The Fourth 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 most populous city in America, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If you’d like to get a more in depth handle on that collision of concepts, I’d suggest listening to the first episode of this series. Today, I’m talking about the 4th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E04 - Champion Pizza: A slice of NYC’s generosity, released March 6th 2023. Going as fast as I can through the backlog here, to get us all caught up.

In today’s episode the mayor is talking to a man he introduces as his friend, who he says he sees every Wednesday night, though he’s quick to add this is not a date. In the year 2023 in NYC, and as a man with a reasonably center left legislative history with regards to gay rights, this is a weird thing for the mayor to say, if for no other reason than I cannot imagine a man who seems more heterosexual than Eric Adams, and I say that without any judgement. I can, and sometimes do, imagine quite a few cis men kissing other cis men, and Eric Adams is simply not one i can imagine doing this. The mind flees it. You don’t need to worry, Mr. Mayor, though its’ kinda weird that you did.

At any rate, the man he’s got on his podcast is a man by the name of Hakki Akdeniz. Every Wednesday night, they meet and feed people who need food. So here’s the thing, I listened back a few times, but there aren’t transcripts. Best I can tell the mayor said that every Wednesday night “we are at the people’s connecting New York food distribution to those are down on their luck” and then gave an acronym for a group that may be the group doing this. But it goes by fast, and again, there’s no transcript and there’s no links at all in the show notes indicating how to find this group or if you heard it correctly or how you can donate, so I’m not going to say the acronym, because I’d only be guessing based off of what I heard, and I’m 45 and I listened to a lot of loud music growing up; I’ve got pretty bad tinnitus at this point.

The mayor then asks Hakki to tell his inspiring story. Hakki is honored to be here. He reminds the mayor that a year and a half ago, the mayor said that if Hakki invited him, he’d join Hakki. It’s not clear in what.

Anyway, Hakki first came to Canada as a teen, then moved to NYC. Didn’t speak English. Had no money, slept in the port authority. then a cheap hotel. then the street. Finally found the Bowery Mission, which took him in. I doubt I need to tell you all that the Bowery Mission does very good work for the homeless population of New York.

Hakki doesn’t say where he came from, but his website tells me that he’s from a small village in Turkey. I only say that so that this story is as clear as I can make it. Also to underscore that Eric Adams is not a particularly good interviewer, because he never makes sure it’s clear on his podcast. Also, This may well be a coincidence, but in the future, when I’m recording this episode, the mayor’s ties to Turkey have been the source of an ongoing FBI investigation that included a raid of his campaign finance chair.

Hakki says that he’s not special. A lot of people like him are on the street. We have to be kind and follow our dreams. We all have dreams. It goes on like this for a while.

At any rate, Hakki now owns a local pizza chain. He started by working at a pizza place in Hoboken as a dishwasher.

This hits all the beats, you can tell where we’re going from here. There’s striving, the kindness of strangers, betrayal from people he trusted, more striving, times so dark they should overwhelm him, and then a pizza championship win, and the ownership of a chain of pizza restaurants. This is The Inspiring Rags to Riches Story etc. I don’t say that to diminish anyone’s accomplishment, either Hakki, who seems like a good guy, or anyone else like him. This is what should happen. It’s a story because it rarely does, and I’m one of those people who is constitutionally oriented towards finding the material conditions that prevent stories like this from being the norm much more depressing than I find inspiration in the rare stories of triumph in the face of what is for most people completely overwhelming odds. Indeed, if you listen to this story carefully, there are probably a dozen times when Hakki only got by because of a coincidence that was outside of his control, or a fluke of timing. This doesn’t make him bad, or unworthy, or not a hard worker, but it does make him incredibly lucky, and, if someone is telling you about all the unlikely events that bought them to a place, it’s sometimes useful to reflect on all the people who aren’t able to tell you about the very likely events that lead to them being someplace else.

So, the mayor says, Hakki is someone who has taken what he’s achieved and is giving back. Every Wednesday, when the mayor joins him for feeding people, in some kind of way that the mayor may just not be a good enough interviewer to actually define, but it’s confusing to me, certainly, and I’m one of the only people listening. At any rate, they agree, everyone should do this.

