 Welcome to start up the storefront, presented by Aurobora. All right, welcome to the podcast. We're back with the district attorney, George Gaskoen. Thanks for joining. Of course. My pleasure. You're a love man. You're a hated man at current time, not ideal. I think the first thing we can talk about crime, crime is down. I actually went to, I was doing the statistics earlier today. Crime is down since you've been in office. Why do you think so much hate, so much anger around? I think what people see is in my world is everyone lives on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. And so what happens is they see these smash and grabs and they think it's all your fault. What's going on in reality? No, you know, and I'm glad that you started the other way saying crime is down because it is, it's actually down substantially, right? And we'll put a link on our, on the podcast so people can see it. They can literally go, it's not made by you. It's by the city, FBI data. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know, this is a, it's a phenomenon that's going around the country, right, where the feelings, if you will, of people, the perception of where crime is or where the economy is and where it really is, it's very disconnected. And in my case, I think what we're seeing is something that is also a little unusual in that we're addressing public safety through a different lens. You know, we're trying to take the safety of our community and sort of a 21st century conversation where, you know, incarceration can be used when it's necessary, but it's not the ultimate answer to the work. And you start following sort of science and data that tells you that, you know, incarceration has a lot of limitations, right? There are people that are dangerous and they need to be separated from the rest of us. But in general terms, it cannot be the answer to every social ill. And that makes people uneasy because as a society, we have sort of become accustomed to using policing and incarceration and prosecutions as sort of the answer to all of our problems, mental health, incarceration, homelessness, incarceration, right? You know, in police, it's sort of become the vehicle for that. And all of a sudden we're saying, well, wait a minute, you know, the reality is that these things do not work, not only do they not work always, but they can actually be harmful. They can actually create more crime, more insecurity. And then, you know, COVID hit, right? So we have this incredible moment in our history, right? You have to go back to 1918 and that was a very different time. So you have all these things that are sort of layering together. And then, you know, you're going after an industry. I mean, people forget that, you know, policing and prisons and prosecutions in industry. It's a business. It's a business, right? You know, people make money out of that. There are, you know, I want to help you make that point in some way. When I was a civil engineer, I remember one of the projects that at the time, this is a long time ago, one of the projects we got was a correctional facility, a prison basically for women. And we were bidding on it as a construction company. And there's a lot of money in it. It was a privatized prison. Privatized prisons at that time were sort of new, sparking up everywhere. But to say it's a real business that not only employees, the people operating the prison is also getting some funding, is also putting construction jobs at work. And so you're talking about unions. You're talking about a whole host of people that benefit from building anything, but in this case, also prison. No, absolutely. As a matter of fact, to your point, and I'm going to get out of that quickly, but, you know, in 2020, when I was making my rounds seeking endorsements, I have one labor union that refused to endorse me because I was against building a new jail. And I said, they say, well, you're taking jobs away from us. I said, look, I mean, we need to turn that jail into mental health facilities. That's why. And then to public health, build something else. Exactly, build something else, but they could not wrap their head around that we were taking the jail away and that somehow there would not be anything else. That's such a fascinating. Which is contrary to the truth, right? But, you know, so I think that you have you have the social perception of how crime and safety and punishment should work in this country. Then you have the economic interests, which are huge, right? You have, you know, like you said, you have companies betting for building facilities. You have the supply side of this. And then you have the people working in the facilities including the labor unions that start, you know, building up more larger workforces. And those people in turn pay a percentage of their salaries into a union fund that that goes to buy political influence, right? So, you know, I compare it to like when we decided to go after the tobacco industry or more recently, how we're going after fossil fuels. This industry will fight back and they fight back because they view it as a for them, I say, although I disagree, but it's sort of a sum, a zero sum game, right? We're instead of looking and I say, OK, we just need to do the work differently, right? We need to repurpose some of the work. We need to shift our workforce in a different direction and kind of work in that area of people. The first reaction is, whoa. And then, you know, you have covid and there's the perception of this increasing crime in some of it. They go up not just here, but around the country. And