Political Leadership Lessons From Mayor G.T. Bynum & Rusty Bailey

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1:04Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

1:56Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I want to talk politics with you. No, no, no. Please don't turn it off. Not that kind of politics. That's not what I want to do. Of course, we know the Stoics were involved in politics. We tend to focus on the Stoics who are involved in politics at the highest level, right? We got senators, we got consuls, we got the emperor of Rome. Seneca said actually the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that the Stoics were engaged in public life and the Epicureans ran from it. Well, look, we live in dysfunctional political times.

2:29Now we're in an election year here in the US. We're really in an election year all over the globe. And it's kind of terrifying. Who's winning here? Who's winning there? Sort of extremists on both sides. But one of the things, one of the problems with media culture today, one of the problems with politics today is that we tend to focus on national politics and then geopolitics, right? Because these are the big things. These have involved the wars and trade policies and, you know, these sort of big picture, contentious, major issues. But the reality is not just that expression, like all politics is local, but most political decisions are happening at the local level.

3:07And these are the ones that actually impact and affect your life. And these offices are usually held not by hyper-partisan individuals. And usually the best ones are hyper-competent issues who are solving actual problems for other people. They are involved in real leadership issues. And it's important that we remember that most of the Stoics who were involved in politics would have been people like this. Mark Subrileus' philosophy teacher, Rusticus, he gives a job effectively as the mayor of Rome, the city. Plutarch, the great writer, serves as sort of a local official in his province in Greece, which is ruled by the Roman Empire.

3:48There would have been so many Stoics that we've never heard of that just held these sort of ordinary positions in government, in public life. And they were just trying to do the best they could. They were trying to be effective, honest, hardworking, decent, problem-solving leaders. And that's actually what I wanted to talk about today. So a couple of years ago, we did this thing called the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. And I think it's one of the best challenges, sort of courses we've done here at Daily Stoic, where we look at what the Stoics can teach us about leadership. And you can take this, I'll link to it.

4:21It's an ongoing thing. But as part of it, I wanted to interview and talk to people, modern leaders who were fans or followers of stoicism. And I talked to GMs of sports teams. I talked to Air Force generals. I talked to small business owners. And then this summer, I talked to two political leaders of opposite parties. I talked to Mayor G.T. Bynum, who's the Republican mayor of Tulsa, where he's held office with quite a lot of popularity since 2016. And then G.T. Bynum is actually part of kind of like a political dynasty. He is the fourth member of his family to serve as mayor. This is the family business.

5:06He's been there forever. It's crazy. He is the great grandson of Robert Newton Bynum, who served as mayor of Tulsa from 1899 to 1990. How fascinating is that? And he too is going to be retiring. He said he's not running for a third term for mayor in 2024. He and I have gone back and forth over email many times over the years. I've gotten to know him. And then, if you don't know, I went to college in Riverside, California, UC Riverside. That's where I dropped out of. And I went back there and gave a talk many years ago, and I met Rusty Bailey, who was then the mayor of Riverside. He left office in December of 2020, but his most recent job was as the mayor of Riverside, this lovely but complicated college town of no small population.

5:55He was a Democrat. And I wanted to talk to both of them about how you actually hold this office, how you don't get corrupted by it, how you try to make the city and the people in that city better, what citizens can do. Anyways, we had two great conversations. I wanted to combine those two so we can kind of have this look at stoic politics on an accessible, practical, and I think non-divisive, non-partisan level. I was really proud of these two conversations. And they're both fascinating people. Mayor Bailey went to West Point and he served in the army as a helicopter pilot and platoon leader. He worked for the U.S.

6:34Department of Housing and Urban Development. One of his big things as mayor was trying to tackle the homeless problem in Riverside. So again, these guys didn't have agendas. They didn't have, you know, higher office they were necessarily appealing for. They're just trying to do their job. And I think they can teach us a lot of awesome lessons. I was really excited to put this compilation together. I think you're going to get a bunch out of listening to it. If you want to sign up for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, definitely do that. And if you're a member of Daily Stoic Life, which we've got a lot of different leaders in, you get this challenge and all our challenges totally for free.

7:04You can grab that at dailystoiclife.com.

7:15So here's Mayor Rusty Bailey. Serendipitous, to say the least. Yes, very much so. I walked out. on the patio, the mayor's patio of city hall on top, looking out over downtown Riverside. And there was a group out there having a discussion and there was this young author named Ryan holiday and he had gone to UC Riverside and, and then decided, you know what, I don't, I'm going to go, I'm going to go do, I'm going to do the real world instead of this academic stuff. I'm going to go be a writer and dropped out of UC Riverside, but came back, Came back to see what was going on and talked to a small group of business folk.

7:54I think it was the pick, the pick club, young professionals in Riverside. Yeah, or something with the Chamber of Commerce, right? I think. Yeah, yeah. And so I stepped out on the patio and listened to you for a while. And then we started talking about streetcars. Yeah. Yes. Oh, I forgot about that. I want to ask you about that. So, okay. So what I remember from this, I'm trying to remember, was this like 2015, 2016, maybe just yeah right right about that time yeah i think i think they had bought a bunch of copies uh of one of my books in exchange for me coming to talk uh i think i got a copy of that which which i was very excited to do having gone to riverside and have a very fond place in my heart for it um and i didn't i didn't expect to meet you but but that was yeah almost eight eight or so years ago now, which is pretty incredible to me.

8:49And yeah, just such a wonderful place. And I'm excited that we get to do this. So walk me through your story a little bit. I can't imagine too many kids from Riverside end up at West Point. How did it go for you? There's a few of us. There's a few of us that made it and survived. And so there's a little bit of a tradition there, but really I was, I was born and raised in Riverside. My dad, born and raised, grandpa came in 1914 from Missouri, trekked across, you know, country and worked in the orange groves. Exactly. It's the stories of people. I was listening to one of your last podcasts and just, you know, thinking about the stories of my family and how they got here, kind of like yours up in Northern California.

9:42And so my story is partly the, you know, coming from the Midwest and looking for a new, you know, a new life. And they settled in Riverside, probably saw a packing label with orange, you know, orange groves and palm trees on it and set up shop on the corner of Adams and Arlington. And so they were citrus farmers on my dad's side in 1914. On my mom's side, she actually came because the Air Force Base in Riverside, March Air Force Base, not Reserve Base, you know, has brought a lot of talent, you know, to Riverside and through Riverside. And so those are some big magnets, I would say, that collect people in our city.

10:29So I, you know, followed kind of my dad and grandpa's footsteps in a public service, you know, grew up in leadership from student, you know, eighth grade student body president to Pauly High School student body president, similar to most West Point graduates, you know, they get there, they dip their finger in leadership at the, in the high school level. But, you know, left as a 17 year old, probably too immature to join the Army at that time, but, you know, survived the four years and graduated in 1994 and then was in the Army as a helicopter pilot for a few years after that. But my story, you know, morphed into one of service at the county level, at the federal level, went back to grad school at UCLA and got my Master's in Public Policy at the new School of Public Affairs there, the Leskin School of Public Affairs where I met and really, you know, kind of got me into politics.

