment development, everyone else are the ones that connect them with the jobs, opportunities, all of that. What you're speaking about is something else that we invest in heavily in the city of Baltimore, and that's actually community violence intervention at the street level. For us, our flagship CBI program is Safe Streets.

58:12We have 10 sites across the city of Baltimore, including two in Park Heights, where I grew up, where we actually, our community partners, our community organization partners employ people, even though it works through a mayoral program, they're actually private employees that used to be out on those corners, used to be involved in the violence to now intercede and mediate conflicts that can lead into violence, right? But this is just one layer. That's just one, there are many layers. That's the street intervention that they do. And I want to just, I want to touch on that because what they do is critically important, right?

58:51We'll just, we'll use me for example. Yes, I can go out on a corner of Park Heights and Cold Spring all day long. I don't really need security to do that. Like I grew up there. Right. I know folks have been there, but I still can't have the conversation that my friend who used to be on that same corner doing the things that people doing that same corner with those people. He has an extra layer of credibility. You need credible messengers to be able to diffuse some of these issues. And if they were all here, they would tell you most of the issues that they're talking about are very simple. Someone, you know, they found out that they both had the same girlfriend and they didn't know.

59:32Right. Someone sent somebody else's girl a message on Instagram. Someone made a rap video and the person thought they were dissing them. Right. Or they got into it in a party. All of these kind of simple. This is the stuff that people are dying on over, not just here in Baltimore, but around the country. And I think it's important to go back to your point earlier that we have to we understand that the way, especially now, news is pushed down to be simple, quick and dirty. There is nothing simple or quick about murder. You cannot explain the reasons that another human being will kill another human in a 30 second or a minute clip.

1:00:12It cannot be boiled down to like, oh, this person. They had these legal problems. They sold drugs. It has to be about drugs. It doesn't. And I always say it like this. Just because someone who plays, had played football forever has a heart attack doesn't mean it happened because of football. Right? Someone can be involved in illegal activity and get killed and had nothing to do with their illegal activity. It could be about a woman. It could be about something that happened before they were doing that illegal activity. I think that in this country, we really have to get to that that portion of where we're talking about things as they are, even when they're not simple, because there's nothing simple about picking up a gun and killing someone, because we have to also understand most people, most are killed by someone that they know.

1:01:03if you're thinking about these incidents where they find someone dead in a car right where they were sitting in the front seat and they get shot in the back of the head right how many times have you heard that over and over again I don't know about you but I don't let nobody sit behind me that I don't trust with my life right like that just does not happen or you hear the stories about them like they're in the house there's no doors kicked in there's no nothing right but the person is dead in the home. That means that person was comfortable with that person being in their home. And when you think about that, for us, it then goes to another level.

1:01:39We also have our violence intervention workers in hospitals, hospital-based response, because people that get shot go where? The best place to make sure that the next incident doesn't happen is at the hospital, providing services at the bedside, right? And when you think about that, we put$50 million of our offer money into community violence intervention. And we've seen it. It's not just about Say Streets. We have We Are Us. We have the Peace Team, Challenge the Change, and Uncle T, who you saw in the other video, who makes me go viral every six months. Thanks, Uncle T. But we also have other organizations like Tendaya Family.

1:02:19You have all these groups and organizations. And this is the part where I always say to folks, because folks are looking at me, I always say this historic reduction that we have is Baltimore's victory. Yeah. Right. That's what this is. This is about all these different parts because we're also doing it in a different way, even on a law enforcement in the legal route. Right. When you think about the fact that because I have changed the way that they operate. Right. The police department is focused on the folks that are committing those those illegal acts and on the guns. They seized 2 ,300 illegal guns in the city of Baltimore just last year and 2 ,400 the year before.

1:02:59Over 60 % of them come from states, not the state of Maryland. And when you think about that and you think about how we have real gun laws here in Maryland, right, you can see how that impacts. But we don't just stop there. When I first came into office, every city was having issues with ghost guns. We sued Pilema 80, the nation's largest ghost gun company, ended their business, not just in Baltimore, Maryland, and now pretty much just ended in their business. We also just a few months ago at the end of the year, one, the largest settlement that any city has ever had on a gun dealer. $72 million against Hanover Armory outside of Baltimore City, where we knew we proved in court that they were purposely going around Maryland's gun laws and selling weapons to people that they knew would end up in the commitence of crime here in Baltimore.

1:03:56We're doing all of that. Those gun cases are being turned over to our state's attorney's office and our U.S. attorney, I mean, U.S. attorney too, but our attorney general's office here in Baltimore, who are prosecuting these gun cases. And because they're not being overloaded with a ridiculous zero tolerance policing cases, they actually are probably doing a great job of making sure that we're holding people accountable. But we did all of that. And at the same time, we have historic investments into schools in Baltimore, right? I think we, I think we're on like 12 or 13 new or renovated schools since I've been in the mayor's Baltimore.