so all that came together. And I in this community, I became the target of that. You know, it's like I was associated somehow as, you know, the misinformation was building up. So traditionally, I mean, Gallup just actually came up with their annual, you know, sort of crime and perception of crime poll that they do every year for the entire nation. They started in the early 60s and this is something really interesting. Since they started Americans with the exception of two very short periods in the early 2000s. And I forgot the other period of time in the 70s. Americans always feel that crime is worse than it really is. And that has been a traditional, you know, sort of perception of the American public. And then you have to understand, you know, politicians for decades have been fear mongering, right? You got to go back to the 60s and 70s, right? About fear mongering and how it generally came from the right. But, you know, the left has used it too, right? Crime is going up. I have the solution for you and, you know, the other guy doesn't, right? So I think we have sort of, you know, got sucked into that vortex. What do you associate it with or to? What do you have a reason for? Why do you think that is like, is it because in my head, I just go, OK, so before people would get their information on the news. And so the news became, you know, the time where everyone got scared and then the weather, you know, and then now you could be tech talking and be Instagram. And so now it's feeding a whole host of demographics. That's such as anecdotal to me. But I don't know, but I think you're absolutely right on. First of all, look, we just really started to get hypersonic, if you will. When we started with CNN of the 24 hour news cycle, right? Because before cable news came on board, you know, you had traditionally had a news show in the morning. You had, you know, something around six, seven p.m. and then you had something around 10, 11 that were usually half hour shows and that was it. All those certain you have a 24 hour news cycle and you got to fill this thing with something, right? And then, you know, so you sort of started out in the 70s, it really builds up into the 90s and the early 2000s and all sort of now we get into social media by, you know, really getting into in earnest in 2010, 2011 and beyond, right? You start with, I mean, Facebook has started to become a thing. Then it was Instagram, of course, TikTok, Twitter, you know, all those things. So now anybody can be a publisher. Number one, so journalism has really degraded to levels that you have to go back to the pamphleteers of the 1800s, except the pamphleteer. You know, they found, yeah, the development nation and they had a very limited span of communication. But this people, you can have hundreds of thousands, millions of people looking at your and then everything is compressed into, you know, very short sound bites. And then it becomes clickbait, even for the traditional journalism. In fact, you know, we joke around that you look at a headline, even in a local newspaper, like the L.A. Times or some. And then you read the article and sometimes there is no connection between the headline and what the article says. Happens all the time. But most people are really only consuming the headline and maybe, maybe the first paragraph, right? And then, you know, it's sensationalism, right? I was talking to a friend that works for a major newspaper and said, look, if we told you that Martians landed in downtown L.A. yesterday, that's going to catch your attention, right? This might end up being the clip for the podcast. And then if in the first paragraph, we talk to all the crazies, they say they sell the Martians, right? That's all you read. And then we get to the second half of the article and then we talk to the scientists and said, you know, there are no known Martians and this is not true. But most people do not read the second part of the article, right? They read the headline and they read the crazies saying they saw the Martians. And then when you get to the conclusion, it actually said this is not true. It didn't matter because most people never got there, right? The people that are listening might go, that'll never happen. Or that's not true. I'll tell you this thing. As a developer, we were building one time a project and somebody had somebody on this neighborhood council decided to tell a small group of people that we were getting government money to build this project. Yeah. This project is a hospitality project. There's no reason why anybody would give or we wouldn't get a cent of government money. It wasn't for us to tell, right? So I would go to these public meetings and they would. I mean, I've never seen people yell at me so much in my life. Yeah, but because they really were convinced of that. Yeah. And so as someone who does some public facing work, it's it's shocking when it when you see it, but it is true. People will believe anything and it's unfortunate. But that's the reality. Last time we spoke to you said something that stuck with me where you said, you know, nobody fails to commit a crime, a murder or something like that because of the death penalty. Right. Right. And I think that that part is it was an interesting. I'd never thought about it until you had said, obviously, this is your line of work. What are things that you're working on now? What are you know, as you see important items for the voters for your office in 2024? What are the what keeps you up at night? What are the things? Yeah, look, I mean, we obviously violence was will continue