Austin, Texas – Mayor Steve Adler stopped by the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Tuesday to talk about big-ticket items in the city, like homelessness and its booming population.

It's not every day that the mayor of a city sits down with Joe Rogan (53), but not every city has a famed mixed martial artist-turned-podcaster living in it.

Austin-based Rogan started off the conversation by asking Adler (65) what it was like being the mayor of such an expansive city, to which he responded like any Austinite would, confessing, "it's a trip."

Adler took over as the Mayor of Austin in 2015, and was faced with the reality he never knew to be true.

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Rather than being the top dog, Adler found that he had no more power than any member of the city council – something many people are unaware of to this day.

"It makes it difficult to come into a city and lead when the other 10 people on your council have identical powers that you have," Adler explained, to which Rogan bluntly responded, "So this is why things don't get done."

He's not wrong, either. Take homelessness in the city, for example.

The situation isn't new to the city, yet it's something that has been ignored for years outside the short-term solutions, like allowing public camping without providing even the most basic resources.

But with a booming city that won't stop growing – including its homeless population – band-aid fixes aren't going to cut it, and Adler knows it.

The mayor told Rogan that housing has helped get homeless veterans off the streets for good, and it could help others do the same.

Yet, Austin residents voted to reinstate the camping ban, in the hopes of removing the eyesore of encampments, but that doesn't address the root of the problem.

"If you hide this challenge, it's going to continue to grow until it is so big you can't hide it anymore, but at that point it's going to be too big for you to actually meaningfully deal with it," Mayor Adler told Rogan.

As for the city's cut of the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill that the federal government has passed, Adler said that he and several of his colleagues on the city council have an idea on how it should be spent.

"Rather than taking those dollars from the federal government and splitting it up 50 different ways and sending it out to people, what if we actually took those dollars and actually put them towards the homelessness challenge in our city," he said.

His goal? To get those experiencing homelessness off the streets, into housing, and enrolled in job training programs to help "right their ships" and get them back on course.

But the city has to hold itself responsible for the expansive homeless community, and Adler owned up to some of its wrongdoings: "We're creating a lot of the challenges that we're dealing with because we don't have the capacity."

In fact, the rising population of the city was an issue that Adler ran into during his run for re-election. "There were lots of people coming up to me and their one ask was that I would stop the city from growing," he revealed.

Both Adler and Rogan agreed that the only way to stop a city from growing was to invite crime in and make it less appealing– something the Adler and the city council have no intentions on doing,

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Adler's final term as mayor of what Rogan called "one of the best cities" runs through January 2023.