Latest / In Search Of Excellence / Mayor Eric Garcetti: Fight For What You Believe In | E20

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Mayor Eric Garcetti: Fight For What You Believe In | E20 · In Search Of Excellence

• 0:00
  Eric Garcetti: It's not failing, it's actually succeeding that you should be scared of. I thought about that when I was considering running for president or when you think about becoming a famous actor, be careful what you wish for.
• 0:10
  Eric Garcetti: You will never have your life back again. Every moment you're out in public, people will own you and want a piece of you. But if you can't not do something, you must
• 0:23
  Randall Kaplan: welcome to a Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be to learn, educate and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential is about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication and perseverance.
• 0:36
  Randall Kaplan: It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there.
• 0:41
  Randall Kaplan: Achieving Excellence is our goal and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings.
• 0:47
  Randall Kaplan: We all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. My guest today is my good friend Eric our city. Eric is the mayor of the great city of Los Angeles, a position he has held for the last eight years.
• 1:00
  Randall Kaplan: At the time he was elected Eric was 42 years old, which made him the youngest mayor in Los Angeles in over 100 years. He is the city's first elected Jewish mayor and its second consecutive Mexican American mayor. Eric served four terms as the president of the LA City Council for 13 years while I was serving in public office. He was also a lieutenant and intelligence officer in the US Naval reserves. Eric is also an avid photographer, and accomplished jazz pianist and composer. In July of last year, President Biden nominated Eric to be the US Ambassador to India. Eric, welcome to In Search of Excellence. So great to be with you, my friend. Good to be on your podcast. Thanks for having me. I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helps shape our personality, our values and our future. You're a fourth generation Angeleno and we're born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. Your mom Sookie grew up wealthy in West Los Angeles, her father, Louis Roth, built a tailor shop into a chain of successful stores that sold high quality men's suits. He was also the tailor to Lyndon Johnson, the 36th President of the United States. Your dad Gil is of Mexican American and Italian descent. He grew up poor worked in the LA District Attorney's office for 32 years and was twice elected as the LA District Attorney where he's best known for prosecuting OJ Simpson and the MME Heidi Fleiss, and is another interesting insight into your family. Your grandfather Salvador emigrated from Chihuahua, Mexico and listed in the US Army during World War Two made a living as a barber in the rough area of South Los Angeles where I used to hang out with Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohn and other well known Jewish gangsters, who was eventually arrested by an LAPD officer named Tom Bradley, who would go on to be the La mayor for 20 years himself, going back to your parents, What were they like? And what kind of values did they instill in you? Well, I just feel like I walked through a century of history altogether.
• 2:47
  Randall Kaplan: Two quick corrections. My great grandfather was Louis Roth. His son Harry was the guy who ran the company with his name. And that arrest I think happened when my grandfather was a teenager. So then he went on turned his life around. I don't want people to think he was arrested as a barber. So just for grandpa style. And for grandpa Harry just wanted to make that clear. I kind of described myself as a border crosser. I say that provocatively because, you know, my family of obviously, all of them crossed borders to come here, whether it was fleeing Russian oppression, ironically, right now, in what is today modern day Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Poland, or whether it was my grandfather who lost his father in the Mexican Revolution and was carried by my great grandmother over the border, in her arms as a dreamer before they even use that term.
• 3:31
  Randall Kaplan: I think my family's history has been about crossing borders to come to where we are. But then I was the embodiment of that Italian last name, but half Mexican, half Jewish, growing up in the city where the whole world is on the streets of LA.
• 3:43
  Randall Kaplan: And my parents were very implicit teachers, not very explicit teachers. They didn't say, Eric, you must do X, Y, or Z ever. But they are incredibly loving, incredibly supportive. I didn't grow up in a famous family. A lot of people think that happened to me as a kid, but my father didn't become District Attorney till after I graduated college, and my sister had been out of college a couple years. So we were fully formed, anonymous family, you know, in the San Fernando Valley, which was literally where the Brady Bunch was filmed. And it felt like the world was just full of possibility. There was a strong sense of service, my mom ran a charitable foundation, my dad as a, as a civil servant in the district attorney's office, I think they really imbued and guess, again, implicitly, not explicitly give back. But they're also very creative. Post da my dad is an incredibly accomplished photographer. My mom was a pianist, the daughter of two pianists who were from LA but met at the Eastman School of Music. And my grandmother was a piano teacher. So I think creativity was always really a big part of growing up. I had a sister who was two years older, a great dog named Bo that looked like President Obama's dog Bob, long before that dog was born.
• 4:56
  Randall Kaplan: So it was like history repeating itself when I saw Bo at the White House, but we were
• 4:59
  Eric Garcetti: I'm in the middle of the San Fernando Valley where he'd walked a little league where my friends were around the block, where we celebrated the bicentennial of this country as a as a five year old kid and watch the Olympics as a 13 year old kid come here. And it really shaped to me that everybody's equal, that you cross borders in order to find one another. And that culture mixes in a place like Los Angeles, so you never have to learn things like how you deal with other cultures, languages, races, religions, that was always imbued in me from a very early age.
• 5:31
  Randall Kaplan: I want to talk about your early childhood, you went to UCLA Lab School for elementary school and starting in the seventh grade, you went to Harvard Westlake or prestigious private then all boys school. Can you tell us what you were like as a kid? And as part of this, can you tell us about Bernardo and the play West Side Story, the special prize they had to make for you in a piano competition? What you used to dream about as you rode your bike around Balboa Park, your trip to Ethiopia when you were 16 years old, and what you did there and how all of these and other experiences you had in your childhood influenced your future?
• 6:01
  Eric Garcetti: Wow. Well, each one of those is worth a podcast, definitely Bernardo. So I went to what was then called University elementary school, it was a public school that was free. If you could afford it, I think they charge you 100 bucks a year. And it was the legacy School of elementary school that created UCLA when it was called the normal school. It was created downtown as a public university public college to train teachers. So there was an elementary school attached to that. And when UCLA moved first to where la CC our community colleges now and then to the Westwood campus, the school traveled with them. So it was a very old school, very cutting edge. Madeline Hunter was our principal who really pioneered the idea of great teachers make a difference in a classroom long before that was accepted. And I loved it, because they were very conscious in how they put together the student body. They made sure it mirrored the demographic, the income and the ability, statistics of LA. So you would have kids from every background, every race, every part of Los Angeles, poor kids, rich kids, you'd have kids that had Down syndrome, but that were maybe a few years older, but at your learning level, and no grades, and no grade levels. So it was really kind of a freeform place that allowed you to learn, as you learned, and you didn't have to learn how to work with kids who had different level abilities, physical mental disabilities, for instance, that was just something that was baked into your classroom, you didn't have to learn what it meant to be with immigrant kids or fourth generation fifth generation Americans that was just baked in. So to me, I always am a big believer coming out of that, that you change society at a very early age by who you surround your youth with your children with. And if they aren't around people, they don't know how to interact with people, whether that means for lower income kids not knowing and being intimidated by higher income kids or professional people, like lawyers and doctors or vice versa. You have just as much cultural ignorance, sometimes from well off kids who have never interacted with just regular kids who are middle class or working class or even poor. So that was an amazing stamp on my early life, and probably the best school I've ever attended. And I've been very lucky to go to some good schools, I still think that you Yes, was the very best of them all. I was headed towards public school in the valley. And then my parents gave me the option to go to what was then Harvard school for boys only. And I got in and last minute decided to go there. And that was also an exceptional place. I guess, as a kid in elementary school, I was kind of a little nerdy, I guess, is the best way to describe it.
• 8:33
  Eric Garcetti: And I loved music, I played sports, but I was into the classroom for sure. I loved ideas and math. And I got to seventh grade. And I realized, Hey, I think I'm a little too nerdy. And I tried, I think really hard that next year from seventh to eighth grade, to try to be cool. And I think at a younger age, experimented with drugs got into like, trying to figure out I was I was a year young and tried to figure out the girls scene and all that.
• 8:59
  Eric Garcetti: And I kind of realized after two or three years of that, and even getting into some trouble that you want to find your core friends. You want to find your core interests and you don't have to strive to be cool, be comfortable with who you are. So I did a lot of theater. I did sports, baseball and wrestling.