1:04:34We've renovated five and built six new rec centers, seven pools, right? We have five rec centers under construction here. We had 8 ,500 young people with youth work summer jobs last summer. Those things are also mattering in this fight because this is Baltimore's victory. And now we just have to keep it going. This is super, super interesting because I think a giant theme of our show is talking about how nuanced problems are. Like when you talk about global issues, but even when you scale down to the issues of a city or a town, the approach that you have to take to solve problems is so complicated.

1:05:25And figuring that out is really, really challenging because people look, people want everything to be in like such black and white, like simple, this is the solution, why don't you just do this? There is no one solution. There is, and this is such a demonstration of that. I think the question I have is you and the rest of the city are taking an approach that is so comprehensive and has so many layers to it, but it took a long time for a lot of these actions to be taken. And I'm wondering how, how replicable do you think this, the, this broader approach is for, I don't know. It was like cities like, like Memphis or St.

1:06:17Louis. Like, do you think it's because it took, it took Baltimore a long time to get here. and attack the problem in such a nuanced way. And I'm wondering, is it reasonable to, can other cities look to you as a model? I'm wondering, it took a long time for Baltimore to get here. Is it reasonable for other cities to figure this out as well? I think that we have, and I think this is an important thing. yes as you said earlier we're having a more uh a steep and stark decline right than other places but we're not the only one and if you look deep uh a little secret mayors talk to each other every day all day long and when you look deep into it you'll see similar things happening right and let me just say this because i have to i have to say this for uh there's a uh in in the conference of mayors there's a secret uh group called the tennis shoe caucus uh i'm the vice president of the tennis shoe caucus the the president and leader of that is mayor ross baraka of new york new jersey will always be that person but i say it to say this uh myself uh randall woodfriend from birmingham brandon johnson in chicago justin bibb in cleveland all of us know that what i am doing and what they are doing, right?

1:07:44It's just taking the work that Mayor Baraka did years ago, over a decade ago, to the next level. That was the standard. Reimagining public safety the way he did it in Newark. What I have done and what my brothers and sister mayors have done has really been taken to have the new updated and evolved version of that. We just, in Baltimore, we're blessed because the way that our government is different, right? We I don't also now that I have my fabulous governor, Governor Moore, I don't have the issue with my state that so many of my counterparts have. Right. I don't have the preemption or and more importantly, I have someone who understands and believes in the mission and the plan and is a deep supporter of the plan.

1:08:28The governor announced his his upcoming budget for this General Assembly session and included money to help expand CBI and GVRS in Baltimore. Right. That's a big part of it for us. GVRS is funded not just with help from our federal delegation. That's the best federal delegation in the United States Congress, obviously with city money. Now we're talking about state money and also private and philanthropic partners. But yes, but there's different for every city. Right. When you think about that and when you think about some of those folks have come here. Right. I mean, you're young. I mean, we've seen a whole bunch of folks were here, I think, last year around this time, actually.

1:09:08because I'm one of the co-chairs from Mayors Against Illegal Guns. And we actually worked and talked with them about DVRS and all these other things. We're getting a new mayor of Albany, Mayor Dorsey. She's going to be here, my good sister, coming to talk. They talk. We share ideas all the time. But when you look and see the approach, actually Mayor Woodfin and I from Birmingham were on a panel in Baltimore together like a month ago. And we basically gave the exact same answer to every question because we're all doing similar things in our cities. You have to adapt it for your locality, but we're all doing similar things because it works.

1:09:47You just have to make it work for your folks. And our job really is to do the best job that we can. I want one of them to take everything that I have put in place and figure out ways to make it better so that we can continue to learn from each other. And if really the country, when we hear a lot of folks, especially in Washington, D.C., thinking about how we did nations should be moving on violence and all these other things. The truth is, is that they should be coming to the mayors. The mayors are the leaders on the issue. We're the ones that we can't escape folks. We're going to see these people in the grocery store.

1:10:23We're going to be the ones at the funerals. We're the ones that have to deliver the phone calls to those parents. That is our job. every day, which is what makes this job the toughest political job in the country without a doubt. But we also know how to get things done. We don't live in a world of hyperbole. We don't live in a world where you can just politically grandstand and show up to work and not approve a budget. We don't live in that world. If we're looking, if folks are looking for examples of how to do it, they should come to us, let us lead the way and stay out of the way. this is so it's crazy because you're preemptively answering a lot of the a lot of the questions i had and because i'm a clairvoyant they didn't tell you that yeah yeah you're you're you're beating me to the you're beating me to the punch because i i think one uh one narrative that i feel like the public has broadly there's a lot of political polarization and frustration in the country.

1:11:23Really? And I think people have this idea that at a, you know, maybe at a city, like a city council level or a mayoral level, and then on up, even if you're the president, you're sort of subject to the trends and constraints of your time. And that makes it difficult to accomplish things because you're you're stuck in this like broader political system but everything you're saying is about navigating and like finding a way to have a large impact even with those constraints yeah listen i think that and you can pull a clip uh my first day in office december the 8th 2020 i uttered something that my staff did not want me to utter and it's still drive some of them crazy.

