From Tech Entrepreneur to Mayor of San Jose: Rebuilding trust in Government with Innovation | Mayor Matt Mahan

Join us for an enlightening conversation with the Mayor of San Jose, as he discusses his journey from the private sector to public office. Discover the nuances between running a business and managing a city, and learn about the challenges and strategies in tackling issues like homelessness, public safety, and civic engagement. Get an inside look at the importance of performance management, the role of technology, and the need for transparency and accountability in government operations.

00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:27 Entrepreneurial Mindset in Government
00:49 Differences Between Private Sector and Government
02:18 Performance Management in Government
03:22 Motivation and Challenges in Public Sector
04:24 Setting and Achieving Goals in Government
04:54 Addressing Homelessness in San Jose
11:34 Community Engagement and Civic Participation
21:06 Balancing Priorities in Government
29:09 Rebuilding Trust in Government
34:12 Closing Remarks and Future Topics

Transcript

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 0:40

Evan, thanks for having me on.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 0:42

It's a pleasure, sir. Pleasure to see you. It's a pleasure to have this, this time to talk about your incredible journey. And how far you've come from the civic work that you've done for so long and the businesses you've created and Brigade specifically I'm excited to talk about and capture some of that entrepreneurial mindset as the, the mayor of San Jose. So how do you, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO of a civic tech company, think about the government space? Where are the overlaps, the disparities, government culture versus the entrepreneurial mindset?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 1:22

Yeah. Evan, I, think, about that a lot and, and I think there's often a shorthand people use. That is not really fair that we, you know, people will sometimes say, I just want government to run like a business. And there are some really fundamental differences between the two that we're not going to be able to avoid. I've been in business. I've built startups that focused on a customer. We're incredibly agile and it's a wonderful environment to be in. And there's a lot we can bring over to the government sector. And I'll speak to that in a moment, but just on a couple of the differences. You know, in the private sector, you can offer a very narrow set of goods and services or services, and you can focus on a very small segment of the total customer base, the total population in government. We have a responsibility for serving everyone. Without distinction, we have to serve everyone equally well. We are in far too many lines of business that are not synergistic. We're doing wastewater treatment facility, running an airport purchasing power, paving roads, providing police and fire response, running afterschool programs in the libraries. It's a very diverse portfolio. And even when we do a really good job. not like revenue just increases and we can plow the profits back into more R and D and better products. And, and you know, it's a, there's a real lag over time. Good governance leads to more revenue in the real long run, but it's not a tight feedback loop. However, what I learned in the private sector that was just eye opening for me going through the process of building a couple of startups was the power of performance management, being able to. Pick a few key goals and, you know, frame up hypotheses, measure performance, and build a, a continuous learning environment where you're looking at data frequently, you're making adjustments, and you're holding yourself accountable for making steady progress toward a measurable outcome. And I think we could, we would benefit in government from organizing ourselves. In a similar fashion. That's what I've been trying to do in San Jose. My first two years as mayor.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 3:41

Yeah. How do you, how do you make sure that the, what your, you know, in the incentives and motivations are different in business, right? So how do you make sure that folks are incentivized, motivated in a way to continue to hit those targets? And I should say, how do you set those targets and how do you make sure people are motivated to continue to hit them?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 4:02