• 9:14
  Eric Garcetti: But really theater was my love and that and kind of human rights and public policy. As a kid there I started founding you know, like an Amnesty International chapter and a public policy club and doing speech competitions. But I also just loved the theater. And because we didn't have girls at Harvard, I used to go to Westlake to do their plays, which later merged and became Harvard Westlake. But West Side Story was one of the plays that they're casting and I got cast as Bernardo, and it was by far the best musical I've ever been in. I don't know about my performance, but I love the story. Still love it. Just love the remake that Spielberg just made. And I did some after school specials. I got an agent I did some stuff on TV. I thought I was gonna go into acting, but then in high school you mentioned Ethiop Yeah, something kind of changed my life, which was, I was asked by my friend Josh Geller, who was a classmate whether I wanted to go with him and his parents to Ethiopia, between the two airlifts of Ethiopian Jews. And right around the time of the famine. After the first airlift, the able bodied folks who were faced with famine, old Jewish community, Ethiopian Jewish community had been airlifted out by the Israelis out of Sudan, but who was left behind were the older, sicker, often sometimes single mothers, others, a little kids. And so we went to Ethiopia, which was run down by a Marxist regime. So there would be very embarrassed if they knew publicly or if we said publicly while we're there, but huge suitcases, a couple doctors, they just happened to be full of medical equipment, and we were tourists. And we went to the area around Gander in the north of Ethiopia. And I saw the most extraordinary scenes, people with elephantiasis and leprosy, I saw a country which I think there was one doctor for every 200,000 people. And my parents had always raised me because they met working at pan-am Airlines, you already described how they kind of came from opposite sides of the track. But they met here downtown in LA, working at Panem airlines where my dad was trying to save up money to leave the country as a student for the first time.
• 11:13
  Eric Garcetti: After I graduated from SC. They got engaged three weeks after the first date, got married three weeks after that. So six weeks after the first date, they were married in the next week, they left to live in England together. But they raised my sister and I always been in and out of the world. So we went to China right after it opened up when I was 12 years old. 1983 we would go on trips, never vacations, but whatever money they had, they wouldn't get a nicer car, or invested in the house, they would take us on these trips to places like Nepal or India, Morocco, Rwanda, before the genocide, China, as I mentioned, just after it opened, etc. And so I think that seed was planted. And I told my friend, Josh, absolutely, I want to go to Ethiopia. And we're the youngest kids to ever be able to go on that. But a 16 year old, I knew that I wanted to be a part of making the world a more just fair, healthy, equitable place.
• 12:02
  Eric Garcetti: And I think that kind of changed my my life forever. So I think I hit everything. I played piano as a kid, I kind of inherited that from my parents and grandparents, or at least my mom and my grandparents. But I also loved writing from a young age.
• 12:14
  Eric Garcetti: So I went to a composition contest when I was, I think six or seven against, you know, kids that were up to like 15, or 16.
• 12:22
  Eric Garcetti: And I started studying jazz. My mom was really smart. Most kids stopped playing around 13 or 14, because it's not creative. She said, don't worry about classical music anymore. Just play jazz. And I started studied under Charlie Shoemake, who was the vibes player for George hearing great jazz guitarist in the San Fernando Valley and really learned and loved jazz.
• 12:40
  Eric Garcetti: So I used to play as a kid in piano bar, you know, as a high schooler in Santa Monica, and earn a little bit of money play for some parties sometimes. And that kind of changed everything.
• 12:51
  Eric Garcetti: So yeah, I think, you know, I used to bike around the valley walk every summer with no shoes on to the record store. It was just very idyllic kind of growing up. Don't get me wrong.
• 13:01
  Eric Garcetti: I was a teenager. So life sucked, right? It's really tough to be a teenager, no matter where you are. Had depressing moments got dumped by girlfriends had to figure out how to make my way. But I came out of it and look back on it now is really understanding what a childhood should look like, which is surround yourself with that sort of diversity go out into the world, and just have some downtime to have fun.
• 13:21
  Eric Garcetti: Something I worry about for our kids like that feeling when they said just be home by sundown.
• 13:24
  Eric Garcetti: And you go out and get lost. You don't do that anymore. Three weeks after meeting getting engaged three more weeks to get married. That's some kind of record Madison I met. We got engaged three months after our first date. I thought that was quick, is fast. Well, I used to think that it was it was true love. Now I look back on it. And I realized it was just dumb luck on their part. They love each other. They're still married, but you can't know somebody in six weeks. But they took the jump and they got lucky.
• 14:44
  Randall Kaplan: Every successful person I've ever met has had a series of odd jobs when they were kids are almost never glamorous. They're never sexy. I pick weeds and dug ditches on a construction site. $5 per hour cash. Not fun, but I had cash you mowed lawns, what did your experience mowing lawns teach you about the value of hard work? And as we think about our future, how should we think about our previous and current jobs is stepping stones to where we want to get to in life work for youth, which has been a passion of mine as mayor, by the way I came in, and I looked at the City of LA with 4 million people and probably hundreds of 1000s of youth that are under 16 that we're only providing 5000 summer jobs for them. I'm really proud of that. By the time we I'm leaving. We've quadrupled that at least over 20,000 summer jobs and year during the school year jobs as well. But I think first and foremost, it's just teaching the ethic of work. Like you know, work is work. If you got a job that you're passionate about, and that excites you all the time. You're a unicorn. That doesn't happen very often work is just about learning to grind it out and to figure out almost like becoming a distance runner.
• 15:47
  Randall Kaplan: Like it's not fun to run. I mean some people enjoy If I ran one marathon in my life and the Paris marathon when I was living in England, I'm glad I did it once, but it's just learning that discipline.
• 15:58
  Randall Kaplan: Second, though, is being exposed to just how things work. I fly in my neighborhood and became kind of the guy who would take care of people's lawns and plants. i It was my first experience as an entrepreneur.
• 16:12
  Randall Kaplan: It's funny, my daughter just gave me some flyers today, where she wants to sell some bracelets that she's making. And it brought back with all the misspellings and everything else on my first flyer, that I looked at those memories. And I was so proud of her. I think it teaches you entrepreneurialism and how to start things. But I was also refer one summer as an office assistant. And you think you know what an office is you think you know how a house is built, you think you know how grass grows, until suddenly you're responsible for them. So, to me, one of the things we over segregate in this country is the classroom learning and real life learning. And somehow other countries from Germany to Switzerland, they incorporate much earlier on into young people's lives, the experience of work, not just to teach them the ethic and the pace of that, but also to expose them to what the work really is because a lot of American kids pick a major, they go to college, or pick a job just kind of out of thin air or whatever the family around them does. And I think we can do a much better job of exposing young people to you know how things work. So they can say, Oh, I never thought I really want to be a cinematographer. Or hey, I am passionate about landscape design. I'm going to start as a gardener and go from there. I think education is one of the most important ingredients of our future success. You are an excellent student you graduated from Columbia with a BA in poli sci and urban planning, then you earn a master's degree at Columbia from the School of International Affairs when you graduate it your musicals in your spare time then went to Oxford and London School of Economics where you are a Rhodes Scholar, you traveled to Colombia, Burma and Ethiopia to work and study. For our viewers and listeners who don't know the Rhodes Scholarship was established in 1902. As the oldest and most prestigious scholarship in the world, it's awarded to students based on grades character, their commitment to people and their potential for leadership, as rarefied air, we can all do that. How important is education to our success and path to excellence. And as we move forward in our lives, how important is continuous learning to our future success? Well, let me start with the last piece because as now a 51 year old man, sorry, that's the automatic lights in the room that we save energy here in LA. So I gotta flap my arms a little. There's a 51 year old man, I wish I was more of a student. I mean, I'm constantly learning. I learned a lot from my peers now. And I think people never asked themselves, I helped head up the vice presidential search for President Biden. And one of the questions that my co interviewer one of the other four co chairs, asked all these extraordinary women, governors, senators, others that were interviewing, how do you learn? And most people don't ever stop and think about that? Are you a learner by talking and conversation? Are you a learner by reading or your learner by writing? And do you look to learn in segregated spaces like only the classroom or online? Or do you constantly learn to do you go to a museum and approach it as a student or just as, hey, entertain me with the art that's there? So I think that if we stop educating ourselves and stop being learners, we stop evolving, growing as human beings. And I have to admit, as mayor, even though I've grown tremendously, I think as a leader tremendously as a mayor, I haven't grown a lot as a person for the last eight and a half years because of the sacrifices of the pace of life. I was talking recently to Bob Iger, who's a friend and stopped as stepped down as longtime and amazing CEO of Disney, if not one of the best CEOs ever. And I said, What are you doing? He said, I read a novel. I said a novel What's that? And we both laughed that while we were both in these positions me still as mayor him a CEO, we read some nonfiction because we think that's what leaders are supposed to do. And you wind up reading them, they're entertaining, but most of the time, not a lot of lessons. Because what Teddy Roosevelt was doing, you know, as a youth in Cuba, probably doesn't apply to the decision you're making on recycling water or greenlighting streaming service. But we hadn't been reading fiction. And I haven't read I think a novel probably in almost the entire time I've been mayor besides some short stories, and I reminded me that being a student means not just stimulating the part of you that you have developed or chosen as a profession, but stimulating those other parts with regularity. And with fun, don't just approach it as you know, an obligation. I said what my elementary school was like my Junior High in high school was extraordinary. I loved Colombia and went there because of the Great Books program that they had of going into the literature and the philosophy, classics that really informed so much of the evolution of thinking I did that while I was there to looking at Asia and I studied, not knowing that one day I might be Ambassador to India from the United States. I studied all the Indian Religious classics. And to me the learning
• 20:52
  Eric Garcetti: What I have done since I've been a public servant for the last 2021 years, really has been too narrow. And I think we have to remind ourselves to widen our education to look for it all around us. And to not be embarrassed because I think folks who have some success, start becoming really embarrassed about not really knowing something deeply asking the, the one on one questions when the reality is most of us, we might be the advanced graduate student in one or two things, but another 50 topics, you taking the one on one class every day, and it's okay to ask somebody. In fact, I like it when people ask me the most basic questions not like, Okay, let's get into the nuance of like the building type on the pop up structures you can use for the homeless shelters that we need to have. I'm happy to get into that. And I know that stuff well, but you're more reflective and you evolve more, and things in the world change more with the most basic elementary questions, the ones that we would call stupid questions. I know people say no, no such thing as a stupid question. Quite the contrary, a good stupid question is gold.
