Mayor Steve Adler

Steve Adler, then mayor of Austin, opens by describing the job as both spectacular and draining. He says he keeps reminding his wife Diane that they volunteered for it, and he admits that it is also the most frustrating thing he has ever done. He had never held elected office before. His political experience consisted of working on campaigns and taking time off to help a friend who became a state senator set up his office.

stayed here for the music and the breakfast tacos

Adler explains his motivation as gratitude. He arrived as a poor student passing through, never left, and says that over 40 years the city gave him achievements he "didn't even know existed." Running for mayor was his chance to give back. When Joe Rogan suggests that COVID made the usual mayoral problems worse, Adler says the strain began before the pandemic.

He lists the disasters of his seven years in office. There were three 100-year storms in which people died. One storm washed out a bridge far north of the city, and the silt sent downstream forced a boil-water notice for a city of about a million people. Adler says this "never happens," yet it happened twice during his tenure. He also names a serial bomber, a wildfire that nearly burned Bastrop just east of Austin, a historic drought already underway when he took office, a week-long ice storm, and COVID.

On the drought, Adler says Lake Travis was down to roughly 25 to 30 percent, and he was being pitched multi-billion-dollar proposals to pipe in water from aquifers east of the city. He then jokes that one of the best things he did soon after his election was that he "made it rain" and the lake filled. Rogan asks whether it filled in about a day, and Adler agrees. The claim about making it rain is plainly a joke. The quick refill is something both men assert in passing; no figures are offered for it.

Adler describes a bomber who left bombs on porches and mailed them, killing people, while about a thousand law enforcement agents worked in the city. He says there was no motive: the bomber was "a kid who's obviously had significant problems," whom Adler also calls evil, and the targets were chosen at random. At first nobody knew the attacks were random, so the city was trying to guess who would be next and what the plan was.

Adler is openly unsure of the details. He says the case was over in "a matter of just a few weeks" and that it "could be 2 weeks," though it felt much longer because "every day lasted forever." Asked how many bombs went off, he says he is not sure, and his recollection is "probably about four, five maybe."

He says the first couple of bombs hit children of prominent Black families in the city. That made it look as though the attacks might be racially motivated, and he uses this to show how little early evidence can support a conclusion.

cuz you just don't know when you only have two or three data points.

Adler describes his role during the crisis as interpreting official information for the public. Residents heard the law enforcement briefings and then looked to him to judge how scared they should be. He recalls being asked: "So, how are we supposed to be feeling for this? What's our swing thought?"

His fear came from reading about similar cases elsewhere. He says "so many of these things end where it just stops. They don't catch anybody. There's no finality to it," which leaves a community unsettled. Watching the FBI and the Austin Police Department work calmed him, and he reached the point where he knew "that if that guy kept setting off bombs, they were going to catch him."

How Adler says investigators closed in: tracing the packages that were coming in; getting video at what he thinks was "like a FedEx place"; using equipment that could show which cars had been at two different mailing locations within a set time window; and checking doorbell cameras such as Ring at places a suspect had probably driven past. He sums it up: "it's just a lot of lot of police work."

Rogan calls the week-long ice storm "pretty bananas." Adler describes it as nearly unprecedented in recorded history and explains that the pandemic made it worse. The usual response, moving people off the street into congregate warming stations, was restricted by COVID precautions. Then the city lost power, and Rogan adds that "no one had water. No one had electricity."

Rogan says supermarkets felt communal rather than panicked, with people talking to each other and offering solutions to one another's problems. Adler agrees and widens the point. Many people across the city had no food or water, and a disaster on that scale is "way too big for government relief efforts to be able to get to people."

You need neighbors that are that are stepping up to help other neighbors.

Adler says voters' top priority when he ran was transportation. Austin has no real mass transit and one interstate, I-35, running through the city, which he calls one of the most congested in the country. Rogan, who moved from Los Angeles, dismisses Austin's traffic as "a joke" and says that if traffic is the city's biggest problem, "you literally live in Narnia." Adler doesn't argue the point. He says Austin has been accused of this on many occasions.

Adler names two things he did not expect. The first was the volume of demands. He says you could spend your entire time doing nothing but responding to constituents, or mediating the zoning cases that come up every week, and never do anything big-picture. He used to blame earlier councils for avoiding big issues, but it was "real apparent to me 3 weeks into this why it is that that happens."