1:12:20But it was the truth, right? I said that we would do, always do the right thing. Not the popular thing, even if it's politically bad for me. Changing the way that we did public safety at that time, right? You're in here interviewing me in Baltimore because this comprehensive violence prevention plan has had like historical success that no one else has seen and that Baltimore is outpacing the country. But at the time. But at the time, right, people were like, we shouldn't have a five-year plan. We needed to do it right now. We need a plan for this month, right? Like, yes, go back to the old ways.

1:12:57Sweep everyone up. Do all the dumb things that didn't work before, right? And I think even when they knew, right? So if you think about 2004 in Baltimore, 278 homicides that year. They arrested 91 ,000 people in a city of 600 ,000. 91 ,000? In 2024, we had 201. We arrested about 16, 17 ,000. Significantly less violence with significantly less arrests because it's never been about how many. It's about who and for what. But I said that to say this. You, we in this country, especially right now, this was true when I said it. Then we need elected officials who are unafraid to do the right thing. Even if it means they only get one turn.

1:13:42If you only get one turn, fuck it. You got that one term and you did what's right. Because having folks govern, right, for one, if you're in Congress, one year to get reelected to the next, right, because every two years or in the most, most, in most mayor offices for three years to get reelected in the next or fourth and the fourth. What has that gotten us? Right. It's gotten us into this point where people are just consistently only pushing at the margins because they don't want to ruffle in the feathers. We need the chicken plucked in this country right now. And we have to change the way things operate.

1:14:24That means that some of us aren't going to get reelected. For me, it worked out, right? I'm the first mayor in Baltimore to be reelected in 20 years. The last time the mayor got reelected in Baltimore, I was in college. I'll be out of college in 20 years on May the 13th of this year, right? We have to do that. Push the envelope now because ultimately we're not in these positions for a long time. We're in here for a good time and to do good work. I think with your point of having long-term solutions not be popular when you introduce them, like you're describing right now, now we've come around to this point where we can view the historic results.

1:15:07One thing that is really impressive to me is that the reduction in homicides stayed consistent in its quantity. Like you reduce by a huge percent, but then you reduce by a similar quantity the following year and the following year. The last three years we beat the previous year. Yeah, it's not slowing down, even as you get closer to zero, which is incredible. and the results feel almost indisputable. Like they seem really difficult to argue with. So I was curious because undoubtedly there are still people arguing. I was curious of what the pushback at this point could even, to the work that we're talking about.

1:15:55Yeah, what the pushback is? Yeah. Listen, we live in America and I think that I didn't say this, But we also have to understand the history of my great city. We know Baltimore. There would be no United States of America without this city, right? We literally right around the corner from where you are sitting, the Star Spangled Banner was written, right? You talk about the right, the war, 1812. You think about education in this country. This is why Baltimore feels in particularly personally invested in the fight around education in this country, because we have the education system in this country that we have because of a little boy from West Baltimore by the name of Thurgood Marshall.

1:16:35When you think about this city's history, people think about that. They think about some out forever congressman, the conscious of the Congress, Elijah Cummins. They think about all of these great people. but then they don't think about that the first racial redlining bill was signed in my office right they don't think about that and we have to understand that those kind of people and their thinking doesn't just go away that's why we have to undo those policies right there are still laws that i am working to change and things on the books now that are connected to that and how that impacted what happened here when you think about you have the first racial redlining laws and then you have suburbs being built and you have flight and then you have deindustrialization and gm and all these other places leave and then drugs miraculously show up in east and west baltimore when black people don't own ships right like boom you have a recipe for disaster and and now you have people who unfortunately they they're like our cvi right our our safe streets workers They're under constant attack.

1:17:42You saw the Channel 5 interview. There was a reporter who is racist who said that one of my CVI workers was a crip because he had on a blue hat. Yeah. A blue Los Angeles Dodgers hat the day that the Orioles played the Los Angeles Dodgers. That's the kind of thing that you're still fighting and that those people, because some people still think that someone that looks like me, right? Even there are some folks who are obsessed. All right. Think about it like this. The mayor, the politician didn't poll because I don't care who, quote unquote, gets the credit for the homicide reduction. Yeah, the media poll that they polled and did a story about their own poll about who should get the credit.

1:18:31Because some folks are obsessed with really if we want to pull back the onion. The reality is that some folks think that a young black man from Park Heights who, you know, is probably closer to the streets than he is to the boardroom can't be part of the solution because I'm the problem. Right. And that's the same thing for my safe streets workers. It's the same thing for my young people. It's the same thing. We people have not evolved as much as we think they have. Right. Because, look, the truth is, if it's all going bad, it's the mayor's fault. Right. But if it's going good, it's everything but the mayor's fault.