• 21:55
  Eric Garcetti: Because it really requires the answer to give a basic description of something that she or he almost never does. I love it. After you studied abroad, you moved back to LA, you taught International Affairs at USC and Occidental College.
• 22:10
  Eric Garcetti: You did that for a few years and the 2001 when you were 30 years young, you ran for public office for the first time when a vacancy opened up in the highway district, after incumbent Jackie Goldberg was elected to the State Assembly. Basketball we met for the first time in the kitchen of my old doctors House who's hosting it get together for 15 people, you won, and then you want again. And then you want again. And were elected four times by your fellow colleagues to be the president of the LA City Council in 2013.
• 22:36
  Eric Garcetti: You were elected mayor for the first time. Let's go back to 2001. What made you run for public office? And as part of that, can you tell us about the full page ad your grandfather took out in the New York Times?
• 22:51
  Eric Garcetti: Let me start with that I even though my grandfather Harry Roth was a very successful businessman, he had ups and downs almost lost the business grew, it made one of the two best kinds of men's suits in America, and even had the honour of becoming tailor to President Johnson when Jack Valenti, who was a Hollywood guy became Special Assistant to Johnson, he said, Hey, I know this great guy who makes suits out in Beverly Hills, we're gonna get you dressed up and he became his tailor. But he also was an activist, an ACLU Man of the Year, big lefty, supported Jewish and liberal causes civil rights. And when the war started, it was something that he opposed, especially as he saw the cost the human cost of it, in Vietnam. And so in 1968, when President Johnson was looking to maybe run for reelection, he took out a full page ad in the New York Times saying, as your tailor, please don't run again, and please withdraw from Vietnam. And in fact, my wife, Patricia, and I will send you$10,000 To help with your retirement or some some amount, I think it was $10,000. And it made national news. It was a Newsweek and Time and even saying, even the President's Taylor opposes this war. And he knew the story I got growing up, because he died when I was young, when I was four years old, he had a heart attack and died when I was five, after being in a coma for a year was that he probably had a choice to make, stay silent, and keep the best and most famous customer a tailor could ever have. Or don't stay silent, but lose that customer. And I don't think it was a tough choice for him. So it taught me at a very early age stand up for what you believe in for those values. If you're gonna be in a leadership position, it's not about the prestige or the glamour, that stuff, you know, the end of our lives, is like cotton candy.
• 24:36
  Eric Garcetti: It's kind of just dissolves away. But what we build and what we say and what we change, and what we do, and the relationships that we have are the most important thing of all.
• 24:46
  Eric Garcetti: So why did I run was the question? That's a good question. I never really have a great answer. But the only answer I have is that I have the will I regret this test? Because there are certain things like wanting to become an actor, which I thought of when I was younger, doing professionally or composer or a politician that you should only do in the words of a drama coach, I think it was actually Sir John Gielgud. I took a masterclass with ones.
• 25:13
  Eric Garcetti: And he said, Only do this if you can't not. In other words, the odds of success as an actor are one of the 1001 in 10,000 to be a great one. The odds of success running for office are low. The great majority of people lose the election and only one person wins. Becoming a musician. Good luck. You know, how many musicians are there that get A a gold record or platinum record?
• 25:34
  Eric Garcetti: Very few. But I do say to myself at moments, whether it was joining the Navy, whether it was running for office, am I going to regret not doing this? And I think I did that test. It was somebody who suggested it to me it was Jackie Goldberg's former chief of staff and I were on a fellowship together through the Rockefeller family Asian looking at next generation leaders who come from minority Marian kind of backgrounds, and she said you'd be a great council member you should run.
• 25:58
  Eric Garcetti: But I'm sure she said that to like 10 people, she was like looking for anybody. And I couldn't get the idea out of my head. I was pretty sure I'd lose. But I wanted to be the young punk in the race, because I thought I could bring something different. The politics of almost everybody running were pretty identical.
• 26:13
  Eric Garcetti: But I think the methodology was different. I went to more people's doors, I knocked on them, I got a very grassroots campaign. And my whole thing was new leadership for our neighborhoods, the idea of maybe it's time for a young generation. And secondly, let's really focus on the gritty neighborhood level of the cracks on the sidewalks, the planting trees, the fixing up parks, or building new ones. And that's really what I did for 12 years.
• 26:34
  Eric Garcetti: We reduce graffiti by like, over 90% Oh, Chief Bratton used to say I know when I literally crossed the street into your district, because it's so effective. We had 300 volunteers who would just call and graffiti obsessively, whenever it happened in their neighborhood, we tripled the number of parks we had, I think eight parks when I started, I left with 24, or maybe was 12 to 36. But like, usually build one or two parks as a councilmember in 10 years, we built like 20 Something I think, and we really tried to revitalize those areas of Silver Lake Atwater, village Echo Park Hollywood, that had been down on their luck without moving people out, building good, affordable housing, keeping the income level the same, bringing union and decent paying jobs to those areas. So again, in 2013, why did I run actually wasn't looking to and I didn't have the ambition to be mayor for any long period of time in my life.
• 27:22
  Eric Garcetti: I never thought I'd be in local government, quite frankly, I thought I was going to do international relations, because that's what I taught. It's funny. My next posting finally brings me back to what I thought I'd be doing. But for 2021 years, I've realized that doing local politics is doing national and global politics. But I really was looking for somebody who would inspire me in 2013 race. And there's really great people that were running, but I kind of felt like I had something different to say and to do, I wanted to build on the success of that Hollywood turnaround that we had at that moment, and bring a lot of kind of economic justice and racial justice work in an environmental justice work. So I threw my hat in, I was the last kind of major candidate to do so. But elections are strange. They became about the Department of Water and Power. And suddenly I, I won, and I was the 42nd, Mayor of the City of Los Angeles. So to me, I would tell people out there listening to this because everybody's different. First of all, if you're going to run for office, get your head checked out, talk to a psychologist, you know, I tell my friends coming to me now who want to run for mayor to succeed me, if I love you, I'm telling you not to run, if I hate you, I'm saying Go for it. Only half jokingly because it is an immense, immense personal sacrifice. It's not failing, it's actually succeeding that you should be scared of I thought about that when I was considering running for president. Or when you think about becoming a famous actor.
• 28:42
  Eric Garcetti: Be careful what you wish for.
