The Twelfth 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.

If this is your first time listening, it’s very nice to have you here. I personally recommend listening to the episodes in order from the beginning, but don’t let me boss you around if you feel strongly about doing things another way. Today, I’m talking about the 12th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E12 - DMC’s Amazing Run: A hip Hop Pioneer on the Highs and Lows of an NYC Journey, released July 21st 2023. I wish they’d made the episode’s title just a little longer.

Gonna put a trigger warning at the top that conversation about suicidal ideation comes up throughout this episode. There is also a discussion, at the end, of the murder of Jason Mizell, better known as Jam Master Jay. The mayor, as usual, does not warn his listeners about this. I also have not mentioned the lack of transcripts for the mayor’s podcast lately, so this is me doing that. In any case, please take care of yourself and do whatever feels best for you, including doing something other than listening to this if you feel like it might cause you distress, there’s no shame in that at all, and this stupid podcast is really not important, but you are.

The guest for this episode is Darryl McDaniels, aka DMC, from Run-DMC, and I assume the mayor is going to do his typical lack of context setting at the top, but a) no one listens to his podcast, and b) I also assume that the listeners to my podcast are at least somewhat aware of Run-DMC, one of the most popular and important rap acts of all time. From Hollis, Queens, the first rap act to go gold, the first to go platinum, the first to go multi-platinum, the first to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, the first to be on MTV. For some reason, DMC decided to go on the mayor’s podcast for no one, and I’m really excited to see how Adams goes about making this interview boring and un-fun.

Adams introduces DMC as one of the talented people from “that organization” which is a way to start things off, sure.

I’ve talked on past episodes about how being successful at one thing can instill in oneself the idea that you’re generally competent, or even good at other things, especially if the thing you’re good at is particularly hard, like getting people to vote for you. That’s really hard! And if you got good at it, you might look at other things, like a late night talk show host sitting and chatting with a guest, and think, that’s doesn’t look anywhere near as hard as getting people to vote for me. And then, as a follow on: I’d probably be pretty good at that, because I’m so talented.

The tell for that sort of mindset is that you don’t get better at it. If Conan O’Brien was the sort to think that way, he had every reason to believe he’d kill as a late night host. He’d had nothing but green lights getting into places, and succeeding in places, that are generally speaking, really hard to get into. He went to Harvard, he became a writer on SNL, then the Simpsons at the height of the show’s popularity. His first season hosting Late Night was a toilet: I watched it, I’m 15 years younger than Conan, so I was 15 when he got the show - holy shit he was only 30 - and I loved being up late and even at that tender age I could tell he was struggling. The reviews were not kind.

Conan got better, much better, and quickly. He had, of course, every reason to. This was his job and it would have been humiliating to be very quickly bounced from it, but you also need humility to see that there’s a reason why things need to change, and that you’re that reason. That you’re what needs to change. Even if you’ve been wildly successful to date. Especially if that’s the case.

The mayor is not a podcaster, he’s the mayor. But I have a feeling that he podcasts the way he mayors. He’s not getting better at podcasting anyway.

McDaniels talks about growing up in Queens, commuting to a high school in Harlem in the late 70s, and through the mix of people and kids he got to know, becoming acquainted with hip hop right as it was starting. Hip hop was democratizing, it allowed real people from real New York, not the areas that are rich, to tell real stories.

I certainly can’t find fault with any of that.

But this is me summarizing the main points of 7 minutes of meandering rambling from the mayor. He talks about McDaniels’ narrative and how interesting it is at the top, but he cannot stay in any one area of it long enough for it to make much sense. From high school they touch briefly on MTV and how helpful it was - but they don’t talk about how Run-DMC had to be the ones to kick the door down, that MTV wouldn’t play Black acts at all for the first two years it was on air, and it wasn’t until two years after that that Run-DMC’s Rock Box became the first rap video that was played on MTV. They were already platinum at that point. No talk of that, but that’s getting stuff done! This is notionally the podcast about people who get stuff done, tell me about that! Instead the mayor jumps to their collab with Aerosmith a year later, and we haven’t even heard how DMC, Run, and Jam Master Jay met. We haven’t heard about his college experience or about his experience learning to DJ in his parents basement.

