Is Business Waking Up from Its 30-Year Nap?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Firewall with Bradley Tusk

Episode Title: Is Business Waking Up from Its 30-Year Nap?
Date: March 19, 2026
Host: Bradley Tusk
Guest: Steve Fulop, CEO, Partnership for New York City (PNYC), Former Mayor of Jersey City

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Episode Overview

This episode features a deep-dive conversation between host and political strategist Bradley Tusk and Steve Fulop, the newly appointed CEO of the Partnership for New York City and former Jersey City mayor. The central theme is whether New York's business community—and its storied organization the Partnership—is finally shifting from decades of relative political passivity into a more muscular, organized, and relevant force amid the city and state's political and social shifts. The discussion explores Fulop’s personal journey, his views on public service and governance, the failures and potential of the Partnership, and specific strategies for business engagement in local politics.

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Major Discussion Points & Insights

1. Steve Fulop’s Background and Path to Public Service

• Steve shares his immigrant and Holocaust-survivor family roots, upbringing, and how his early years shaped his outlook (00:49–03:14).
  • “My grandparents never spoke about it except…when the Steven Spielberg foundation…filmed her. It was the first time I heard her speak about [the Holocaust].” — Steve Fulop (02:12)
• He discusses being an underachieving student and an athlete, how 9/11 motivated him to leave a lucrative job at Goldman Sachs for Marine Corps service (03:24–08:08).
  • Notable moment: Steve describes the emotional scene as he left Goldman to deploy, sending a farewell email and getting applause on the trading floor (08:08).

2. Military Service and Its Impact

• Steve outlines how being in the Marines and his deployment to Iraq shifted his worldview, giving him new empathy for people of different backgrounds and struggles, and exposing him to systemic obstacles (10:32–11:27).
  • “Boot camp changed me… a lot of things I took for granted, it changed my work ethic, it changed my viewpoint on the world.” — Steve Fulop (10:32)

3. Route Into Politics: Jersey City and Beyond

• A chance meeting with Jersey City’s first African American mayor, Glenn Cunningham, led to Fulop’s surprise congressional run, and a rapid political ascent in Jersey City—eventually becoming mayor for three terms (11:33–17:35).
  • “After my deployment…Cunningham said, ‘We want you to run for Congress against Bob Menendez.’ I wasn’t even registered to vote.” — Steve Fulop (13:36)
• Fulop describes Jersey City’s unique character—dense, diverse, neither quite suburb nor big city (17:35–18:58).

4. Life as Mayor and Transition Efforts

• Fulop reflects on the challenges and excitement of being mayor, handling everything from shootings to COVID to development, and why he chose not to run for a fourth term (19:20–20:06).
  • Strong endorsement for municipal government as the most impactful sphere for public service (20:06–20:56).
• Discusses his decision to run for Governor, his strategy, the miscalculation of primary turnout driven by Trump voters, and reflections on running “the right race at the wrong time” (20:59–24:42).

5. From Politics to CEO: The Partnership for New York City

• Fulop recounts his origin story with the Partnership—born out of post-election soul searching, a random reconnection, and his strategic pitch for the position (25:58–30:25).
  • “If the Partnership is perceived as the mouthpiece of super wealthy people, then it’s going to fail to exist in five or ten years…people are more worker centric.” — Steve Fulop (30:57)
• Host and guest candidly critique the Partnership’s historic lack of political muscle and its niche in research, white papers, and events (33:01–37:02).
  • Notable quote: “Other than events and white papers, I still can’t tell you [what the Partnership does]." — Bradley Tusk (33:19)

6. Diagnosis: The Partnership’s Political Irrelevance

• Tusk makes a forceful case that the Partnership, under past leadership, failed to build any meaningful political power, lacking field organization, coalitions, or the ability to influence elections (38:13–42:49).
  • “No one in New York politics believes that the New York City Partnership can in any way impact their next election. As a result, you’re not only functionally irrelevant… you create the impression you’ll be an effective political voice, and nothing else gets done either.” — Bradley Tusk (40:45)