• 28:42
  Eric Garcetti: You will never have your life back again. Every moment you're out in public, people will own you and want a piece of you. But if you can't not do something, you must three things here. I collect art. First thing you see when you walk into my house, but you've been there a couple of times, we're gonna talk about that in a minute. Is an ad reshape painting that says, I can't not do that? Wow. So the literally the first thing when you see you walk in the door.
• 29:11
  Eric Garcetti: Second, I got a little photo of us on election night here.
• 29:15
  Eric Garcetti: That's awesome. We were having a good time. This was downtown at some. I don't know. It was like a nightlife bar. There were all kinds of fun people there. Yeah, that was where the celebration was. Right. That was a celebration. And then I also want to say something, you know, I never got involved in politics before. I never wanted to support someone until I met you.
• 29:33
  Eric Garcetti: I heard you speak at Soho House one day, and we're sitting around the table. I thought it was cool. So house, I thought, God, this is a guy that I really want to back. He's a real guy.
• 29:42
  Eric Garcetti: And then we had a couple of fundraisers for you here at my home. And you said to my kids at the time, when I when I'll come speak at your school. And I thought all right, that's cool.
• 29:52
  Eric Garcetti: And by the way, they remembered it. They kept saying, is he going to when is he going to talk? Or is this true? And I said he's gonna win. And he's gonna come and he's gonna speak.
• 30:00
  Eric Garcetti: And obviously, when you first got there, you were very, very busy, a little harder to get a hold of, you know when that happened, but you came. And this was pretty much a mostly white, rich kids school, wealthy kids school, not in the city of Los Angeles. But But you did it. It was a commitment. And I'm forever grateful, as was the school. So I just want to tell people what kind of person you are. You made a commitment, and you did it. So I'm grateful for that. I think, you know, my dad taught me. I loved being there.
• 30:28
  Eric Garcetti: I love teaching. We didn't get to talk about that much. But I love teaching at USC and occidental. I love being in the classroom. And I'm kind of whether that's the school that is the toughest school that is the worst off and trying to inspire them or whether it's a school. I actually like going to school where the kids are well off and talking about what kind of society we're going to build and what sort of obligations do we have to make sure you aren't just quote unquote the best but that you are bringing the future forward with you. Because I think if you said self segregate yourself and only talk to one group or another, one of the strange things I always say, being mayor is kind of like, I don't know, it's mayors, priests and journalists, who are the only people really cut across all the strata of society every day. Add to that something that not all priests and journalists do, although they may, is that cut across a lot of geography.
• 31:16
  Eric Garcetti: We all think we know LA, I would say point oh, 1% of people really regular way criss cross from Chatsworth, to San Pedro, from Boyle Heights to Brentwood, and have to kind of figure out what is our story? How can we narrate what this moment is, and then could be and I always approach my role as a mayor and as an elected official, as a public servant, as a narrator and chief storyteller, and chief. And I think I always confuses people, because they're like, huh, but I think that is the difference between human beings and other animals, right is our ability to narrate our ability to tell stories to pass those on. To summarize the moment whether it's in a pandemic, or whether it's in a campaign, you have to put together that possibility. But I also learned from my father, try to fulfill your word as much as you can always, so whether it's promising you coming there or campaign promise, I track those things. And a lot of my team was nervous, because early on, I developed a very metrics driven administration, a dashboard.
• 32:15
  Eric Garcetti: They said, Well, this is just internally for you to manage the unemployment rate and the miles paved of sidewalks and streets in this No, no, my dashboard is going to be a public dashboard.
• 32:26
  Eric Garcetti: Because I want the people to have that information. And I want them to keep me as accountable to my promises as I have. No politician can fulfill 100% of his or her promises, things change, you also make stupid promises. But you got to communicate that, for instance, the green New Deal, which we put forth for Los Angeles, has literally I think 96 Plus promises in it with benchmarks.
• 32:49
  Eric Garcetti: Well, the good news is we hit 95% of them early or on time.
• 32:53
  Eric Garcetti: And then we kind of edited them to be even more ambitious. But you got to be honest about that.
• 32:56
  Eric Garcetti: 5%, that's a high batting average, and politics, by the way, but 5%, this was stupid, that's not achievable. We can't do that. Or I just messed up.
• 33:05
  Eric Garcetti: And I'll try again. And I think people appreciate that. Because so often, in politics, it's just brag about every success or find a success, even when people know, things like homelessness are so brutally difficult, that nobody's going to buy that, hey, we've done everything. And it's like, we're the model, but people will buy. We're doing more than anyone else. And we're trying every single day, this guy wakes up with a passion about it, and a purpose and a heart around those sorts of issues. And I think I wish there was more of that in politics.
• 33:34
  Eric Garcetti: And I wish that people out there would support people more as they do in the business sector as we fail forward, figuring out how to get it right. Awesome.
• 33:40
  Eric Garcetti: Let's talk about the great city of Los Angeles. And let's start with some stats, we have a population of nearly 4 million people, which makes us the second largest city in the United States, the largest manufacturing center in the United States. And if you combine the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, we have the busiest port in the United States and the fifth busiest port in the world. In 2018, the LA metropolitan area had a gross metropolitan product of over a trillion dollars making it the city with the third largest GDP in the world after Tokyo in New York City. To give this a little more context are only 15 countries in the world that have a GDP more than a trillion dollars. That's a lot to manage.
• 34:17
  Eric Garcetti: And to do. It effectively requires working together with a lot of different departments and organizations not only on the city or state level, but with many other states and countries around the world. In our search for excellence, how important is cooperating with others, getting along with them, making sacrifices where you don't get everything you want? And being a good team player and is getting along with others and being a good team player something you're born with or did you learn it? So I fundamentally think that leadership is usually miscast as that strong solitary leader in the biography written 100 years later, who, like the general in World War Two, or the president at the right moment led his nation because always a him his nation or led his army on to victory, when most of the world is changed by those who understand that power is about sharing power, sometimes ceding power and giving power.
• 35:12
  Eric Garcetti: Certainly being mayor of Los Angeles, if we were to construct a polity, called Los Angeles from scratch, there's no way we would construct what I had to inherit. Let's cut up 19 million people into five counties, the biggest one, we'll have 10 million people. Let's make 88 cities and a few unincorporated areas out of that the biggest one will be 4 million. The next biggest number to Long Beach will be 400,000. And then we'll go down to some cities that really only have like 150 people in them and everything in between. Let's segregate off the type of problems into their own governments. So if you have Community College, let's make got its own government school district, its own government, air quality, its own government, even rats and pest, let's create vector control its own government just to deal with that, let alone the counties and cities where public safety and health and other things are all divided. It is both on the horizontal and the vertical axis of jurisdiction and geography a mess. So the only way to be effective and by the way, even if LA is especially messy, most places are like that, right?
• 36:18
  Eric Garcetti: Because you layer a state government or county government, federal government on that, you look at how to do international things together to deal with climate change. When there's no international government, there's only this thing called the United Nations and whatever treaties people want to make your power comes from your ability to convene, coerce, and to ultimately convince those three C's of bringing people together. Sometimes you have to use your power and not be afraid to use it to kind of threaten what the consequences will be if we don't. But ultimately, you have to convince people. So I'll give you a case in point.
• 36:50
  Eric Garcetti: Traffic is our number one problem in Los Angeles. And to me, it's a reflection of our housing crisis, right? We didn't build housing where jobs are, etc. We're all stuck. The commutes about as long as New York DC, but in terms of just car traffic, we use our number one. So to change that, we've got to do a lot for 30 years, we didn't build out a public transportation system. We haven't used technology, we haven't put housing, where it is, et cetera. But on building our transportation, I was very ambitious. I didn't want to be the mayor who built on the great work of Mayor Villaraigosa and others to build a line or two, I said, Give me every line we think we need. All right, let's put that all into one package.
