The Daily Stoic - Political Leadership Lessons From Mayor G.T. Bynum & Rusty Bailey

Episode Date: August 24, 2024

One of the problems with politics today is we tend to only focus on what is happening on a national level, which is currently quite dramatic, dysfunctional, and extremist. However, the political decisions that are being made at the local level are the ones that actually impact our day to day life. Today, Ryan talks with Rusty Bailey (Democrat), the former Mayor of Riverside, California as well as G.T. Bynum (Republican), the current Mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma to dive into what it means to be a successful leader in politics. Both share their journey to politics, political leadership lessons from history, how the Stoics were involved in politics, and the issues they are working to find solutions for. Follow G.T. Bynum on Instagram: @GTBynum and X: @GTBynumG.T. Bynum’s website: https://www.gtbynum.com/Learn more about Rusty Bailey’s time in office as Mayor of Riverside here💡We designed The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Leaders to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. Check it out: store.dailystoic.comGet The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Leaders & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Welcome 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.

Hey, 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. Now 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? The 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 are involved the wars and trade policies and 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. And 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 Stokes who were involved in politics

would have been people like this. Mark Sebelius' 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. There would have been so many stokes 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. 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. It'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 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 GT Bynum,

who's the Republican mayor of Tulsa, where he's held office with quite a lot of popularity since 2016. And then GT 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. He'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 gonna 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. He 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 US Department 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 can get this challenge and all our challenges totally for free. You can grab that at dailystoiclife.com. So 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 then decided, you know what, I'm going to go 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. I think it was the PIC club, young professionals in Riverside. It was something with the Chamber of Commerce, right? Yeah. I think it was the PIC, the PIC club, young professionals in Riverside. 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, I, 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 bought a bunch of copies of one of my books in exchange for me coming to talk. That's the way 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. And I didn't expect to meet you, but that was, yeah, almost eight or so years ago now,

which is pretty incredible to me. And 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 born and raised in Riverside. My dad born and raised. Riverside. My dad, born and raised. Grandpa came in 1914 from Missouri, trekked across country and in the Jalop. You worked in the Orange Groves or what? Yeah, I worked in the Orange Groves. Exactly. The stories of people. I was listening to one of your last podcasts and just thinking about the stories of my family and how they got here, kind of like yours

up in Northern California. And so my story is partly coming from the Midwest and looking for 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 our Air Force base, not reserve base, you know, has brought a lot of talent, you know, to Riverside and through Riverside. And, and so those are some, some big magnets, I would say that,

that collect people in, in our city. So I, 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, poly high school student body president, similar to most West Point graduates, you know, they get there, they dip their, their, their finger and leadership at the, in the high school level. But, you know, left as a 17-old, probably too immature to join the Army at that time. But survived the four years and graduated in 1994, then was in the Army as

a helicopter pilot for a few years after that. But my story 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 of public policy at the new school of public affairs there, the Alaska School of Public Affairs where I met, and really kind of got me into politics, Michael Dukakis, Governor Michael Dukakis,

and he 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 of years out of grad school, where during that time I met my wife.

And as you all know, who are married, things change when you get married. For the better, of course, if my wife is watching this or here's this. And so she was from Riverside and we decided to move home from Washington DC where I was working at the Department of Housing and Development and I started life here and she got me actually into teaching never intended to be a teacher. But I was working at the county economic development agency and, um, ended up, uh, you know, seeing, seeing the, uh, the good life and teaching and, and connecting with kids and having your summers off and, um, ended up coaching as

well. And, and, uh, then they, somebody, somebody started recruiting me to run for, for office, uh, as as city council, you know, 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, So 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 in a 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. And 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 routes where you're from, being of service, taking public service jobs, running for office, working your way up through the local system or power structure or is it just something you saw modeled? Yeah, I would say it's organic. It was modeled and just kind of followed along. You know, enjoyed watching my dad 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, he was always introducing me to some really interesting individuals and educated folks in town and rubbing elbows with some of the politicians. And also just, I remember him out in Paris, California. He was 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. And 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, to, to, 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, by knowing them and the character of our community. And you can only do that by that by getting out and pressing flash and knocking on doors and learning about the issues from the people themselves. And so what drew you to West Point, if the family tradition is Stanford, what draws you