1:19:10But for the mayor, it's everybody. everybody every this is baltimore's win and that's what makes it special that everybody plays a part in it but people are trying to tear it down because they've also lost their power and sway in the world and they want to get it back they're used to controlling everything that comes out of city government in the mayor's office they don't believe that the city should be invested in the city equitably that we're building new rec centers in west baltimore and east baltimore and that we are we're doing uptown and downtown not just one part of the city there are folks that have not evolved in and we're gonna say we don't care is it i'm just more personal to you you impressively like you're you're not looking for that credit it is the city's victory there's so many layers to this it's not just about you but is there any part of you that you know was that kid who was dreaming of being the mayor all along you get into this position you you know you work in the city all those years leading up to it you create this incredible change with the help of all of these other people around you the results kind of speak for themselves and you still have that like layer of of of pushback is it is it disheartening or discouraging does it make you want to be like what you know fuck this uh like you gotta understand um i'm a young black man from park heights in baltimore i'm always gonna have that right and i think because i know my history and where my family comes from and who we are like to me that pushes me to be even better it's this it's personal to me for a different reason it's different when the gun's been in your fucking face.

1:20:59It's different when you had to duck the bullets. It's different when you've been sat down on the curb and handcuffed just because you were breathing. It's different when a few years ago, a young man that went to my high school was murdered. And his mother told me that he was looking for me before that football game. It's different. So yes, it's personal to me. It's very fucking personal to me. But I don't give a shit about the credit. As my grandmother would say, let the work that I've done speak for me, right? That's the reality. But I know that this isn't just, this is being a part of something that is greater than yourself is the best thing that any human being can do.

1:21:41And for me, this is about my city. This is about the next me who is in one of our schools or playing on a basketball court or football field somewhere that they don't have to, they live with less of what I live with as possible. That's what this is about for me. But do I think that like, oh, I would reach my goal and then America would just be like, oh, yep, look, he did it. No, I knew that. That's not the history of this country, especially when it comes to people that look like me and especially when it comes to people who look like me, who don't code switch, who don't. I will never shrink my blackness who don't do those kind of things.

1:22:26I'm not going to just be black. I'm going to be bliggity, bliggity black because that's who I am. I come from a family on one side. My mom's family escaped rural poverty outside of Richmond, Virginia in Amelia County to move here when my mom was an infant. My dad's family, my dad followed my uncles here after he graduated from high school where my grandparents ran a pig farm in North Carolina until the day they died. It's actually why I don't eat pork, right? I know the history of my family. I know that even in the 1700s in rural North Carolina, members of my family were free. They never owned me.

1:23:03So when you know your history and you know the history of this country, no, I never expected that and in the truth be told uh to have them fight me now about something else or that's their problem my job is to make those kind of people uncomfortable because i am working towards undoing systems policies practices that have kept people not just black people but anybody really who isn't wealthy and a wealthy white male from succeeding to the level that people they say people can in the American dream, whether you're a woman, whether you're Hispanic, whether you're an immigrant, whether you're LGBTQ, but including black people, because I am black, right?

1:23:48Going to continue to do that. If I always tell my team, if we go through a week and someone didn't call me nigger online, we didn't do our job, because that means we're not pushing hard enough. Honestly, that's an incredible answer, man. I'm kind of blown away. I think you have an incredibly admirable outlook. I don't think it's necessary to seek credit in life by any means. The only time I like to seek credit is about my athletic prowess. That's it. That's the only thing that matters to me. I did want to ask you, and we touched on this at the beginning. beginning i think the perception people have of baltimore is so heavily shaped by media i think the wire is a big part of that i think news media is a big part of that i think there are so many and this is you know media shapes the perspective of everything it's not you know it's not just baltimore but i think baltimore sits in this place where the media has informed a very specific view with it and i was wondering how that perception of the city especially because it shapes people who aren't from here the most heavily how does that impact your ability to do the job so it doesn't impact me i think one thing folks have to understand about baltimore is we don't really care what other people think outside of baltimore especially if you're from pittsburgh i had to make sure I put that in there.

1:25:33And New York. If I could give you a quick practical answer, like in my head, maybe because some person in the state Senate has a view of Baltimore because they watched a bunch of TV. Does that mean that you're unable to get the funding for a program you're looking for? It can be sometimes a little difficult when you're dealing with that, but I think that we have a blessing for us right now, right? The Senate president of the Maryland General Assembly represents the area that we're in right now, right? The governor of Maryland is from Baltimore. I just happen to be very good friends with the new speaker of the House in the Maryland General Assembly.

1:26:17But we know that that does have an impact. But when you think about Maryland, you have to also think about the big blue areas of Maryland, Montgomery, Prince George's County, in Baltimore City. And because we have, it's not just about when we are going for things, right? It's oftentimes we're working alongside my county executive counterparts, right? And we have to continue to do that. We do have to fight through some of that stuff that is pushed down through media, not just in the state, but around the country. But we would now, you can see, and a lot of relationship too, when you think about the fact that I've been going and talking and testifying and getting working on public safety stuff in there literally since 2011, right?