11:33Michael Dukakis, Governor Michael Dukakis, who started, was one of the individuals that started the school there at UCLA. And so he definitely is a mentor of mine, a political mentor of mine, and got me thinking about running for office. And then went to a presidential management fellowship for a couple years out of grad school, where during that time I met my wife. And as you all know, who are married, you know, things change when you get married for the better, of course, if my wife is watching this or hears this. And so she was from Riverside and we decided to move home from Washington, D.C., where I was working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and started a life here.

12:13And she got me actually into teaching, never intended to be a teacher, but I was working at the county economic development agency and ended up, you know, seeing the good life in teaching and connecting with kids and having your summers off and ended up coaching as well. And then somebody started recruiting me to run for office as city council initially for five years there, one full term. And then the mayor of Riverside, one of the professors you might have seen or heard or audited his class, Mayor Loveridge, was in office for 19 years in Riverside as the mayor, another 14 as a city councilman.

12:57So 33 years of public service, another one of my mentors. And so he recruited me to run for mayor when he stepped down and I ran and won and had two terms and then said, enough is enough. I need to step away, get back into civilian life and enjoy some weekends and nights off and spend time with the family. And so I went back into the teaching field after that. But that's a snapshot of my... I love that. Yeah. Service, leadership, always kind of been a part of my family. My dad went to Stanford and became a Superior Court judge back in Riverside. My grandpa went to RCC Stanford, came back, was a school district administrator in Riverside.

13:37And so that's my legacy is of service to our hometown. And although we both, you know, all three of us kind of went away for a time and, you know, got some experience, knowledge, skills, abilities and education. we desire, we wanted, we'd made the choice to come back and put that to use in our hometown. Was this something that your family consciously talked about, like a legacy of putting down roots where you're from, being of service, taking public service jobs, running for office, you know, working your way up through the sort of the local system or power structure? Or was it just something you saw modeled?

14:21Yeah, I would say it's organic. It was modeled and just kind of followed along. You know, enjoyed watching my dad and in his capacity as a spirit court judge. And, you know, I remember going down to the courthouse and playing around, running down the hallways and just, you know, he was always introducing me to some really interesting individuals and educated you know, folks in town and rubbing elbows with some of the politicians. And also just, you know, I remember him out in Paris, California, who's a municipal court judge out there. He'd take me out there and Paris Valley days, he'd be flipping pancakes, you know, and serving people and judging the floats at the parade.

15:08And so those types of connections to the community, I think, were instilled in me at a young age, you know, and really allowed me to, you know, figure out what was important about service. And it really comes down to connections with others and making sure that you can represent them by knowing them and the character of our community. And you can only do that by getting out and pressing flesh and, you know, knocking on doors and learning about, you know, the issues from the people themselves. And so what drew you to West Point, to West Point, if the family tradition is, is Stanford, what draws you to the other side of the country and to a very different model of education?

16:00Yeah, yeah, great, great question. Well, one of them was, you know, Stanford didn't, didn't accept me. So, but I did get into West West Point early. So I kind of joke that I had to earn my degree at West Point versus, you know, I think they only give A's and B's at Stanford. But at West Point, it's definitely you earn everything that you, you know, you get there. But my brother actually was in the Army, I would say that he was a huge inspiration for me looking at the military as a career path, leadership and service. When I when I looked at the different academies, I applied to both Naval Academy and West Point and left Air Force out.

16:37But, you know, it came down to leadership of human beings, you know, the military and the Navy and the Air Force. The systems are at the core of what they do, whether it's the aircraft or whether it's the ship. But in the military, the core of what they do is lead others, you know, into combat and support those that are on the front lines. And so that's what really gravitated me towards West Point. And like I said, I applied early and got in and never looked back. It must have been an intimidating experience. I was just talking to someone about Grant's memoirs. And one of the most striking parts of Grant's memoirs is just how scared he was to start at this school and how miserable the first year is for him.

17:27And, you know, it takes a while basically for the process to start to work on this kid. on this kid. And I mean, they were younger than I think they were 15 or 16 and they're coming from these tiny farm towns and it's a much more brutal system in many ways. But what were you drawing on just to sort of get through that or to, to, I, that's a heavy thing for a 17, 18 year old, just what you're, the thought process you're working through there that, that, that saying like, I want to be a leader of people like at 17 or 18, I, I don't know what I was thinking about, but it wasn't that. That's a great question.

18:06It just, you reminded me that they gave us that book. I probably have it around here on one of the shelves, you know, it's that thick and Grant wrote it. And then he died like a week after, you know, really after he finished that, that memoir and what an incredible leader he was and went through the ringer himself. um so so definitely you know when you when you look at at some of the the history of west point and individuals that made it through there we we draw on that and they you know they talk about those different leadership styles whether it was patent or or grant or eisenhower um but i think at the core it goes back to um being with other like-minded individuals that are there to serve their country and to develop their leadership and, you know, be part of the institution.

18:58And so, you know, from day one, you have to rely on your roommates and your teammates, you know, and your classmates to get through. And really for me, being a Californian, what saved me was the volleyball team. And, you know, they always encourage you to find your niche and find whether it's a club, a team, a sport to be able to sync up with. And that camaraderie that is felt, not just corporately with 4 ,000 other individuals at West Point, but through your company, they organize just like the military. So you have a company structure with a couple of hundred individuals in it and a battalion and a regiment, but having some like-minded individuals, like you said, from the West Coast that maybe think a little bit differently and like to have a little bit of fun.

19:49And so the Army volleyball West Point team or the volleyball team at West Point was a bunch of Californians. And, you know, we gravitated to each other and had fun, you know, together and would take trips together. And so they really diffused a lot of the stress and tension that was there, at least for me. And I can say that other people had a similar experience, whether it was, you know, with a sports team or with a club, that's how they got through the struggles and stresses that were there. And if you don't know, you know, about West Point, it's, I think they call it, you know, it's, it's how many, so it's four years, you know, stands two months, but you're, you're in the military, you have a card, you're getting paid to go there.

20:42Your summers are not off. You know, you're not getting the same time off as other college, you know, students. And so you're in it. And I'll never forget the first day, just a quick, you know, example of government issue from the first day. You know, they shave your head, they put on, you know, the same clothes, your uniform, they're teaching you all the you know, basic military verbiage, as well as the movements, you know, left face, right face, but so you're going through these different lines, and at one point in time, they said, hey, you're from California, you're from Southern California, I said, yeah, you know, yes, sir, well, come this way, and so they divert you into another room, you're from Southern California, yes, yes, sir, I'm, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, take a little bit of blood from you, and breathe into this tube, and And later I find out that because, you know, I was from Southern California, you know, they were doing a study on lung capacity of individuals.

