The Nineteenth Episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast, my name is Dave. The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, has a podcast. No one listens to it except a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

Well.

It’s possibly more precise to say that the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, had a podcast, and I was the only person who listened to it. On the other hand, I still technically have a podcast about Heathcliff Comics, despite the fact that the last episode was released in June of 2019. I never deleted it, people can still listen to it. So the fact that this is now the longest that the mayor has gone between recording episodes doesn’t really mean he’s suddenly podcastless, but it may mean he’s stopped recording new episodes of his podcast.

Or not. He’s a hard guy to read. Maybe I’ll put this episode up only to wake up the next day to find a new shitty interview from the mayor in my feed, which would, at least, mean more content for you, dear listener. Speaking of, if you’re new, welcome. You may want to listen from the start, though. The episodes are short, you’ll have fun, the rest of this may not make much sense if you don’t.

That Heathcliff podcast I used to do, it shares some DNA with this one which may reveal something about me, and since I’m updating you with the information that there’s not really much of an update (at least not from his podcast, there’s plenty of Mayor Stuff to talk about and I’ll do so as soon as I can summon the will to cease my infernal digressing) maybe that will be a little bit of a fun chat right quick.

I did like almost 60 episodes of a podcast about Heathcliff comics for a chunk of 2018 and 2019. But I didn’t really tell anyone I was doing it. I was going through some real weird shit at the time and just wanted to make something and so I did. I happen to use Podcast Addict as my podcatching app, it’s a little niche, but I like it. PA tells you how many subscribers are using their app to subscribe to a given podcast. This Week’s Heathcliff, which is a podcast where mostly what I was doing was describing individual panels of Heathcliff comics to the listener and then saying that I do not understand what the joke is supposed to be? It has 6 subscribers. On Podcast Addict, that’s twice the number of people who subscribe to the Mayor’s podcast. It’s just one data point, there’s at least one other much more robust analysis that’s been done, but they both nod at the same thing. If you extrapolate from Podcast Addict’s numbers, to the likely totals for other apps, to the number of subscribers per subscriber total who listen to more than a couple episodes, if any, I feel pretty confident when I say that I am the only person in the world who has listened to every episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast.

If you’ve never read Heathcliff comics, I’ll throw a link in the show notes, check them out. Briefly, it’s the less successful comic about an orange cat released in the 70s, but it’s still pretty lucrative as comics go in the era of print’s death. The comic has been around five years longer than Garfield, 50 years now. There’s been no major fanfare for that anniversary, at least none that trickled down to me. The guy currently drawing it is the nephew of the original artist and the major themes of the comic are, now, mostly odd and mildly unsettling inside jokes he seems to be telling himself for his own amusement. He seems to like robots a lot and the word meat in all caps, so both of those appear frequently, and without any other explanation. Heathcliff plays a lot of backyard rock shows with a band that are often dressed in egg costumes. A character called Garbage Ape appears for week long arcs, and is always greeted with cheers from Heathcliff and his friends, despite the fact that, aside from being an ape who often is pictured holding a garbage can, it is not clear what Garbage Ape is intended to represent or what he does. He’s just sort of there, unmoved by the glee around him, eyes fixed into the middle distance, an ape, garbage can in hand. I relate. I just took a spin through recent strips and, to give you a flavor of what beats the mayor of New York City’s numbers, I’m going to do a very abridged version of the pod I did back in the day, describing the Heathcliff strip from December 4th, 2023. We’re looking at the corner of a city street. Weird rectangular buildings are in the distance. On the corner, with his back to us, is Heathcliff, wearing a Santa hat. He is standing in front of a meat store that has a red and white awning. We know it is a meat store because the extremely off center sign over the awning says MEAT in all caps, and then also, just in case we missed it, there’s a sign in the window that also reads MEAT in all caps. Facing Heathcliff, on the street, between him and the store are three child sized carolers, wearing Santa hats, holding sheet music, with their heads tipped back and mouths wide open, so: singing. Heathcliff holds a conductor’s baton. To his immediate left, facing both him and the children singing is a giant, bone in rib eye steak, with arms and legs. It is so tall it is almost the height of the one story meat store. It is wearing cowboy boots and has a cowboy hat on top of it, where a head might be, but there’s no head, it’s just a huge steak with arms and legs. In the bottom right corner, observing this scene are a man and a woman, the man has his back to us, the woman is drawn in 3/4 profile, so we can see her mouth is open, and therefore it is she who is providing the caption: I didn’t know there was a meat cowboy carol.