to the other side of the country and to a very different model of education? Yeah, yeah, great, great question. Well, one of them was, you know, Stanford didn't didn't accept me. So but I didn't get into West Point early. So I kind of joked that I had to earn my degree at West Point first is, you know, I think they only give A's and B's at Stanford. But at West Point, it's definitely you yearn 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 looked at the different academies, I applied to both Naval Academy and West Point and left Air Force out. But, you know, it came down to

leadership of human beings, you know, the military and the Navy and 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 lead others 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 grants memoirs. And one of the most striking parts of grants memoirs is just how scared he was to start at this school

and how miserable the first year is for him. And it takes a while basically for the process to start to work 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, 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 it's saying like, I want to be a leader of people. Like at 17 or 18, I don't know what I was thinking about, but it wasn't that. That's a great question. It 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 shortly after he finished that memoir. And what an incredible leader he was and went through the ringer himself. So definitely, when you look at some of the history of West Point and individuals that made it through there,

we draw on that. And they talk about those different leadership styles, whether it was Patton or Grant or Eisenhower. But I think at the core, it goes back to being with other like-minded individuals that are there to serve their country and to develop their leadership and be part of the institution. and to develop their leadership and be part of the institution. And so from day one, you have to rely on your roommates and your teammates and your classmates to get through. And really for me, being a Californian,

what saved me was the volleyball team. And 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, 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. And so the army volleyball West point team or the, the, the volleyball team at West point, um, was a bunch of Californians. And, you know, we, we gravitated to each other and had fun with, you know, together and, um, would take trips together.

And so they really diffused a lot of the stress and tension, um, that was there, at least for me. And, and, and I can say that other people had a similar experience, whether it was, you know, with the sports team or with a club. That's how they got through the struggles and stresses that were there. If you don't know about West Point, it's four years, it stands two months, but months, but you're, you're in the military, you have a card, you're getting paid to go there, your 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 example of government issue from the first day. They shave your head. They put on the same clothes, your uniform. They're teaching you all the basic military verbiage, as well as the movement, left know, left face, right face. But so you're going through these different lines. And at one point in time, um, they said, Hey, you're from California, from Southern California.

I said, yeah, you know, yes, sir. Well, come this way. And so they divert you into another room. Um, 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 later I find out that because, you know, some Southern

California, you know, they were doing a study on lung capacity of individuals and it was a USC study that, that West, you know, the army put into effect at West Point. And so, 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, your government issue. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenpann. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history.

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When I spoke to a West Point class on Tuesday, I think no Monday or Tuesday, I did it 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 right? Cause 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 getting to talk and he's asleep. It was pretty great. And I, I'll, 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 point out a book to everyone that I really nobody notices. But to go back to Grant really fast, what I think I 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, he's to travel across the country, he 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, you 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 JP Morgan. So Grant gets this devastating blow, and then he finds out he's dying of tongue cancer. And 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 campaign, in this case against time itself. And he produces this amazing memoir. And ultimately the memoir makes like the equivalent of 10 or $15 million in today's dollars. It's just, he manages to succeed. But 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 you feel like they they really taught you about leadership? If if the purpose of the web 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 in the purpose of the United States Military

Academy is to provide nation in the leaders of character to serve the to serve the, for the common defense, right? Yes. Provide the nation with leaders of character who serve the common defense. And, but number one, it boils down to lead by example, and then number two, take care of your troops.

They always, you know, are, you know, focused on those two, you know, cornerstones of leadership. If you don't lead by example, people aren't going to trust you, people are going to follow you. Then if you don't take care of your troops, bad things are going to happen there as well. Sure.