Yeah. Well, you know, I actually find that in the public sector motivation is generally not as much of a challenge as people think. We get into the public sector because we want to serve the community. We want to make our community a better place. And in the private sector, if you're doing it right, you're obsessively focused on your customer. So that's an area where there actually is more commonality, whether you're customer centric or. Or constituent centric. It's a service industry. You're focused on how to deliver value to someone. I think what's challenging in government is that the expectations can be overwhelming. We have come to expect government to solve every problem, to solve it immediately, no matter how entrenched, how complicated it is, or how much it actually requires social change and cultural change. And we often just want to pay our taxes and throw it over the fence and say government. Go fix the broken school system, go fix the healthcare system when so much of it is a reflection of our society and our culture. And so that can be challenging. What I've tried to do, at least at City Hall, is identify the top handful of goals that the community has told us they expect us to do better on. Where it's within our purview, crime. Reducing homelessness, cleaning up the city, speeding up permits to build more housing, being an easier place to bring a, bring jobs and, and create economic opportunity, and then create some metrics around those things and have a North Star goal. I'll just take homelessness. It's the most top of mind and maybe easiest to explain. Our community expects us to be on the path to you. Zero people living outside in tents. That's a very worthy goal. It's a goal we all share. We're all motivated to achieve it, but then you have to start breaking it down. You have to start formulating hypotheses and saying, okay, we need to do a certain amount of prevention to stop people from falling into homelessness. We need to intervene earlier and do a better job of mental health care and drug treatment. We need to do a better job of jail reentry because that's a source of people into homelessness. We need to build basic shelter because when you do the math. We can't wait to build a brand new apartment for everybody. It's too slow and too expensive. So you start to formulate hypotheses, program your budget around that, go execute, And then look at the data and say, are we moving the needle or not? And I'm trying to bring that performance management mindset, that level of transparency to city hall on an issue when I think historically people have generally thrown their hands up and said, I'm just going to blame somebody else. I'm going to blame the federal government, or I'm going to blame the County or whatever. I've tried to take a very rigorous approach to how we actually break it down and make steady progress.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 6:46

How is, how is the homeless part of that progress going?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 6:50

Well, we we've made A bit of progress in San Jose. I'm excited about what's coming in the year ahead. In my first two years in office, we had a very big debate around our budget and the primary strategies we were funding. And I'm a believer in a multifaceted approach to homelessness that focuses on cost per outcome. Prior to taking office, we were spending 80 percent of our dollars on homelessness on one strategy. Which was building brand new publicly subsidized apartments that would be deed restricted. So affordable apartments as the primary strategy for getting people off the street or having an alternative to the straights. And we certainly need more affordable housing. And that's a whole other conversation around housing supply, permitting fees land use construction costs that we should get, we can get into if you're interested. looking at the math, I came to the conclusion and did some work to get our council to come around to the idea. That we have an underdeveloped shelter and treatment system in California. We need to be much scrappier about building basic dignified shelter with security sanitation, three meals a day in case management, and get people connected to supportive services faster. And that that's a better path than waiting to build a brand new million dollar apartment six years from now, just to get somebody off the streets. That was a very real debate. We have shifted dollars and this year. We will be opening over 1, 000 new shelter placements, mostly individual beds with a tiny room with a door that locks, many of them modular units, some are converted motel rooms, and we will be able to double or more than double our shelter capacity and immediately move over 1, 000 people off of our streets this year. So I'm very excited about sometimes it takes a couple of years to really get there. It's not as quick as building software, but but we're making steady progress and we've seen it. Two years ago, over the last two years, we actually saw our number of people living outside decline by about 15 percent. The number bounces around, but we actually measured a decline two counts in a row. The rest of the state was up. So there's an indication there the data's not perfectly, it's not precise, but there's a sense that we may have topped out and that we're starting to come down, which is a very good sign.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 9:11

Sure. Yeah. It's always hard. There's confounding variables for everything, so, you know, every, and even if, even if, even if there's not, someone will find them.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 9:21

Yeah, even it's just as an excuse, but yes, you're right. It's complicated. These are complicated.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 9:27

Yeah, it is. Do you find, do you find on issues like that? That even when there is success that folks will come up with things confounding variables that may not be the primary sources of concern for you or that don't really invalidate the data. And how do you navigate that sort of like those, those difficult issues, those complex topics where that does happen a lot?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 9:53

Well, I think it's just human nature that we want to simplify the story. We love store from the time. We're children. I have two little kids. We love stories of just of good and evil things that are just black and white. We it's just I think the way our brain is wired because complexity is is hard I find myself often in community meetings. Where people are wanting to tell me it's just one thing it's it's just greedy developers have somehow prevented us from building the housing we need which doesn't actually logically make a lot of sense but that's a narrative or everybody out there is addicted and mentally ill and we should just put them all in a mental health hospital and you know there are often there's generally a kernel of truth in every story. of these popular notions, popular myths, we don't have enough housing. That's for sure. The housing is not affordable and the cost to build it is too high. I happen to think of that more as a, as a market failure in part driven by government regulation. We certainly have people on our streets who are trapped there with untreated addiction and mental illness. That is a major issue. It's also true though, that we've got in our community, a quarter to a third of folks out there who are working. And so, you know, it's just the reality is more complicated. And so you've really got to break things down. I think the nice thing about technology these days is that it is easier and easier to and visualize and in this case sort of triage. the population and be able to say to people, okay, we've got roughly this many people in this situation. We've got this many families. We've got this many people who have a mental health issue and we can kind of better the community, honestly, what the need is and not default to this very simple answer of, it's just one thing.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 11:54