McDaniels is a really interesting guy with a lot of cool things to say, so he talks in interesting ways about the roots of all of it: the blues, and how everything rap, rock, jazz is all the same thing. How they used disco and James Brown breakbeats.

But this isn’t a talk, this is an interview, so the mayor interrupts him with a story that goes nowhere about a movie he saw on a plane.

Again, trigger warning here: the mayor segues extremely seemfully into talking about one of the books McDaniels wrote, 10 Ways To Not Commit Suicide about his mental health struggles, and the stigma, especially among men of color, about talking about feelings and trauma. DMC says “The most powerful thing you can do is talk about when you’re weak, scared afraid and vulnerable” and again, yes, good, thank you for saying that, absolutely the case.

McDaniels grabs the wheel at this point. I’m 100% sure that he’s done what he does here as a full on Talk for an audience, and he is a performer with decades of experience, he can tell what’s needed here. So, he just steamrolls the mayor, and does his Mental Health Presentation. In the span of maybe two minutes he runs through his upbringing, his rise to fame, and how empty he felt, and how it made him feel suicidal. How he, at 35, touring the world, platinum records, Adidas contract, alcoholic and depressed, got a call from his dad telling him he’d been adopted, how that made him realize he needed to talk about how he felt, how he needed to go to rehab and therapy, and how it saved his life.

And it’s effective and it works because there’s finally, after all these fucking terrible fucking episodes of this worthless ass podcast, someone who doesn’t need the mayor at all, who can just talk over him, who has the prepared material to talk about This Issue quickly enough that the mayor cannot interrupt.

Eventually the mayor does, to ask McDaniels to take us into the stress of performing, which McDaniels does until the mayor again interrupts him to talk about the mayor’s morning routine, which he credits as centering him, and you need your center, the mayor says.

Sure man, this guy’s talking about rehab and therapy and the importance of communicating about your scary feelings so they don’t feel so scary anymore, but your green juice smoothie is cool too.

The mayor says that McDaniels is doing amazing things for kids in foster care through his foundation, the Felix Organization. The mayor says the city is also doing amazing things and talks about himself for a while and how great he is. McDaniels, to his credit, elbows his way back into the conversation to actually tell us what the Felix Organization is (they communicate with foster kids and adoptees and try to help them to understand their situation) and what it does, but he shouldn’t have to do that! It’s only possible because he’s a performer with 40 years experience commanding a stage.

Adams tells a very weird and frankly impossible sounding story about taking a trip when he was young to go to school in Texas, and being confused when they stopped in Waco because everyone was acting like they knew him and calling him Kevin, because, apparently, his father had a second family that he didn’t know about in Waco.

Look, could this happen? Yes. Is the fact underlying it, that his father had another family, true? I have no reason to believe otherwise. Is a coincidence of that magnitude so extraordinary that Adams would be The Guy That Happened To instead of A Weird Mayor Who Tells Weird Semi-True Stories? Yeah, more or less.

I mean, among other things, this would require Kevin to look so much like him, and also be locally well known enough that multiple people who see him at a bus stop for 30 seconds run up and say hi.

We can’t hear Kevin’s side of this, at any rate. The mayor immediately says that we lost him to crack. The mayor’s wiki page makes no mention of a half brother named Kevin or his father, Leroy’s other family. Google is sorta broken nowadays, but searching “Eric Adams’ half brother Kevin” mostly returns news clips about Adams hiring and then demoting a different member of his family, his brother Bernard, as his security. Maybe it’s all just as the mayor says.

Maybe.

I’m just a guy who doesn’t have the time or resources to confirm anything other than it’d be a truly incredible story if it was true.

But it’s not particularly important, either.

However, since we got a real humdinger from the mayor just now, and I don’t really have a larger bit of policy that conveniently attaches to this episode, let’s just do a quick greatest hits of some of Eric Adams’ uh fibs.

During his campaign for mayor it became clear that Adams spent most of his time living in a co-op he co-owned with his girlfriend in Fort Lee, New Jersey. When asked if that meant he didn’t meet the residency requirements to be the mayor of a city in a different state, he responded that the question was racist, saying "You're old enough to remember Obama and Trump, running around saying Obama was not born in America. This is the same thing. This is how people demonize."

He claims to be a vegan, he eats meat all the time.

