The Third 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 more of an explanation, I’ll point you to the first episode of the pod, and I think I’ll go ahead and recommend listening to these in order, but that’s just my recommendation. You do what feels right for you.

This episode of the pod is about the third episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast, Titled S1 E03 - Small Business in the Big City. It was released on February 20th, 2023. And in it the mayor interviews his administration’s Small Business Services Commissioner Kevin Kim.

Adams begins by discussing the philosophy of getting stuff done… which is to get stuff done. To that end, he’s bought on Commissioner Kim to talk about getting stuff done for small businesses. Adams asks Kim to give him an elevator pitch overview of… Kevin Kim, which is a very strange way of saying “tell me about yourself.”

I guess I should pause here to say that I’ve struggled a little bit here with whether to pull clips of the audio of the mayor’s podcast. I ultimately have decided against it. I don’t think it would add much, and while the mayor regularly says pretty uh not normal things, I’m trying to focus less on the syntax and language he uses and more on figuring out what he’s trying to accomplish and why.

That said, “elevator pitch me your life up to the moment I hired you to run Small Business Services for the city of New York” is odd.

Ok, so Kim’s story is that he was raised by immigrant small business owners in a one bedroom in Queens. They sold artificial flowers. They stressed education. They were successful and they became exemplars of the American dream. Good for them!

We are suddenly, jarringly, interrupted by an audio clip of the mayor, over the intro music, giving a speech after signing legislation that instructs the DSBS to create a one stop portal on the internet for small businesses in NYC.

Back to the interview where Eric Adams tells Kevin Kim that when Eric Adams signed that bill creating that portal, it really resonated with Kevin Kim. Adams puts a little bit of rise on the end of his sentence, implying that this is a question and then waits for Kevin Kim to respond as if it was, which Kim does, stressing that his goals for SBS include language access and regulation mitigation. The idea of the portal is to help small businesses navigate and understand the regulations they might encounter, and to do so in the languages that people speak in New York, which often isn’t English.

Adams ask Kim what’s different here, and I guess this is a good time to mention that I’m a small business owner in the city of New York, and I wondered this myself, because when I decided to start my business, about 10 years ago, there was this really neat little website where I could just check boxes: does your business have these things? Is it dealing with, say, dyes, or chemicals. Food. Beverages. Refrigeration. Over x number of people in the location at a time. Making noise? How much? And I just went through checking them off (or mostly not), and then it spit out what forms I needed, what departments I should contact, and what licenses I should seek. it was pretty hype! And easy to use!

Kim says the difference the new portal represents is the commitment of the entire administration, since all agencies are now involved, which, again, seemed to be the case for the website I personally used to get my business set up a decade ago.

They pivot to talking about the violations that small businesses face and the fines they can receive from the city. Kim and the Mayor want to be running a city of yes, so they studied the most common violations that businesses receive and eliminated 30 of them off the top. 49 others had fines reduced, 39 had a chance for curing. “That’s getting stuff done!” says the mayor. Which ok. Can’t really argue that stuff was done. I would like to know more about these violations they took off the books and whether they’re the type of onerous “you had the wrong font on your store front that’ll be 2000 dollars” type of violations or the “the sandwiches you’ve been feeding children in our schools contain lead and glass” type of violations.

In talking about the fun new attitude the city’s employing Kim says that the Mayor’s going to make NYC the e-sports capital of the world. Super. We’re also able to celebrate Jim Beam/Suntory moving their HQ from Chicago to NYC. Seems weird to celebrate a bunch of people in Chicago losing their jobs or uprooting their families when we have some really great small businesses in NYC that make some really good distilled spirits, and Beam/Suntory is one of the largest businesses in the booze category with 6,000 employees worldwide.

Adams and Kim talk about the fear in the Asian business community surrounding the rhetoric from Trump vis a vis COVID. They set up a small business council of Asian businesses and are teaching Asian-American history in schools at the mayor’s direction and I’m not sure how this addresses hate crimes, or takes them seriously, which I very much agree that the city should be taking them seriously?

They wind things down talking about the rewards of the work they do. So that’s nice for them.