Right. And did, did, did they respond to that with an open mind in general for you? Mm hmm.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 12:00

Depends on how you do it. I mean, I, I was, I'm a former public school teacher before I was in tech. I'd spent two years doing teach for America or beginning of my career. I taught middle school, seventh and eighth grade English and history. And I don't know how much it scales, but I really personally enjoy being in that community meeting with 50 neighbors who are rightly frustrated. feel that their government is not delivering. For them. And that's not at all specific to San Jose. This is right now voters in California. I'd say this is generally true nationally, but especially in California are frustrated. There's a gap between. Their government and the daily experience they have, and they don't feel that we're delivering the outcomes we need to deliver. That's why I ran for mayor. I saw that gap. I felt that frustration as a homeowner, a private sector, entrepreneur, a parent. And I wanted to fix things like homelessness and crime and invest in infrastructure and so forth. So it's a great question. I think people often initially come in with their frustration. Sometimes their righteous anger. But when you're face to face, one of the things I do like about the offline world, even though I use technology so much. that you can really look somebody in the eye, empathize with them, acknowledge their very valid frustration, but also share with them some other perspectives. And I find that actually we're very lucky, at least in San Jose, to have a that's empathetic and open and wants to learn. We're the capital of Silicon Valley. We've got a lot of people here. with STEM degrees who are genuinely curious about how things work, and they ask great questions. And so I love that. I love that dialogue with the community.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 13:49

That's, that's interesting. Do you find, I mean, in terms of, I mean, even in terms of age of people getting involved, like I've always found in, in, in my civics journey I was always probably the youngest for a very long time, in a lot of, by 20 or 30 or 40 years in some cases, right? It's not very, it's not a popular thing to go to your neighborhood of meetings and as a, geez, I was in my 20s. When I started doing that, right? do you find, because you're in Silicon Beach, that the people who are involved tend to be even, more, more than other places? I mean, I guess it would make sense that the folks, there are Silicon Beach people. Sorry, I live in Silicon Beach. You're in Silicon Valley. Do you find that there's more of those folks that do get involved from the Silicon Valley, businesses?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 14:39

Yeah. We have a very engaged and educated community here and extremely diverse. We are. And this is true for California broadly, but we're over 40 percent foreign born in San Jose and a really interesting mixture of folks from all over the world, over Latin America, Asia. and, and other places. And, and people really do connected to their neighborhood, their faith community, the school, their kid attends, we're a city as all cities are a city of, of neighborhoods and neighbors and at a great, you know, fortunately a great place to raise a family. We're a very family friendly city. We're the largest city in Northern California. And as I look out from city hall here. sprawling neighborhoods. As far as the eye can see, a lot of families here have built their American dream in San Jose. And what I find in terms of civic engagement is there, there are different things that hook people to be civically engaged. It's usually life experience. a bad experience. It could be a, I don't know, a family member being incarcerated. It could be an inspire. It could be a great experience. It could be a civics teacher who inspires you. I do think we tend to see people becoming more civically attuned and engaged as they progress through life. In part, maybe because they have a greater stake in society. I find that when people buy a home and they're looking at their property tax bills, they start to ask more questions when people have kids. They start to really think about the broader societal issues. They start to really think about the quality of the schools, safety in the parks, programming at the library and the community center. So I think life events tend to drive civic engagement, but I do think we're lucky to be in a place here that has drawn so much talent from all over the world. I think it leads to a really interesting civic culture with, with a lot of engagement. I'll just give you one quick example. I came into office. identifying this need for more blight eradication. I knew that city government couldn't do it all ourselves. Every Saturday morning at 9am we partner with a neighborhood association or a faith community or a local employer and bring volunteers together to do a cleanup project or a beautification project in the city, whether it's picking up litter, spreading mulch in the park, covering up graffiti or painting a sound barrier, painting a mural, planting trees, whole variety of things. And