• 37:25
  Eric Garcetti: Let's just have the naivete to go in front of the voters and say, Hey, don't you want all of this? So I authored measure m, which was the largest transportation package in US history times two. But guess what, even if the voters of LA, were all with their mayor, there's at seven other cities I had to convince and five supervisors. So I invited very early on long before I wrote that, the 87 mayor's to convene with me every three months to talk about whatever the Olympics, housing, earthquakes, things that we held in common, and they loved that a mayor of La who's just 40%, the population who gets 90%, the headlines, so they traditionally love to hate the attention that the mayor of La gets, they saw some humility, and some, and I treated them as as partners, and equals because they are their mayor's also elected by their cities. And it became this cadre that when I went on a transportation tear, that we were able to do that together and pass not just a half a cent, but a full cent without a sunset. So that that is $120 billion, the next 40 years 15 rapid transit lines, we don't have enough time to go into other examples. But to me, if you don't share power, you are powerless. If you can't convince people with soft power, you won't get anything done. And if you're only relying on the fact that Yeah, sure. I've run the port and the airport and the largest municipal utility, and there's a lot of important things I can do there just by dictating it together with my city council, but there's probably, I would say 5060 70% more you can do. If you understand power is about sharing. You've touched upon a couple of important issues facing LA. public schools are not great. More than one five residents who live here don't graduate from high school. You mentioned traffic, the average Los Angeles residents spend 62 hours and traffic every year nearly double the national average and cost drivers an average of $968 a year contributes to our horrible and disgusting smog problem. Our interstate five south from Euclid Avenue to 605 was ranked as the most congested quarter in the United States in 2021. We talked about public transport.
• 39:32
  Eric Garcetti: It's great. We're making strides. We're still not there.
• 39:36
  Eric Garcetti: We're unfriendly to business.
• 39:36
  Eric Garcetti: Among other things. We have something called a co a Los Angeles business tax. It's a privilege tax with $2.55 per$1,000 of gross revenues of every business based here. We have a lot of crime. Last year la had its highest number of homicides, nearly 15 years. But I want to move on to the homelessness problem which we've talked about which is getting a lot of attention and has since you took office and seems to be growing not seems to it is growing. You've called it the moral and humanitarian issue of our time. And we'll start with some very depressing stats on this one in every 588 Americans is homeless a total of 552,830 Americans in January of 2019. LA County had 58,936 people experiencing homelessness a year later in January 2020. The number had risen to 66,433. A pandemic only made things worse, much worse actually. There's a new number count coming up and homelessness Experts are predicting the number will rise to more than 100,000 people when the audit is finished. There are more than 36,000 people without permanent homes in Los Angeles.
• 40:44
  Eric Garcetti: With 75% of them living in unsheltered living unsheltered on the streets of our current homeless population. Three out of five are chronically homeless
• 40:52
  Randall Kaplan: Homelessness struggled with a disabling condition and 5% of people experienced homelessness are fleeing their homes because they are victims of domestic violence. It's a crisis, like you said, which touches all kinds of other difficult issues, crime, public health, cost of living transit in our environment. On the flip side of helping the homeless, which is something everybody wants to do, people are leaving la because of it. They're afraid. My wife Madison was driving in Brentwood two months ago, taking with our two year old in the car in the car seat going to pick up Carter, our daughter at preschool in Santa Monica. This is a good neighborhood, some person who is homeless, jumped on the hood of her car, start screaming wildly banging the hood woodenly pounding trying to break the window, open up, open up, open up the window. He told her that if she doesn't do it, he's gonna keep pounding. And she said, I'm gonna run you over if you don't get off the car to which he threatened, you're going to break my foot and I'm going to lay down beneath your tire. She called me petrified shaking. There was an incident and Hollywood I mean, there's something every day and I have many friends who have picked up and laughed just because it's affecting their quality of life.
• 42:02
  Randall Kaplan: It's a terrible problem. Can the homelessness problem ever be solved or as our best possible outcome here to try to minimize it?
• 42:11
  Eric Garcetti: I think you're right. California is the only place really where there's a state dream. It's not that people in Missouri or Montana or Florida or Texas don't have dreams. But there's you don't hear about the Illinois dream.
• 42:22
  Eric Garcetti: You don't hear about the main dream. But it resonates not just in California, but across this country, the California Dream.
• 42:28
  Eric Garcetti: So there's the American dream and the California Dream. It was predicated, I believe on great weather, good jobs, good schools, cheap housing, we still have great weather, we still have great jobs. Our schools in the higher ed are still the best in the country, but K through 12 still have a lot of work to do.
• 42:42
  Eric Garcetti: And when you look at housing, we've failed collectively for over 40 to 50 year period where we used to say yes to building you don't have to be homeless to feel this, and I'll come back to that. But our graduation rate LAUSD has gone from 50% to over 81%. Now, there's been real progress. I'm very optimistic about our new chancellor, I mean, our new superintendent who's come in from Miami where he has an extraordinary track record. And I've been very engaged as a mayor to everything from those youth jobs to making community college free, which increase the number of kids going to college by 40%. Within two years, I agree, you know, when it looks at our gross receipts tax, you know, the work that I've done to reduce that, and I think it's an anti business friendly tax, and we need to continue to wean ourselves off of that. Crime is actually at a lower rate than it has been. But you're right about homicides. They went up everywhere. It's the safest decade in our city's history.
• 43:29
  Eric Garcetti: But the warning signs when things pick up, I want to praise our police officers and our wide kind of vision of public safety, which isn't just police officers, everything from mental health, which I'll get to in a second vans that now roll out 24/7 through 911. And they're just starting to the amazing work that our gang interventionists and police officers have done. So that, for instance, follow home robberies, some of the work that we did around folks that were smash and grab, it's lower than before those stories came out, because within a period of three or four months, but the echo chamber sometimes creates this feeling like the worst, super unsafe and don't get me wrong, if you're a victim of crime doesn't matter what statistics are, you are a victim of crime. And I've deep deep, deep sympathy for that.
• 44:12
  Eric Garcetti: When it comes to homelessness, I would say it's very tough to be a mayor and deal with homelessness. Recently, Willie Brown was interviewed. And he talked about when he was mayor of San Francisco, how he was gonna look at homelessness, which was really tough then and still is even worse than here.
• 44:27
  Eric Garcetti: And he convened all he was gonna convene all the experts and the nonprofits and the policymakers and he cancelled it a day before and up in San Francisco. He's in charge of the city and county because they have city and county together. So things that I don't have power of over here like health care, mental health care, actually is under the mayor's control there. And he said the following and it haunts me. He said no mayor can ever solve homelessness. And I figured that out before I did the convening. And I just walked away from it. Now I don't buy that we can't make a huge impact. But I think people think that the causes in and the solutions out of homelessness lie with our local leaders, and I have run to this fire. And I have not regretted a minute of that even against all the political advice I got, I ran on ending homelessness. And when I was planning what I wanted to do, I think most of my advisor said homelessness is a dead bang loser politically. But I don't care because I've worked on this since I was volunteering in Skid Row as a teenager. And the easiest way to summarize what homelessness is, is it's trauma meets high rent, the traumas may be different. It may be the failure of war and veterans coming home from the longest war in our history in Afghanistan and Iraq. It may be that it was the foster care system in my I know we're going to talk about later my wife and I are foster parents and you see the failures of that system and how those children that we give so much to when their children that a majority of them will either be in jail, homeless or dead five years after they are in the system, it may be sexual and domestic violence, because 90 plus percent of the women on skid row are the survivors of that. And it's quite often mental health and or, and they go hand in hand drug abuse, that where people are self treating their mental health care, because we have no mental health care system, when those things collide with not having built enough housing. And a lot of places those traumas exist, we have drug abuse meth across this country, it's never been cheaper, but it doesn't live outside, partially because it can't because of the weather.
• 46:22
  Eric Garcetti: And partially because people can still get a room someplace, and they used to. And when Los Angeles has had lower homelessness over the decades, it's when we have more housing.
• 46:30
  Eric Garcetti: So if you want to solve homelessness, you have to move it indoors. And we have to have a mental health care system, so that that person who attacked your wife, or was threatening her, Well, how can we live in a civilized society, and there be no solution for that person?
• 46:47
  Eric Garcetti: It's not just out, quote unquote, lock them up. Yeah, there needs to be if they're a threat to themselves or somebody else. We do need to have people in secure environments. But we also need to have solutions.
• 46:55
  Eric Garcetti: I'll give you an example. Our firefighters answer so many calls down in Skid Row for people who are overdosing or a drunk. So when I was early on as mayor, they used to transport them to County USC, they'd be out of commission for three or four hours while they waited for them to sober up, it was called Wall time. So they're not answering your 911 Call or mine.
• 47:13
  Eric Garcetti: And then they get them and take them back to Skid Row and release them. There's nothing that's a solution there. So we got together with a county to create sobering centers in Skid Row where people can get treated, and a sobering van.
