The Eighth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

S1 E08 Tacos, a VW bus and a dream - the story of Tacombi founder Dario Wolos

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, the greatest city in the world, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If you’re new, welcome, and there’s more explaining done of this whole thing in the first episode. I’d personally recommend listening through from the beginning of this podcast and not listening to the mayor’s podcast at all, but you should do what works for you, of course. Today, I’m talking about the 8th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E08 Tacos, a VW bus and a dream - the story of Tacombi founder Dario Wolos, released May 10th, 2023.

Quick word of warning, at the end of the episode, during the section where I talk about what the mayor was up to during the time between the last episode and this one I talk about the killing of Jordan Neely by Daniel Penny, which occurred on May 1st, and which the mayor had a lot of really just brain rotted things to say. I do go into some detail about the killing, so if that’s not something you want to hear about, please don’t feel any obligation to listen. I’ll let you know when I’m about to start talking about it.

At any rate the mayor dives in, introducing Dario Wolos, his friend, whose factory the mayor recently toured. I want to just step back at this point and recognize that in the mayor’s telling, on this podcast, a lot of his time seems to be spent just going to places of business that are owned by friends old and new and that seems fine, except that this is a podcast, theoretically about getting stuff done, not visiting pals, and also the mayor’s administration seems to have actually accomplished very little, and maybe this gets at part of the problem.

At any rate, the mayor reports that the workers at Dario’s seem happy and the environment is clean.

The mayor asks for Dario’s life story, which Dario gamely provides. Born in Corning, New York to two people who’d met in Mexico. His mother is Mexican, and his father was born in Paris as the son of Ukrainian refugees from World War 2. They moved to Mexico so his father could work for Corning glass works. Corning glass works is headquartered in upstate New York, in Corning, which I have been to, it’s nice. Ran a half marathon up there and glass is enough of a thing that the medal was made of glass. Anyway, his parents relocated to Corning when his dad was promoted.

His mother cooked Mexican food, and used “the language of food” to communicate with her new neighbors. The mayor jumps on this to promote his Breaking Bread Building Bonds program of having people have a 1000 meals in the city to talk with each other. It’s come up before on this podcast and don’t have any more to say about it now than I did the last time he mentioned it.

Dario jumps around a bit, but that’s what happens when someone interviewing you asks you essentially “tell me everything that happened to you”. Seems that he wound up opening a taco place in Mexico, and then decided to open more outposts of the brand, Tacombi, in NYC.

At this point I googled Tacombi because the word brand got said a lot here, and, well, it’s not quite at Chipotle levels of ubiquity, but it’s got a bunch of locations in NYC, Florida, Jersey, Miami, Chicago, Virginia, etc with a very recognizable design aesthetic and pretty good reviews on yelp.

Dario says that in Mexico he couldn’t really gain traction, he was just another taco stand trying to sell Mexican food to Mexican people, also, and this is a stunningly honest admission, he says that a lot of the taco stands in Mexico were simply better than his. But he learned a lot about hospitality in Mexico.

So, he put his stand on a boat, since he didn’t have the money to buy a new stand in America, and floated it to Florida, and then drove it up to NYC. After working out of the stand for a year, he found a guy who rented him a space on Elizabeth street, and now he has 11 locations in NYC. I’m not really editing his story much here, that’s how he told it. Googling leads me to the information that at some point Danny Mayer invested a bunch of money in the concept.

His locations started making their own tortillas, and then Whole Foods came knocking so he opened a warehouse location that makes tortillas, that is, I think, the factory Adams mentioned at the top. So now his tortillas are in grocery stores and restaurants in 40 states and sold online (research indicates that they’re reviewed positively as well).

They talk about how wonderful Mexico is and how wonderful the Mexican community in NYC is and how the mayor encourages everyone to bring love of their country to NYC and again we’re in a place in one of these where I feel like I’m insane because the same person saying this is, at the same time he’s saying it, actively trying to get people to stop coming here from America’s southern border, saying NYC is full, that we cannot help people anymore, and that the people who’ve already come are ruining this city.