We saw that in Vietnam and other places with Frasnized, et cetera. So those are the two 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 your family, whether that's your city, whether that's your classroom, the students in the classroom, your coach on the field, with your players, they they will produce a lot more for you, if they

know that you're taking care of them. And and 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, you know,

willingness to make sacrifices along that line. Yeah, exactly. And so you always have to lead from the front, you know, if you're not seen 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 following you and protecting you. So you could see that with leadership today is that, a lot of times aren't willing, you know, to take some of those

risks and lead by example, you know, across the board in Congress, and they're making decisions based on, you know, personal gain or, or, you know, political preference, instead of doing the right thing. And, and their decision process is huge process is huge in that respect, I would say. One of my favorite grant stories sort of 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 to the US 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. And so, you know, Grant deploys them in the battle of wilderness, and it is a brutal, terrible battle, you know, so bad that like forest fires are being started by the by the sheer number of sort of rifle shots and and you know, And Bruce Catten, 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're they can go

back the direction they came. And this turn that's going to head them south and grants 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, you know, 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 going to play it safe. And he wasn't going to needlessly prolong this thing either. He was finally doing the thing that the men had known that needed to be done and believed that they could do for going on 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 else fails, attack. That was his bottom line, go on the offense. And he knew, back to West Point,

he went to school with a lot of those leaders, including Robert E. Lee. And so he knew their personalities. He knew Longstreet, you know, he knew, he knew all of those leaders. And so he felt confident enough in the numbers, especially, because he had the numbers, being them is to go on the attack.

And- 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. He basically realizes that they can last longer than their opponents can. 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. Grant has the confidence, but also I think he learns at West Point, just the most basic principle 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. 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, literally and figuratively, we'll grind this thing down and we'll win. And I think that's something that leaders have to understand. The 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 can feel pretty comfortable

with what you're doing, you know, suddenly it's not so scary. You have, 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 that book. And it became a war of attrition.

And they knew that they had the beans and bullets and support behind them 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. So does 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 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 an executive of some kind. What's interesting about politics, I feel like is, is that you have these multiple constituencies, right? You have the voters who put you into office. And then 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. And so how did you think about that balance? 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. And then I'm sure in other cases, you know,

you have to use the carrot and the stick to get the whole thing to go in the carrot and the stick to get to get the whole thing to go in the direction you want it to go. Yeah, exactly. And in one word, it's influenced, right? Politics is just the art and science of influencing the government, you know, and, and so individuals do it, political parties do it, you know, mayors do it. And so it comes down to 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 that takes time. So relationships matter. You know, at the core, my belief is that everything rises and falls on leadership. And and so if you, so if you prove that you're a leader and you're doing things the right way, people are going to respond to that. And 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 hyper sensitive 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 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 on the vision for whatever organization,

you know, a level of organization you're working at. And so, for example, I'll come back to that streetcar vision that I had that was going to, it was a project, but more than that was a kind of, But more than that was a kind of a well, hope and a dream to connect the city. Yeah. And the streetcar was just the way to do that. And so we've got four institutions of higher learning with UCR, you know, 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. And 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's 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's in between there 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, 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. So, 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 up, you know, along the street car line and then we wouldn't have to have cars and cars are, and traffic is a big issue in Southern California.

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, uh, for the seven council members, you know, you got to count to four. So that's, that's the first, um, you know, step in the process or obstacle in the process. But even before that, you kind of got to go after the public opinion. And you can do that through the Holy pulpit as mayor or get out there and like I said, use the media to influence public opinion and so, and then you got to get the city manager and the city bureaucracy on board to do the real work of, you know, designing the system and finding the funding to get that. And so it never happened is the bottom line. And part of it was because of politics. In my second term, my political advisory came to me and said,

you're going to get killed on this issue. The public opinion is that it's going to cost too much money. There was 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 the second, in my, you know, reelection campaign was another city council member. And he cut and pasted me onto a San Francisco trolley

and said, Bailey's trained to nowhere. You know, it's going to cost $500 million, which was the highest estimate for the most amount 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. You know, we could have done it in phases and started with UCR to prove the concept, to 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. It was on the front page of the newspaper, people were excited about it, and you could see the split between generations. The younger generations or the more liberal individuals, you know, were all for it. And then you have the older generations and the conservatives didn't want to spend the money or thought, you know, they didn't want to make, they didn't want any change. They don't want any change to what's going on in the city.