to be obviously something that we care deeply about. But, you know, during twenty one twenty two, that was a big concern of ours. Right. You know, the spike was going on in our community, it was going around other communities. How do we deal with this? And, you know, that that has become less of a pressure point because, you know, homicides going down, you know, not to say that that's not important, it's still a primary part of our work. But, you know, we now have the opportunity to start looking at other things. So we're looking at waste stuff. Right. You know, a lot of people don't realize that probably the biggest property crime in our community today is waste stuff. Right. So we're a billion dollars that are stolen from workers every year in L.A. County. And that you when you consider that that is not only the salaries that get stolen from the workers, but it's also money that is not going to, you know, payroll taxes, money that is not going to workers compensation fund money that actually in a way creates a unfair advantage for the employers that actually play by the rules. So like, let's say on your business, right, if you're paying your workers, you know, little wages and benefits and all that stuff, and you're betting on a job and somebody else comes next to you that is not doing that, right? They may get the job because you are higher. It's cheaper, right? People don't think that actually this person here, not only is it underpaying their workers, but they're also underpaying the whole structure that actually pays for roads to be built, schools to be built, hospitals, right? Law enforcement. So so we're going very aggressively on that area. We're also really looking aggressively at environmental crimes. You know, L.A. County is one of the hotbeds of, you know, polluters and environmental crimes. And we had hundreds of oil wells that are on cap that are putting out, you know, quite frankly, toxic and deadly, you know, substance up in the air. You know, so looking at these things and, you know, also looking at how do we get better at investigating property crimes and getting consequence? You know, the one thing to the comment that I made with you back in 2020 about the death penalty and murders, that all the evidence and when you really think about it, this is about common sense. I mean, we do this with our kids. We do it with our pets. The way that you modify behavior is when there are, there is a likelihood that bad behavior is going to be detected immediately. And then there are going to be swift consequences to that, right? When it comes to crime, if you're committing a property crime, for instance, you have somewhere around 85 to 90% likelihood that you're never going to get caught, right? So if you're doing robberies or you're doing shoplifting or whatever, you're not really expecting to be caught. And the reality is you're unlikely to get caught. And if you do, the system often moves so slowly that by the time there are any consequences, you know, the connection between your behavior and the consequences becomes a disconnect. So it's like when your kids are doing something wrong or if you're trying to train your new puppy and, you know, not to perhaps urinate or bite your shoes or something, right? If you wait for days to do something about it and you let it do it multiple times, by the time you're trying to tell them, no, you know, well, it's a little too late, right? So it's the same thing for our work. Yeah. So yeah, how do you fix that? So part of it is a lot of people don't know this, but I was in policing for many years. I was an assistant chief in the LAPD. I was a patrol officer for years. And when I was in the LAPD, I developed, you know, running operation, we developed a concept that we call the 10%. And basically we put three concentric circles. And if you can imagine three concentric circles, one was people, one was places and one was activities. And where the three overlap, it was sort of our 10%. I said, you know, if you concentrate in people that are doing things that are harmful, you concentrate in the activities that create that and sort of the locations that are more likely to have that. And you are very focused in dealing with this. You take care about 80% of the problem because we'll never have enough resources to deal with 100% of anything, right? But if we, it's about 10% of places, people in activities that cause about 80% of our problems. So dealing with that, you have a tremendous impact. So it's, you know, sort of thinking in those terms. So I tell our prosecutors, for instance, you know, when the police brings you a robbery suspect or a burglary suspect, you have to understand they got caught for that incident, but this person's probably committed many other burglars or robberies. So why don't we take a step back and why don't we try to start working with our law enforcement partners and our own crime analysts and try to connect with us and see how many other crimes can we identify that are connected to this person. Obviously, it's a more complicated and nuanced way of looking at our work, but we're starting to do that. At the same time, we're starting to more aggressively understand that our interventions have to be very measured, right? We take a 15, 16 year old, we put him with hardened criminals. We kind of almost guarantee yourself a lifetime of criminality. So how do we intervene with those young people, hold them accountable for their bad behavior, but make sure that we do not cross pollinate them with people that are doing more harmful things, that then that becomes their way of