Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1657 - Mayor Steve Adler
Uploaded: 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1657 - Mayor Steve Adler' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1657 - Mayor Steve Adler' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-25. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1657 - Mayor Steve Adler

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Thanks for doing this, man. Appreciate it.
No, I appreciate the invite.
What's it like being the mayor of Austin?
You know, it's a real trip.
If you could go back and do it again, would you?
I keep reminding Diane that we volunteered to do this.
Yeah, I mean, because there's so many things about it that are spectacular.
But it is also the most frustrating thing I've ever done.
Have you ever done anything in public service before this?
Not in any kind of elected office.
What gave you the motivation to do it?
You know, I was in and around politics.
But, you know, I worked on some campaigns.
I had a friend who became a state senator,
and I took some time off helping him set up his office.
I think, you know, really it was, you know, literally the city had been real
good to me.
You know, I came here as a pretty poor student passing through town, never left,
stayed here for the music and the breakfast tacos.
You know, 40 years later, I've achieved so many things that I didn't even know
existed.
And it was a chance to give back.
This is the classic case of no good deed goes unpunished.
Well, and then, you know, the way it stands now, it's such a strange time,
right?
Like, everything was fine.
I mean, so many mayors across the country had, you know, you have your standard
mayor problems.
But then COVID hits, and you have everything is exacerbated.
And, like, what kind of, like, massive change has this been for you?
You know, it actually starts before that.
You know, let's go back.
We've had three 100-year storms in my seven years where people have died.
We had a bridge wash out way north of here, sending silt downstream, and we
ended up having to do a water boil in Austin.
And this was at a time—
Water boil, meaning people had to boil their tap water so the processing wasn't
working?
Yeah, in a city of a million people, you couldn't drink the water.
I mean, that never happens.
But yet, in my time as mayor in seven years, it's happened twice.
We had a bomber that was putting bombs on people's porches, mailing people, and
people were dying.
You know, we had 1,000 law enforcement agents here.
We were talking about that.
And then COVID.
I mean, it was—
What was the bomb about?
Like, what was that about?
It was no motive.
I mean, it was just a kid who's obviously had significant problems.
I mean, he was, you know, evil.
He was just randomly sending bombs.
And, of course, when it started, we didn't know that it was random.
So everybody was trying to figure out who's next and what the plan is.
And it was fascinating to watch the FBI and Austin Police Department work on
that.
How long did it take to catch him?
You know, it was over in a matter of just a few weeks.
And I don't even remember now, but it could be even shorter than that.
It could be two weeks.
I remember it being a really long period of time because every day lasted
forever.
But it was relatively, relatively quick.
What is it like being the mayor while something like that is going on?
While you're trying to sleep and you're thinking, like, when's the next one
going to blow?
And how do we catch this guy?
Like, what is that feeling like?
It's hard, you know, because you know your community is scared.
And you know that the community is looking to you to try and gauge how scared
it is that they need to be.
You know, we had the FBI and APD.
We had other law enforcement that was working on it.
I was kind of like the translator.
You know, they would listen to the official reports by law enforcement.
And then they would look at me and say, so how are we supposed to be feeling
for this?
What's our swing thought?
I mean, what are we supposed to be thinking about right now?
And I, you read, start reading, you know, about other situations, other mayors
that have gone through some similar kind of thing, looking back in time.
And so many of these things end where it just stops.
They don't catch anybody.
There's no finality to it.
So there's this lingering, unsettled place where you just never know when it's
going to come back again.
It was a scary, frightening time, except for watching those guys work, because
you watch those guys work.
And I knew that I got to the place where I knew that if that guy kept sending
off bombs, they were going to catch him.
And how did they wind up catching him?
You know, they ended up tracing the packages that were coming in.
They ended up getting a video at a, I think it was like a FedEx place.
You know, they knew that bombs had been mailed at different locations.
And they had pretty sophisticated equipment to be able to determine in two
completely different places what cars happened to be in the same, in those two
spots over a defined period of time.
And so they were doing that.
They were checking the kind of the ring cameras on places where they knew
somebody had probably driven by.
I mean, it was just a lot of police work.
Yeah, that's a thing, right?
If you have someone doing something like that in your city and there's really
no way to figure out why and there's no way to understand.
It's random.
You're sending them out to random people.
And when it started off, you didn't know that it was random, right?
So some of the first...
How many bombs went off?
You know, I am not sure.
My recollection is probably about four, five maybe.
But the first couple hit children of some pretty prominent black families in
the city.
So it initially looked like there may be a link between who was getting bombed.
And this might actually be something that was race-driven.
Because you just don't know.
When you only have two or three data points, it could be anything.
And everybody imagines each one of those scenarios.
So you've had that, you've had the storm which washed out the bridge, and then
this crazy ice storm.
Bastrop nearly burned up.