Look, everyone should. Everyone should help as much as they can, but the ability of any one person to meaningfully change the circumstances of the homeless is very limited. I’m sure Hakki does a lot to help but how many other Hakkis has he produced? Not because he’s not doing enough. But because there’s almost nothing anyone could do. At least on their own.

Hakki is in conversation with the chief executive of the city of New York, who oversees a 107 billion dollar budget, and who is demanding 15% budget cuts from every city agency by April of 2024.

Let’s take a quick sidebar to talk about the group that the Mayor mentioned as running these food distros. I did my best. It’s possible I didn’t hear the acronym or name right. I have limited resources here. So I’m just going to say that with the limited amount of time I had available to research, I did find an organization that does food distribution that seems to meet the description the mayor gave, and it appears to pop up at various locations around the city, often working with and alongside other organizations. I cannot tell its relationship to other entities with the same name though there appear to be some overlapping instagram posts with some of those entities, but I honestly cannot tell who is involved with what to any degree of confidence. I couldn’t find a website or a list of donors. The group as I heard its name is not on the list of food pantries and providers that are on the city of New York’s website.

Now, I’m not saying any of this because I believe there’s nefarious intent. All of the information I couldn’t find is probably out there, but the mayor didn’t give it on his podcast, and the name he used may have been wrong or a name they use internally but not in a front facing way or something like that. I have no evidence or reason to believe that the people involved in these efforts are anything other than saints, nor do I believe that they do anything but good work. But, how do I help? If not this group, how do I help generally? The mayor of New York City should be able to connect the listener to his podcast to a wealth of resources to either get help or to volunteer, but he doesn’t.

This is a long way of saying that Christ this is all so fucking very Eric Adams. Hakki does great work. This food distribution group does great work. Why wouldn’t you tell us how to help out, Mr Mayor?

One way to look at this is that the mayor didn’t talk about any of that because he didn’t bother to look into it because he doesn’t actually care, or can’t be bothered. The goal here isn’t to help Hakki’s efforts or the group he works with or really anything else. The goal here is to make a podcast and feel, in the moment, good.

As a follow on to that, one might be tempted to note that the Mayor tells a lot of stories. Not all of them are strictly speaking what the rest of us would recognize as true. But he seems sometimes to view his job less as accomplishing material things in the world, and more as making people feel a certain way with his vocal cords. The facts matter less than the mayor’s feelings, because the mayor isn’t changing the facts, he’s myth-making, mostly about himself.

There’s another way to look at this too. Because you know who else does great work for the hungry? The city of New York which runs multiple public and public/private, public/non-profit food distribution and shelter efforts. Why isn’t the mayor promoting those?

Look, you know why, I know why. The mayor is maybe the last neoliberal out there, confidently increasing funding to the police, starving everything else, reifying personal responsibility and gleefully presenting groups who, best case, are regular people with limited time and resources putting aside their own lives to step into the massive gaps left by that slashed funding to provide calories to people who otherwise do not get calories, presenting those people as inspiring stories instead of extreme illustrations of the failures people like Eric Adams represent.

Except it’s not failure. This is exactly how this is supposed to work.

What was the mayor up to from February 20th, 2023, the release date of the previous episode thru March 6th when this episode was released? Let’s take a quick spin through as we catch up to these episodes being released in real time. 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.

Well, due the extremely dangerous and occasional fatal virus of Rite Aid losing a certain amount of toothpaste, Eric Adams encouraged retail stores to forbid their customers from wearing masks when inside, and to be fair, so many more people are killed every year by finding shelves temporarily emptied of tampons than COVID-19.

He spoke at an interfaith breakfast, and said that we should revoke the separation between church and state, that “when we took prayers out of schools guns came into schools” and then he took a kitchen sponge out of his pocket and, waving it about, encouraged the audience to wring out “the sponge of despair.”

He said that Lori Lightfoot’s primary defeat in her reelection campaign in Chicago was a validation of his stance on being a guy who yells a lot that crime is bad and funding cops is good. It is probably noteworthy that Lori Lightfoot’s position on policing was progressive, but also she was an incredible weirdo, and the person who ultimately won the race for mayor of Chicago in the general election is a political progressive whose stance on crime has no meaningful daylight with the previous administration. So might be a warning for weirdoes, rather than progressives.

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, thinking about going to the gym but not doing so.

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.