The Fifth Episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

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.

There’s more explanation in the first episode of this series, and if you find you like it I’d recommend listening to all of the episodes I’ve released in order, but, if you’re new and want to just dive in, that is, of course, also totally cool. Today, I’m talking about the 5th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E05 - Marcus Samuelson Knows NYC Has the Perfect Recipe, released March 22nd, 2023.

I’m going to quickly tell a story. The last time I saw Weird Al live, a person I was with, who has, as far as I can tell, never written a song, parody or otherwise, was clearly unimpressed and turned to me and said “I just feel like I could do this.” Like what Al does is easy.

That person is pretty successful at what they do actually do for a living, and to be fair they’ve got a pretty nice voice. But, whether or not you like his schtick, Al is, like, one of the most talented people in the world. He spends a lot of time making that talent look really effortless, but it’s very hard to do what he does. That’s why he’s the only one doing it.

It’s not entirely easy to create a podcast. I’m only ok at it, and I’ve been writing and performing in one way or another for most of my life. It gets easier if you have access to a recording studio and people who’ll do the stuff like editing and mic placement and stuff like that. People who’ll handle the uploading and the promotion (though it’s very clear that no one who could be promoting the mayor’s podcast is doing so, I assume because they know it is bad). If all the friction is removed, though, you still have to know how to tell a story. You still have to be able to communicate in this medium. And you may be good at communicating in other mediums, you may have a real knack for retail politics. You may have risen quite high in your chosen field, and you may assume that means you can do other things with ease. You’ll almost certainly be wrong.

Anyway, only 5 episodes in, one of which was just clipped together from his state of the city, Eric Adams’s podcast about getting stuff done in New York, which could bring in any number of people from his administration, politics, faith, community, business or any of the other 9 million strange people who live here, is for the second episode in a row, interviewing a chef with an inspiring story.

The mayor mentions a program he’s involved with called Breaking Bread Building Bonds, which seems to have a goal of bringing groups of 10 people together to have a meal. They’re looking to do a thousand of these and it appears to be a real city initiative, there’s a sign up page on the city of New York’s website. I had to google it because there’s no link in the show notes and the Mayor gave no information on how to sign up, but also I’m not planning on signing up because I do not want to dine with a lot of strangers under normal circumstances and certainly not during a pandemic. But if you do it and want to report back I’d love to hear about this weird thing the city is doing.

Anyway, the Mayor spends some time sort of free associating around the idea of eating with people and feelings and food and then asks his guest, Marcus Samuelsson to tell his inspiring story.

He does so.

Having just done an episode about an episode where an immigrant to New York City tells their story of becoming a restaurateur, I’m hesitant, in a way the mayor clearly wasn’t, to just relay many of the same beats. I’m trying to come up with an angle on this. I do suggest looking Marcus Samuelsson up, his story is genuinely interesting. Part of the thing the mayor achieves here is that he doesn’t really present it in an interesting way. He barely asks questions of the guy, and doesn’t really shape the conversation. He asks about the obstacles Marcus faced when he got to NYC, but honestly when he got here he was already pretty well established as a chef. Most of his obstacles seem to have come from when he was striving, and that’s when he was living in Europe, which the mayor seems to find less than interesting. But, he did good things with his success. He was here on 9/11, and he fed people. He was here for COVID and he turned his restaurant into a community kitchen. He seems like a good guy who wants to help people.

But his NYC stories? He mentions that he started a restaurant, because Maya Angelou had him over and told him to open a restaurant in Harlem, which is, I mean… This isn’t a story I’d call “relatable”.

One of the things that just struck me here is how did this interview happen? This is a James Beard award winning chef. He owns like 14 restaurants around the world. He cooked for the Obamas. He has a TV show and also he’s a regular on Guy’s Grocery Games. He’s written a bunch of cookbooks. He’s been famous long enough that he wrote his first memoir over a decade ago. He doesn’t need this podcast, especially since I am a statistically significant number of the people who’ve heard it.

Sometimes you find something secret and it’s like… great. And no one knows about it. An underground comic some guy is making for fun but it really speaks to you. Or a band in your local town that is going to break up in 6 months so you’ll only wind up with a CD of their demo they burnt just for you because you went to more than one of their shows in the back of a bar. Stuff like that, for whatever reason, that reaches you and stays with you and is somehow all the more meaningful to you because you’re one of the only people who has found it to find meaning in it. Or you’ll find an old recording on YouTube of a famous actor on, like, Letterman in 1980, just before they break out, and it’ll have like 5 views and they’re vulnerable and human in a way that they’d never be publicly again.

I didn’t like my representative in the House very much so I supported his challenger in 2018, which is to say I happened to volunteer, wholly without knowing any of the things that were about to happen, for AOC’s campaign. I met her and was in a room with her and like 5 other people a few times. I don’t have any special insights, outside of: I actually can confirm that she is a human person. So many people who know her as a person on one of their screens cannot say that, though.

Most media in the world that’s good enough could be like that. But most won’t. Most will wind up unheard and then thrown away when the clean-out happens, or lost to fire years later or just lost. But some of that ephemeral work will later be heard by someone. No one important, just someone and it’ll touch them. It’ll be their secret, because they’re no one famous so they can’t get other people interested.

Then there’s the stuff that’s pretty bad but that’s made by famous people and the people who are cultural taste manufacturers, who work alongside those famous people, they take steps to assure that you at least hear about that bad stuff, and huge numbers of people watch it or listen to it.

