The First Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

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

This is a podcast about Eric Adams, the current mayor of New York, and I feel I should say a few throat clearing things here about who I am, who Eric Adams is and why I’m making this podcast.

Eric Adams and I are both New Yorkers and that’s about the extent to which we have anything in common. Adams was born in 1960 in Brooklyn. He’s lived in NYC his whole life (maybe, we’ll probably talk more about his New Jersey residence at some point). He’s been a cop, a Republican, a New York State senator, Brooklyn borough president, and now the mayor. He was elected as a Democrat. He’s a Black man, a vegan (except when he’s not), and a father. He’s a non denominational Christian. He loves going out at night.

I was born in 1978 in Detroit. I grew up just outside of Boston, and have lived in Queens since 2003. I am a dog walker and comedian. I do weird shows like this one. I’m somewhat to the left of leftist, I’m a strict vegetarian. I’ve lived in rentals the entire time I’ve lived here. I’m culturally Jewish, I read as white, and male (I don’t know how else to say that; the whiteness of American Jews is a pretty fraught subject, and could be its own podcast. Gender is the subject of several podcasts (I recommend Tuck Woodstock’s Gender Reveal, which I’ll link in the show notes.). To be totally honest here, I don’t identify strongly with any particular gender, but of course the fact that society sees me as a white male is going to come with extraordinary privileges).

Eric Adams and I are not the same. I bring certain things to the table here, and some of them involve blind spots I am not even aware I have. Feedback is always welcome.

So, why is this called The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast? It’s called The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast because it’s going to examine Adams’ mayoralty through the lens of his podcast, The Get Stuff Done Cast. The mayor of New York has a podcast. No one is listening to it.

The mayor has been interviewed on other podcasts. Podcasts about politics, or the news, or being a vegan, which I personally think you should only claim to be if you aren’t regularly photographed eating meat, but that’s neither here nor there. This is not a podcast about the mayor’s podcast appearances. It’s a podcast about his podcast. Which, again, no one is listening to.

There’s been analysis. Very few people have downloaded it. Almost no subscribers. Why? Podcasts are huge, NYC is the center of the world. The mayor is a fascinating infuriating lunatic. Why wouldn’t people listen to this thing? Why don’t they know it’s being made at all?

I’m going to try to answer that question with something more interesting than “it is a bad podcast,” though that’s partially to blame, unfortunately. But I’m going to listen because someone should. And I’m going to report back so it doesn’t have to be you. The mayor’s podcast unintentionally reveals certain things about his leadership, his administration and his values. I think it can give us an insight into why he’s failing, which I believe he is doing. Podcasts come out sequentially in time, so each episode rests in the period it was made, and both through what is discussed, and what’s omitted, can serve as a history of his administration.

Well that’s all fun but also the mayor’s maybe going to jail? Yeah. So, I’ve had this idea for a while, and I started working on it a couple months back, when a podcast called FAQ NYC - if you’re an NYC politics person you should be listening, I’ll link it in the show notes - talked about the mayor’s podcast and the fact that no one was listening to it. That seemed funny, and somehow important, so I started listening to the mayor’s podcast, and was instantly hooked by how bad and weird it is. I took my time, though. The mayor says he’s going to do a lot of things, and follow through isn’t his strong suit, so I wanted to be sure he was going to stick with it.

Fast forward to the end of October, and episodes were still coming out, so I figured I’d start recording, and right as I did so the mayor travelled to Washington DC for high level meetings about an issue he insists is the most important facing the city, which is, as he puts it “the migrant crisis.” Now, I don’t believe it’s ever a crisis to be asked to help people, particularly if you’re well positioned to do so, which NYC clearly is. Additionally, just as a numbers thing, there aren’t an overwhelming number of refugees coming to New York. In October, The Times estimated that in about the last year and a half, roughly 130,000 arrived. That’s like 1.5% of the total population of the city. It just doesn’t seem like that much. In the first year Ellis Island was operating, it saw a million entries. It’s not like arrivals here haven’t already had contact with the government in some fashion. Many have entered through some contact point. Many are stopping through before heading someplace else, someplace they have family, or Canada, or something like that. Some stay, they should become New Yorkers, that’s sorta New York’s thing. I recognize that this is a high need population, but we’re where, like, literally all the money in the world is traded back and forth, I think we can check the cushions and come up with a pretty significant amount of resources.

All of that’s to say, I see this one way, and the mayor sees it very stridently another way, and he’s used language like “This will destroy New York City” and screamed at every open microphone that he could find that the Federal government needs to give him more money to deal with all this, so these meetings with the feds were clearly very important to him.

Which is why it was so odd that he was, like, hanging out at the breakfast buffet, getting ready to start meeting with folks, chatting with someone, and when that person turned to, like, put suryp on their waffle, and then turned back to say something, a dust cloud in the shape of Eric Adams and a spinning bowl of oatmeal was all that was left of the mayor.

The dust cleared, staff cleaned up the porcelain shards and got the steam cleaner for the rug, but the question remained: what happened? Why’d the mayor suddenly flee DC and return to New York?

Well, turns out the 25 year old that he’d given the job of campaign finance chair to for his 2021 mayoral campaign had been raided by the FBI in a probe of efforts the Turkish government appears to have made to purchase influence with the mayor through campaign donations. It is, of course, illegal to knowingly take campaign donations from a foreign government, and I’m not sure what the legal term is for someone who is an American elected official who acts on the behalf of a foreign flag, but I think the word traitor could possibly be applied.

Whatever, I tend to think of the employees of the FBI the way I think of every employees of every job. They like being inside and warm and would rather talk about who’s been flirting with whom in the office, rather than putting on a lot of equipment and typing up a lot of paperwork, and going out to deal with an angry stranger in their home.

