So how did you begin to actually put the pieces together? If you were going to tell somebody, you know, who's in a hard to place vertical like transportation, like yourself, like, let's say I'm doing, I don't know, I'm in landscapers or I'm in demolition or whatever how would i even begin to go about building one of these things

you know for me i guess out of the gate and what i've always thought was important was you know a mentor a mentor in the organization you're going to be working through so you know i had a mentor out of gate ryan knowles uh branch leader you know tom carraway here um And then, you know, what I, what I, what I noticed quickly that some of the guys, I go look at the, you know, the leadership board, right? Production board, who's, who's books where, who's making the money.

Then I go right to the guys that are building the program.

So we had two individuals that had built, well, just two specific built programs for schools.

Guy Griggs and Jack built the Texas program.

The public school has been there for many, many years.

Guy did the same for the Oklahoma kind of school piece.

Can you mind sharing the numbers with us for the listeners? Not to not in a hubris or braggadocious way, just as a, Hey, here's what's possible.

You know, what, what does work? What, what, what are the effective messages and campaign approaches that, that do cause the legislators and, and actually voters to support minimum wage increases?

Well, well, the truth is the majority of the public supports raising the minimum wage.

It's really only Republican lawmakers in office who tend to be opposed to it.

You mentioned that minimum wages have been raised even in red states.

I mean, that was true, you know, probably the clearest example of this was Florida back in, uh, I think it was twenty twenty-four when they, uh, excuse me, uh, twenty twenty when the state went for Donald Trump, but the voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure to raise the state minimum wage to fifteen dollars.

And then this has been replicated in since then in Missouri, in Nebraska.

And so the, the truth is most people understand that you have to set a floor that is at a reasonable level for, for wages that allows folks to afford their basic needs.

[laughs]

Your sense of what it might be versus what it's turned out to be, did you think going in this was gonna be a hit or not?

Oh, look, [coughs] I think we were confident that, uh, Erica Stanford got it right.

I don't think we quite expected the deluge that we've had, uh, but it's fantastic.

You know, we'll, we'll have 5 billion by the end of this year, and that's only, what, about 18 months in.

Uh, is the money going useful places, or i- is it just getting stuck into funds that return interest?

No, it's definitely going useful places, and, and there's a lot of green-eyed monsters suggesting otherwise.

Um, you know, there's been recently a, $135 million infrastructure project announced for, uh, a big property development at the, uh, end of the North Island.

And then you get small stuff like a, a chap who's sunk a million dollars into a coffee business so that it can expand, uh, employ more people, increase its output of coffee.

Many good projects in Vancouver, etc.,

Anything three of you can share with the experience, that would be great.

But let me leave after David.

We've had some pretty significant differences when it comes to capital.

We don't have a national transit strategy in Canada.

We don't have a federal transit administration that does oversight or funding, but we do have increasing interest from provincial and the federal government in terms of funding these big ticket capital projects, but we're having a hard time convincing them on the operating.

We had a missing generation of transit projects.

I think if you saw her prime minister's speech in Davos, this is the mantra for Canada going forward.

Yeah.

Some people think in words or in concepts or maybe not at all, and it just shows the diversity of thought.

And then when I'm having this conversation with my girlfriend, she's like, "I have no inner monologue." I'm like, "What?" And then I go, I'm like, "What's the difference between you and me?" And so we started, you know, un- uncovering the research.

Turns out people who have no inner monologue, they might be potentially more impulsive.

There's no l- like we say the tiny voice-

So what's, what's, what's the j- the, the bifurcation? What's the, the delineating line between love and limerence?

Desire to speak with them, desire, like, uh, inability to stop thinking with them.

I mean, it, to psychologists, uh...

Yeah.

Thank you.

Well, here we are again.

Get rid of the frog in my throat.

It's good to be here again.

They've trotted me out again.

Every now and again, they dust me off and put me on to preach.

if you like.

I don't know.

But apparently we, people with aphantasia, those who cannot have, don't have a mind's eye, we apparently have poor autobiographical memory, which means every time I go on a rant and tell the same story on the radio over the years, and it gets more exaggerated, and I'm portrayed as more the hero, maybe I'm not just full of it.

Maybe-

They'll say, "Well, his brain was rotted by toxoplasmosis."

Toxo.