21:49And it was a USC study that, you know, the Army put into effect at West Point. And so, you know, your government issue from day one is my point. And as a 17-year-old, you're not going to ask any questions. And so that was just an interesting memory that I've always had and kind of shared to illustrate the point of when you're in the Army, you're a government issue.

22:32work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas.

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25:26When I spoke to a West Point class on Tuesday, I think, no, Monday or Tuesday, I did it remotely. And so we're doing it in Zoom or Teams or whatever. And they were doing it remotely from their rooms also because they wanted them to have the chance to get a little bit of rest. I could tell they need it because this kid falls asleep in the middle of the conversation. It's like a Q &A. He falls asleep. But they had to have their sound on. And so he was making the most sound, right, because he's sort of breathing heavily. And so it puts it on display for everyone. So it's me and him side by side while I'm talking.

26:09He's asleep. It was pretty great. And all I could think the whole time was, oh, man, he's going to get in so much trouble, isn't he? I hope nobody notices. But to go back to Grant really fast, what I think I'd point out a book to everyone that I really enjoyed recently. There's a book called Grant's Final Victory that's about that final year of Grant's life. So, you know, you think about this difficult time Grant has as a kid. He's sort of sent away from his family, traveled across the country, goes to this school and just sort of kicks his ass. And it's partly that experience that he draws on at these sort of dark moments in his life when he when he busts out of the military and he's selling firewood by the side of the road.

26:51You know, that's what he's thinking about. And then after the war, he becomes part of this Wall Street firm, a Wall Street fund. And it looks like it's going very, very well for a long time. And then it turns out that it's being run by this sort of Bernie Madoff figure who's basically stealing all of the money. And so not only is Grant not getting rich, but Grant is losing everything he's earned in his presidential career, his awards, all this stuff. And Grant loses everything to the point where he has to hawk his Civil War mementos to J.P. Morgan. So Grant gets this devastating blow. And then he finds out he's dying of tongue cancer.

27:37And so he spends the last year of his life basically in excruciating pain, like pain to drink water, pain to cough, pain just to sit there. And he's trying to write this book to leave his family something to live on, which he ends up succeeding. Yeah, he finishes and I think dies three or four days later. You can tell that it's sort of the final campaign. he's drawing on everything that he learned both how to think how to talk how to communicate how to give orders you know he's drawing on this to fulfill this sort of final you know campaign in this case against time itself and he produces this amazing memoir uh and and and ultimately the the memoir makes like the equivalent of 10 or 15 million dollars in today's dollars it's just he manages to succeed.

28:31But it is crazy how these sort of early experiences that we have can be so formative. Like, what do you think you learn? What are some of the things you feel like they really taught you about leadership? If the purpose of the West Point is to raise men and women to lead men and women, what is that philosophy built around, like, specifically? Yeah. So I always and the purpose of the United States Military Academy is to provide nation and the leaders of character to serve the for the common defense. Right. Yes. Provide the nation with leaders of character who serve the common defense. But number one, it boils down to lead by example.

29:14And then number two, take care of your troops. They always are focused on those two cornerstones of leadership. If you don't lead by example, people aren't going to trust you. People aren't going to follow you. And then if you don't take care of your troops, bad things are going to happen there as well. You know, we saw that in Vietnam and other places with fratricide, et cetera. So those are the two, you know, tenants, core tenants, I would say that I've learned and used throughout my career is to lead by example in whatever I do, walk the talk, another way of saying that, and then to take care of my troops, whether that's, you know, your family, whether that's your city, whether that's your classroom, the students in the classroom, your coach on the field.

30:04with your players, they will produce a lot more for you if they know that you're taking care of them. And again, you're leading by example. Yeah. And that must be such a tricky balance because you are having to send into harm's way the people that you are taking care of. So you have to build this relationship of trust. And at the same time, I wouldn't say exploit that trust, but at the same time, you're building the trust to then deploy that trust. And it's based on this, this, you know, willingness to make sacrifices along that line. Yeah, exactly. And so so you always have to lead from the front, you know, if you're not seen as a as a leader, it's going to, you know, be the first into harm's way, the first into battle, the first into whatever, then you're probably not going to have anybody, you know, following you and protecting you.

31:11So, you know, that's, you could see that with leadership today is that people, you know, a lot of times aren't willing, you know, to take some of those risks and lead by example, across the board in Congress, and they're making decisions based on personal gain or political preference instead of doing the right thing. And their decision process is huge in that respect, I would say. One of my favorite Grant stories along these lines is when Grant takes over the Army of the Potomac. This is the army that has been sort of kicked up and down the east coast of the U.S. by Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy, sort of been typically on the retreat, typically, you know, although they had more advantages and more resources, you know, not on the offensive.

32:10And so, you know, Grant deploys them in the Battle of the Wilderness, and it is a brutal, terrible battle, you know, so bad that like forest fires are being started by the sheer number of sort of rifle shots. And, you know, it's one of the worst things that's ever happened on U.S. soil. And so, you know, typically this would have been another Union defeat and they would have retreated back towards the safety of the North. And Bruce Catton, one of the great biographers of the Civil War tells this story is they're sort of marching along this road, a road they've been on many times. And there's this sort of turn and there's this turn where they can go back the direction they came and this turn that's going to head them south.

32:56And Grant's marching in front, leading, and they come to this turnpike and Grant turns. And this big sort of cheer goes up through the ranks, right? You'd think this would be a defeated, a depressed, a demoralized army. And the reason they're cheering is that Grant is actually taking them south, right? And what Grant had done there, although they hadn't necessarily won the battle, what Grant was sending the message of, why they were excited for the first time, even though many of them would die, the direction they're heading, is that Grant was taking the war to the enemy. He was leading them at the front, like we're talking about, but he wasn't, he wasn't going to play it safe.

33:43And he wasn't going to needlessly prolong this thing either. You know, he was, he was, he was finally doing the thing that the men had known that needed to be done and believe that they could do for going on years at this point. But Grant was the first commander with the courage and the tenacity to actually do it. Yeah. When all this fails attack, that was his, his bottom line, go on the event. And he knew back to West Point, he went to school with a lot of those, those leaders, including Robert E. Lee. And so he knew their personalities. He knew Longstreet, you know, he knew, he knew, he knew all of those leaders.

34:27And so he felt confident enough in the numbers, especially because he had the numbers behind them, is to go on the attack. That's actually a really interesting point there. And I do think, again, we're nerding out of the Civil War here, but I think this metaphorically has some lessons for people. You're right. What Grant fundamentally figures out in the Civil War is pretty basic. He goes, we have a bigger population. We have a bigger industrial base. We have more money. And we have more territory, right? He basically realizes that they can last longer than their opponents can. He fundamentally, the whole balance of the Civil War up until this point has been the South taking the initiative because the South actually has less time, less resources, needs to wrap this thing up.

