Okay guys welcome back to Lightweights. Today we have Joe, myself, and we have a mayor, the mayor specifically of Glendale, here with us. Very interesting. I'm actually super excited to speak with you.

Mayor Arty and or your last name. Can you please pronounce it for me?

Kisakiin.

Okay. Yes. Mayor Kisakiin. Cool last name. Where are you from originally?

So I was born in Boston but obviously you know you can tell from the name I'm Armenian both my parents are. Armenians come from like all over the place you run into Armenians that are from all different places. I mean after if anyone knows history there was a terrible genocide at the start of the 20th century.

So Armenians were dispersed all over the globe to different countries. So you got Armenians in Argentina, you got Armenians in Europe and South America and everywhere mid-least.

And former Soviet Union, some in Chicago, some in New Jersey. Where do you guys are from? I'm from Belarus, right? So Eastern Europe and I will say that the Belarusian people get along with Armenians really well.

The Lithuanians do too. I was at a Lithuanian festival this weekend. I'll are you in LA and they're like, oh your Armenian we're all like you know brother people.

One of our best friends is Armenian. Yeah. Yeah. Nick Antonian. Yeah I know him. Yeah he's got the Johnian Kabab. Oh yeah.

Have you guys ever met? No I think we communicated online. I'm supposed to go and have some Kabab at his place.

You should it's pretty good actually. It's great. Yeah. And he does some funny videos. I know you guys I know you have you been in the videos? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean he has to. Yeah.

Yeah. Everyone kind of works together in that sense. Yeah. So LA I believe has the highest population of Armenians in the United States. In the United States. Yeah.

Because you got a lot of Armenians in Moscow. You got a lot of Armenians in different places in the Middle East and like Lebanon. There's a large community in Iran.

We've had Armenians in Glendale. The first Armenian family there was probably there in the 1900s. But it really didn't become a large place concentration of Armenians until the 1970s after the Iranian Revolution.

And then again in the 1980s late 1980s when the Soviet Union collapsed. Yeah. Wow. That's interesting. How did you get into the position that you are currently at and did you always want to be a mayor?

Yeah. So the mayor is a appointed position. I get to be mayor for one year. I'm about six months in my term. A lot of cities smaller city. So what we understand of government and politics. We understand from usually TV shows and what we maybe have read or think we know.

But a lot of cities the size of Glendale. By the way, we're the fourth largest city in Los Angeles County. Los Angeles County has 88 cities in it. It's Los Angeles is the largest. Then it's Long Beach. Then Santa Clarita and then it's Glendale.

We used to be larger than Santa Clarita, but they passed us in this last census because they have room to grow anyone who's been Santa Clarita knows that they're still building homes and it's kind of a city that's expanding.

But we're like a suburb of LA, a suburban community. We used to be called a bedroom community. People would work in downtown, but living Glendale. And that is still the case, although we have a very strong economy ourselves.

But your question as to how you become mayor, you run for council. And we have five council members. LA has more than five. Pasadena has more council members, but Glendale structure is similar to many cities.

Five council members, we act like a board of directors for a corporation. We hire a city manager who's a person, the CEO who runs the city. So we make the decisions policy wise as to what direction want the city to go in.

And every April in Glendale, we select one person among the five to serve as mayor. So you become the first among equals. You get to run the meeting, you have the gavel, you get to set the kind of tone of the meeting.

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