doing business. So we're really concentrating now and sort of taking us to the next level in terms of technology in the office. How do we become more analytical about our work, you know, more transparent to we on our website, we're increasingly putting as our website has developed the capacity, we're putting a lot of our work. So we show you our filing rates. We compare them for a 10 year period. We are showing, you know, our prosecution rates so people can see. I mean, a lot of people think, for instance, that we stop prosecuting people when we tell people, look, we're actually prosecuting felonies and misdemeanors of violence, the same rates that we have for the last 10 years, and our conviction rates in some cases is higher because we're not necessarily going after the person without a driver's license, right? We're sending those people to traffic court. It begins to create a different narrative around our work. And so this is the kind of stuff that we're really pushing as we try to train our staff and I'm quite frankly, hire people to think about the work differently. Yeah, I want to go back to this. So it's like, I think only in LA people go, they go to the CVS or the target and they'll try to get deodorant, you know, something. And they got a call. It's all locked up now. It's a whole another world. And that this brings us to the shoplifting element. I think when people see that, it also makes them feel scared, right? And so it feeds into the narrative and everything they're seeing on social media of like, oh my God, a burglary could happen any second now. And so what you're suggesting or what you're saying is to catch that person is extremely difficult, number one. Right. And in the world you're suggesting maybe there's just more police somewhere. Even if even if they're just walking the streets, but at least it provides some level of, I know that's not your problem per se. It's not your office's problem. But let's take that for instance, because by the way, if you were to walk on a CVS in other major cities around the country, you're going to see the same thing, right? I mean, the shoplifting is a problem that is nationwide. And by the way, it is a problem, especially organized retail theft. In general terms, even the industry has come out recently and say we overinflated our numbers by about a hundred percent, meaning it was about half of what they said the losses were, but organized retail theft, which is really where the big, it's not a one off thing, smash and grab on all the stuff. But what we often don't see is, okay, in order for people to steal this much quantity of merchandise, let's say that the order or whatever, there has to be a marketplace for this, right? So before you had the big digital merchandisers, you know, eBay, Amazon, Etsy, all that stuff, you know, people that stole the stuff had to go to the local swap meet or they sold it out of the trunk of the car in a parking lot and the quantities were small, right? But what we're seeing now, for instance, recently there was an individual in Miami, Florida, they got caught. He was selling about a million dollars of stolen merchandise in Amazon every year. He had, he was paying a lot of drug addicts and other to go steal stuff. He was bringing it in. He was repacting and selling it. So one of the things that we're starting to think of said, well, we got to create a process where this digital retailers have to have assurances that the merchandise being sold is rightfully owned by the person that is selling it. Because otherwise we keep creating the incentive, right, to steal this large quantity of stuff. So we're, we're working on that. You know, I tell people, look, around 2014, well, 2010, 2011, 2014, the theft of iPhones became a real nightmare. In every major city, we had murders that occur in London, New York and Chicago and in San Francisco, we had some people that were very seriously injured and there were people talking in Congress about creating a federal crime out of stealing a cell phone. And I said, boy, we still haven't learned our lessons, right? It's not about sending somebody's prison on this. I mean, the reality is you can steal a cell phone and the reason why you do is because you can reseller for a large dollar a month, right? So I say, how about if we create a process where your cell phone gets stolen remotely, you can do something so that the cell phone no longer functions. And we fought Apple and we did with, we also dealt with Samsung and others. And that's how we, we call it a kill switch and we actually got eventually got legislation passed and you know that flying my iPhone and the feature to turn your phone off was the result of this, right? Cell phone theft plummeted because on when they steal your phone, the value of the phone generally some of the parts, right? The screens and all that stuff. But you know, if you are like, I think the majority of the people now, they don't know how to turn this thing off remotely. That phone cannot be used by anybody else, right? You cannot break, you cannot jail break that phone. That's such a fascinating thing. I hadn't actually considered this. And so in the world where there's a changing landscape, crime is also changing landscape, right? And so when people think crime, they probably think about some movie they've watched on Amazon where it's like the mafia bosses and its drugs and then the stripper, you know, they're just washing money, essentially in the new world that you're talking about, you can be a sort of super savvy person who's getting people to rob for you, kids to go to the local