35:23And Grant has the confidence, but also I think he learns at West Point, just like the most basic principle of military history, of military strategy, he just figures out we have more than they do. We can afford to lose more than they do. This is purely a battle of will at this point. It's who wants it more. If we want it less, the other side will win, right? But if we want it in a way that's commensurate with our research, if we're actually willing to gamble the capital that we have, you know, literally and figuratively, we'll grind this thing down and we'll win. And I think that's something that leaders have to understand.

36:02The thing that you're after could be intimidating. It could be big. It could be audacious. It could never have been done before. But if you kind of check your resources, if you do the math and you can feel pretty comfortable, yes, if you feel, if you can feel pretty comfortable with what you're doing, you know, suddenly it's not so scary. You have you, you're not just guessing here. You have some solid basis behind the moves that you're making. Yeah. It just shows you courage is the calling I love, you know, that's basically the bottom line, what you're talking about through, through that book.

36:36And, and it became, yeah, became a war of attrition and they knew that they had the beans and bullets and support behind them to, to be able to outlast the South. But he also had his buddy back to friendships and what matters most and relationships. He had his buddy Sherman that he put on the point. And he just said, you know, talk about burning things down. He burned the South down on that march to the sea. um so those relationships matter you know leading by example matters and then knowing knowing your troops knowing your your strengths and weaknesses and exploiting those and and he did that better than probably any other um general at that time so let's talk about public offices i think you know you're talking with a business leader you're talking to a military leader you're talking to a an executive of some kind.

37:25What's interesting about politics, I feel like, is that you have these multiple constituencies, right? You have the voters who put you into office, and then you have the actual people inside the office, whether we're talking other elected officials or the public officials or the bureaucrats who you have to then get to do what you want or what the voters have said they want you to want, right? And so how did you think about that balance, right? Because it's not as if they simply hand you the keys and now everyone's on board and does whatever you say, right? That's not how it actually works. You have to persuade and convince and cajole.

38:14And then I'm or in other cases, you have to use the carrot and the stick to get the whole thing to go in the direction you want it to go. Yeah, exactly. And in one word, it's influence, right? Politics is just the art and science of influencing the government. And so individuals do it, political parties do it, mayors do it. And so it comes down to influence. And that's what leaders do is that they motivate and inspire others to do things that they wouldn't normally do. And that takes time. So relationships matter. At the core, my belief is that everything rises and falls on leadership. And so if you prove that you're a leader and you're doing things the right way, people are going to respond to that.

39:12And unfortunately, you know, at the local level, politics have kind of crept into that. It was designed to be nonpartisan, to be able to do what's right for your city, your county, your ward, your, you know, you name it at the local level. And now that we have this such hypersensitive and hyper politicized media and presence, you know, starting to creep into the lower levels of government. But for specifically Riverside, the mayor is kind of right in the middle of the city council and, you know, the city manager and, like you said, the bureaucracy of the city. And so we have to bring, mayors have to bring those two into agreement, you know, on, on the vision for whatever organization, you know, a level of organization, um, you're working at.

40:08And, and so for example, I'll come back to that streetcar, a vision that I had that was going to, it was a, it was a project, but more than that was a, um, uh, kind of, uh, well, hope and a dream to connect the city. And the streetcar was just a way to do that. And so we've got four institutions of higher learning with UCR, California Baptist, Las Vegas University, RCC, 50 ,000 college students across the city, but they didn't come downtown. And so - Yeah, I probably went downtown like three times the entire time I was a student. For people who don't understand, Riverside is one of the big public universities in the state of California.

40:50and because it was built on what was previously fruit groves, it's at the other end of what's called University Avenue. So downtown, which is where the government is, most of the big buildings, jobs, et cetera, the downtown core is there, the university is over here, and it's separated by kind of a windy street that had gotten pretty run down. How long is University Avenue? Three, four miles? Yeah, yeah, three miles. you know, and there was in between there was, was kind of a sketchy neighborhood. And so you weren't going to walk it or ride your bike for the most part. And so to bridge that gap, other than the buses, and we know that people just for some reason have a stigma against buses, we're going to put rails in the ground and create a, you know, kind of a streetcar route, basically, you know, back and forth, and then down one other street to connect the other universities and various business, you know, nodes that are out there and malls.

41:48So, you know, I thought it was a great idea. And I kind of campaigned on that. And, and it was going to solve a number of other issues in terms of economic development and where do we build up, you know, along the streetcar line, and then we wouldn't have to have cars and cars are, and traffic is a big issue in Southern California. And so here I am an idealist coming in thinking I'm, you know, serving my, my city and, you know, I've got this, this great idea, but you have to convince for the seven council members, you know, you got to count to four. So that's, that's the first you know step in the process or obstacle you know in the process and and but but even before that you kind of got to go after the public opinion and you can do that through the pulley pulpit as mayor or get out there and like I said use the media to to influence public opinion and and so and then you got to get the city manager and and the city bureaucracy on board to do the real work of, you know, designing the system and finding the funding to get that.

42:58And so it never happened is the bottom line. And part of it was because of politics. In my second term, my, you know, political advisor came to me and said, you know, you're going to get killed on this issue. The public opinion is that it's going to cost too much money. You know, there was the The whole high-speed rail system was kind of in the news at the time, and so timing was bad for this project. And so the opponent that I had in my re-election campaign was another city council member, and he cut and pasted me onto a San Francisco trolley and said, Bailey's train to nowhere. You know, it's going to cost$500 million, which was the highest estimate for the most amount of track that was going to be laid.

43:46You know, we could have done it in phases and started with UCR to prove the concept and do a pilot project. And so, you know, again, here I am, idealist thinking this is going to be, actually, we talked to Siemens. Siemens has is building streetcars for other cities in the United States, including San Diego. And they were so gracious enough to drop one of these streetcars on University Avenue at one point in time and let people walk through it. And it was on the front page of the newspaper. People were excited about it. And you could see the kind of the split between generations. So the younger generations or the more liberal individuals were all for it.

44:25And then you have the older generations and the conservatives that didn't want to spend the money or thought, you know, they didn't want to make, they didn't want any change. They didn't want any change to what's going on in the city. We're against it. And here I am in the middle trying to bridge that gap between generations, between parties, between, you know, the city council members. And I took a beating. And ultimately, you know, learned a lot of lessons. But we talked about that. You really encouraged me. I remember you talking about being personally down in New Orleans and got injured, whatever it was, riding a bike.

45:03On a streetcar track, yeah, I did. We had that conversation. You said, you encouraged me to, that was when the obstacle is the way was out. And so I was trying to push through that. But ultimately, I think politically, it was killed through, you know. So how do you deal with that? I've been struggling with this. I was actually just talking to a city council woman in a little town that I'm in about a very, not very similar, a similar sort of issue where we both really cared about something. We're trying to get this Confederate memorial down in the town that we live in. And we've got public opinion on our side.