I mean, you can see the appeal, right?

When was the last time you looked at Heathcliff? Or thought about it at all? Or looked at a comics page in a newspaper?

Heathcliff, the comic, like The Get Stuff Done Cast, the mayor’s podcast, doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it doesn’t seem like a lot of people pay much attention to either. Both are insulated by their position, though. Heathcliff is a legacy comic with syndication. There’s like 10 of those total, and they’re impossible to dislodge from print as long as someone is available to draw them. The mayor is the mayor of NYC. There’s one of those. He’s relatively difficult to dislodge too, meaning it’s easy to let him fade into the background or to ignore the information that he has a podcast because why would you care?

I mean, people pay attention to the mayor, I guess, but only 20% of the city voted in the general election when it came time to trudge to the polls. The press does their best to cover him, but the outlets that remain are mostly read by broken people like myself. Certainly no one pays attention to the mayor’s podcast.

I enjoy stuff like that, I guess. It’s instant ephemera. It doesn’t even tell you information that was useful when it was created, like an old Sears catalogue or TV Guide. Those had utility when they were released, and then to the extent that they have utility now, they act as historical curiosities or nostalgia prompts. The mayor could make his podcast useful, of course. He could give us info on how to get our boosters updated, or about rising case counts due to new Covid variants. He could share information about how to engage with city services, maybe services you don’t even know are there. He could tell you about how the libraries have ebooks and how you can, with a library card, get into museums for free. You know, any number of things.

In the case of Heathcliff, a comic still has the utility that it might in some way entertain you, of course; the mayor doesn’t manage that. But there’s something they both share. They’re both works with the infrastructure behind them to reach millions of eyeballs and eardrums and they don’t, though Heathcliff is at least seen by many more people than the mayor’s podcast. But most of them don’t seem to notice that it’s insane and weird, so, one assumes, most people don’t engage with it when they see it, they just sort of clock that the orange cat is there and turn the page.

I did shows at various theaters around the city for years, and I toured a bit as well, and you wouldn’t get slots anymore if you didn’t bring in an engaged audience. I’ve done silly little online projects like this one for years as well, and I can sorta understand losing what passes for an ability to care how many people pay attention, since some were pretty popular, but it’s not like that translates into getting, like, paid. But there’s still usually some sort of impact if you don’t reach a certain amount of people? At the very least, it’s hard for me to imagine a world where Marcus Samuelsson or Shepard Fairey would do my podcast, despite my honest ability to tell them that many more people listen to it than will ever hear the mayor’s.

I dunno, stuff like this fascinates me. Every day millions of people go about their lives not thinking about Heathcliff and not knowing the mayor has a podcast. I am the cursed bearer of this information. I bring it to you to share my distress.

At any rate, the mayor hasn’t done an episode of his podcast since October 25th, which is, as I’m writing this out, about 5 weeks, and it’s the longest he’s gone without doing so. Plenty of stuff relevant to him has happened in that time. Let’s talk about it. A quick content warning, I’m going to talk, without going into specific details of the incident, a bit about an allegation of sexual assault that has been leveled against the mayor during this section of the podcast, and then a bit after that I talk about the allegations against Andrew Cuomo and my own Assemblyman, though, again, I don’t really get into details aside from the fact that they were accused of being creeps. Still, no worries at all if that’s not something you want to hear about.

In past episodes we talked about the investigation into Adams and his campaign regarding the Turkish government’s efforts to evidently purchase influence with him. Adams’ oddly close relationship to Turkey stretches back years, and weird details keep coming to light, like how he had a cameo in a Turkish movie in like 2018 where the main characters tried to bribe him, ha ha, as a funny joke, or his deputy press secretary was a registered foreign agent of the Turkish government in 2021, nothing weird there, and at least one favor seems to have been, well, the word for it could be “purchased” but of course that would just be an allegation at this point. Adams called the FDNY and got them to sign off on opening the Turkish Consulate’s new building in Manhattan, despite major concerns that it wasn’t, like, firesafe. This appears to be a part of the investigation that lead to the seizure of his personal phones and the raid of the home of his head of campaign finance. Whether there’s more to it all than that, hard to say. Since that reporting came out in early/mid November, the amount of news about the case has slowed considerably. Adams insisted there was no list of entities who get preferential treatment in getting the FDNY to inspect and sign off on their occupancy. The guy who works in government who has the title that is, essentially, Guy Who Hangs On To That List, showed the list to a bunch of reporters and was like “Yes we have this list it’s right here it’s what I do I hold the list”. The list was used to get a bunch of places that are linked to associates of Adams bumped to the front of the line, while inspections for things like overcrowded schools were delayed or cancelled. How nice.