This podcast isn’t any of that. The mayor of New York had an interview with an extraordinarily talented and charismatic giant in the world of food. It should be great. If not great, it should still find you, because people should be forcing it on you. No one is. It’s a secret I’m sharing with you, but I’m telling you not to bother listening to it because there’s nothing to take away from it. You already know that you should help when a pandemic happens, the fact that the mayor has spent so much time downplaying the pandemic aside. You already know that good food tastes good and that you like eating with nice people. You probably didn’t know about the mayor’s weird 55 burgers, 55 fries, 10000 diners, 1000 meals, 55 shakes program, but that’s because he only mentioned it once on his own podcast!

Is there a larger takeaway here? I might be a little tempted to note that maybe the mayor’s interview was particularly vague because he suddenly realized he was interviewing someone who was a bigger deal than he is. I was in fact a little tempted to note it, so I just did.

But I also want to pull a bit on the thread of just how bad this podcast is. I make a joke of it at the top of most episodes, and that’s because it’s objectively funny that the mayor of New York City has a terrible podcast. It’s funny that he doesn’t seem to know it. It’s funny that every couple weeks he goes into a recording studio, monumentally fucks this up and leaves smiling thinking he’s crushed it yet again. But, it’s also, like, rare, right?

There’s a great joke that Katie McDonough tweeted from the de Blasio era. If you’re not particularly read in on NYC media and politics, you need to know three things to understand this 1) de Blasio would appear on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC and take calls from the public in a segment called Ask the Mayor 2) for a lot of de Blasio’s tenure the public more or less hated him, and this got particularly acute during the unrest that occurred summer of 2020 after the NYPD was repeatedly filmed brutalizing protesters and de Blasio refused to condemn said brutalization and 3) Brian Lehrer is a goddamned treasure. The tweet, from June of 2020 reads “The Ask the Mayor calls are like, "Hi Brian, first of all thank you and I love you. You are my king. Mr. Mayor, you are a disgrace. I hate you. You must drink piss instantly””

To find that I googled "brian lehrer de blasio piss tweet."

This was an accurate picture of the state of affairs in the summer of 2020. I bring this up because 1) it’s really funny. 2) de Blasio would just sit there and take it, sorta gray faced, he was term limited by this point. 3) But it was clear that de Blasio just knew. He’d fucked up COVID, he’d fucked up dealing with Albany, he’d fucked up his attempted exit, thinking he could run for president, people were so mad. He came out on top though. He made a game of it, he ran for the house of representatives in his home district, so he could tap federal campaign funds to pay off various debts that he had from running for president. He knew he was so unpopular by that point that he’d lose in the district that he lives in, but that he’d get an infusion of cash. Even in total, abject, humiliating failure, de Blasio was a success at getting himself out, if not unscathed, at least in one piece.

What I’m saying is: it’s very rare to see a politician actually be terrible at something. When you do, it’s usually highly choreographed, like Bob Dole going on a day time talk show and dancing with the host, where looking bad at dancing is actually being good at appearing to be human, or it’s part of a de Blasio like plan to advance themselves. It’s rare to see Bob Dole fall off the stage during a campaign event, but when he did, it made him look bad. Bob Dole is still a relatable reference, I am young and my joints feel normal.

It’s rarer still to not only do something poorly, but to keep intentionally doing it, over and over, every couple weeks, and it says something important that the mayor never gets better at this (spoiler, it’s still terrible all these months later), that he doesn’t know that there’s no upside to putting this out this way (he, like de Blasio, appears on the radio as well, that’s plenty of audio content from the mayor), that there’s no upside to putting this out at all, that if you’re going to put it out, you should at least improve in X, Y, and Z ways. This is small and stupid, it’s a podcast. Why do it at all if you’re going to do it this bad, and if it is small and stupid, why is there no one around the mayor who feels that they can tell him this small, stupid thing isn’t really working and maybe his time should be spent on more important stuff?

Ok, so that’s the episode but let’s quickly dive into what was going on with Mayor Adams in the period of time between the previous episode and this one. I don’t have a fancy name for the segment and I never will, but 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.

From March 6th to March 22nd 2023, Eric Adams

Said that Jeffery Maddery, the top uniformed official at the NYPD, acted appropriately when he voided the arrest of Kruythoff Forrester and ordered him released about 90 minutes after he’d been taken into custody late in 2021. What was this Forrester guy arrested for? Oh just menacing several children with a gun that he pointed at them while chasing them. If you are thinking, why on earth would the number one uniformed official at the NYPD intervene 90 minutes into an investigation into the attempted murder of several kids, and further why on earth the mayor would defend the decision to release the man clearly shown on security cameras chasing children through the streets while pointing a gun at them, it might help to know that all three of the adults I’ve mentioned in this story are or were cops.

Other than that it was a pretty quiet stretch for the mayor, aside from some major fundraising violations that came to light from his campaign, but I can’t really imagine that won’t blow over, I’m sure this’ll be the last time we hear about any fundraising improprieties.

If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it, but I refuse to believe that liking it does anything, and reviewing it will just take up moments of your life that you could be telling a friend or, I don’t know, putting up that poster on the wall you keep meaning to put up.

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

Piss tweet

https://twitter.com/kmcdonovgh/status/1268928020615761922?lang=en

See you next time.