45:38We got the city, the county to vote on it. We got the private funding secured. And then an election happens and the commissioner who was on board is swapped out with the commissioner who's not on board. Right. And I don't think this guy wakes up every day and he's like, I love Confederate monuments. I think he wakes up and he goes, the people I don't like, don't like Confederate monuments. So I'm just going to kill this thing. Right. Or I'm just, I just, I don't want to do what they want to do. That's my sort of mode of operation. And I think there's a lot of despair or frustration that comes from this, right.

46:22You bump into, in your case, something that should be a nonpartisan issue, something that actually is more achievable than people are saying. It's not like it's coming out of their pocket, right? Their objections are primarily they don't want to help someone or their objections are X, Y, or Z. And part of what I think those people want is that they want to be just difficult enough that either you give them something they want, or they're just difficult enough that you don't want it bad enough and you let it go. So how do you suggest leaders deal with that? Because I feel like that's kind of where we are in a lot of places in our society where you have this small minority of people who are very, very animated.

47:10It's essentially what they're calling a vetoocracy, right? Their primary role is to just stop things from happening. And that depends on good people accepting that veto. You know what I mean? Yes. Yeah. And man, I wish I had the magic wand to do that. And in some ways, you know, I do believe in the benevolent dictator, you know, they can come in and just have the power to do what's right. But it comes down back to, you know, one word, it's compromise. Are people willing to compromise and find the middle ground? And, you know, you don't see much of that at the different levels of government these days.

47:54And that's troubling. But I think, you know, our government is built on that, on compromise and giving and taking. And, you know, sometimes it's quid pro quo. And, you know, if you vote for my project, they'll vote for your project and that's not the best way to govern but it's it's a practical way to govern and and so so you got to figure that out and you got to count the votes you know and sometimes it's only four at the city council level if you got seven or on the board of supervisors it's three and so that's even nicer the smaller number i got there congress you know it's 535 of them total but um so the higher the number the harder it is to to count to that majority um And I talk about this a little bit in the book I'm doing now.

48:44I talk a little bit about Harvey Milk, who runs for city council in San Francisco. And, you know, it's funny where these sort of names go. He gets elected. And Dianne Feinstein, who just recently passed, is on that city council. And, you know, for Harvey Milk, he's this sort of he breaks through this ceiling. He's this, you know, pioneer figure, one of the first gay elected officials in the United States. And, you know, he sort of wants to begin by giving these kind of flowery, hopeful, exciting speeches. And she says to him pretty early on in his political career, she says, hope is great, but the name of the game is six votes.

49:21Yeah. You know, and what she was basically telling him is that if he wants to get things done, he's going to have to create allies. he's going to have to log roll or uh you know uh trade favors he's gonna have to compromise as you're saying and and actually this this um this makes sense to harvey milk what's fascinating is he gets his start in politics helping the teamsters who are organizing a boycott of coors beer right and and he basically says i'll help you he goes to the teamsters they or they come to him, they say, we want you to help us organize the part of our boycott through gay bars in San Francisco.

50:03And he says, I'm willing to do it if you hire gay drivers, which you currently don't allow. And so from the very beginning, he actually does get this lesson that it's great to be a breakthrough barrier breaking figure. It's great to have all the right idealistic ideas or notions, but politics is functionally allies and compromise and favor trading. And that's how you get stuff done. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes you like back to that one stick in the mud or that, that anti everything, you just got to work around them and let them put themselves, you know, on that limb and hopefully, you know, it'll break off at some point.

50:45But, But there was a couple of members on our city council that gravitated toward each other. That's the danger is when you have that one person on a limb and if he can capture another one and another one, and then the anti-everything coalition really has a lot of power. But if you can peel them off, you know, and you can educate them, and you can get the Chamber of Commerce to support you, you know, I remember Leverage would say, if you can get 40 people in the room, you can do anything, you know, 40 people speaking on one of the issues. And so voting by their feet and their mouths, if they come to us, that's the power of local government.

51:28If you can pack the hall full of individuals that are in favor of your policy or project, you can probably, you know, bully the council potentially into voting, you know, in favor of that policy or project. I did that one night when it came to homelessness in our city. That was the biggest issue when I was leaving office. And I ended up living in a shelter, a pallet shelter, a pallet shelter for almost two weeks. To send a message, to demonstrate what that looks like? Back to leadership by example, back to my West Point training. I've got to do it if I expect other people to do it. And if they're going to take me seriously and to bring a sense of urgency to the issue.

52:12And so, actually, the city, back to the city government, okay, Mayor, this is your last night. We're going to evict you. We're going to put a tag on it. We're going to lock it. You got it. This is it. I said, okay, just give me one more night because the council is going to vote on it tomorrow night. And so we packed the hall, the city hall, the city council chambers, full of the faith community, full of individual, the nonprofit community. And we kind of pushed the city council to open up their hearts and minds to having this shelter, this pallet shelter village, 30 units ended up being an expanding shelter in our city right on our skid row.

52:51And, you know, it's just crazy how much time and effort and energy it took for that to happen. But that's back to leadership. You know, everything rises and falls on leadership and leadership matters. If you don't have a leader that's willing to take that stand and to sometimes be a little bit confrontational and a little bit crazy, you're not going to get things done.

53:25We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone. And then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

54:00My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

54:37Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

55:16Go with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 a month trial at shopify.com slash listen. Shopify.com slash listen.

55:29And now here is Mayor G.T. Bynum. I'm in my office at City Hall and I've got pictures of Kato's all over the place here. So here is my great grandfather who came to Tulsa from South Bend, Indiana with literally nothing. He dropped out of school and he was in sixth grade and got into the energy business here and made enough that he could go back and build the student center at Notre Dame where the priest had let him work to get his degree there while working on a maintenance crew. And then over here is my grandfather, who's my kind of lifelong leadership and life hero. He was the mayor of Tulsa back when I was born.

56:15So they happen to be here. But we've got Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin all over the place in here. So, yeah, you said you said choose your Kato's. Those are the sort of models that having up on display help sort of check you or inspire you or remind you. Is that the idea? That's exactly right. They're sources of inspiration for me. And especially if I'm going through a challenging time, it's always helpful to think about what these heroes of mine, the challenges that they went through and found ways to overcome them. Maybe they're in different jobs than the one I have right now, but they've all faced challenges and overcome them.

57:03It must be strange, though, for one of your Cato's, so to speak, to have literally had the job that you now have. It must be good. And do you feel like it's hard to measure up? Are there still people around who compare you guys? How does that work for you? Oh, sure. And he is still alive. He's 96 years old. And so that is also helpful to have somebody that you can go and visit with who's really seen it all before. As he says, the issues have a tendency to repeat themselves over the decades. When you get that old, you see the same things repeat themselves. But yes, now that's all my life in Tulsa, really until I became mayor, I was mostly known as his grandson.