7. Fulop’s Roadmap for Change

• Fulop pledges to reorganize: leveraging the Partnership’s scale, launching a C4 for direct advocacy ($10M fund), organizing employees, improving political engagement, and hiring government affairs staff (46:48–50:32).
• On building political muscle: Fulop and Tusk debate how far and fast the Partnership can go, with Tusk pushing for aggressive field and candidate recruitment, Fulop arguing for phased, organic growth (50:32–57:12).
  • “My brand in New Jersey was always outside the establishment…and nobody would tell you that I was a go along to get along type of person.” — Steve Fulop (59:48)
• Fulop emphasizes the need for business to be willing to “rock the boat,” including aggressive advocacy, even if it risks relationships with politicians (59:48–62:01).

8. Can the Partnership Become Feared and Effective?

• The episode explores whether Fulop—known for his independence—will get board support to be confrontational, use hardball tactics and opposition research, and act as a true counterweight to the energized far left (62:01–66:01).
• Both acknowledge: having money is not enough; what matters is field organizing, candidate recruitment, and willingness to make politicians “fear you” (62:01–64:26).

9. Practical Application: Budget and Advocacy

• Fulop reveals active discussions and imminent tactical moves by the Partnership’s new C4 to engage on tax and budget policy, including spending money in specific legislative districts to support Governor Hochul’s agenda (66:01–66:43).

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote/Highlight | |-----------|---------|-----------------| | 02:12 | Steve | “My grandparents never spoke about it except…when the Steven Spielberg foundation…filmed her. It was the first time I heard her speak about [the Holocaust].” | | 08:08 | Steve | Emotional moment leaving Goldman to deploy, receiving applause from colleagues. | | 10:32 | Steve | “Boot camp changed me… it changed my work ethic, it changed my viewpoint on the world.” | | 13:36 | Steve | “After my deployment… Cunningham said, ‘We want you to run for Congress against Bob Menendez.’ I wasn’t even registered to vote.” | | 30:57 | Steve | “If the Partnership is perceived as the mouthpiece of super wealthy people, then it’s going to fail to exist in five or ten years… people are more worker centric.” | | 33:19 | Bradley | “Other than events and white papers, I still can’t tell you [what the Partnership does].” | | 40:45 | Bradley | “[The Partnership is] functionally irrelevant… you create the impression you’ll be an effective political voice, and nothing else gets done either.” | | 59:48 | Steve | “My brand in New Jersey was always outside the establishment… and nobody would tell you that I was a go along to get along type of person.” |

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:49 – 03:14: Steve Fulop’s upbringing and family background
• 03:24 – 08:08: 9/11, decision to join Marines, deployment, and emotional moments
• 10:32 – 11:27: Impact of military on Steve’s worldview
• 11:33 – 17:35: Path into politics, from chance meeting to mayoralty
• 19:20 – 20:56: Why city government matters most
• 20:59 – 24:42: Governor’s race, miscalculation, lessons learned
• 25:58 – 30:25: How Steve became CEO of the Partnership
• 33:01 – 37:02: Critique of the Partnership’s past effectiveness
• 38:13 – 42:49: Tusk’s assessment of Partnership’s political irrelevance
• 46:48 – 50:32: Fulop’s planned changes—C4, organizing, hiring
• 59:48 – 62:01: Willingness to confront power, importance of “being feared”
• 66:01 – 66:43: Practical advocacy plans for the current budget cycle

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Conclusion

This episode offers a refreshingly candid, sometimes tense but always substantive look at the intersection of business, politics, and public service in New York. Fulop emerges as a pragmatic, bold new leader for the Partnership, committed to making the organization a player in city and state politics—but faces deep-rooted structural and cultural challenges. Whether he can transform the group into a feared and effective political force remains the open, urgent question.

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Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tuss. My guest today, Steve Phillip. Steve is now the CEO of the Partnership for New York City, but previously the mayor of Jersey City and someone I've been texting with and talking to a little bit and really excited he's here. So Steve, thanks for joining us.

[B]

Thank you for having me.