He claims to be a blue collar mayor, he spends all his time at a $4,000 a year members only club.

When discrepancies came up on his tax forms, he said it was because he was trying to help out a homeless accountant, and I actually sorta believe this one because making a homeless guy do work they’re obviously too stressed out to do safely, instead of just helping him out is a pretty classic example of Eric Adams style leadership.

For many years, to multiple different reporters, Adams claimed that he carried a photo in his wallet of a friend of his, a former cop, killed in the line of duty, in 1987. He even recently showed it to reporters who asked him about it. The Times uncovered that said photo was a recent creation by members of the mayor’s staff who found a picture of the officer on google, printed it in black and white, and splashed coffee on it to age it. Extremely normal shit.

He’s claimed he can do skateboarding tricks, that he used to sell fake gold chains on Canal Street, that he was in a gang fight and was hit in the head with a bat with a nail through it.

He claimed, twice, that schoolchildren in NYC “start their day going to the corner bodega buying cannabis and fentanyl.” That migrants were occupying half of the entire stock of NYC hotel rooms. That he graduated from high school in 1978 (it was 79).

None of this is true. A lot of it isn’t even a good story, or one that would seem to matter politically, really, in any way. But it’s kinda fun for everyone, I guess, to have to run around being like “ooo, I bet that one’s a lie” all the time.

At any rate, fun little digression, let’s talk more about the mayor’s bad podcast.

McDaniels goes into another bit of material he seems familiar performing, and this time the mayor doesn’t let him get too far into actually entertaining and informing people before cutting him off, and saying, completely out of nowhere and unrelated to anything McDaniels is saying, “Adidas! You won that big endorsement, the first non athlete endorsement, but I do want to want to touch on something,” and immediately asking him to talk about the death of Jam Master Jay, which the mayor says not too many people realize was to gun violence, and, uh, that’s what everyone knows about it.

McDaniels says he found out from watching the news, which is of course terrible. He says he didn’t believe it at the time, he tells the whole story and it’s awful. He makes a special note to underscore that the recording studio Jay was killed in was literally right across the street from the local police prescient.

For the record, Jay was shot in 2002, and two men were arrested for the killing in 2020. The trial is scheduled to start sometime toward the end of 2023. Among other things, one of the men who has been arrested had also shot one of Jay’s nephews in 2003, but you know, police work takes time. I’ve already spent the better part of an episode about the Sanitation Department talking about the ways the NYPD fails to utilize it’s mass surveillance tools to solve crimes, so let’s move on.

McDaniels wraps up and the mayor asks him what’s next. McDaniels said he spent a lot of time as a paid lecturer on the college circuit (so, yeah, I’m guessing a lot of the times he was able to filibuster the mayor, was with material from that) and speaker at high schools and younger. And now, he wants to do whatever the mayor wants him to help with.

And that’s nice. It’s a kind and empathetic way for him to end this. Even the mayor’s awkward assurances that he’s going to read McDaniels’ book - one would think he had at least given it a look since a) it’s part of the interview and b) McDaniels wrote it in 2017 - don’t manage to derail the dismount.

So what happened between the release of the previous episode on June 30th 2023, and this one on July 21st? 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 six people were indicted for allegedly bundling illegal donations to Eric Adams’ campaign including a former colleague of Adams’ from the police force who knows the mayor socially. Fortunately for the mayor he was not implicated and anyway nothing else weird shady ever happened with his campaign fundraising.

The mayor announced that migrants who’ve been in the shelter system for a ‘significant’ amount of time will receive 60 day notices to leave the system. He also announced that he’d deploy leaflets to the border to discourage migrants from coming to NYC because the cost of living here is very high.

The Times revealed the existence of the faked photo of the mayor’s deceased officer friend that we already discussed, and that everyone agreed was very normal.

Despite a plan that had been in the works for two years, one that had the support of the local city councilmember and 7000 residents who signed a petition, a plan that the mayor himself had signed off on, Adams spiked the planned redesign of Greenpoint’s McGuinness Avenue, which would have added safer pedestrian crossings and protected bike lanes. The reason appears to be that resistance from a lone business owner in the neighborhood, who just so happens to be a major donor to the mayor.

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Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

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stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

See you next time.