57:50Now he's known as my grandfather. So it's been interesting to see that generational shift take place. Yeah, that must be interesting, right? One, to have a family member have had the job that you had, so you're sort of walking into their shoes. But then for them to live so long, to have a post-office career must be interesting because he would have the kind of ultimate perspective, right? So the issues haven't changed. So there's this kind of cyclical nature of it. But I also imagine the stress, the crises, the things that seemed incredibly important, he now has decades of time to have reflected on.

58:32And so he can kind of help you turn down the volume or give you a little bit of hard-won wisdom about what matters and what doesn't. Oh, 100%. 100%. With him, I think the value of perspective is tremendous, both from him personally, kind of like that, what was that, that Calvin Coolidge line about 90 % of the things you're really worried about never actually come to pass. Putting things in perspective, whatever the drama of the day might happen to be. There's only been, in our city, at least 40 people have ever had this job. So the number of people who can really relate to what you're going through is fairly small.

59:19And so it's helpful to have somebody also who, you know, I know I just have complete and total trust in all he wants is for me to be happy and successful so I can go to him for guidance and know that it's going to be coming from that place. The other great value of it, though, to me is it helps me put issues in perspective. I remember when I was a city councilor, reading through old newspaper articles, as one does for fun, and coming across this article about how my grandfather, when he was a street commissioner in his very first month in the job, was the deciding vote to desegregate public facilities in Tulsa.

1:00:03And I was so proud of that. And I've always thought about that moment ever since, that if my children or my grandchildren are reading about something I did 25 years from now, 30 years from now, will they be proud of it or embarrassed by it? And that really helps put decisions into perspective. And also, sometimes the issue of the day, you realize people are not going to be worrying about this a quarter century from now. Yeah, you know, when I lived in New Orleans, I was writing my first book and we didn't know anyone. And this woman from my wife's work said, Oh, hey, come to my I have a big family come we're doing Thanksgiving, you should come.

1:00:42And so we go. And it turns out like her step grandfather is Moon Landrout, like the mayor of New Orleans, the famous mayor of New Orleans. And, you know, he's the one who famously desegregates New Orleans, which, you know, in a deep southern city, this would have been a huge deal. So and so when you just said that, I was thinking about it because, yeah, there are these decisions that you make in office in your career that it would be nice if the hard, important decisions everyone was in alignment over. And that's usually not the case. So oftentimes these things that we hang our hats on legacy wise were quite unpopular at the time.

1:01:19And then also, though, as the years pass, as we go on and do other things, eventually, you know, someone's turned out of office or they go to the next office or the next job or start the other company. Really, though, all the other things that seemed so important in the moment, all that's left are those handful of decisions. So I've got to imagine your grandfather did quite a bit, but that's one of the things that he looks back on and goes, if that was the only thing I did in my career, that would have been a good career. You're exactly right. And I think the other thing that I get from that is, and you asked earlier, like, do people think about you in relation to him?

1:01:58The reality is it's been a great reminder to me that people's memory of who is serving in office is fairly brief. The generation of people who were voting for him in the 1960s and 70s mostly have passed at this point. And so a lot of people, you know, they don't remember his time in office or, you know, one of his predecessors. I think probably the two of them are the two best mayors in the history of Tulsa. Most people could not tell you who they were at this point. It's a reminder that this notion of legacy is a false choice to be pursuing. You really have to be focused on people every day benefit from the work that they did, but don't necessarily remember who they were or that they did it in the first place.

1:02:48And for my grandfather, at least he's fine with that because the work got done. Well, that's one of the really interesting passages in meditations. So Marx is realized he's the emperor of Rome and he's writing this diary. And he's reminding himself, he goes, who remembers Vespasian? Who remembers Octavian? Who remembers Hadrian? He starts to list the names of these people that came before him. And I mean, famously, there's one year in Roman history called the year of the four emperors. There's four emperors in one year. They're all so bad that people are like, nope, nope, nope. And so, yeah, you do have this sense that what you're dealing with is the most important thing in the world.

1:03:30You're building this legacy. That's what counts. And people's memories pass very, very quickly. And most of us are not emperors. And most of us are not even mayors. no i i had a great experience with that it was uh my family we took sort of this pilgrimage before i was sworn in as mayor we went to rome uh and i will always remember we were taking a tour of the villa borghese and there's this room in there where there's probably 50 busts of emperors and generals and my two kids, you know, both under 10 years of age are just walking around, you know, imitating the faces of these buss and making fun of them.

1:04:16And I thought 2000 years ago, these were like the most feared, powerful people in the world. And now here we are, we don't even know who they are. And they've got two little kids that are mocking their appearance in a bus. it's a reminder that all that glory is very short term. Well, I was in Budapest, maybe this is 2019. I wrote about this a little bit in Lives of the Stoics, but it really hit me. There's a quincum, which is where Marcus Aurelius writes his meditations. And there's this statue of him. Well, it's actually not of him. It's the chest to the neck of the emperor. It might have had legs too.

1:05:00But so let's say it's a full bust or it's a full body statue of the emperor for the cult of the emperor, right? So the emperor was not just the leader, but he was literally worshipped as a deity in his time. But what was so remarkable about this one is that, and Marcus could have passed by this very statue having spent some time there, is that the head was replaceable. So it's the body of the emperor. And then every four years or however, you know, however long the emperor lasts. I don't know why I said four years, but every couple of years, you know, you get a new emperor. They carve a new bust and they put it on top.

1:05:38You know, it's thank you next. Right. And you see the same thing. You go to the airport and there's the there's the the picture of the president and the picture of the director of Homeland Security. And every four years that gets taken down and somebody else gets up there. How many people know who any of them are? How quickly that? And so there is this this timelessness of, you know, you've only you're only occupying the job. You're the placeholder for the job. Right. And not only is someone going to come and replace you, that's the nature of leadership. The job endures, but you don't. But very, very quickly, we don't remember who had the job before.

1:06:18How many people can name four vice presidents ago or five vice presidents ago, right? And that was the second most powerful person in the world less than two decades ago. Yeah, one of my favorite books is this biography of a senator named Mike Mansfield. He was a copper miner who worked his way up to become a university professor and then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. A senator ultimately was Lyndon Johnson's whip and then became majority leader after LBJ became vice president. And Mansfield was the majority leader longer than anyone has ever been the majority leader in the Senate.

1:06:59And he was incredibly popular both sides of the aisle. Today, the room that senators caucus in right off the floor of the Senate is the Mike Mansfield room. He was so popular, both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had him be their ambassador to Japan after he retired from the Senate. But he was being interviewed for this book, and he was in his 90s. And the author asked him, you know, what do you want? You've done all these things. You were the majority leader that got the civil rights legislation passed. You've been the ambassador to Japan during a critical moment in history. Like, what do you want your legacy to be?