target steal for you. They'll never be caught. Doesn't matter. Low risk, roughly. You can give them 20 bucks and you have an Amazon dot com five star business where you're just doing self fulfillment and making a pretty good amount of money. That's a fascinating world. So it's almost like the DVD trade, right? So I'm speaking to like the business people that listen to us, but it's like it's almost like the hundred percent. The DVD trade, the people that would go into movies, film it. Obviously that's a crime, but they're doing it anyway. Same thing. Never going to get convicted. And they go sell it. It's interesting. Yeah. And you know, I mean, this is durable. You can follow all the innovation. Listen, when I was a young officer, B&W's just to get broken into all the time in the 80s and 90s because the blockpong radios were very popular. Yeah. And we used to joke around that B&W stood for break my window, right? And we kept going after the manufacturer and said, you know, you have to create a system that if I remove it, that system no longer works, right? You don't have people stealing radios and sound systems from cars anymore because they're integrated. And if you take them off and you don't have the the coding to make them work again, they just don't work, right? Yeah. So it's, you know, how do we develop different avenues? So yes, we are prosecuting. We're going after organized retail theft aggressively. In fact, we're going to have a press conference showing our numbers because our numbers are going down as we prosecute more people. But the long term solution is actually to stop the sort of the the the economic incentive for the theft of this in such a large quantities. I feel like you should do a lot of content around this because I mean, you're just getting killed. I mean, obviously there's a bunch of media outlets also working against you. But nonetheless, it's it's a really interesting consideration of an evolution of the crime landscape where it's not just drugs, knives, guns. It's a whole it's something else. Well, but the problem is, you know, right, no one is going to carry this story of the six o'clock news. Right. No, I know. But I like at least for me, it's a really it's interesting for two levels, you know, it's like the business side of it is it's fascinating. And I say this all the time where people will just taste the carrot and so it's up to you to put the carrot somewhere. And then you're in what you're suggesting is is that that's true, too. And there's legislation that can help move the carrot. Absolutely. Yeah. And technology on the other side. So you're going to there's eleven people running against you. Yep. Probably four make it maybe. But again, we'll see. I mean, there's eleven now. We'll see. Yeah, yeah. There's eleven on all of us. Yeah, yeah. Anybody you're particularly worried about any. Look, I mean, right now they're all kind of, you know, they're all packed together. I mean, clearly it shows that I'm, you know, I'm significantly ahead of them. I think, you know, because this 11 way race, there will be a general. So, you know, we be interested in the next eight weeks, who can raise the most money amongst those other ten people to become more recognizable in order to jump away from the pack. And then, you know, we're prepared to to compete on the merits of policy and work for the general. And obviously, we do the same thing for the primary. But, you know, the primary gets a little more, you know, we have a debate, we have eleven people on it's very hard to communicate any significant policy or what is being done or not. And, you know, for for a challenger in this race, right, they don't have to have any facts, right? They say, well, you know, they used to say, crime is up. They cannot say that. So, well, people feel that crime is up. And I say, well, you know, Gallup poll says that Americans have felt that crime is going up for the last 40 some years. I was actually at an event for someone running against you recently. And they did, they did say, is that actually interesting? They said, crime is down. I can't say it's not. And I was like, that is incredible. But then he was about people feel he didn't, he didn't. Oh, OK, I was blown away. OK. I was like, that's a really, I don't know. I don't know. I'm like, do you really want to win that bad? That's your open. I've been pushing out. I'm going to say that. Now you blame me for the feeling, right? Yeah. So I've been kind of shaming them a little, so. Yeah. So last thing we spoke, we were doing, you were running in a campaign, twenty twenty during COVID. Now, so fascinated with that was like, how do you raise capital? You're doing zoom after zoom after zoom. It's a different time now. And so what is it like now? What are you doing now? Look, I mean, we're like this public speaking, you know, interestingly enough, we learn some things from COVID that I don't think will ever go away, right? So we have learned to be very digital savvy. So we still do a lot of a lot of things on zoom. And but we we also do the retail stuff on, you know, the meetings in person, fundraisers in person, a lot of community stuff. But we we sort of now taking the technology to give us sort of an added on tool that was not there before COVID in terms of people using. I mean, clearly, you know, zoom had already been out there for a while. But, you know, we're now doing hybrids. And I think we're becoming more technologically savvy about how do we communicate? And I think that's actually creating the ability for us to do a lot more than we would traditionally, especially in