• 47:27
  Eric Garcetti: It's a fire department unit that rolls out, picks up people who are overdosing or drunk and drops them off with help and three minutes later, are back ready to be able to answer another 911 call. And we have to do this comprehensively from our housing policy, to our work that we look at in terms of poverty in this city in this country. I think only two things if you want straight talk on homelessness will end homelessness. One is a right to housing in this country. That's incredibly controversial. I think for conservatives, they're like, hell no, or even your average person, I got to work hard and pay rent, why should somebody get free housing, it's cheaper. And the countries that have ended homelessness, it's the only thing that works, you can't begin to treat someone's mental health, childcare, job training, drug abuse issues, when they're on the streets, you simply can't. And you can't just stick them in a shelter. That's not good enough, the step shelters where you got to spend the night and then you get kicked out in the morning. The second thing is comprehensive mental health care in this country. And it's very important for us to disentangle mental health, from homelessness because not all folks who are unhoused have mental health issues. They're not all that example. Most of them are not that example. But all it takes is the trauma of the one and 100 people who are experiencing schizophrenia or experiencing whatever it is, and threaten somebody to say, hey, I don't want to stay in this town anymore. And vice versa. We didn't do anything to help that individual as well. And we grossly underfunded this, the city of LA doesn't control any of the departments besides zoning on housing, that solve homelessness. We can't arrest our way or clean our way out of homelessness, right? Arresting it, somebody's gonna be out two days later, and cleaning it up.
• 49:02
  Eric Garcetti: That just pushes people from one area to the next. But if you think about mental health, that's with the county state and the feds. You look at Veterans Affairs, you look at the mental health counseling for survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
• 49:14
  Eric Garcetti: All these things exist outside the city of LA, but I'm the mayor. So people say fix it, mayor and I take that challenge.
• 49:19
  Eric Garcetti: And I have I've increased our budget from literally $10 million a year on homelessness to a billion dollars last year 1 billion with a B. And I think most experts, I've talked to you I know this source, you had think that the numbers will go up this year, we're finally seeing some thinning in some areas of the encampments. tents have never been cheaper. Meth has never been cheaper mental health care has never been less cheated. And rents have never been higher. So I always say you put those four things together.
• 49:43
  Eric Garcetti: And the traumatic interactions with people on the street that people have is just too far spread. And small cities push it into our city, they probably violate the law, the Constitution in a way that we get sued and can't. But you don't see people in some of our smaller neighboring cities, because cops show up when they're just pushing a shopping cart, say what are you doing here? And so they go over the border not to be hassled, even though that's probably illegal.
• 50:05
  Eric Garcetti: So I know it's a long answer, but it deserves it. Because in many ways, I hope that Americans will wake up to until we have an entitlement all this the last thing I'll say and I asked only thing I asked President Biden to put into his platform, when he asked me to chair his campaign was a right to housing in this country, it will take years to pass and maybe even a decade plus to get in there. But think about it. And when we have somebody who's hungry in this country, we don't limit how many people get food stamps. It's an entitlement. Somebody doesn't have health care in this country. We don't limit who should be able to see a doctor so they don't die. That's Medicaid. We call it medical.
• 50:36
  Eric Garcetti: But when it comes to housing, we have section eight vouchers, housing choice vouchers, which is our biggest program, there's a one in eight chance if you need housing that you're going to get it in the city of LA you'll wait years it's probably not enough in that voucher to pay for the rent that are in LA if we're serious about it and we reduced a Veterans homelessness by 80%. In my first few years as mayor, that's because there were vouchers from the federal government that helped us put people in doors. We've got to put people in housing. Let's switch
• 51:02
  Randall Kaplan: gears and talk about something that's very important to me and I know which is very important to you as well foster care. Let's start with some background here. Kids enter the foster care system through no fault of their own. They're victims of abuse or neglect, you can continue to live safely with their families or in their homes. According to the most recent federal data, there are currently more than 400,000 children in the foster care system of the United States. Out of this 400,000 There are more than 65,000 children in the California foster care system of the 65,000 children. 35,000 of them reside in LA County. When children aged out of the system when they turn 18 and half of them end up homeless or incarcerated with 20% of them becoming instantly homeless.
• 51:43
  Randall Kaplan: Less than half of all foster youth in California graduate high school in 75% of young women in foster care report at least one pregnancy by the age of 21. These are horrific numbers. My grandmother is 103 years old was raised in foster care, bounced around from home to home was treated like the maid slept in the closet. It's an issue there and dear to my heart. I started event called the magic ball with my friend John Terzian eight years ago with the benefit for a nonprofit whose mission is to end the cyclist and family homelessness and the chronic poverty that results from it. I also endowed a scholarship at the University of Michigan for a student who's homeless, that student who was the first person again, it was living in her car in East Lansing, Michigan parents in prison. Nothing good had happened her before she graduated Michigan, got a master's degree promised me she'd become a public speaker one day and a role model. She's done all those things. She's a mother, a homeowner, is just a phenomenal person is a member of our nuclear family. Right now.
• 52:43
  Randall Kaplan: There's lots of reasons why I admire you one of them, you don't really talk about it that much is you have seven foster kids, which is incredible stuff.
• 52:52
  Randall Kaplan: Tell us what prompted you to do that, and where this ranks in the long list of your many impressive accomplishments? How can each of us help and is giving back necessary to our path to excellence?
• 53:06
  Eric Garcetti: Well, the short answer is absolutely that is, to me, the only thing that really is excellence, you can do a lot of things that change the world or that give you accolades. But if we're not healing this world, what's the point, you can leave the Nice place you live the nice job that you have and go out onto the streets as you just described that experience and we collectively have all failed. If we're not focused on that, if everybody did what you did, we wouldn't have homelessness, we wouldn't have the trauma that's out there. And I always say, don't tell me with 40,000 people who are on housing the city of LA with 4 million people that 100 people per one couldn't somehow figure out a way to help him or her get off the streets.
• 53:47
  Eric Garcetti: But we often we like giving others that assignment government is like kind of a customer client relationship instead of a community. It's like, okay, I'd like to do Mayor go solve it. And I say, I'll do that I'm gonna work my tail off.
• 54:01
  Eric Garcetti: And I have every single day, seven days a week, longer hours than I care to think back on.
• 54:04
  Eric Garcetti: But if we had enough people who would not just give to the groups, which is really important, engage with but personalize these relationships.
• 54:13
  Eric Garcetti: And we get so scared about interacting with each other. I think like how many people have gone up to that person who's on house, on their street. In some cases, they might feel threatened or that person has mental health issues that make them feel unsafe about that. But I've do a lot of this on the street, I walk the streets, I talk to people in the tents.
• 54:30
  Eric Garcetti: Nine out of 10 are folks whose stories you immediately begin to engage with I was in Hollywood and talk to folks who have been the foster care system, talk to a vet talk to somebody from Indiana where my wife's from talk to the guy who was kind of the mayor of the encampment area, and he was living there with his girlfriend and they're about to get out of being homeless. I mean, you begin to humanize this. And so I think it's the best thing I've ever done. And it's not an accomplishment. It's just the best thing I've ever done. It's the hardest thing I've been just like parenting is period. And I would say to folks who ever think about doing this being a foster parents no different than being a parent. I mean, yes, I had two children come to Me who were foreign, and 12. That was my first parenting experience.
• 55:07
  Eric Garcetti: And I had a days notice not nine months of gestation or anything.
• 55:10
  Eric Garcetti: And that was a little bit of a shock, even if you go through the classes, but it's still the most amazing thing I've done and we're in touch with almost everybody we're godparents to some we're close to others, we visit them. But I've also seen the full spectrum of folks the mental health issues that come with that the homelessness that comes with that. The abuse, the drug abuse, the teenage pregnancies, the problems that are our collective problems, and if you just think that county of LA is going to solve this on its own, we need more people to be foster parents. We need them to be mentors. We need them to be engaged. And we need people to to do it not in a savior way.
• 55:44
  Eric Garcetti: But like as equals. I've learned as much from the children who have been in my care as I've hopefully impart To them, and it's heartbreaking. I mean, some of them leave ones that you hope would stay. But you also, somebody once said, your role is not to decide what their outcomes are, that's for the court and the system to and foster parents really have no say in that. You're just supposed to model love for children who have not had that, for them to be able to see and to feel even if they resent it, and are yelling at you, and that you think that they hate you.