What else? Well, Adams insisted that his campaign finance chair has his full confidence and wouldn’t be moved from her job and now she doesn’t have that job anymore. Also she has an attorney.

Adams opened a legal defense fund/new front in the war to commit as many corrupt acts as possible that you can contribute to if you feel like your money was in danger of being used too legitimately. Credit goes to my friend and podcast improver John for the line “His legal defense fund is probably staffed by more feds than a midwestern militia.”

All of that is to say that the investigation seems to be ongoing, which wasn’t really the implication of the 72 hours about a month ago when his campaign finance chair got raided, he ran home to NYC from DC, and was relieved of his consumer electronics by the FBI once he got here. That sorta implied “wrapping things up on a heretofore not publicly known but quite mature investigation that will be serving up charging documents in short order.” But it’s the holiday season. People are in and out of the office. Maybe they’re just taking their time and making sure every i is dotted.

It’s entirely unheard of for the FBI to just take the personal phones off of the mayor of the largest city in America. They walked up to him on the street with a warrant, which implies that they were concerned he’d destroy his phones if they just asked him to bring them in. It’s not hard to go down a pretty rapid slope of assumptions about what that level of aggression means, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind the risks that attend assuming any competence from the FBI. After all, Donald Trump is, at least at the moment, a free man.

It’s also good to remember that every mayor of NYC in the modern era has been investigated, some quite thoroughly. It’s worth remembering as well that all but one of them were white. And worth remembering as well that the FBI is, historically, not great with race. And that Adams’ race might well have something to do with how he’s handled here by the feds.

It’s possible that what we are seeing is a meaty stew of all of it, incompetence, racism, and the time it takes to make a stew. We’ll just have to wait, and we may or may not see.

Aside from that there’s been the usual Stuff that goes on around the mayor. A member of his administration is now under investigation for asking people to do things like renovate her house for free in order to get city jobs, and telling them to give her “non-profit that was going to build a weird friendship arch in Sunset park” 10,000 bucks if they wanted her to secure them tickets to parties at the mayor’s residence. Very normal stuff, and there’s nothing weird about how it keeps happening to people so close to Eric Adams that he calls them his family.

As I mentioned before, I’m gonna talk about some accusations of sexual assault by elected officials, starting with the mayor. The New York Adult Survivors Act opened a year long period during which victims of abuse could sue their alleged assailants, regardless the statute of limitations. About two weeks ago, a couple days before the window closed, a woman filed a notice, very light on details, of intent to sue the mayor for an assault. The notice accuses Adams of committing said assault 30 years ago, around when both would have been city employees. Most outlets are not naming the accuser. NBC New York has noted that she’s filed other suits in the past and written a self published book about self representing before the supreme court. Just as a point of reference, I’ve been a plaintiff in two lawsuits because I have rented an apartment at any point in NYC and been employed at any point in NYC. The latter resolved in my favor, the first is ongoing. We a) live in a litigious society and b) a fun thing about living in a city full of grifters (for evidence: the mayor) is that there are only a couple ways to deal with it when you catch them, see point a. As to the, admittedly, at least based on the blurb on Amazon, strange book she wrote, I wrote a lot of weird stuff in 2013 too, and I’d prefer no one look it up when trying to assess any potential crimes that may have been committed against me. No journalist that I’m aware of has pried loose any true credibility issues (a history of, say, perjury or being a fabulist, though simply being or having been either of those things doesn’t mean one hasn’t been assaulted, or that one deserves to be). I honestly hope Adams didn’t assault this person, simply because I don’t want anyone to be assaulted, but beyond that I’ve seen nothing that makes me question her, and at this point we don’t have most of her story. I tend to believe that 1) the statistics of how often women are assaulted indicate a huge number are 2) it tends to be incredibly unpleasant to report a public figure for assault (last I checked Christine Blasey Ford - who didn’t want to come forward publicly - has still not been able to return home or to work) and 3) enough men I’ve known have turned out to be shitheads that I am no longer surprised when anyone turns out to be a shithead. We’ll see when we see, if we see.