And, and it, it's, it's so wild, but the whole reason it affects our brain is 'cause it adapted to affect mice brains.

We have similar brains, we're mammals, you know, that's why we have lab rats, this, that, and the other.

And, and the whole reason is this parasite co- Why wouldn't it just transmit through the air? Why does it have to go through a mouse, to the belly, through the urine, and da, da, da? It's wild.

Yeah

...

if you have a rare form of cancer, and it, cashews are good for everyone, and they're just a nut.

And then they'll say, "Okay, cashews kill you." And then people believe this stuff.

And so, um, like, someone with a background in nutrition who studies at a university, I think in Halifax, I feel bad if she's somewhere else, but, um, she basically went through it and actually tested the claims and look at what the research says of the claims.

And basically a lot of these channels are sponsored by the protein powders.

... makes you feel alive

...

Check Wilco.

Wilco.[laughs] I don't think it's tickets.

Um, you know, I did say to my girlfriend earlier today, I was like, "Who throws a wedding at MSG?" To, uh, to that she just, just responds, "Taylor Swift." What do I think of it? Yeah, it's opulent.

I, from a billionaire who flies private jets.

I think she owns two of them.

She's one of the highest profile celebrities maybe on the planet.

I'm not surprised.

Yeah.

I mean, it doesn't really matter.

Wow, local accent there.

Um, okay.

The psychopathic life coach.

This is a guy who was in and out of jail and was diagnosed by, like, you know, prison psychologist, whatever, while he was being, uh, punished.

A, a psychiatrist gets on the stand, I think, and c- labels him a psychopath, okay?

Mm.

It hasn't been passed yet.

Right.

And then I got kicked out of Curtis.

And I was like, well, I don't, now I don't even care about my life, right? And I just stopped really even wanting to live.

And then I got around some of my old friends from high school who were not really doing much with their lives.

And yeah, it was kind of a negative effect on my life.

Yeah, I went back to Michigan State and kind of felt like a failure, and then I ended up dropping out of Michigan State, and I needed to take some time to just heal, right, like to deal with the grief.

So I ended up getting some help and went out to the West Coast and got some therapy, and I stopped playing the horn.

you know,

Is there something do you think about The Simpsons itself besides just the quality of it? Like maybe the expansiveness of the the universe that lends itself to creating art about it?

I think there's kind of two aspects to that.

There's the fact that nothing else has been able to exist in this kind of singular form for, you know, almost 40 years.

The closest thing would be like superhero comics, but superhero comics are like, you know, they're making you think that they're changing.

Whereas the illusion of the Simpsons is it doesn't want you to think it's changed over those 40 years.

So like, because they've sort of, they established it, along the way, and they just kind of stuck with it, then it's kind of ingrained in everyone's head.

Everyone knows who Groundskeeper Willie is, for example.

But maybe you can explain what Movember is and then talk about what the process is for filling that out.

How do they sort of go about sort of a balance of making sure that anyone who takes transit feels safe, but that we are not targeting people unjustly?

So part of the work that we did in the national study on the impacts responses to drug use on transit, we went to five U.S. cities to look at both the outreach and enforcement approach.

And I've also been across Canadian systems looking at this with the frontline staff from both of those components.

And one of the things when you look at the legislation is that either under the provincial offense or criminal code, The first thing is what it states is you ask them to stop from committing the offence of using illicit drugs.

So it's not automatic enforcement.

There's a request, you know, ask to stop.

And then usually it goes to diversion.

Zooming out even further, I don't want to put you on the spot in terms of what city is doing this better, but are there states in the U.S., are there cities here in Canada that have gotten safety right on transit?

There's this huge section of your brain that is just inherently The Simpsons, and I think that's so true, 'cause I was born at the, uh, end of '89 and grew up with, like, the, uh, episode guides in the, uh, house and, like, the Bart book and the Travel Guide to Springfield, so I've been Simpson-ing for a while.

Yeah, I, I often think about how much The Simpsons kind of defined a lot of my worldview in terms of like, you know, how much I should d- should or should not trust authority figures, or, uh, how to be cynical about, like, um, the entertainment business, for example.

All those things, I think a lot of them are at least formed by, by f- watching The Simpsons when my brain was still, you know, mushy and, and impressionable.

[laughs]

See you again in two weeks, and until then, smooth sailing.

Peace.

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