1:07:34and Mike Mansfield said, I want to be forgotten. That's the legacy that I want. I want to be forgotten because that's the most realistic thing that's going to happen. And I've always thought about that. If somebody who did everything he could could have that mindset, then certainly I should as well. Well, I think that's another very stoic idea. And I think Marcus is sort of meditating on this in meditations, which is, sure, there's the couple that are remembered because they were such great conquerors, such great leaders. So amazing. So wonderful. But the vast majority of mayors that people could name are probably nameable because they were awful.

1:08:14Right. They they took the wrong stand on the wrong issue. Right. I'm thinking of another New Orleans mayor like they fell asleep on the job. They messed up on the job. They they committed crimes on the job, you know, so on and so forth. So so if there's an extra humility and not just, hey, you're probably going to be forgotten. But if you do a really good job, that may be the best case scenario, right? Like, you should want to be forgotten because chances are, if you're memorable, it may mean that you were corrupted and broke under the pressures of the responsibility. And being sort of an ordinary workmanlike journeyman in your job is all we can kind of shoot it for.

1:09:01That's very well put. When I came into this job, I thought I want to read all about the great mayors. And there's like three biographies of Fiorello LaGuardia, widely regarded as the greatest mayor in U.S. history, as mayor of New York during the Great Depression, World War II. And then there's really not anything else. It is not a job that lends itself toward wide acclaim that you might get where you'd have books written about you? Well, being mayor must be an interesting job. I've said this before about writing. It's like one of the weird things about my job is everyone thinks they can do it, right?

1:09:40And a lot of people want to do it. And I think mayor is a similar job like that where not that many people wake up and go, hey, I want to be senator. Maybe we kind of fantasize about being president, but probably not even that because it seems really, really hard. Mayor is one of those unique leadership positions where it actually touches and affects people's actual lives. So we have some kind of understanding and knowledge about it. And then it doesn't seem like it's necessarily going to, you know, the picture of the mayor when they take office and the picture of the mayor when they leave office, they're not necessarily totally worn down by it.

1:10:19So it's kind of got this aspirational accessibility to it. But whether you're a mayor of a small town, like I'm talking to you now from a town of 8 ,000 people or a town like Tulsa or a town like New York City, it's probably a lot harder than people think it is because you get all the problems and not most of the fun stuff, right? Oh, yes, that's exactly right. I think, I mean, I'm biased. I think it's, and I've worked in the U.S. Senate. I've worked in state government. But I think being mayor of an American city is the best job in public service and at least in elected office. And the reason for that is because you have the ability to work very quickly with great speed on tangible issues that affect the daily lives of the people that you serve.

1:11:11I mean, the streets get fixed or they don't. The police officers and firefighters get hired or they don't. The employer comes to town or it doesn't. You know, there's any number of things you can think of where you have direct responsibility for making that happen. Now, the flip side of that, though, is you're also much more accessible to the people you serve than, say, a member of Congress or even a governor who are fairly removed from the people they serve. You know, I cannot go to no mayor that I know could go to a restaurant or the grocery store without having folks come up and let you know either what they think you're doing well or something that needs to be fixed.

1:11:54The benefit of that, though, and always, you know, having that obstacles the way mindset is that you get a feel for what people really care about, not what's popping on social media on any given day. But when you're out at a Rotary Club or just out at a restaurant and people come up and talk with you, you get it. Somebody doesn't have to be angry enough to write something on social media or call your office. You're there, you're face to face with them, and you get a better feel for what real everyday people really care about. And I imagine this is true for all leaders, but you have this sense that, oh, when I get into office, and this is probably the fantasy of the citizen suit.

1:12:38If I were mayor, here's what I would do. Or you run on your platform, here's all the things I'm going to do. And then you get into office and the reality of leadership is you realize it's more complicated. There's reasons things are the way that they are. And also your power is more circumscribed than maybe you would like it to be. How have you come to understand that or deal with that? You know, the mayor is the sort of chief executive of the town, but also not. Right. You it's there's the I alone can fix it. You know, that's just not how the American system works in basically any level. You know, I benefited from the fact that I was able to really study the job for a long time, both obviously from my own family members who've been in the job.

1:13:31But then I was on on our city council for eight and a half years before I became mayor. and with two different mayors in the job over that period of time. So could have a better feel for what different mayors did that made them more effective or less effective in the job, which I think helped. But one of the best pieces of advice I got when I came in was from another and outgoing mayor, actually, who said every mayor, they run on the things, you know, the things that they're going to do. But then once they get into office, the issues really decide them. They don't decide the issues. And so what I did when I came in was intentionally design our team, knowing, especially being in Oklahoma, and you can appreciate this in Texas, you know, in Tornado Alley, we have rivers that flood, we get hit with every kind of natural disaster that you can imagine here.

1:14:26And so you have to know that that's going to come. And I would say I've gained a lot of this from reading about the Stoics, you know, preparing for those bad outcomes, but then having people on your team who you know are going to be able to handle that when it arises, but also people who don't get distracted by that, who stay focused on your positive goals that you want to get done, regardless of whatever the crisis of the day happens to be. And then as the leader, you have to be able to quickly. And I thought what Randall Stutton said a couple of weeks ago in the video you put up about the the one of the most important qualities of a leader being able to move from one issue to another to another very quickly.

1:15:06You have to do that in those types of situations. So I interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger a couple of weeks ago, and this didn't get recorded. So I'll share it. And maybe you can you can either use it or tell me what you think of it. But he was saying I was talking to him and his chief of staff after we finished, and he was telling me that they were doing some emergency preparedness drill for the whole state of California. Like, you know, what if there was a tsunami or what if there was some thing? And so, you know, even though you're preparing, there's still an artifice to the preparation. Right.

1:15:37It's like, OK, starting at 4 a.m. tomorrow, we're starting an emergency preparedness drill. Right. And so this is this is the plan. Everyone's doing it. And what Arnold does is he sets his alarm for like three in the morning, the day of the emergency preparedness drill. And then he calls the head of the emergency preparedness program and he starts the drill an hour early and everyone gets very upset. Right. Like this isn't this isn't how we're supposed to be practicing it. And his point is the whole point is it's not supposed to be that way. And so, yeah, so many leaders are defined by and their success or failure is determined by these things that are outside their control.

1:16:19And then they spend a lot of their time acting as if things are always going to be in their control and they don't prepare not just for the things that could happen, but prepare for the fact that they don't even know what could happen or how it could happen. Yes. I had one of, I thought, I think one of the better learning experiences I've had in this job was in my first year, a hurricane had come out from the Gulf Coast and then just dumped a ton of water in Kansas and northern Oklahoma. Was this Harvey? It might have been, yes. It was 2019. Yeah. And this caused all Tulsa is located on a river and upstream from us to prevent flooding downstream.