This portal creating legislation was signed in October of 2022, the portal is due to go live on November 1, 2023. I checked on Nov 1, and several times since, including just before recording this episode, and that stuff was not done, or, at least, I don’t see any changes to the SBS website. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place.

So, look, here’s the thing. There’s a lot of problems facing NYC, and there are a lot of people who could be bought on to this podcast to discuss them. There are enormous challenges - I can personally attest to this - to running a small business in any setting, let alone one where people who some reason root for the Yankees are allowed to operate vehicles and machinery.

Thematically, we’re arriving at one of my thesis statements about the Adams administration: it’s fundamentally small ball. There are no big swings, no signature initiatives, no major efforts to restructure the way the city fails to work in ways that attempt to make it work. Adams will say that the rent is too high, he’ll acknowledge that our schools leave kids behind, and he seems to think that’s doing his job. But his job is to change those things. He’ll feel our pain, sorta, but if we complain about it, we’re haters he’s going to turn into his waiters (that’s an Adams line; I’ve actually worked for a living, I wouldn’t say something like that). Adams gained political capital by getting elected, but he has refused to spend it, even on the things he said he’d accomplish, like giving the Parks Department a full percentage point of the city’s budget.

I think that we’ve spent enough time now with his podcast that we are starting to get a feel for the guy, and one thing about Eric Adams is that he truly believes that his success is a sign that everything is going pretty well. This is why, I think, he views the issue of refugees as such an existential threat. If there are families on the street who look like the city is destroying them, and this is a new thing that started to happen under Adams, that’s optically terrible for him, and suddenly he wouldn’t be doing well.

But, improving schools? Adams is a product of our schools. Bringing the rent down? Adams is a landlord. Dealing with climate change? Adams is both figuratively and literally insulated from the effects of it. And if Adams is doing well, come on, everyone is. We don’t need change, we need more of Eric Adams doing great.

And, since he is not trying particularly hard to accomplish anything meaningful for people who aren’t him, and since he still needs to celebrate something, we’re celebrating, on this episode, the minor tweaks to an online portal that so far have missed their deadline. We’re calling that getting stuff done.

Time to update you on the mayor’s doings in the time between the previous episode of his podcast and this one, which is Feb 6th-20th, 2023. By the way, 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 mayor was fined 300 dollars for having a rodent infestation at his Brooklyn townhouse, which he decided to fight by appearing in court. He lost on one of two counts and had to pay the fine.

He, and 50-some other NYC elected officials signed on to a progressive effort to expand the supreme court, which, hey, I agree with that.

His Social Services Commissioner resigned following the revelations that he fired one of his spokespeople for attempting to blow the whistle on his agency’s failure to provide shelter to migrants.

With Kyrie Irving off to Dallas the Mayor said, “I will find the team that beats us the most and send him to that team, because then we'll start beating that team.” I don’t approve of his Kyrie Irving COVID mandate carve-out policy, but I do approve of his pointing out that Kyrie Irving makes every team he joins much worse policy.

The Daily News wrote a bit about the mayor’s recent experiences in audio media. Not the podcast we’re discussing, here, but his 5 appearances on Sid Rosenberg’s radio show, Sid and Friends in the Morning. He’s also been seen hanging out with Rosenberg quite a few times socially, and has met members of Rosenberg’s family. At a press conference Adams called Rosenberg’s show “his favorite talk show”. Who’s Sid Rosenberg? Well, he’s an unapologetic pro Trump Republican who has been a guest fundraiser for a group that has hosted the Proud Boys, had Don Jr on his show, has had Roger Stone on his show, etc etc etc.

Also during this time span Adams appeared on Morning Joe and blamed “woke” Democrats for taking charge of the party and driving minority voters away, and I dunno, maybe. Could also at least partially be that the largest city in the country has a cop for a mayor who goes on fascist podcasts and complains that we need to return to stop and frisk, a policy he used to be full throatily opposed to. But sure, in Joe Biden’s Democratic party it’s the woke voices that are in charge.

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-star-thumbs-up-ing 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, eating something delicious.

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.