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 17:02

internet has videos of you out there

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 17:04

Yeah,

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 17:04

doing that. That's great.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 17:07

much every Saturday, really. And we've seen about a 300 percent increase in volunteerism. At city volunteer events over the last couple of years because we're giving people more opportunities in their neighborhoods.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 17:21

That's awesome. You know, one of the things I heard you say during your brigade days was that increased participation can solve problems. A lot of the problems that people have with government, right? A lot I think the one you mentioned was like special interests, for example, right? The, the, the wash there, it can, the wash, it can wash out the, the power of special interests and the, and, and that machine and so it's comforting that that's actually, it's continually building for you in terms of more people getting involved. Do you still feel that way?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 17:59

I do evan and you know, just fundamentally always believed In and loved the the grassroots bottom up version of government and maybe I had a great teacher and maybe I oversimplified in my own mind the sort of small town Democracy at the founding of the nation, colonial democracy, the small town. And look, there were, let's be really clear that it was exclusive to white men with property for the most part. I, so it's, there's never. A perfect analog for this, but idea of people coming together, forming government to, to deliver public goods, to deliver for the common good and a government that was really close to the people, really accountable to the people and where the people had a direct role to play. discussing and debating the issues of the day, formulating their, their needs and prioritizing them, deciding through their taxes, what to invest in solving that sort of basic form of of a democratic republic that was the founding story of our nation. think we just have to keep adapting to our time and place. We're a bigger, more complicated country, but fundamentally I think we get the best outcomes. When we have the highest possible levels of civic engagement, when everyone's involved, everyone's engaged and educated, when a diverse range of people are running for office, when people are really scrutinizing those candidates. And I do think the more popular participation there is, the more that we, we wash out or dilute the power of concentrated interest, concentrated money. In the system and make that government more reflective. I will say though, because that can, you know, verge on an unhealthy level of, call it populism, it is a two-way street. And I think Ben Franklin's pithy quote about it's a, you know, democracy or republic if you can, if you can keep it, it, it, it was so prescient because yes, we need a highly engaged electorate that holds us accountable. And it's paying attention and ensures that government is truly working in their interest on their priorities, using common sense, being highly accountable and pushing itself to deliver. yet it's a two way street in that public officials other government leaders need to be able to communicate honestly with the public about our constraints and our limitations. And I referenced this earlier. can't solve everything through the vehicle of government. And sometimes our leaders need to reflect back to us. That, it's also our culture that needs to evolve. It's also our own individual decisions. I mean health is a great example of this. We could simply pay our taxes for Medicare and Medi Cal and health, you know, the, the National Institute of Health and all the rest and say, government, make us all healthy. Or we can have leaders who say, here's what we can do through the healthcare system, but here's what you, here's what the research says and here's what you need to do, individual American, to be healthy. It's a two way street. You cannot just throw it over the fence and expect government to solve every problem for you either.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 21:20

Yeah, and where, where's the limit in people's minds where they have decided, right, it's very subjective of what they think their taxpayer dollar is going to and what should be done for them, right? I get the entitlements in the sense.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 21:36

Yeah, and what's feasible? You know, we pay a lot in taxes, but that doesn't mean the government's capable of delivering everything or doing all the things we want it to do. And so we have to

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 21:45

Right.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 21:46

We have to prioritize. I've tried to be really clear. I ran on this back to basics message. I was really honest with the community. There are like 200 things we do at the city. I'm going to really focus on making sure these five things are great. You need to be able to call 9 1 1 and know somebody's going to pick up and dispatch a firefighter, police officer quickly and that you're going to get a high quality of service and you're going to be safe. You know, we need to, those are the basics. pick five things we're going to do excellently before we start adding more things. To our portfolio.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 22:15