Ok, so what advice would Dario give someone who’s doing business from a small cart today? the mayor asks. First follow your heart. Second don’t give up.

And that’s it.

Part of the interesting thing about the Mayor’s podcast is that I’m not sure anyone knows what it is. I’m not sure he knows what it is, except “a podcast.” It’s possible he has some sort of internal definition driving this whole thing that somewhat deviates from the standard concept of what a podcast is.

Podcasts are their own thing, you know? They’re audio, you can make musical podcasts, but they’re not albums. They’re (usually) serialized, but they’re not radio, you have a lot more freedom than programmed radio blocks allow. That freedom means there’s a lot of podcast content that’s pretty unlistenable, but have you put on terrestrial radio recently? Or ever tried to sit through talk radio? Or sports radio? I grew up in the Boston area, know what I’m saying?

What I’m lurching toward is that there’s no reason for the mayor’s podcast to be a podcast. This podcast, about his podcast, could only be a podcast. No one would put it on the radio, you can’t make an album out of it. There’s something only podcasts do, and that’s what this podcast exploits. The mayor already has a radio show, but a local station would give him another, and would let him badly interview anyone he wanted, I’m sure.

But think of the freedom that comes with a podcast. You can do literally anything audio you want. Dan Carlin does extremely popular 5 hour long episodes about horrible wars. Mike Duncan does 200 episode seasons about the French Revolution. I do weird sorta comedy political analysis about other podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts because I work a job where having an earbud in all day is fine and otherwise I’ll be pretty bored. I’ve heard some really great pods that really explored the medium and what it allows, and I’ve heard some that really explored the fact that just about anyone can make one of these. But it’s rare for me to hear one and ask why it’s being made as a podcast. It’s like saying you’ve written an opera, but there’s no singing. Just people onstage talking. That’s a play.

And one of the reasons I started this podcast was the sense that the way you do one thing is sorta the way you do everything, and so, by listening to his podcast, we might get a sense of his mayoralty, and I feel like this is a pretty good episode for that, even if it’s a pretty terrible episode from the standpoint of being a podcast or telling a story or giving advice or having a reason to have been released for people to listen to.

What I mean by that is: Say you own a small business and want to learn how to scale up. Well, it seems like listening to a podcast where the guest did exactly that, going from a taco stand to a nationwide brand with locations in multiple states and a line of grocery store goods, that might be really useful. But there’s no advice here except pablum, and there’s nothing we can take from this guy’s story. How’d you meet Danny Mayer? What do you think he saw in you? How’d you find your second location? Your third? What surprised you? When did you know this would work? Say you’re you live somewhere else and you’re wondering if you should move to New York. The stories of striving and eventually making it might be inspiring to you, but there’s nothing like that here either. There’s just a list of stuff that happened. I’m sure there’s drama in this dude’s life, but he never brings it up, and the mayor doesn’t draw any out. How’d you wind up back in Mexico after your family moved to Corning? Did you like living upstate? What was it like being of mixed Ukrainian/Mexican heritage outside of a major city? The mayor enjoys hanging out with this nice guy and asking him vague questions, and so that’s what happened. The mayor enjoys being in a podcast studio so we got a recording of it. The mayor isn’t accomplishing anything with his administration because he doesn’t enjoy accomplishing material improvements for the people of New York as much as he enjoys the accomplishment of having personally become the mayor, and he sees the job of mayor as doing what the person who is the mayor personally enjoys, which is a few initiatives from the Sanitation Department, giving the cops a bunch of money and toys so they can more or less stand around and play candy crush on their phones, staying out to all hours having fun at various parties where people are happy to see him, declaring victory over Covid and never mentioning it again, and yelling about whichever group he decides is a good bloc to blame the problems of the city on. Nothing’s getting done because aside from Eric Adams’ serotonin receptors, nothing’s being served.