[A]

So, you know, you're here primarily to talk about your vision for the partnership. And I think kind of obviously I have a view as to where it should be and what it should do and that's we're here and I appreciate if nothing else, you're here to talk about.

[B]

I've read a little bit about you.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, a little bit. I have a couple of comments gotten some attention. So but, but for the listeners that aren't familiar with you, just walk us through your background if you don't mind.

[B]

Background come from an immigrant family, first generation American, grew up in a Holocaust survivor family. So have a Jewish background.

[A]

So they were in the camps. Is your grandparents.

[B]

Grandparents were in Auschwitz 35 of them were taken to Auschwitz 7 survived and they immigrated here, settled in New Jersey and my parents had a deli growing

[A]

up in New York. Were your parents born here or in Europe?

[B]

My parents were both born in Europe and my mother's sister was murdered in the gas chamber. My father went to Israel and then to here to avoid the Holocaust. His side of the family, they met here though.

[A]

My parents.

[B]

Got it.

[A]

Got it. And then your grant, were they really active in your lives when you were growing up, your grandparents?

[B]

Yeah, very. I mean I went to an Orthodox day school growing up, even though I'm not observant, just my parents wanted to be grounded in religion and have some familiarity.

[A]

So I had a somewhat similar situation growing up. And I found and I'm just kind of wondering if this is a common thing or just sort of a particular neuroses of my family. But there was just this constant refrain of we all went through the worst thing human beings could ever go through. So it's on you to really make something of yourself here because we suffered so much to get you this opportunity.

[B]

You have that a little bit different. I mean my grandparents never spoke about it except, you know, there was one time where my grandmother spoke about her experience. Experience when the Steven Spielberg foundation they were filming survivors because they were all going to die in that age. And so my grandmother, they found her, she took it very seriously. They filmed her. It was the first time I really spoke heard her speak about it Other than having a Jewish foundation. My parents weren't really, you know, religious or thinking or talking too much about the Holocaust or the experience, but they were.

[A]

They. I mean, the interesting Judaism, obviously, it's a religion and it's a culture and you can be one and not the other. Were they kind of culturally Jewish at home?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, culturally Jewish that we would celebrate the more significant holidays. We didn't keep kosher or anything like that. And I think obviously we identify as Jewish proudly, but I would say beyond that, nothing really substantial in our home that would be different than somebody that wasn't Jewish.

[A]

Right. What did they want for you growing up? Was the idea that you would become a successful politician? Would that have been appealing to them? Or they're like, what the fuck you're supposed to be a doctor, lawyer or a banker?

[B]

I wasn't the best student growing up, so I got recruited to play soccer at Binghamton. So I played soccer there after that, went to nyu. I think my parents were just hopeful that I was employed, to be honest.

[A]

There you go. All right.

[B]

I got some traction academically at Binghamton and did well and then got a job at Goldman Sachs.

[A]

So you checked all the boxes?

[B]

So I checked all the boxes. But like, if you ask, you know, in high school if that's the trajectory, they probably would have said no because I was generally being disciplined and I wasn't really into my academics and I thought that my soccer skills at the time would help me get into college. So I was kind of like thinking it in that way. Yeah, but so I got a job at Goldman first in Chicago, came back here after a year, worked at One Year Plaza. Then 911 happens. Changed trajectory in my life when at that point I decided I wanted to do something service wise.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Left to enlist in the Marine Corps.

[A]

How'd your family react to that?

[B]

Oh, man, Bradley. You know, I think they were scared. They were concerned, but they recognized that I was an adult and was going to do whatever I wanted to do.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I went to a recruiting station, went on the enlisted side. So most political people go as officers or I went on the enlisted side down to Paris Island. It was an outlier as a Jewish person down there.

[A]

Had being in the Marines ever occurred to you before 911 or was it literally just this thing happened? This is the way I can serve?

[B]

You know, I was always the one in my family that gravitated more towards military service. And I was interested in it, but I always thought it was peacetime. And I would say to myself, hey, you know, it's not really necessary, but I know if it was needed, I would serve.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so after 9, 11, there's a lot of patriotism. And so told my managers at Goldman that I was going to leave and enlist in the Marine Corps.