1:27:00As when I was a council person and people understand, they know that I'm going to be balanced and fair. That's what we have to continue to do. But now I think the results of what we're doing, especially nationally, is changing the narrative. When I'm out of town, I'm hearing everyone's like, oh, you guys are doing great. I want to invest in Baltimore. Like three years ago, that wasn't the case, right? We have had more positive national news stories about our city in the last two years than we probably had in the last 20. That's a good thing. But the truth is that the best way to keep that going and to change that perception is to keep changing the reality on the ground here in Baltimore.

1:27:40With the change that you're looking to in the future to kind of round things out, I'm wondering with, you know, all of the progress that has led up to this point now, what are your... What are the biggest things you're looking at in the next few years? You know, if you continue to be mayor or, you know, whether long enough in the future, you're not the mayor anymore. What are the primary things you think there are to still work on right now? Well, one, we haven't finished growing out the ecosystem, I think, to continue to work. Because, look, everyone, you haven't heard a celebratory tone from me for a reason.

1:28:19I was being ardent at the National Action Network's MLK breakfast and folks went to clap. You can see the video footage from yourself went to clap when I gave the number. And I said, don't clap. We have nothing to celebrate. We acknowledge the historic progress. But 133 lives is 133 too many for me because one life is one too many, as we say, and we are us. But for me, we have to grow that. GVRS is in five of our police districts. We have four more to get to. We have to continue to do that work. We have to make sure that all this ecosystem with CBI, with hospital based response, safe streets is there already with GBRS and all these other things that we're doing are institutionalized.

1:29:04And not just in city regulation and all of those things, but also within the mind and the culture of the community so that when the day comes that I'm no longer in the chair, they can't walk away from it. What has happened in Baltimore and many places before is that people come in and they change it just because it's not their idea. And we have to make sure that we're doing that. That's the work that has to continue now so that we're just seeing less and less. But we're not just focused. Yes, everyone thinks it, but we're not just focused on violence. We have to focus on economic development. We are tackling vacant housing in Baltimore.

1:29:43When I was a junior in high school on December the 8th of 2000, Baltimore had 16 ,000 vacant properties. When I took office on December the 8th of 2020, we had 16 ,000 vacant properties. We now have that down to 12 ,100 and something. I didn't check it this morning. That's a big drop. But we have a plan to eliminate it over the next 15 years between the city, GBC and our business community, building the community, our state government that is helping with us. We just put out a first of its kind TIF, instrument financing, tax breaks, what people normally call it, not for some wealthy development in a wealthy area, but on the vacant housing across the city of Baltimore.

1:30:26Right. And that is now that work is now starting to really catch fire. And that's the work that has to continue to happen as well to continue to make Baltimore progress. That's where we're going to be focused on that and the people element as well. Thank you. And winning the World Series in the Super Bowl, but that's the conversation. Well, LA's kind of holding it down right now before the World Series. Until this year. They won't be able to buy it this year. It's coming home, baby. Black and orange. Book it. I'm actually a Blue Jays fan, so I was pretty sad. Oh, wow. It will be in AL East, but not across the Canadian border, my friend.

1:31:10I, uh, thank you. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate your time. Um, it's really nice to get, uh, just more background on what's going on, uh, directly from you. Cause I think a lot of, uh, you know, the headlines and the stats are like what are heavily perpetuated through news media. And I think you see like a lot of the same information regurgitated over and over again, especially when you're outside of Baltimore itself. So to get to hear this from you is incredible. Thank you so much for coming on.

1:31:44Brandon Scott:Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. It's tax season and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply. Spring is here, and the shopping list is long.

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1:32:53It's weeknight dinners. Sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Welcome back. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the interview. I wanted to do a little wrap up of that. And I wanted to see what you guys thought of, especially Doug. My, my feeling, we're trying to, we have a sub goal to keep my words below 100.

1:33:39I have to be very choosy with my words. In the latter half of the interview, I really felt like there's this theme in what he's saying that is deeply echoed through our show from basically the start and a lot of the books we've read of there are no easy solutions to problems. This era of looking at things as just do this and you will and fix the problem this way. It doesn't exist. It's not how you solve anything. You need to have a deep, like nuanced understanding of the communities where problems exist and a multi-layered approach to be able to tackle issues as complex as your city's, you know, high, high murder rate or housing or healthcare.

1:34:36These things are not just do this and you will fix it. And it's It's eye-opening to me as somebody, to look at him as somebody who is so young, he's 41 now and he got elected in 2020. Wow. And to see someone like him so confident and motivated and humble in taking that approach on and then also finding success. Like he has demonstrated that this attitude can translate into policy change and an approach on the ground that actually changes the problem. Like it honestly made me incredibly hopeful. And that was my biggest feeling coming out of this interview. I was wondering how you maybe echo some of that or maybe feel differently.