Yeah, when you say basics, I mean, it literally means basics. It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If people don't feel safe, then how, right, I mean, what else matters after safety? Lots of things, but if you don't have that, you don't have, you can't worry about anything else.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 22:32

right. And we have,

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 22:33

Right.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 22:34

districts that are dedicated to education. They need to be held accountable for doing an excellent job. have counties which are primarily responsible for health and other basic social safety net services. They need to be held accountable for doing that. Cities. First and foremost are responsible for public safety. That's police fire, emergency management, response, prevention, infrastructure, roads, sewers, streetlights, parks. You know, these, these like basic local infrastructure. And then beyond that, You should be able to expect that if you are a property owner and you want to invest in your land the rules of the Road are going to be clear and permitting isn't going to take three years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars We need to make it easier to facilitate people's investment in their own property because we land land use is another local control that is Generally given to cities. So when you really strip down, what is the city responsible for tends to be things like public safety infrastructure and land use, basically permitting. And then there's a lot of other things people want from us, but we better be really good at those things before we

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 23:42

Right.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 23:43

a bunch of new programs.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 23:45

Right. You're boiling the ocean otherwise, I guess, as they say.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 23:48

Yeah,

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 23:49

Right. Heard that too many times. I mean, I mean, I don't know if that's a business thing or a software thing, but,

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 23:56

analogy many times. I reference it occasionally. It's a good one.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 23:59

Yeah or, or another one is you know, businesses don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion. Have you heard that one?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 24:06

Yeah, it's good.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 24:09

Which is like, which is sort of similar. It's like if you don't focus your resources on a problem that you can solve and you spread yourselves too thin with the resources you have, would you say that that's a similarity between business and government?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 24:24

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that and it's it's even more endemic to government because it's somebody else's money and the community, the customer in this case is constantly coming to us with new needs and we're in a more vulnerable position in terms of saying no, because we have to be responsive to the community. A, you know, Steve Jobs can tell his customers, here's what you're getting. It's going to be great. And he can say no to 1000 other things. proverbial Steve jobs, right? The great kind of corporate visionary. That's hard to do when, when you're up for election every 2 to 4 years and your, constituents who will vote on whether or not you stay in office or asking you to do a bunch of things. So it is a constant battle in government to constrain

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 25:07

Right.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 25:09

And it's always this trade off of are we in a moment where we can take on another responsibility and expand a bit? Or do we need to double down and do better at our fundamental responsibilities? I think it's very clear in California right now. That we have overexpanded and we're not delivering on the basics. I think that's

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 25:26

Yep.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 25:26

clear variety of so that's a failure. I think a major failure mode in government is the desire to be everything to everyone is always say yes to our bosses, the public. And that's where you need mature leadership that says there are trade offs. We got to prioritize here. And then another failure mode, of course, is, is special interest capture, where the groups that give the most money in politics also. Often drive some of the prioritization, the policy work, the budget decisions, and that that could become a very destructive feedback loop. So I think there are different ways that we can we can go. In in public leadership,

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 26:05

Sure. Well, you do a really nice job at explaining it. I think part of what I've seen is that so, it's not explained well to people, to the common, the angry person at the council meeting, doesn't really understand that perspective, right? Doesn't understand that decisions are a matrix of possibilities that you have to weigh. You only get to do this on, when you vote. But the decision could be 51 49. And that's for the voting for the president too. It could be for anything. Voting is up and down,

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 26:35

Yeah,

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 26:36

but the but the re the, the, the, what made you pick that vote? Everyone can have different reasons for that. And you know, you do a good job of ex of explaining that. Do you, are you able to do that at council with, with with, with folks who come in who are just heated

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 26:52

I tried to I, I told you, I prefer the community meeting with 50 people where we're having a long form conversation about a topic like homelessness, where I have an hour with people to hear their good questions and really, Tell them, well, yeah, here's, here's what we're seeing in other jurisdictions, or here's what we've tried, or here's the actual, here's the data, here's the, you know, it's, it's just, these things are always more complicated as you get into them, and that doesn't mean there aren't answers, but it's worth having that context. I think one of the challenges of public meetings, and I don't love the format, is because you get a lot of people coming in wanting to speak on a wide range of issues, you just sort of give everybody two minutes individually. That's not substantive. I mean, we, it's useful. It's an important outlet. But people generally don't get what they need. And actually, typically we have so much volume that we're not responding to each person. We're listening. Sometimes I'm taking notes or asking my staff to follow up with people. It's not the best, it's not the best format. For giving people what they need, is why we've tried a bunch

