London Breed

So even if someone opposed me, which, you know, I had a member on the board of supervisors who was just the worst person to work with. That person's name was what again? Uh, Well, here's the interesting part is somehow once that person decided they wanted to work with me, we developed a tight, really good working relationship. And so what I've always said is, look, I may not like you.

I don't have to like you, but I will work with you.

No, I just think when I wake up in the morning, I'm the mayor of San Francisco. Like, I'm the mayor of San Francisco. So come right in. Look, sometimes it shows on my face, but I'm a grown-up here, and I have to be better than somebody who's petty because you don't particularly care for someone. I mean, you know what's in your head, but the business of the people is the most important.

I can't just... support or work with the people who voted for me. I can't just talk to the people that I wanna talk to. And it's what anybody in elected office should be if you are here for the right reasons to get the business done for the people. And I've been able to accomplish a lot because I've always kept the door open.

So under the law, I can't look at other opportunities until I actually leave office. And so I will be having a lot of meetings once I leave office because I need a job.

I think that the biggest thing we need to do is cultivate young, new talent. I mean, my race is a perfect example. I am a perfectly capable, qualified Democrat who runs a major city. And when you have young Democrats... You guys like that, huh?

When you have people in these various positions, whether it's mayor or board of supervisors or other places, we have to invest the resources into helping to grow our talent pool to ensure that we have a pipeline

I think that the tent needs to be open. Again, I come from nothing. So I've only mostly volunteered and helped people in their campaigns. So it's significant that I'm mayor. So how do we capitalize on that in order to ensure that people like me don't get lost by the party? It really does start with how do you get more people choosing to register as a Democrat rather than decline to state?

I would be open to it, but I'm not 100% sure that that's the right route to go.

I mean, it's politics. And you got to remember, politics is never going to be nice and wrapped into a neat little bowl. It's going to be something you have to fight for. The reason why I struggle with the open primary has a lot to do with, I want to see the Democrats united.

And I want us to do the work to get behind the candidate, whether we agree with that person or not, to really fight for that candidate. And also to listen to people as to why they might want something different. We may see something or hear something and we say, oh, they don't know what they're talking about. But you know what?

if you listen closely and you hear what they're saying, you have to think about, well, how do we appeal to the people who we believe may not know what they're talking about?

I just think you have to be a little bit more open-minded and not just toss someone to the side just because their beliefs aren't 100% of what you think our value system should be because clearly we got a lot of work to do and we have to understand all those different states differently than we have in the past.

I was able to get the Chinese government to commit to allowing San Francisco to host pandas. You went to China to get the pandas. I went to China to get some panda bears. It's called panda diplomacy.

How's things? Well, freedom is fast approaching right now, so... It's almost like I dropped thousands of pounds.

Yes.

Oh. Oh, yes. Pull out those phones, because you guys are going to see a different mayor breed.

Well, it has been a rough ride, but I'm really excited about where we are now as a city. This city has been more fun than it has been in a long time. More fun, you said? More fun. We have closed down streets to have night markets, first Thursdays, events, entertainment zones. Because we need some joy. This city has been a place of, no, you can't do fun things. And we turned it into a city of yes.

We have helped over 20,000 people exit homelessness. We have had a significant decline in our crime rate and one of the lowest homicide rate since the 1960s. I mean, this is the work that we're doing, but we also know there's more to be done. It's a major city.

Cities have challenges, but we are finally in a place where we build the capacity, we change the laws, we made the hard decisions, and I just believe that the best is yet to come. The biggest thing that we do struggle with is the perception. So we need people to come to San Francisco, or people who live here, to tell their own story of San Francisco.

You didn't take a Waymo where you didn't have anybody to talk to?

Well, it's interesting. They become a tourist attraction in our city. But you just said people do a lot of communication, but not conversation. So I don't know if I'm going to take away Mo.

I want somebody to talk to.

I'm going to say this with a lot of pride. There was over $20 million spent on my race to unseat me.

I don't know where the money came from, but there was a lot of money. I think that things were not happening as quickly as people wanted to see them happen. And that is something I take full responsibility for because this government and how bureaucracy works, it is not designed to make things move quickly.

I think I do mean a lot of the board of supervisors. And now this new mayor is getting a good board. I'm just so mad about it. People say, oh my goodness, your response to the pandemic was amazing. And yeah, it's because we cut bureaucracy. We had emergency authority to make decisions without the bull crap that gets in the way of trying to make things move.

And then we go back to, you know, a post pandemic world after we come out of that, we needed to be able to act quickly, dealing with the rise in fentanyl overdose deaths and the emptying of our shelter beds and the need to build more houses. We had all these things we needed to do and could not move fast enough.

And the good news is we worked very hard to build our capacity to make the necessary changes to use technology and to really help combat these issues and think about it. our crime rates have consistently been dropping. I mean, even car break-ins are lower than 10,000, and this is a major city. It hasn't been that low since 2015.

Things happen in all major cities.

But don't you think of San Francisco as a major city? Okay, Steven. You better watch out what restaurant you eat in. Somebody might put something in your food.

And they were dying elsewhere. Listen, let me just say this. We shut down early. We made really hard decisions. It was not easy. And the people of San Francisco really came together to try and save lives. I was really proud of how people went grocery shopping for folks. Folks showed up to work in the hospitals. And people sacrificed to make that happen. And so I'm very proud of that.

But a lot of people did leave. And they were talking a lot of crap when they were leaving San Francisco. But you know what? Many of those people are back. Because this is $34 billion in venture capitalist investment of the top 20 AI, artificial intelligence companies in the world. Eight are right here in San Francisco. Five million square feet of office lease sign.

In San Francisco, 70% of the new office space is by new companies and AI. People are coming back to San Francisco because they know this is where they're going to be successful despite what people try to say about the city. It is still where people want to be.

But it has less than a million people, so I totally understand that.

There are so many different things that happen. Last time when we talked on the podcast, I talked about my brother who's incarcerated and how we both went to the public school system. He didn't even graduate from high school and I did. It's hard to finger point where the issue happened, but I feel really honored and grateful to God for that.

just the strength to overcome so many of those obstacles and to get my education and to want to go back to the community and make a difference.

I don't know if I would say that I have the best temperament because I have a temper. But I will say that I have remained true to who I am as a person. But the whole reason why I got involved in public service in the first place is because of violent crime in my community where people were dying, where our homicide rates were significant in the 90s. And it is...

just amazing to see us in a better place than we've ever been before. And I've always said it is always the will of the voters that I'm going to respect and be grateful that I had the opportunity to serve.

I think so a little bit, yeah. I didn't talk about it much, but when the mayor calls you and to not return the mayor's call, that was pretty offensive. Or to sit in a meeting with me and to look at my chief of staff and talk to him and not talk to me directly.

In the moment, I'm like, hi, I'm right here. Nice smile. And I'm the one who makes the decision. And then I move on from it. I didn't come from money. I come from the hood. I didn't have built in relationships with a lot of these people, but I did do what I could to try and reach out to people and develop those relationships and make sure that my door was always open.