1:35:34no i there was two like two i don't lines or segments i thought were badass one is him being like i know i wanted to be baltimore mayor since i was what like 10 so he was a nine nine yeah i was just wild to do that and then make it happen that's that's awesome that's super badass um he's a cool ass dude man he's like he's like cool uh and then the second thing that i was super not expecting was him saying that being a mayor is the hardest political job never would have thought a mayor would say that forever because even us i mean you know behind the scenes we've had the opportunity to interview other mayors and uh and we've sort of been like i thought you meant even

1:36:11Brandon Scott:us like we're the hardest political job no no no no i mean it is very difficult i'd say that a mayor is hard even though we have the hardest job there is because we are warriors yeah and the you know one of the things he mentioned that i had never thought about is that as a mayor you're like in your community and you see the people like it's it's maybe as influential as you can be in politics while still just like literally being in your community every day seeing them every day like mentioning that somebody's going to come up to you in the grocery store based on something you just did or said and that was really interesting to me i mean talking about us on ironically i think of this job as hard because people say mean things about me on the internet sometimes the idea that people are saying that to your face all day every day that's like a thousand times harder.

1:36:56And then the idea that, you know, somebody in the Senate goes and lives in Washington, DC, most of the year, they're traveling or they're doing all these things and they're not actually face to face with it. They're like us, they're internet warriors and they go on X if they feel like it. But I thought that was like really fascinating. And it made me think, okay, it made me value the position of mayor. I think more than I had, because probably like many of you, it's just It's like, well, mayor does less things geographically than a senator or a governor, which does less than the president. But it's like, man, if you're really having that much on the ground effect.

1:37:32And then ties to his other points, which is like the fact that he's actually lived there and knows it means he's one of the only people qualified to come in and actually speak to the community.

1:37:40Brandon Scott:Closest to the problems. They understand them better. And even he mentions how like that's true of him. But even that goes further if you want somebody who's actually lived on that street to monitor that street. And that's how you're going to be effective. So I really liked a lot of what you said. You know, this is a weird segue, but you've worked in a, you've worked at the EA, right? Like a big corporation. This is such a common thing there where the people that are higher up are often so far removed from the actual reality of what has to get done in the actual work that the guy who's doing middle management or whatever is actually the one in the weeds or in depth on the real problem that needs to be done.

1:38:13Brandon Scott:and the hardest part is getting their solutions, enough power and buy-in higher up. This is one of my questions I wanted to ask him, but I didn't get to ask because we did run out of time. And I was, because over the course of this interview, I'm developing this feel for certainly part of the reason, maybe the largest part of the reason why he's so successful at this job is because of how ingrained in the community he is and how much genuine care and love he has for his own city, right? Yeah. And in a way, I don't, like, when I look at my own upbringing, I wonder, especially you, because of the way you grew up in, like, a military family moving around and stuff.

1:38:54Yeah, yeah. I actually feel like this is a big, like, whole, it's actually hard for me to, like, relate to people at a personal level because I moved around so much when I was younger. Oh, yeah, yeah. I did not have, like, a town or a city that I, like, definitively feel a strong connection to. I think it's also a huge part of the reason why I see moving as a part of my future. Because it's not, I don't really, I feel very differently about the connection to where I'm from because of how I grew up, my roots. But he is very much the opposite, right? And I wanted to ask if he thinks that's essential to being politically successful, like genuinely politically successful, not getting elected, but like by your actions successful.

1:39:46And because so many people, especially at the top sphere of politics, feel like they're jumping around looking for positions that they can just land, right? Like when you see somebody, and I'm sure he could be a good guy, but someone who came to mind was Tom Steyer, who I think I see running for California governor. and I think he was in a position in Colorado a few years ago when he was like running the Democratic primary but people like him of there are many at that top level of politics where they're playing like the game and they try to become like I try to become the mayor of this city I'm not actually from and then a state senator of this state I've only lived in for a little bit and then climb up the political ranks I feel like I see so much of that that's why I liked Andrew Cuomo getting back to the mayoral roots of New York city, you know, he was going back to where he's from man of the people.

1:40:38I, I, I genuine and maybe maybe not even like if I were to look at it in the best faith faith possible, it's, I, I, I feel like it's very difficult to actually engage with problems. If your, your life is just so far removed from them. If you didn't grow up in that city. You just don't understand what the problems could even be, even if you want to.

1:41:03Brandon Scott:Especially the detail, which I think mattered. The little details of like how, like what is bottleneckiness from actually happening? Yeah. And genuinely also in this comes up in the interview that you all just watched a few times, but he, he notes it's like, because I'm black, like I understand what the, the problems are in Baltimore and, and, and what I had to deal with growing up and what black people in Baltimore deal with in a, in a way that I think would be harder for, I mean, anybody outside of Baltimore, but maybe a white person from Baltimore to understand like genuinely. And I, I think that is also a theme in the interview and I'm not, I'm not saying it's impossible for an outsider to come into something and do a, do a good job.