• 56:16
  Eric Garcetti: They will take that chapter of seeing what love is supposed to look like. And it will go into their being. And, to me, that's what this is all about. We're adoptive parents, our daughter was adopted. And we were debating whether or not to have our own children biologically.
• 56:31
  Eric Garcetti: And like after that happened, my wife's never really cared about doing that. I said, How could I love children more than these children that have been given to us. And to me, it is the greatest gift you can receive.
• 56:44
  Eric Garcetti: And I'm so glad that you've done that work. And I hope that some of the listeners out there, there's usually one in a couple of issues like one who's like I've always wanted to do this and the other one's nervous. Let me speak to the nervous one who might be listening to it. It's easier and harder than you ever think. But so as parenting if you've been a parent before, and it'll be the most enriching part of your life.
• 57:03
  Randall Kaplan: On our path to excellence. We all face challenges on our way there, some of which involve moving past controversial things, which all of us do. As a politician with a very high profile job.
• 57:11
  Randall Kaplan: You live under an atomic powered microscope, where every last move is scrutinized, evaluated and judged by millions of people or often 10s of millions of people. It sounds horrible to me, but I know you love your job. So let's talk about a few of your controversies. In 2014.
• 57:29
  Randall Kaplan: You were sitting in a car in the passenger seat that struck a pedestrian you were supposedly on your phone, it didn't see the crash happen. As our mayor, you have a driver so I don't see any issue there if you're working.
• 57:38
  Randall Kaplan: But others did see an issue. The woman went to the hospital and you visited her there and she lived
• 57:44
  Unknown: and I wasn't driving just wasn't driving, right?
• 57:47
  Randall Kaplan: Yeah, no, not driving. In 2014 You spoke at a huge rally outside of the Staples Center to celebrate our Los Angeles Kings winning the NHL Championship after we beat the New York Rangers four to one. And as part of your speech, you said there were two rules and politics to never ever be pictured with a drink in your hand and to never swear. The next Millisecond you raise your left hand which was holding a bright blue metallic but like Ken and said, but this is a big fucking day Way to go guys. You are heavily criticized for that and clear the air on the issue by saying it was a word.
• 58:18
  Randall Kaplan: Everybody had already heard that now you went to Jimmy Kimmel and said it was a hockey match and not a match of lawn bowls. And the next day you spoke at a luncheon at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza and apologized to those who found that what you said was offensive, although you also suggested they lighten up because it was something that plenty of people have heard before. And then there's the most recent incident which has everybody talking where you took a picture of the NFC Championship game between the rams and the 40 Niners on January 30 of this year. It was a thriller of a game where Matthew Stafford led a comeback after the Rams were down by 10 points in the fourth quarter. As a Detroit are in a huge Stafford fam who couldn't be happier for his success. I just want to point out that in his 12 painful years with the Detroit Lions, he orchestrated 38 game winning drive and 31/4 Quarter comebacks more than any other quarterback in NFL history on the worst team in the worst professional sports franchise in history. But let's go back to the game. The game was a home game at SoFi stadium, it was a great time for everybody in LA watching it or who were at the game. You were at the game you were sitting in a crowded box but the Governor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London breed and Magic Johnson among others, and at some point during the game, magic and some others took photos of the three of you not wearing masks despite the fact that at the time there was a Los Angeles County mandate requiring people to wear mask and indoor events except when they're actively eating or drinking regardless of the vaccination status. It's an utterly ridiculous rule that nobody follows and is completely unenforceable in a stadium where 74,447 people went to the game that day. And response to the uproar then ensued, you said that you wore a mask the entire game and that when people asked you to take a photo as a matter of practice, you hold your breath and hold your mask your size so people can see it. And you also said that there's a 0% chance of infection from that. I have two questions here. First, how is overcoming controversy challenges and setbacks essential on our path to excellence? The average person can hold their breath 3090 Seconds How long can you hold your breath for?
• 1:00:24
  Eric Garcetti: Don't know I can hold it really long. But that has nothing to do with the medicine and my advice is don't ever take your mask off. If you're the mayor period, I thought it was an issue of manners. And and mostly not with Magic Johnson. It's usually with a janitor or a student or a family. And when they ask I always just took it down and gave them the face because that's what they wanted. And you're right. I think a lot of people think I set the rules. I don't set the rules on masking that to the county. But I do set the example and I take that seriously. And you have to, if you're going to be in the public light, not take things too personally, because it'll paralyze you. I know how often I have bided by above and beyond, somebody sent me a picture in the stadium of me like the only guy in this sea of people because I mostly wasn't in a box. I was actually in regular seats, wearing a mask. And I'm glad I did. I know that it's a higher standard for me, and I'm not going to lose sleep about what I think people will feel.
• 1:01:19
  Eric Garcetti: So people were outraged. Well, today, you can always find 5% of people. 10% of people outraged about anything if you go on social media. Oh, my gosh, all you think is that we're all hated. But 80% of people came with me said, this is the stupidest thing ever. Like let's talk about that. 55 people died from COVID. Yesterday, let's talk about the real work. And my goal is always to do two things to breathe to give people manners and deal with the morale and to try to chart the way to be that storyteller. And Chief, I did 100 Live addresses during the pandemic. And those were always my to kind of guideposts like explain this the toughest, darkest days and give people some hope. And then, you know, tend to that morale, which is anyway what came out of that.
• 1:02:02
  Eric Garcetti: And it was an amazing game. And the Super Bowl was even better.
• 1:02:04
  Eric Garcetti: Even the Super Bowl where I literally didn't even take it down for anybody's photos, I did have to drink a beer because I'll admit, I had one tall beer at the Super Bowl. And somebody like took the photo from an angle. That way you don't see the hand or you can even see it people like see he's still not wearing it. I'm like, you gotta go on with your day. And you have to just know who you are.
• 1:02:21
  Eric Garcetti: And realize, somebody asked me once what it's like being mayor and I talked about a football game. Everybody who walked by me was super nice. You know, this was pre COVID, like, wants to take a picture wants to be with you like great job, love you, Bill. And then I'd never want to be on the Jumbotron. They put me on the Jumbotron. And if 10% of the Crowd boos, that's, it's loud. And so I said being there is like, in three dimensions and live, people love you. And in the abstract, there'll be plenty of people who hate you. And you can't win over everybody. But I also have learned how to know who's important. I have amazing family and friends, my three best friends are still my best friends from seventh grade. I love my family and my relationships. And those are the people who long after I have this title will be there. And I also watched my dad, who when he didn't get elected to a third term, he lost almost two to one, about two years after he's out of office, people used to come up to him. And they'd be like, Hey, guy said to you put me in prison, or you made me pay my child support. But I love you come here, can we take a picture together. And once you realize that sometimes people people's anger is directed towards the title and whoever's in that title, but they come to realize what some space and some time the person and the sacrifice that people who serve, make. And I would say this not about myself, but to everybody listening, please, even if you disagree with them, understand how much your public servants sacrifice out of their family life, their personal life, their time when he said it was tough to get a hold of me. I told friends, you wanted me to be elected mayor. And that means we aren't gonna be friends for eight and a half years like I'm actually being there. You want me to be mayor, you want me to hang out with you. And I don't know if good people will step forward these days with everybody visiting people's homes Daxing their numbers harassing their families I talked to mayor's during this pandemic, and it kind of led to the mayor's support group of some of the big cities, we just check in with each other, you know, mayor's who decide not to run again, because they're high school children. When 1000 People were outside their home, were texting their friends, who was the son inside saying, your mother's whatever, using much more foul language than anything, I use the Kings game.
• 1:04:26
  Eric Garcetti: And they just said, I can't do this anymore. And we need good people to step forward. We need to not hate each other. We need to find how to lead with love.
• 1:04:35
  Eric Garcetti: We need to find our humanity. We need not to dehumanize people and I am dehumanized in good ways where people say, Oh my God, you're so incredible. And they've never met me. They don't know if I am or not. But I say thank you. But I'm also dehumanized in negative ways where people who don't know me say you're XY and Z, and you're a hypocrite and you don't believe in this stuff around things that I deeply believe in.