the county as large as ours, right? You know, but, you know, if I have a meeting, I have this today with you. And if I have a meeting in the Alano Valley next, you know, it take me an hour and a half to get there after that. Right? Yeah. Anything about homelessness you can tell us anything about your office that is a priority? What's going on? Obviously, everyone feels it. Yeah, you know, I mean, the priority for me with homelessness and finally, we're getting through the fog is is dealing with a mental health issue, right? That that's so many of our and I want to be careful because I don't want anybody to say that that I'm implying that the entire problem with houselessness is mental health because it's not. It's economics. We have a lot of people that are working and cannot afford the rent. Nevermind buying a place. I'm on the board of Imagine that. Yeah, exactly. So there's women and children and everyone's one one car accident away, one dentist appointment away. Exactly. Exactly. So that's a huge component of, you know, sort of housing and security. But the one that generally comes in front of us in the sort of the criminal legal system is generally when crimes are occurred. And a lot of that has associated with, you know, people camping on the sidewalks and then having somebody that is seeing, you know, visions and other things and they're schizophrenic. They're bipolar. They're not taking their medication and, you know, and so bad things occur there. And in the solution to so much of that is creating the capacity for us to have enough mental health beds to deal with the problem. Right. And that takes a variety of levels, right? Some people in outpatient mental health capacity is all they need. For some people, they may be dangerous at the moment and they need to be in a secure facility. But being in county jail for two, three or 10 days doesn't fix that, right? They cycle in and out. So it's how do we look for more permanency, right? You know, that can have the level of security and health care services that eventually get that person from that secure facility to an outpatient facility to eventually be able to be restored and live on their own. And the board of supervisors now increasingly is, you know, moving the ball in that direction, you know, because of court lawsuits and other things, you know, we have a plan now in five years to create 3,500 beds of different levels. We're also working with other partners, right? So there's a bunch of things that we're trying to do to address this, whether it's the intersection of sort of houselessness in the criminal legal system. And then the other component, which goes to the thing that you talk about the organization you work, one car accident in a way, one dentist, you know, and you're, well, we want to make sure that we're not one day in jail incident because you were driving without a license or, you know, you commit some very low level nonviolent offence. And we lock you up for two, three, four days. You don't show up for work the next day because this are generally people that are very vulnerable. They get laid off, they get replaced very easily. They're unemployed and when the month comes up, they cannot pay the rent. And this thing, you know, they're getting an eviction notice and they become houseless. So we're trying also not to create or increase houselessness by providing the wrong interventions, if you will. Yeah. I want to give you the last 10 minutes of our time together. What do you want the people to know? Look, I mean, what I want people to know, first of all, I go to sleep every night thinking about the safety of our community. And I get up every morning thinking about the safety of our community. And I have done that for three plus decades. I started as a police officer. I was an assistant chief in the LAPD. I was a chief of police in two different cities, Mesa, Arizona, San Francisco. Then I was then I've been a DA now, you know, two terms in San Francisco now. I deeply care about safety. But I also recognize that over incarceration and the over criminalization of certain communities has created more insecurity, has created more social inequity in our country than anything else. And if we really want to create a better future for all of us, we need to deal with that. That doesn't mean that people should not go to prison and jail. Some people have to. They're dangerous at the moment. Some people need to be held accountable for the harm they cause. But we need to do it differently. And we also need to look at victims from a different lens. You know, the traditional way has always been look at the victim and the punishment to the assailant is going to cure the trauma. But that is now the case. And we know that, you know, all the evidence, all the data shows that, you know, the traumatization of someone because they have been the victim of a crime and harmed by it doesn't get cured by the punishment side, even though maybe a victim may initially they got reaction and saying eye for an eye. But that doesn't take care of the problem. You know, there is an old saying that says, you know, hurt people hurt other people and heal people, heal other people. When you look at our prisons, if you look at a women's prison, for instance, over 90% of the women in our prison system were violated. There were rape. There were reviews as young kids. Over 80% of the men in our prison system were the victims of crimes way before they became the cost of crime. So understanding that the untreated trauma that comes from victimization actually is more likely to increase criminogenic