We're against it. And here, here I am in the middle trying to bridge that gap between generations, between parties, between the city council members. And I took a beating and ultimately 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, you know, on a streetcar track. Yeah, I did down there. We had that conversation. You said, you know, you you encouraged me to that was when the obstacle, you

know, is the way it was out. And so I was trying to push through that. And but ultimately, I think politically, it was 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 were trying to get this Confederate Memorial down in the town that we live in. And we've got public opinion on our side. We 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 gonna kill this thing, right? Or I'm just, I don't wanna do what they wanna 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? You 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?

You know, their objections are primarily, they don't want to help someone, or their objections are, you know, X, Y, or Z. And part of what I think those people want is that they just, they wanna 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. You know, it's essentially what they're calling a vetoocracy, right? Their primary role is to just stop things from happening. And that depends on 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. Yeah, but down back to one word, it's compromise. Are people willing to compromise and find the middle ground? And you don't see much of that at the different levels of government these days. And that's troubling. But I think our government is built on that, on compromise and giving and taking and, and, you know, sometimes it's quid pro quo. And, you know, if you vote for my project,

I'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 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 so the higher the number, the harder it is to count to that majority. I talk about this a little bit in the book I'm doing now. I talk a little bit about Harvey Milk,

who runs for city council in San Francisco. And it's funny where these names go, he gets elected and Dianne Feinstein, who just recently passed, is on that city council. And for Harvey Milk, he's this sort of, he breaks through this ceiling, he's this sort of, he breaks through this ceiling. He's this pioneer figure, one of the first gay elected officials in the United States.

And 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. Yeah. 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 role or trade favors. He's going to have to compromise, as you're saying. And actually, 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 he basically says, I'll help you. He goes to the Teamsters 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. And 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 anti everything, you just got to work around them and let them put themselves on that limb. And hopefully, it'll break off at some point. But I think that's the way it is. You just got to work around them and let them put themselves on that limb and hopefully it'll break off at some point.

But there was a couple of members on our city council that gravitated toward each other. That's the dangers 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 and you can educate them, and you can get the Chamber of Commerce to support you. I remember Loverage would say, if you can get 40 people in the room, you can do anything. 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. If 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, of that policy or project. I did that one night when it came to homelessness in our in our city. That was the biggest issue when I was leaving office. And I ended up living

in a 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 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 you know if they're going to take me seriously and to bring a sense of urgency to the issue and 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, you know, the city hall, the city council chambers, full of the faith community, full of, you know, individual, the nonprofit community. And we kind of pushed the city council to open up, you know, 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 and you know it it's just crazy how much time and effort and energy it took for that to happen. But that's back to leadership. 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 gonna get things done. Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're gonna make some picks, talk some sh-t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agar. So here's how this show's gonna work, okay?

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What's up guys, it's your girl Kiki and my podcast is back with a new season and let me tell you, it's too good. And I'm diving into the brains of entertainments best and brightest, okay? Every episode I bring on a friend and have a real conversation. And I don't mean just friends,

I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on. So follow, watch, and listen to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And now here is Mayor GT 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.

So 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 choose your Kato's. Those are the sort of models that having up on display help sort of check you 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. It must be strange though, for one of your Kato'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. 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, all my life in Tulsa, really until I became mayor, I was mostly known as his grandson. Now 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 go to live so long, to have a post-career, 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.