• 1:04:53
  Eric Garcetti: And it's a tough thing to get through. But if you as the podcast say, if you want to be excellence is also about learning how to become a little zen about these moments about how to find your inner peace and how to recharge. And no, it's important to know that this is your job. This isn't you. My dad taught me that this. This is a title when people say you're the mayor. I'm like, a kid came up to my daughter's school said you're the mayor, aren't you? I said no. I might as dad, but my job is Mayor right now. And that's really tough for people who I think are successful to disentangle I look forward to that day, when I'm not the mayor when I'm a former mayor, but I'll still be Eric. And I'm working on all the time knowing who Eric is, and what Eric can do and how he can be for the people who love Him and whom I love as well. So, yeah, and last thing I'll say is, don't regret the Kings thing. One second. The hockey fans have always been great friends and supporters. If you're going to drop an F bomb, just drop it positively. Don't ever use the F word negatively.
• 1:05:45
  Eric Garcetti: Say it positively.
• 1:05:49
  Randall Kaplan: We've talked about overcoming challenges and now let's talk about Success.
• 1:05:51
  Randall Kaplan: We've known each other for a very long time, you're always very warm, friendly, and in a good mood. It's genuine. It's not a fake or learn politician, warm and friendly, you're always optimistic, you're always talking about the future or goals, what we can accomplish.
• 1:06:07
  Randall Kaplan: You're a great listener. When people speak to you, you're really listening and processing, what they're saying to you and not just waiting for them. To finish talking, you're easily one of the most articulate public speaker speakers I've ever met or heard. And it's not just that you're a great speaker, you're always incredibly prepared to the point where I've never seen you stumped on a single question.
• 1:06:28
  Randall Kaplan: You may not know the perfect answer to every question. But even when you don't you always say something else. It's very intelligent that gives context to those questions. In your view, what are the most important ingredients to success on our path to excellence? And as part of this question, how important is preparation and work ethic? And when we talk about preparation, what is the importance of being the most prepared person in the room, the 1% of 1% of 1%, who prepare 510 or 20, or even 40 hours for a meeting, presentation, or even an interview?
• 1:07:02
  Eric Garcetti: That is such a great question. And thank you for the overly kind words. And I love that you talked about listening, I've always said look, the four qualities to be a good person. And I think also a good leader are first to be fearless. There's a lot of people who just fear step one.
• 1:07:17
  Eric Garcetti: Second, you need an immediate check on that, which is humility. You're not the center of the universe. So be fearless, but be humble. Third, is learn to listen. And I learned that in the classroom, when I thank God, there's the front row with their hand up the first day, or else you'd have a class that nobody was talking in. But three classes later, there's usually and often it was a female student in the back who had raised her hand and said something so powerful changed.
• 1:07:39
  Eric Garcetti: Everyone's thinking, including mine, and I realized she was listening and processing and preparing to your point before just speaking. And men especially successful man, you know, wealthy man, like you can go through the categories are all like taught like talk, just say something, and speak first, instead of think, and wait and work through the fear that other people have about talking, fearless, humble, learn to listen. And the fourth, I always said is lead with love. It's kind of my mantra, because you can do those three things and be effective. But you could do it for bad things. If you don't have, if you can't find the love for somebody who's different than you who's even attacking you. If you can't find love is like the central piece of what you're doing. I don't think you'll be a great leader. Now in terms of being prepared. I don't know, I don't have a lot of time to prepare. I'm lucky if I have a superpower, I can kind of read stuff quickly. And do enough of it. And I've done this for long enough that I usually there's not a lot of surprises, whether it's the environment, whether it's paving the street, whether it's the zoo, whether it's Animal Services, whether it's going New Mexico last week, and opening up the biggest wind farm in American history that DWP on the part of I've been exposed enough that I can speak to it.
• 1:08:45
  Eric Garcetti: But I always do read the amazing work that my team puts together, I get a briefing paper. And I try to focus in and train my team to give me the right things that I need to be briefed and don't be shy about picking up the phone and asking people who wrote things that prepare you.
• 1:08:58
  Eric Garcetti: What about this? What about that you have to in other words, have time to process and ask the questions that haven't been asked. And that's something I do a lot. And then on the really big things where you know, it's going to be a big thing like my final speech to the US Conference of Mayors which I gave in January, I said with my amazing speech writer back at McLaren, I said, Can I write this with you? Basically, this is important enough that I need to put my own voice on this, I need to prepare and, and it took a long time. I already had tremendous respect for my team.
• 1:09:27
  Eric Garcetti: But just to do like a re edit.
• 1:09:27
  Eric Garcetti: And rewrite was probably eight or nine hours of work for me.
• 1:09:31
  Eric Garcetti: But I wanted to get it right because it was the last time I could speak to my peers. And it was a very powerful speech I wanted to give about the state of our country kind of the democracy falling apart, and where hope lies. So know what's important to you segregate out on your schedule when it is important to time it because if you'd like me might take longer than you think. And then set up a system that's good imbued with those values that I mentioned of being fearless and humble and learning how to listen, and leading with love and I think hopefully what will come out will be good.
• 1:10:00
  Randall Kaplan: Before we finish today, I want to go ahead and ask some more open ended questions. I call this part of my podcast fill in the blank to excellence. Are you ready to play?
• 1:10:09
  Unknown: I'm ready, let's play.
• 1:10:10
  Randall Kaplan: When I started my career, I
• 1:10:12
  Unknown: wish I had known how short life is.
• 1:10:15
  Randall Kaplan: The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is
• 1:10:18
  Eric Garcetti: to not take everything so seriously. My number one personal goal in life is to sleep eight hours a night.
• 1:10:28
  Eric Garcetti: My biggest regret is I don't live life with regret or guilt.
• 1:10:32
  Eric Garcetti: Maybe that I didn't pick the fruiting olive trees for the Frank Lloyd Wright house Hollyhock house and I did the unfruitful ones because there's hipsters and silver like and those of us who would have made it into olive oil.
• 1:10:45
  Randall Kaplan: The one person in the world that I admire the most is
• 1:10:49
  Eric Garcetti: boba let's get a Bogota who passed on Two years ago and I mentor a woman who, who changed Ethiopia and the world and basically abolished the custom of cutting girls in Ethiopia by sheer force of personality.
• 1:11:03
  Randall Kaplan: If you could be one person in the world who would it be? Me? Interesting answer. I've never heard that answer before. But I like it a lot.
• 1:11:12
  Eric Garcetti: And don't get me wrong. I don't I don't love myself, but it's me. I think the best we all should choose me.
• 1:11:18
  Eric Garcetti: Not me but yourself.
• 1:11:20
  Randall Kaplan: If you could make one change in American politics today, what would it be?
• 1:11:24
  Eric Garcetti: partisanship?
• 1:11:24
  Eric Garcetti: have elections be nonpartisan?
• 1:11:28
  Randall Kaplan: Amen. Is Tommy's the best burger in LA? Or is it father's office?
• 1:11:34
  Eric Garcetti: Oak Tommy's easily gonna be fancy stuff I liked. I liked the fancy burgers too. But with a bunch of chili on it. Nothing beats a Tommy's burger. Lots of pickles.
• 1:11:43
  Randall Kaplan: Will you run for president one day? Unlikely, but I never closed doors. What is the one question you wish I'd asked you today but I didn't.
• 1:11:52
  Eric Garcetti: Probably something about jazz. Like Who's my favorite la jazz musician?
• 1:11:54
  Eric Garcetti: Who is it? Charles Mingus?
• 1:11:59
  Randall Kaplan: Do you have any last advice for those listening today?
• 1:12:02
  Eric Garcetti: Know thyself, and never lose a thin skin? Oh, you'll stop feeling.
• 1:12:08
  Randall Kaplan: Eric, you've been someone I've admired from our first kitchen conversation 20 years ago. I want to thank you for being a great friend for the amazing jobs and all the great things you've done for our amazing city. Congratulations on all of your accomplishments. I'm wishing you the best of luck and much success in India. I'm very grateful for your time today.
• 1:12:27
  Randall Kaplan: Thank you very much for sharing your story with us.
• 1:12:30
  Eric Garcetti: Thank you, man.
• 1:12:30
  Eric Garcetti: It was such an amazing interview. You came to this with passion with purpose. You surprised me and went deeper than I've gone in almost any interview. As I've been mayor.
• 1:12:40
  Eric Garcetti: Thanks for bringing me out to the world and bringing the world to me.