behavior later on than simply punishing. And again, yes, the person that caused the harm needs to be held accountable. The question is to what level and what does it look like? And it's a little different in every case. And I want to wrap on this, too. This is, we're almost going to flip this whole conversation in a way of like, what we try to do with the podcast is inspire entrepreneurs, right? And so here you are. I think someone might be listening and thinking, I want to be a DA one day, right? And hopefully that's true. Hopefully that more people want to step up. But in the world or the landscape today, I would say fewer people probably want that because of the pressures that come with it, the amount of things that you can see on social media. It's not always enjoyable, right? Even for me as a developer, for anybody in business, really, sometimes you're going to get destroyed. Any business, you name it. You look at the CEO, UFC. It doesn't matter what it is, right? And so what do you what would you say to somebody who wants to get involved in public office and then sees the way not just you, but all politicians, anyone in the public eye is treated? What are the things that motivate you? What are the things that excite you and sort of keep you going? Yeah, look, I mean, I think that this is something that I go to colleges and you know, we're very fortunate but we're recruiting efforts are really ramping up. A lot of people want to come and work for us because we're communicating a vision. I usually tell people, look, first of all, we're on the right side of history, right? History, you know, has to move forward. And what we're trying to do is stuff that is going to be the normal in 10, 20 years from now. And you have the capacity to be on the front road of that evolution. And that gets people excited when you start communicating a vision. But to the to the more central part of your question is, you know, how do you encourage other people to actually maybe put themselves out there to run for elected office? And I would say that if you're passionate about helping others, if you're passionate about making a difference in your community and not in a, you know, not in a, you know, lightweight but really deeply you feel that inside of you, I can't think of a more honorable profession that to be a police officer or to be a prosecutor. I think that the personal satisfaction that you can get from doing these jobs and doing them well and going in for the right level of motivation is something that there isn't enough money in the world to compensate if you're working from that sort of that, the inner, you know, the heart part of your view. So it's what keeps me going. It's like I said, I, you know, I go to bed at night thinking about how can I make a difference in a better way? I get up in the morning thinking the same way. And when you see the moments of success which we get many out, right? You see where you made a difference in the life of a victim or you made a difference in the life of a community or a business or frankly, even an offender. I just had a meeting right before this podcast. I was meeting with people that are, you know, that are actually providing jobs for people that are getting out of prison and they're talking about how these people are thriving and sort of that second chance and what that looks like in terms of the welfare of our community is they're now taxpayers. They are family people, they're buying homes. And you say, well, I put a little grain of salt in that process. The rewards, internal rewards are keeping going, there's nothing like it. So I always tell people, you know, even if you don't care for the politics, sometimes think about it to at least contribute for a period of time to one's careers. You know, it doesn't have to be your whole life. You don't have to make it a career. Well, you know, I wish if we did almost like P scores, you know, you had to do some level of public service for a period of time before you go into anything else. I think it would make better entrepreneurs, better teachers, better engineers, but you know. I'd agree with that. I think as a developer for me, I didn't necessarily always think about the fact that I have to go give these presentations to the city, different neighborhood groups and sort of be not political, but you're in it. You're the guy presenting a vision and then everyone likes it. And in some way, you develop a thick skin, but I don't think anyone, to your point, no one really prepares you for that until you go through that fire. Well, listen, tell everyone what's big on the agenda for you in the next coming months. Yeah, you know, we're really, you know, gearing up. We're putting a whole bunch of things together around wage theft. We're doing some big environmental cases. We're trying to bring more technology into the office in the terms of analytical work and increasing our capacity to have a sort of a front facing process in our website so people can actually in real time, you can manipulate numbers, you can get in, see what prosecutions in your community look like and what the outcome. So we're trying to do all that stuff this year. So it's keep us going. George, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure to show my deal. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, share with your friends, your family, or anyone you might think might benefit from the conversation we've had today. And if you haven't already, please take a moment to leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. 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