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 27:52

Hmm

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 27:52

other things. We we set up one of the things I borrowed from my private sector experiences. We set up a ticketing system, basically a customer support portal where you can go to the website. You can access FAQs. You can submit a question. We turn that into a ticket. On the backend, we assign it to an agent, just like any, you know, startup would have for their customer service system. And we measure ourselves. Our team in the mayor's office here is held accountable. We report out every week in our staff meeting to responding to people within 24 hours and a certain threshold, 90 percent resolved.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 28:29

hmm.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 28:29

within 10 days. And, you know, often it's, we're, it's an inquiry about a permit, or it's reporting a crime and we gotta route you to PD, or it's, or it's just feedback. I, I loved you did this, I hate your vote on that, but people deserve an answer. to the best of our ability, we try to get them a substantive, honest answer in a timely fashion and do it courteously. And sometimes we can help people get in the bureaucracy where they've been trying to get a city service that they just don't know how to access. So we, we actually handle about. 000 constituent inquiries per year in the mayor's office in San Jose, and we've got a whole system built around how to do that. Officially,

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 29:12

Wow. What is that average per day per person?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 29:16

you know, it's

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 29:17

That's a tough math question, right?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 29:18

our.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 29:18

Sorry.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 29:19

I mean, we have a small neighborhood engagement team, if you will, neighborhood services team. know, they're averaging probably 10 to 20 tickets a day, but that's not their whole job. They're actually out attending neighborhood meetings and giving presentations during the budget. See, they're, they're doing a lot of other things, but they're often handling 10 to 20 tickets a day that are coming in. And again, some are really easy. It's thanks so much. Appreciate the feedback and others are much more complicated.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 29:48

Yeah. And all this sort of amounts to You know, rebuilding trust like we like we mentioned, right? And if people can see that perspective, that's usually a sign that they may trust that your decision, even though they disagree with it, may have been wrong. One that was founded on ethical and ethical grounds, but, and, and have impacts across things that are important, safety, education, economy, whatever. Right. And if they can trust that that's part of rebuilding trust, I think. How do you feel from when you set out on this journey? With Brigade till now and now as the mayor. Do you feel like things are turning around a little bit in the trust building venture?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 30:37

I do, but I don't want to take anything for granted. My view of our democracy and how the system should work not changed all that much being inside government. I have a greater appreciation for the constraints. I'm probably even more humble about what government can achieve, but my fundamental premise when I was involved with building brigade, the world's first voter network, which you were alluding to, and even before that I worked on the first app, which was causes called causes on Facebook. It was a little more philanthropically focused, but we had petitions and we built advocacy tools. And so I spent about a decade, a little over a decade, helping, people building tools for people to self organize through the internet, to talk about issues, do issue advocacy and through with brigade actually support explicitly support candidates for office. And that. Desire to see government be more transparent, more responsive, more bottom up and think about what the small town colonial democracy of our democracy is today in the 21st century with 330 some million Americans something that there's a through line there for me from private sector to public sector and I feel strongly about the importance of that. As possible. I do think we're, we're, we're making some progress, but in California right now, I kind of feel like we're on a nice, a nice edge. And I think there's a lot at stake. And I think you were pointing to this. I'm glad that you're so focused on trust when government doesn't demonstrate its competence and deliver improved outcomes and have that level of transparency and direct communication. and accountability. That we've been talking about throughout this conversation. When we don't do that well, that we run the risk of losing our, our democracy to an extreme. Now, whether that's an extreme on the left or the right you know, whether it's veering toward communism or fascist, I mean, it can go either direction. It kind of is a big circle that comes back around, but, but that's what motivates me big picture, which is I want people to believe. In not just in their government, I want them to believe in themselves and our American way of life and that government's a vehicle for us to solve problems together and to create a better life, collective life for ourselves as a community. And that's why I'm trying to be focused, trying to prioritize the things the community cares most about. I'm trying to be very communicative, even when it's painful. I'm trying to be very accountable and be honest about when we're falling short and hold everybody else accountable. I'm trying to set appropriate expectations. I'm trying to move the needle in a measurable way on things like safety and homelessness and cleanliness and permitting speeds. Because I think the best way to build trust is yes, transparency and communication, but at the end of the day, people just want things to work. And if we fail California to deliver the outcomes our community expects and deserves, the reasonable outcomes, again, we can't be everything to everyone, but communities that are safe, that are clean, we Where everyone is housed, where you can get a decent education at your local public school and therefore have a, have a, have career options. These kinds of things, where you can, you, you own property and you want to invest in it and, and build housing or jobs or whatever it is, or improve it in some way, you're not waiting years just to get permission for things that we, we all generally agree are good things. Those are the kinds of things that we will be measured on. And ultimately we have to be competent. Government has to work and has to work well. And the stakes are higher because the private sector keeps innovating. I mean, the iPhone went from not existing 20 years ago to being an incredibly powerful tool. And it's all in your pocket. Expectate, I mean, the bar keeps going up. I use Amazon. I mean, as an analogy, I can, with a couple of clicks, have something magically appear on my porch the next day, government's got to up its game because residents are also consumers of all these other private services, and they keep getting better every year. And so that's, that's to me where the, where the battle for trust really is. It's in, it's in competence. It's in making government work better.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 34:54