It’s a theory anyway, because otherwise I literally have no idea of what he’s going for here or why this podcast exists. Except… well, you listened to the last episode, right? But it’s probably not that.

Ok, so what was the mayor up to in the time between the previous episode’s release on April 19th 2023 and this episode coming out on May 10th. To do this I lean heavily on the reporting of two fantastic New York City outlets, The City, and Hell Gate, both of which I support financially, and I encourage you to do so as well. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

The Biden Administration dropped Eric Adams as a campaign surrogate because he simply would not stop yelling that the migrant crisis in New York City was real, that it was ruining the city, and that it was the fault of the Biden administration, and for last two things to be true, the first one has to be true and it’s simply not the case. To the extent there’s a crisis, the crisis is that Eric Adams has to figure out how to help human beings that want to be here to be here without treating them like shit, and he simply cannot do that.

Eric Adams said he hears divine voices that, 32 years ago told him the date he would become mayor of New York, and also that voice is now telling him to talk about god. Weird stuff!

As I mentioned, this section will discuss the death of Jordan Neely, and I’m going to do that now.

On May 1 Jordan Neely, a 30 year old black man was allegedly murdered on the subway by Daniel Penny, a 24 year old white man. Neely is described by most outlets as a homeless man having a crisis. He entered a subway car in the midst of that crisis, which several people found scary, though there is no indication that he did anything except yell and throw his jacket on the ground. It feels insane to say that neither of these things are reasons to be killed (I suppose the content of the yelling (for example, Nazi slogans) might get one assaulted in certain contexts that most people might even celebrate, but there’s no indication that Neely yelled about anything other than being hungry and upset.)

Daniel Penny, a 24 year old marine from Long Island decided that this situation required placing Jordan Neely in a choke hold that has been reported to have lasted from 7-15 minutes. At some point during that time, someone on the train started filming and do not watch that video.

There are several things that happen to the body when it’s dying in that situation and Neely does them. Penny does not relent in any way that I’ve seen on the video. Neely died.

Penny was not named by the police for days. He was interviewed and released. He was not arraigned until May 12th, 11 days after the alleged murder. He was not indicted, for criminally negligent homicide and second degree manslaughter, until June 14th. He is still free pending the trial.

The medical examiner ruled that Neely died of a homicide, due to compression of his neck.

This podcast is about Eric Adams so, among his statements: “there’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here”, “we cannot blaknetly tell passengers what they should and should not do”. Protests broke out throughout the city, the NYPD responded with their usual lack of restraint. Dozens of people, including journalists, were assaulted before being arrested arrested, and with the exception of three people, all of them had their charges tossed. Adams said that the protests were being infiltrated by agitators with molotov cocktails, which is interesting because there were no fires lit as part of these protests and also Daniel Penny lived on Long Island, so it’s interesting who the mayor decides to refer to as an infiltrator.

Adams claimed to have reached out to Neely’s family. They said they hadn’t heard from them.

Incredibly dark stuff and I’m sorry to be ending this in this way, but it’s what happened, what the mayor said - and did not say, and did - and did not do - what the record reveals. When society makes a judgement call about whose life is important and whose isn’t, we have more access than ever before to the evidence that society is doing that. More videos than ever before to parse of the person who died, trying to convince us that their past behavior might have, at least, made their death less meaningful, if not deserved. More people trying to flee their own dissonance, by roping you into their worldview, rather than taking the evidence before them as a reason to interrogate that worldview. But it’s still shocking. And it does not change the basic facts: A white man choked an unarmed Black man to death, who had not physically harmed anyone. He did this publicly, was filmed doing it, and he is still free. He has raised millions of dollars for his defense and some of the most powerful people in the country have defended his actions.

And that's our episodes, by now you know the drill, so I'm just going to say that transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at:

stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

See you next time.