Moving on, the mayor is a political genius, everyone agrees on this, that’s how he got elected and how he’s built his power, which is why he made the extremely politically intelligent move of announcing massive cuts to necessary and popular services like libraries and sanitation at the absolute nadir of his popularity right after it came out that he was being investigated by the FBI and accused of sexual assault.

What those of you in what I like to call the “community of people who think you need to be something other than despised by the majority of the people who might vote for you in order to be re-elected” fail to understand is that there’s this point at which you can become so unpopular that people start to like you again, even though you closed their toddler’s pre-k, the trash is piling up and everyone has Covid while you’re out partying.

This is literally what he did. Adams, in the mix of multiple scandals and possible legal exposure for actual criminal acts, slashed the city budget across the board. Composting, gone. Libraries closing on Sundays. Police hiring frozen, education department loses a billion dollars, universal Pre-K and summer school slashed to the bone, an entire class of new school safety agents eliminated (Adams said that parents should volunteer instead), food pantries and shelters lose more of the funding they barely have, more kids in classrooms, fewer firefighters in firehouses. There’s something for every voter to hate! These are cuts to the current, active budget, rather than a budget that will be voted on by the city council next year, meaning the mayor can just go ahead and do these immediately, and he is. The effects are likewise immediate and so the very nice lady who helps out with composting at my neighborhood farmer’s market suddenly doesn’t know if she’ll have a job week to week as the Sanitation Department is suddenly trying to figure out how to not spend money it was delegated. That’s a small example, but it’s a picture of what’s happening at every level of the city’s government as every department tries - on the fly - to adjust to having much less money than they were promised, without collapsing. For his part, Adams is blaming the migrant crisis and the theoretical costs to the city from it, for the sudden shortfall in funding, so it’s worth noting that this the same crisis he went to DC to discuss increasing NYC’s share of federal funding to handle, so even if you buy his argument - and, with the caveat that I have the mind for math of a professional dog walker, the numbers I’ve seen don’t remotely add up - the best case here is that he fled the opportunity to get that funding increased because he’s surrounded himself with criminals! That also requires you to buy that the migrant crisis is a crisis in the first place and to state the truth as plainly as I can: it is not.

I met someone the other day who’d worked for a mayor of this dang city. I won’t say which mayor because I don’t know if they’d want me to talk about it here. They didn’t work for Adams, but they’d met him. They said he thinks he’s chosen by God and that’s all there is to know about him. Certainly, New York has had its share of demagogues. Former Governor and grandma killer Andy Cuomo’s whole thing was thinking he was America’s most special lad. That’s also, ultimately what tripped him up. But Cuomo also got a brutal lesson on his way out the door in something that may become relevant to the mayor soon enough.

Toward the end of his governorship, Cuomo was accused of some ugly acts of sexual harassment of aides and coworkers, along with running a pretty toxic working environment, and also killing a bunch of old people during COVID by moving sick elderly people from hospitals back into the nursing homes that had sent them hospitals, and then covering that up. He seemed mystified that there was a question of his integrity and therefore handled his accusations with all the grace and competence of a guy who looks like Andrew Cuomo. He held weird press conferences and released unpleasant reports about how everyone hugs so it’s not bad that he hugs. He leaked his victims’ psych histories to the press. Goon shit.

The AG put out a damning report but no charges were ever filed against Cuomo. His unpopularity just became, like, a glue trap he was thrashing in, unable to free himself, or, really, move. It happened slowly for years and then quickly for days. He’d always been mean and a steamroller. He’d been corrupt and he held a grudge. People who stood in the way of whatever he chose to do often found their careers ruined after he’d gone ahead and done it. And finally he’d just burned too many bridges and found that no one in politics actually liked him, they liked his power and wanted him to use it in their service. When he couldn’t anymore, when other people they also needed to impress moved away from Cuomo, they didn’t want to be near him either. In order to make things happen from the top you need to be able to tell someone under you to do them, he couldn’t do that anymore, too many people resigned. He couldn’t wield power, and partially because of that, and partially because the only conversations he was having at that time were people screaming at him that they hated his guts, being the governor became much too unpleasant to contemplate staying.