So, last question just to follow up on that. How, why is it taking so long for, like why is the accountability thing such a big deal now? Probably should have been a big deal for, you know, 250 years. Right? But why now is the accountability thing, and how do we make sure that we can continue to, to, Transparency and accountability. Big, those are the big words. Everyone says yes to them. But, you know, but what do we, what do we have to do to make that the reality that we deal with to rebuild that trust?

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 35:26

Yeah, and I, I think these things generally go in cycles, but they look different in any given moment because society's different and our technology's different. I mean, certainly there have been. Moments of more and less accountability. You had the robber barons kind of move in an incredible concentration of power and wealth in the country and an overwhelming on government from various interests that led to the backlash of the progressive era and Teddy Roosevelt and this sort of trust busting movement 100 years ago. And so you have these cycles where we have to renew. We have to get back to basics, we have to get back to our core principles, and recommit ourselves to the American project, reimagine it for this moment, and what's different in this moment, I mean one, we're going through a generational change, you are seeing More. I'm sort of an older millennial. I suppose I was born in 82. 42 years old. I mean, I think you're seeing a new generation politics. And I'm no longer the youngest person on the city council or the youngest local elected. There are others. And so I think generationally there's a shift. But I also think technology, I talked, we talked a lot early on about performance management and one of the most valuable lessons I learned from working in tech was this approach to continuous learning and improvement a real transparency and honesty about when things aren't working and then pivoting quickly. That's a cultural shift that technology is driving. sure there have been past versions of that. It's just going to look different in this age. And so we need to use, and we didn't get into it deeply in this conversation, but we're increasingly using artificial intelligence to improve city services. And that's the next big platform. And that's going, that itself is going to change what governance looks like in the coming decades. So I think it's just an ever evolving. evolving conversation.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 37:27

We didn't get into Gov. ai, which San Jose is spearheading. I'm part of. It's a great thing. Yeah, it's awesome.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 37:34

maybe you'll have me back. We'll talk about gov AI next time.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 37:37

Ah, yeah, that would, that would be perfect. But I, I want to thank you for your time. And I really appreciate what you do. By the way, I'm 42 also. So we experience the world in the same generational way, I guess.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 37:50

Yeah, I love it. That's why this conversation was so easy.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 37:55

That's right. That's right. We've got a lot of overlap other than the hair.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 38:02

Well, mine's all going gray anyway.

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 38:04

I do about one ball joke per day. So you were, you were, you were ready. You're right there for it. Thanks for everything. It was great having you. And yeah, next time we'll get into the, some of that other stuff. Thank you.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 38:17

Well,

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 38:17

It's good seeing you.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 38:18

your time and, and you know, appreciate what you're doing with the pod, keep it up,

evan-meyer_1_01-16-2025_152446: 38:22

Thank you so much. Take care.

mayor-matt-mahan_1_01-16-2025_152447: 38:24

take care.