Here is what I knew about Brian and Brad Jans before this episode: they run Jans Corporation, one of the more quietly prolific commercial construction firms in Sioux Falls, and they started a podcast called Two B's In A PODCast that has, in fourteen episodes, managed to be one of the more interesting interview shows in the region without anyone really noticing. Here is what I did not know: they could get Mayor Paul TenHaken to sit down for an hour and answer basically anything.
This is the longest episode of The Directory's first season, and it earns every one of its fifty-eight minutes. The format is simple — Brian and Brad ask TenHaken questions, TenHaken answers them, nobody is trying to go viral — and the simplicity is what makes it work. When was the last time you heard a sitting mayor talk about leadership for an hour without a press secretary in the room steering the conversation toward talking points? I'll wait.
The conversation covers ground that ranges from the genuinely weighty to the unexpectedly entertaining. TenHaken on local versus federal politics is the kind of nuanced take that gets lost in national media cycles — he talks about the difference between governing a city of 200,000 and performing governance for a cable news audience, and the distinction lands. The section on Sioux Falls' growth is worth the price of admission on its own: TenHaken walks through the infrastructure planning that happens years before a new neighborhood appears, the kind of long-horizon thinking that most residents never see and probably should.
Then it gets personal. TenHaken on pandemic leadership is not a rehearsed answer — you can see him actually thinking about what those months were like, the decisions that had no good options, the weight of being the person a city looks to when the playbook doesn't exist. He talks about implementing EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) in city government, which sounds like the driest possible topic until you realize he's describing the moment a bureaucracy started running like a startup, and the friction that created.
And yes, he flew an F-16. The story is exactly as good as you're hoping it is.
The Jans brothers deserve credit here for something that's harder than it looks: they ask questions that a regular person would actually ask, not the questions a journalist would ask to prove they've done their homework. It's the difference between an interview and a conversation, and the result is a TenHaken who comes across as what he probably is most of the time — a former tech guy who ended up running a mid-sized American city and thinks about it constantly.
The final stretch on AI and deepfakes is prescient in a way that will age well. TenHaken is thinking about this stuff more seriously than most mayors in cities five times Sioux Falls' size. Whether you voted for him or not, this is a conversation worth hearing.