1:17:13They had built up just this tremendous water supply in a lake that's upstream from Tulsa. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided this lake is it's going to overflow the dam. We've got to start releasing water. And they start releasing, you know, 100 ,000 cubic feet per second of water. And so we get, you know, the river starts to flood in Tulsa. We start advising people on what to do and how to get prepared for 100 ,000 cubic feet of water. And then the next day, the Corps says, oh, actually, we're going to go to 200 ,000. And so all of a sudden, it's like, well, wait a second, we just prepared everybody for 100.

1:17:46And then the day after that, they increased it a little bit more. And finally, you know, I was growing frustrated because it's like, we keep advising people what to do, and then it's wrong 12 hours later. and did as I do two things in a disaster like that. One, try to get enough sleep if you can so that you're protecting your judgment, the role of a mayor in this case or a governor with Governor Schwarzenegger. Like you have, your most important thing is preserving your own judgment. But woke up in the morning, read the Daily Stoic and reminded myself like, what do I actually control here? Sure.

1:18:22And what I control here is we have maps of the flood of record on this river in Tulsa, let's just put those out, which was over 300 ,000 cubic feet per second. Let's give that to all the citizens of Tulsa and say, this is the worst case scenario that we've had in the last hundred years. Just prepare for that. And if we never hit that, great. Then you overprepared. But the level of, I would say, outrage and concern in the community immediately plummeted after we did that. People are like, okay, that's the worst case scenario. We're planning for that. It gave them a sense of agency and they could go to work.

1:19:02Yeah. Seneca's line was that a leader can never say, oh, I didn't think that would happen. Right? Like your job is to think about what could happen, right? Ordinary people, regular people, you know, the people who have elected you to do the job, they're saying, you think about the things so we don't have to think about them. And it can be so easy, I imagine, in any position of leadership, whether you're a mayor, you're the CEO of a company, or, you know, running your own company, is there's lots of other things to think about things that you want to think about things that are more fun to think about things that are more pressing to think about.

1:19:41And, you know, you agree you. I was just watching this episode of curb your enthusiasm. And he, and he, Larry says this guy to this guy, he says, Hey, can you remind me of something? And the guy says, sure. And then he doesn't remind him. And he says, there's a sacred pact between the person who, who, uh, who, who asked for the reminder and the, and the person who promises to make the reminder it's, there's like a sacred pact with our leaders, which says you think big picture, you think worst case scenario, you're the one who gets, uh, kept up at night so we can go about our lives. And I think, Like, you know, the mark of a bad leader is you abdicate that responsibility or that duty.

1:20:21And then you, when that thing happens, that's when the blame game starts and there's only one person to blame. That's exactly right. And I think one of the, another great book that I read as before I became mayor, that's been so helpful is Jonathan Alter's book about FDR's first hundred days. And, you know, kind of one of the central premises in that book is that what FDR did in his first 100 days was really not all that different than what Herbert Hoover had been doing leading up to that. The difference was that FDR projected a sense of confidence and gave the citizens a sense of empowerment that, yes, we can get through this.

1:21:06And I think that's really important in any crisis situation. And, you know, I've had to deal with, you know, we talked about the flood, but tornadoes, tornadoes while it was flooding, a polar vortex. We had a direct show this year, which I didn't even know what that was, knocked out 200 ,000 households, power for a week. Of course, the global pandemic that hit. And in each of those cases, I felt my responsibility is to dig through and educate myself on all of those worst case scenarios and then to try and build up a way of explaining it to the citizens, trying to boil all that down, explain it to them so that they can, again, feel a sense of agency in trying to govern their own future rather than a sense of powerlessness, which is so easy to fall into when you're in an emergency.

1:22:01You know, it's interesting you mentioned FDR. Another book I love that I carry the painted porch is Leadership by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It's called Leadership in Turbulent Times. It's a great book. And I think she's talking about it, but she's saying, you know, that speech, you know, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. You know, that's obviously great life advice, you know, but he's specifically talking about a pressing issue, which is runs on the banks, right? Like what FDR realizes is that there is this crisis of confidence, but it's not just, oh, hey, people aren't believing in us right now.

1:22:35It's that because people are panicked, they're making bad decisions. And those bad decisions are creating a doom loop or a feedback loop that is going to be really hard to pull out of. And he understands his job of the leader. He can't solve the banking crisis with a swoop of legislation just yet, although he obviously has a bunch of plans. But first, he has to he has to he has to let people know there are hands on the wheel, which is really what, you know, Hoover's main failing was. Hoover tried to do a bunch of stuff, and actually in other circumstances, including the flood of 1927, he actually was a great leader, but he just couldn't understand how to solve that particular sort of economic crisis that was psychological more than anything else.

1:23:27And that's such an important part of leadership. I think we saw during the pandemic, the failures of leaders to communicate effectively. Jimmy Carter, who I actually think was a great leader, you know, is totally right about the environmental crisis, but he couldn't figure out how to communicate it very well. It came off as the opposite of what needed to, you know, you know, he gives the speech in a sweater, you know, and it was like all these other parts of the job. I imagine that it would be wonderful if a politician didn't have to think about if a leader just had to be right on the facts. But it's so much more than that.

1:24:06I received it. So I was elected mayor and then I had six months before I was sworn in. And in Tulsa, we don't we don't have a city manager. I won on the first ballot, which was with nonpartisan elections. So if somebody gets over 50 percent on the first ballot, you're in. And and I ran against my predecessor. I think we all assumed there would be a runoff, but I won on the first ballot. And so in Tulsa, we don't have a city manager. The mayor runs the city day to day. We have a billion dollar budget, 4000 employees. Well, I had never run an organization that large. No mayor we've ever had has.

1:24:42And so I went around and met with a lot of the leaders of the major employers in town who I respected. And one of the best pieces of advice I got was from a man who was the president of the University of Tulsa at the time. But before that, he had been the president of the Claremont Graduate School where Peter Drucker taught and had been very close with Drucker. And he said, you know, being a mayor is very much like being a university president in that you have your technical responsibilities, The things that are in the job description, in your case, in the city charter, you know, developing a budget, managing the team said.

1:25:17But what a lot of people miss is you also have and the term he used was you have your pastoral responsibilities. And those are the responsibilities where the people that you are leading need to feel like you are there for them. Yes. Pete Buttigieg talks about this really well in his memoir, being the mayor of South Bend, how it took him a couple of years before he realized that when he showed up at a funeral for somebody, it wasn't received by the people there like, oh, that's Pete. He showed up. It was that South Bend saying that this person's life mattered. And so in those instances where we've had disasters or emergencies here, I've always had that in mind.

1:25:58Like there's the things I need to tell people that we're doing from a technical standpoint, but there's also the human dynamic that you've got to keep in mind when you're communicating with the community that you're leading.

1:26:15thanks so much for listening if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show we appreciate it and i'll see you next episode

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