Point being, they’re not going to go through that hassle if they haven’t decided there’s a pretty good reason, though I’ll note that if you’ve studied the history of the FBI their idea of a good reason and what people who aren’t racist homophobes might think of as a good reason have been historically divergent at many times.

Anyway, at this point, I’d written several episodes and recorded a few of them. Started writing and recording faster.

The next day - I think, time’s gotten a little hazy at Stuff Stuff Cast Cast HQ - it came out that the NYPD had paid a visit to the subject of the raid the night before it happened, which they called a “wellness check” and most other folks took as a “You may want to start flushing anything down the toilet with the mayor’s name on it” check. But it’s definitely unusual and not how things are supposed to go, and I generally assume: whatever the goal, unlikely to accomplish that goal. Probably the exact opposite. Writing faster, recording with more alarm.

On Friday, so two days ago as I type this, the Times revealed that earlier that week, the FBI stopped Eric Adams on the street, took him into an SUV, presented a warrant, and relieved him of his phones and iPad.

So for the last 36 hours or so, I’ve been writing and recording and editing and drinking coffee and losing my mind. I’ve gotten all the episodes more or less together. I wish I felt like I had more time here. Some of the edits are a little rough, my radiator kept coming on, my voice blew out, which you’ll hear in later episodes, I’m genuinely sorry that the audio is as rough as it is at times. But, looking back, I think this project has a lot of value for its initial concept, looking at the Adams mayoralty’s failures through the lens of the podcast he was making for no listeners, as well as a way of examining, which I’ll do in an episode I record shortly, how we wound up here and what might happen next.

A couple other quick things. I initially recorded an episode that was about the first episode of his podcast, or more correctly, about the fact that the first episode of his podcast was just clips of Adams’ state of the city address. I think it’s better just to get into the episodes, so I made the call today that I’m cutting that one, which means, delightfully, that in every episode I’ve recorded, I uh say the wrong episode number, but I did discuss Adams’ bio and mayoralty up to the point that he released episode one, so I’ll hit a few of the big points quickly right now:

Adams was born in 1960 in Brownsville Brooklyn. He was born poor, to a housecleaner mother and an butcher father who struggled with alcoholism. They moved to Queens when he was 8, he’d hustle as a squeegee boy and low level criminal. He was beaten by the cops at least once. Which he says motivated him to go into policing.

He says stumbled through high school, went to college at the John Jay school of criminal justice, was diagnosed dyslexic, turned his grades around and got a masters from Marist.

Then he was a cop for 22 years, founded an advocacy group, 100 blacks in law enforcement who care. That group advocated that young Black men who are stopped by the police should be as polite and deferential as possible, and suggests reading Bill Cosby’s books.

In 2006 ran for New York state senate, served till 2013. Put up a bunch of billboards in his district about the scourge of sagging pants. He was an early supporter of marriage equality, and vocal opponent of stop and frisk policing.

In 2013 Adams was elected Brooklyn borough president, a more or less powerless position except for the megaphone, with 90% of the vote. He served two terms, and in 2021 ran for Mayor on a platform that crime was out of control, COVID was over, and never mentioning climate change.

He won and was inaugurated on January 1, 2022.

Eight days into his administration, 17 people, including 8 children, were killed in a highrise fire in the bronx when a space heater malfunctioned, and the self closing fire doors failed to close. It was the deadliest fire in the city since 1990.

During the Omicron surge, he began advocating that workers needed to return to the office.

In April of 22, while the Mayor was himself quarantining with COVID, a man shot 10 people on the subway, and then fled. He was at large for about 36 hours and finally captured when he called the tip line on himself. Adams called for metal detectors to be installed at the entrance to every subway station. He was a transit cop, he must of known this couldn’t possibly happen.

Around this time he started to raise a stink about the number of migrant coming to New York, and began to address it as if it was an emergency, a posture that continues to this day, one that does not include actually treating refugees with humanity.

He started a policy of NYPD sweeps of people sleeping on the street and in parks.

And that’s more or less it, no signature programs advanced, like de Blasio’s Vision Zero, or Universal Pre-K, or IDNYC, all of which were first year programs of a mayor who didn’t seem like he really wanted to do the job.

Of course, Adams did make a podcast. And, as long as it stays up, it will remain a record of roughly 9 months in 2023 when the mayor wasn’t, like, about to be arrested.

Of course, maybe he won’t be. It’s impossible to say what happens next, but I wanted to get all of these out as fast as I could so, whatever happens next, even if it’s just him making more podcast episodes, I could be ready.

Lol, I just - as I was finishing writing this - checked my alerts, and the Times just dropped a three byline article stating it has come to light that Adams, as part of a broader public corruption investigation, is known to have, as soon as he had won the race for mayor, but while still the Brooklyn borough president pressured the Fire Department to allow the Turkish consulate to occupy a new high rise in Manhattan, despite the FDNY having significant unresolved concerns with the building’s safety, and despite having a job with the word Brooklyn in it, not Manhattan.

Well, I’m sure that’ll be the last we hear about it.

Let us, as the kids say, fucking go.

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 or giving it stars 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, being kind to a small animal.

I mentioned The FAQ podcast, you should check it out. It’s a part of The City, a local outlet whose reporting I lean on heavily for this podcast. You should also check out Hell Gate, another great local NYC news institution. Both are in the show notes, and well worth your support.

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

I'd like to thank my friend John Coyne for all his help here. He was especially helpful after I'd already recorded a few of these, so unfortunately he's not credited in the first several, but he's been a huge help here throughout this process, so thank you John.

See you next time.

Links to stuff referenced in the episode:

Gender Reveal, a wonderful podcast about gender can be found at https://www.genderpodcast.com/

Hell Gate can be found at

https://hellgatenyc.com/

The City is at

https://www.thecity.nyc/