You know, the city just east of here, wildfire came.
You know, when I came into office, we were in the middle of a historic drought.
Right.
That was when Lake Travis had shrunk, right?
It did.
It was crazy.
Crazy.
Some pictures of friends that I know that live out here sent me pictures.
I was in California at the time, but I was like, that is nuts.
It was like hundreds of yards between their dock and where the actual water was.
We were down to like 25%, 30%.
And I was beginning to get shopped, you know, these multi-billion dollar
proposals to pipe in water from aquifers from east of here.
One of the best things I did as mayor, soon after I was elected, is I made it
rain.
And Lake Travis filled right up.
Didn't it fill up in like a day?
Yeah.
That's crazy.
That's all it takes.
That's all it takes.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's the ice storm out here was pretty bananas.
The frozen snow ice storm that lasted a week is very strange.
And that's also a 100-year sort of event, right?
Almost in recorded history.
I mean, it was the most.
And to have that happen at a time when you're in the middle of a pandemic,
right?
So all the things that you would have done now gets limited.
You know, you're trying to get people off the street and put them into some
kind of congregate warming station.
It impacts that.
It impacts everything that you want to do to have that happen in the middle of
a pandemic.
And then we lost power in the city.
Yeah.
So no one had water.
No one had electricity.
It was pretty interesting.
One thing I did find, though, when you went to the supermarkets, that people
were kind of like bound together with a sense of community.
It was people were almost – people were very friendly here, period.
It's a very friendly city.
But there were even more.
It was like – it seemed like instead of just flat-out panic, people were
talking to each other more.
People were offering up possible solutions to different people's problems and
how to handle things.
It was – it felt good.
And you live here now.
I mean, I really do think this is kind of a magical place.
And I think that is one of the elements.
I mean, there were – not only in the grocery store, but there were people all
over the city that didn't have food and didn't have water.
And, you know, frankly, when something like that happens, it's like way too big
for government relief efforts to be able to get to people.
You need neighbors that are stepping up to help other neighbors.
And that would happen all over the city.
When you first became mayor or when you were running for office, did you have
certain objectives that you wanted to fulfill?
And when you got into office, what was the difference between your ideas of
what you could do and the reality of doing them once you got in there?
Well, you know, when I ran, the highest priority, if you polled people, was do
something about transportation.
A lot of people moving into the city.
Everybody's, you know, looking at congestion issues that they'd never seen
before.
Do something about transportation.
We have no real mass public transit.
We have an I-35 here, one single high state going – interstate going through
the city, one of the most congested in the country.
So transportation I knew I had to focus on.
I need you guys to stop talking about your traffic because it's a joke.
Right.
Your traffic here is literally a joke.
My friend Tony calls it adorable.
It is adorable, right?
Jamie's from out of town.
We're from L.A.
Traffic here is a joke.
It's hilarious.
People are like, this traffic is crazy.
It took me an extra five minutes to get somewhere.
You guys don't have traffic.
I know.
If that's your biggest problem, you literally live in Narnia.
This is a utopian village.
There's no traffic.
And we've been accused of that.
It's true.
Lots and lots and lots of occasions.
But coming in, there were two things that I hadn't anticipated.
The first one was the level of incoming volume was something that I hadn't
anticipated.
When did it start?
When did it ramp up the people moving here?
Because it wasn't just the pandemic, right?
I'm just talking about people reaching out to me in the job.
I mean, you could spend your entire time not doing anything but responding to
constituents.
Oh, okay.
Or you could spend all your time doing nothing but trying to mediate the zoning
cases that show up every week.
I mean, you could spend your whole time never doing anything that's actually
big picture and affirmative in a city.
And I used to blame city councils before me that they would never actually get
in to deal with the really big issues.
Well, it was real apparent to me three weeks into this why it is that that
happens.
It's really hard to do that.
The second thing was that government is hard in Austin.
One, you know, you're not a strong mayor like in Houston or New York.
So the city manager has significant administrative and executive powers in the
city.
When you say not a strong mayor, could you explain that to people, the
difference between the way government works here versus the way it would work
in, say, like Chicago or somewhere like that?
Right.
So the mayor in a lot of cities is the CEO of the city.
Sometimes they don't serve on city council, and the city council is kind of
like the Congress or the legislature.
In a lot of cities, it's the mayor that appoints the police chief and the
executives and the head of the departments.
That system is in a lot of cities.
There's also a lot of cities in the country where the city manager appointed by
the city council is really the chief operating officer of the city and really
makes all the appointments in the city.
The city council operates almost like a board for a company and deals with
policy-related issues, not the management or the executive issues.
And that's what we have in Austin.
So I'm on the city council.
I have no greater vote or power than any of my peers on the city council.
So it makes it difficult to come into a city and lead when the other 10 people
on your council have identical powers that you have with the exception of I
have probably a better abi