1:41:52And also there's a lot of mayors who live in that city who become mayor who suck balls yes that's not like a guarantee of success it's like a thing about hell no no there's a whole history of people's shit and bricks i actually talked to a handful of people in baltimore uh talked to another person that works in politics there uh to do like background for this interview yeah and it's a they've actually had a horrendous track record of mayors in the past of your generation of corruption yeah yeah uh so he he stands out for many different reasons but it did make me question the idea of are you if are you able to do the job effectively even with the best even with the best intentions if you're not if you didn't grow up in that state or that city at the very least uh like could i ever be an effective say i was running for office and i grew up my whole life in washington state and then i just run for like mayor of albany one day it's like i'm

1:42:50Brandon Scott:probably not going to do that great of a job i don't think you could do it if you lived in one place for a hundred years i think you should not be voting at all but i get your your your point i wanted to ask him that and see what his opinion on it was because i i don't know if that's necessarily my solid opinion but as i was listening to him speak it was something i started to think about. It's like, do you need his level of community understanding to truly be effective at this job? And also, you know, I think I want to talk about Mom Donnie real quick. He's one month in. I do think it helps with communication at the very end.

1:43:25Brandon Scott:If you can understand the problems and speak to them effectively, which I think that's been one of the standout parts of Mom Donnie's campaign and his early term as mayor. Again, not much has actually happened We're only a month in. There's not much radical change. Although the childcare stuff was pretty well ahead of schedule. Yeah. But, you know, a large part of what he's doing is being the communicator of what's going on. And he's remarkably adept at it. I think he's really good at it. And, you know, I saw there was some people from Cuomo's administration who reviewed his handling of the first major crisis in New York since he got elected, which was this massive cold front.

1:44:07Brandon Scott:Not a massive crisis, but there's been a massive... And they all gave him an A. They said he did remarkably well. It was his communication, his leading from the front. He went out there. He's obviously not an experienced shoveler, but he shoveled. He's done what he needed to do to get New Yorkers to understand what's going on. Everything ran smoothly. So again, I got to say, I think it's lending credence more to what you're saying. There's a guy from New York who's speaking in a way that people understand. Well, hold on. He's not from New York. That's where he was from New York. He grew up in Ghana, didn't he?

1:44:36No, until he was seven. Oh yeah, but like, then they moved it and they moved it. So he's been in New York since he was like seven. Oh, okay. I thought he moved a lot later. Okay, that makes more sense. Is it Uganda? Uganda? Was it, yeah, sorry. I think it's Uganda. We should make sure. I should go look at the history of this, but. But I think also to, I mean, this is maybe, I don't want to ding Mamdani by necessarily on this, but I think a strength of Mayor Scott's background as well is how long he was in Baltimore politics before he took that position, which is crazy considering how young he was.

1:45:12But I think Momdani's political tenure within New York, I mean, Momdani's younger for one, but him being a little, Mayor Scott's political experience in Baltimore and how involved in the city he was, the way he understood the institutions going into becoming mayor and like the plans that he had ahead of time and his relationships with those people in the mayor's office or like in other departments before he became that person all seemed to have such huge effects on his ability to create the change in the past like five years. So I think that's another part of it too is like coming up in your city's politics.

1:45:57And then there's a weird question here of like, well, when we're talking about like a state senator or a president or like a national level position, you're getting, you're getting so zoned out. That's like, could you ever truly understand the community you're representing anyway? Yeah. I quick, quick, just correction. You guys are right. It was a Uganda, not so it Uganda. And then actually at five, he moved to South Africa. And then, so at seven, he moved to New York, which to me is like, clearly he grew up in New York city. Yeah. You can put me in. Yeah. My first six years, you put me wherever and I still grew up in Sacramento.

1:46:30know like it's like i didn't move to the u.s permanently until i was 11 you know so and canada there's a massive cultural gap and a lot of people don't mention that yeah

1:46:42particularly between canada and washington state it's a world apart yeah even possibly just so for people who don't know if you drive between the two there's no difference if there's not a border crossing you would not it's just it's it's night and day yeah it's like absolutely incorrect yeah it's just i'm really excited to you know more so than already follow what mom donnie is doing and as part of this i looked up a little bit of like what has he done so far and it's you know it's a lot of like executive orders and saying things that's going to happen one of the i forget the forgive me the exact terminology of it but he's like creating an office that is just specifically going to be about communicating a ton with the community so he is super on board with this theme of i mean already he's very good at communicating but the like instituting it as part of his office of like, we're going to talk to the community all the time.

1:47:29It's like pretty notable. And then, uh, yeah, and this childcare thing, I mean, we, you know, super briefly go over it. Um, but already him and the governor of, uh, of New York have announced like this start program for free childcare for two year olds, I believe. Um, and then, so it's going to be universal childcare for two year olds. And then it's going to be expanding over the next couple of years. And this was like right out the gate. Like that's, that's pretty crazy to come out with a big sort of universal child care plan.