And so he can kind of help you turn down the volume or give you a little bit of a hard-won wisdom about what matters and what doesn't. Oh, a hundred percent. With him, I think the value of perspective is tremendous, both from him personally, like that, what was that, that Calvin Coolidge line about 90 percent of

the things you're really worried about never actually come to pass. Yes. 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. And 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 gonna 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 counselor, 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

and his very first month in the job, was the deciding vote to desegregate public facilities in Tulsa. And 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 gonna 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. And 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 in a deep Southern city, this would have been a huge deal. 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. And then also though, as the years pass,

as we go on and do other things, eventually, someone's turned out of office or they go to the next office or the next job or shut 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? The 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. And 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, Marcus Aurelius, 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. 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. You'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 had a great experience with that. It was, my family, we took sort of this pilgrimage before I was sworn in as mayor. We went to Rome, family, we took sort of this pilgrimage before I was sworn in as mayor. We went to Rome. 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 bus and making fun of them. And 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 of him. What's it's

actually not of him. It's the chest to the neck of the emperor might have had legs to it. So so let's say it's a full bust. 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 worshiped 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 long the emperor lasts, I don't know why I said four years, but every couple of years, you get a new emperor, they carve a new bust and they put it on top. It's thank you next. You see the same thing, you go to the airport and there's 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 timelessness of 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. Like how 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 US 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, and 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 nineties. 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? And Mike Mansfield said, I don't,

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, right? 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 committed crimes on the job, you know, so on and so forth. So, there's an extra humility in not just,

hey, you're probably gonna 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 workman-like journeyman in your job is all we can kind of shoot for. That'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 US 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 is like one of

the weird things about my job is everyone thinks they can do it. Right. And everyone, and a lot of people want to do it. And I think mayor is a similar job like that where, you know, 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. So 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 US 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. It affects the daily lives of the people that you serve. I 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.

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 who's or even a governor who are fairly removed from the people they serve. I cannot go to a 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.

The benefit of that though, and always 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 citizens who went, if I were mayor, here's what I would do. Or, you know, 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? There's the I alone can fix it. That's just not how the American system works in basically any level. 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, but then I was 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, an outgoing mayor actually, who said, every mayor, they run on the things, you know, the things that they're gonna 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, in tornado alley, we have rivers that flood, we get hit with every kind of natural disaster that you can imagine here. And 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, 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 Stutman said a couple of weeks ago in the video you put up about one of the most important qualities of a leader being able to move from one issue to another, to another very quickly. You 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 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? It'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. And 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 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 up from the Gulf Coast and then just dumped a ton of water in Kansas, Kansas and Northern Oklahoma. Yeah. Was this Harvey? It might've been.

Yes. It was 2019. Yeah. And this caused all Tulsa's located on a river and upstream from us to prevent flooding downstream, they had built up just this tremendous water supply in a lake that's upstream from Tulsa, but the US Army Corps of Engineers decided this lake, it's gonna overflow the dam,

we've got to start releasing water. And they start releasing, 100,000 cubic feet per second of water. And so we get, 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.

And 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. Yeah, and 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, 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.

Like 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. Yeah, 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? Or 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. And, you know, you agree, you, I was just watching this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and he, Larry says this guy, to this guy says, Hey, can you remind me of something? And the guy says, sure. And then he doesn't remind him. And he says 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 asked for the reminder and the person who promises to make the reminder. 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 kept up at night so we can go

about our lives. And I think, you know, the mark of a bad leader is, is you advocate that responsibility or that duty. And then you when, 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 hundred 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. And I think that's really important in any crisis situation. I've had to deal with, we talked about the flood, but 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've felt my responsibility is to dig through and to 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. You 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. It'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 gonna 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 let people know

there are hands on the wheel, which is really what Hoover's main failing was. Hoover tried to do a bunch of stuff, but 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 economic crisis that was psychological more than anything else. And 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, 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. 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. I received it. So I was elected mayor, and then I had six months before I was sworn in. And in Tulsa, we don't have a city manager. I won on the first ballot,

which was with non-partisan elections. So if somebody gets over 50% on the first ballot, you're in. And I ran against my predecessor. I think we all assumed there'd 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, 4,000 employees. Well, I had never run an organization that large. No mayor we've ever had has. And 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 piece 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, 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, developing a budget, managing the team said, but 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. 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. Like 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. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th 1988 and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore

oil rig. Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10 p.m., workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.