The point is that you can only make yourself so unpopular and stay in office. Past a certain point you’re the elected version of the Simpsons, shambling on but unlike the Simpsons which for some reason still makes a TV show, a zombie official usually has a frustrating inability to accomplish things, and often faces an increasingly unpleasant, hostile, electorate. And it should be that way, that’s democracy at work. Of course, democracy is messy, and the results aren’t always that the elected official steps down, particularly since so many elected officials have the type of sociopathic tendencies that lead them to seek office. My own assemblyman has been accused of a couple assaults of his own, stripped of his committee assignments and discretionary spending and reduced, because he won’t take the advice of literally every democrat in the state and resign, to driving around the district and calling 311 when he sees a pothole, as if that’s being a representative of the people of his district. It’s pathetic. Dude actually sent out his hard at work for you the people etc mailer while I was writing this up so just looking through what he’s claiming credit for, he marched in a parade, he handed out some Halloween candy, he pointed at a malfunctioning walk signal and also he pointed a flooded street. Someone took pictures of him pointing. None of that is, you know, legislating in the state capital. His time in office will almost certainly end with the next election, but he should have quit when everyone told him to! Not that I care, but being in office must also be very unpleasant for him, or it would be if he could feel normal human emotions, because he does have to get out of his car in the district every so often, and while not a lot of people are paying attention to their assemblyman, enough are that he’s probably getting flipped off more than just the times I’ve done it. I’ll link to his opponent’s campaign in the show notes too. Her name is Claire Valdez, her policies probably align with yours if you’re listening to this. I met her the other day, she seems very nice. Throw her a buck or two if you can this holiday season.

But, with all of that said, if, as this podcast claims, Adams’ podcast is a medium through which we can examine his mayoralty, what does it mean that he’s stopped recording? I can think of a few possibilities, though I’m sure these aren’t the only ones. As we know, Adams panicked when he got the news of the raid on his campaign finance person, and ran back home. His claim was that he left meetings about the migrant crisis that he swears is destroying NYC in order to comfort his aide, but also admitted that he hadn’t spoken to her once he got home. Also it’s unclear why he couldn’t do whatever he did once he got home from DC, except, maybe, it’s the type of thing you’d want to do in a way that didn’t generate a written record or call history. I wonder how many of the sorts of conversations you’d only want to have in person Eric Adams had when he got back to NYC. I wonder if one of those conversations was with someone whose job title relates to podcasts and whose job duties are more about finding creative places in podcasts to put consulting fees and purchase orders. How many conversations did Adams have when he got back that involved the words “shut it down and shred everything”?

So maybe that explains the uh radio silence.

Another is that he simply got too busy. After all, he’s now both the mayor and the owner/operator of a legal defense fund.

Or maybe he’s easily distracted and will get back to the pod when he remembers he has it.

Maybe he’s having trouble booking guests. Perhaps members of his administration and various restauranteurs are no longer comfortable going on with him and are finding that, so sorry, but their schedules are a little full right now to set up a recording session.

But if his podcast is truly a mirror of his administration, I think it’s significant that he has stopped podcasting. The way you undermine a podcast is to stop doing it, with no announcement. Just stop, walk away, leave your listeners confused. I’ve done that, I don’t feel great about it, but most pods I had were at a level that very few people were impacted, and the general implication of that is that everyone would probably agree that I was allowed to do such a thing; I wasn’t making any money at it, there’s only so much the audience has the right to expect from a hobbiest, my parents were sick, I stopped being interested in what Heathcliff was up to. The way you undermine a city, though, is you starve it of money.

Or, maybe he’s giving up. He never wanted to be mayor. He wanted to become mayor. He’s done that. On to the next thing.

I can’t even say anymore. Everything’s weird. We’re in a place I recognize as both terrifying and familiar. The current president might lose the election, he is terrible, he should lose. He must not. In every presidential election since 2000 the stakes have felt increasingly dire. Covid is everywhere and no one cares. There’s a bunch of stuff just sorta floating around in the background, potentially fatally, or at least with the power to make things potentially very uncomfortable and terrible for a while, but it feels much harder than usual to figure out the odds of the worst case, just that the worst case is extremely bad. No one is doing anything about it, I don’t know what to do about it. It feels like if I really believe that there are a lot of terrifying and threatening things out there I should be behaving differently to head them off, and I’m not. It feels like the people we elected to work on these issues should be working on them. For his part, Eric Adams is working for Eric Adams, he’s doing a terrible job of it.

I don’t know what I’ll do with this if he doesn’t return to podcasting, but I dunno, let’s see where it goes. He makes enough stupid news that it seems worth talking about.

As always, I recommend reading and supporting The City and Hell Gate, two local outlets whose reporting helped enormously in making this podcast a podcast. I’ll link them in the show notes. 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. Rate and review at your own peril.

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

My thanks, as always, to John Coyne.

See you next time.