1:47:57Brandon Scott:People were impressed with how quick it was. Well, okay, so this is maybe my villain chair here, and what I think is maybe particularly impressive about Mayor Scott is... Yeah, so let's everybody, which mayor do we like better? Which one? Rank them out. I think the thing with Momdani is everything seems cool. I'm excited. Yeah, we're a month in. We're a month in. Let's see how it works out everything seems promising dope i think the thing that impressed me about mayor scott is like we're doing this on the he says it's himself work isn't done he still got plenty to do he was a bit of a jobs not done moment i love that but like he's like telling people when they start clapping to not don't clap that's awesome we're not done i love that i love that shit and and him uh but he's on the like five year end not the or the five year tail of already doing a bunch of having done some having done some shit with real results and maybe the last thing i wanted to touch on was i was so hung up on i do not think you should ever be in these positions for like personal credit or something but i do think there's like of course a personal layer of have i like i've so clearly done i've so clearly done a good job right like you he could be like that yeah and and be a little pissed it's crazy to see that like you have something so you have a result that's so straightforward it's so demonstrable and he still has haters he still has haters and okay wait this This is a question I want to ask you both.

1:49:38Brandon Scott:Because this reminds me of like a thought that someone gave that stuck with me. Basically, with the way politics is now, you can all, the downsides for your psyche and for your reputation are like so uncapped and massive. And the upsides are really not, like even if you do a great job like this, people that likes you, likes you. You know what I'm saying? You're not, it's not a big celebration. You're not making money. It's not, you know what I'm saying? Your rewards are very. And so the theory of this was that this incentive structure is bringing only, almost only, obviously this is an exception, but the worst people into politics, like the, cause only someone who is a true psychopath would choose to use their talent and time and energy to try and run this ladder versus go start a business or what, you know what I'm saying?

1:50:29Brandon Scott:Like this is an, yeah. That's why it's impressive. he has this outlook, I think, because I think you're right. I think it does push people who are like that into these positions. He's on this other end where I think his genuine love for Baltimore and the place he grew up in and how he wanted to improve it as a child that has carried through his entire life is what carries him through. It's truly not about him. It's about the city is making a change as a city. It's not me. It's like all of these people across all of these neighborhoods, these different organizations, these different departments in the government, they all do this work.

1:51:17And like, I'm like a part of that. And I think if you're, you can find on the other end, instead of this person who is like, basically like narcissistic enough or enough to do the job, On the opposite end, it's someone who has such a deep love for where they're from that they're willing to step up and be like the vector for change. I think maybe that's my hope. And Mom Donnie gives me like a glimmer of that. He seems like more pointed in that direction. And maybe like you're saying, as we climb into this like era of frustration, like we'll build up more figures like this. That's kind of my hope is like these are the diamonds that we'll create.

1:52:00Brandon Scott:You've seen a lot of diamond. That's a spooky thought for me because this guy feels like he was designed in a Baltimore lab to be the perfect guy to love the city to grow up there. And it's like, we need someone like that for Blythe. There's got to be a person that loves every one of these cities to make the change. Shit, does Des Moines have that guy? Like, I don't know. And so, yeah, I guess that's the worrying part. I'm really impressed by what you're talking about. There's no shot Rockford, Illinois has that guy. We're just shitting on random cities. No one could love them. Anyway, guys, we include the interview.

1:52:43Brandon Scott:This is probably pretty over time. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Lemonade Stand. The Lemonade Stand curse is not to be blamed for anything that's happened in January. Well, no, no. Last week, we talked about the tariffs for Greenland, and they immediately got overturned. Oh, that was the blessing. The limited cent blessing. Right. So I don't know what we would be blessing here. I honestly would not be surprised if this episode comes out and immediately Trump has fired Christy Noem or Stephen Miller. God willing. Unironically, I think it will happen. Maybe this year we're getting blessings.

1:53:10Brandon Scott:Maybe we're going to go after bad events, and they're going to get better. 26th, the year of limited cent blessing. Or it's like a weird monkey's paw where Brandon Scott gets put into DHS, like head of DHS. and we're like oh shit it's this weird homunculi of what was discussed on the episode it's forced into a single government entity just just sick and twisted however it goes we'll cover it uh next week but i am hoping for a week with no major insane current event because there's a lot of like stuff to catch up on again you know we talk about things other than we talk about economics we talk about uh tech on this show and there's been some incredible developments both in the world of tech AI and then you know I mean the US dollar is like plummeting this year there's a lot of talk about economically that I think we like to get to so we'll plan for that next week unless something else crazy happens uh thank you guys for watching looking forward to seeing your reactions and uh thanks Aiden for going out to Baltimore and doing that I thought that was really cool thanks Aiden later everybody bye thought sweet green was just salads think again there's a new way to do sweet green wrapped and ready these handheld wraps pack bold flavor and 40 plus grams of protein into something hearty, satisfying, and built for life on the go.

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