[A]

Well, who could object to that? Right?

[B]

I mean, they were. They were supportive, but it was kind of uncharted territory for them because nobody did that.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So I left, went down to Parris island, then to Marine Corps Combat Training.

[A]

How are you? I mean, you were an athlete, so I guess you were kind of physically kind of ready for all of that.

[B]

Yeah, I was physically ready, but it was obviously a tough shift. I mean, most of the people in my platoon were 18, 17.

[A]

How old were you?

[B]

25. So it's a significant gap, you know.

[A]

And do you think at that point you already had. Did they have any advantage by being younger or. Did not matter at that age?

[B]

It didn't matter because it's one platoon.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We're all kind of a team.

[A]

25. Not exactly old.

[B]

It's not old, but I had either started or was on trajectory for two masters, Columbia and nyu. Yeah, right. I did both of those.

[A]

In what?

[B]

Master in Public administration from Columbia and then Business administration, MBA from N. And why you? Stern. So, like, it was a very big difference in between, you know, how I thought about the world and how the drill instructors and my platoon thought about the world. The Marine Corps is great, though. It changed my life. Came back after. Did you.

[A]

Where were you deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[B]

Yeah. So I came, I finished boot camp, and I went into the reserves initially. But this was the time when President Bush was on TV saying, we're going to smoke them out of their caves. We're going to get these guys.

[A]

If you remember, I was ran. So I was working for Chuck when I allowed it happened. And on 9 12, Bush comes to New York. I think it was the 12, and we're with him, and we go to the pit or we go to ground zero. And it's the most security I've still ever seen. It was probably 100 car motorcades, snipers on every roof, F16s in the air. But then once you got into the pit, it was sort of like actually kind of totally open because I guess anyone who could make it all the way down there has been vetted a zillion times at this point. And I lost Chuck. And all of a sudden I look up and Bush starts talking. And I look up and he scrambled on top of that fire truck, which Was about six feet from where I was standing. Just fucking randomly.

[B]

Oh, you were right there.

[A]

Right there. Yeah. Not near Chuck, even. We just kind of lost each other in the chaos down there. And. Yeah. So I think I heard the first version of the smoke about speech.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what a moment to be.

[A]

It was. I mean, obviously horrible, but it was. Yeah, you got. I got the witness history.

[B]

So, look, I went into the reserves initially, but knowing that we would probably be deployed, I went back to Goldman for a couple months after boot camp. And then they got us together to reserve duty. And they were asking us weird questions. Are you. Are you vaccinated? Do you own. Do you ran. How many kids? So you kind of knew that they were gearing up. They got us together on a Saturday.

[A]

Yes. To vaccinate. They'd dismiss you.

[B]

True. Yeah, true. And they got together on Saturday night. And our commanding officer said that they're dismissing us early. Come back on Tuesday with your will and your power of attorney. And we're leaving on Tuesday afternoon. That's kind of the way that happens. And drove home. My parents were at. We have a vacation home in the Poconos. I went to go see them to tell them in person. When I got there, it was like 2am and as soon as my mom saw me, she started crying, obviously because she knew they would never let me go unless I was being sent away. Went to Goldman. Back. Back to Goldman on Monday morning. And at the morning call, I was on the trading desk at the time. I asked to speak to my manager and said, I need. I need a couple minutes. And he was kind of. You know, he was kind of like, looking away till later. And I was like, no. And he's like, what? And I said, look, I don't know what you need to do from an HR standpoint, but I'm leaving now. I got stuff I got to take care of for this reason. And. And he was disheveled because he didn't know how to deal with me. Again, it's an HR issue. And so I went back to my desk. I wrote an email to pretty much everybody who was ever part of my life, thanking them for being part of my life, saying, you don't know what the future holds. But I just wanted to say that I'm leaving tomorrow and thank you. And I was gonna hit send, and I had my jacket on, and I didn't wanna talk to anybody. Cause I was kind of in that mindset. And I hit send. And then some people on the trading floor started clapping and Then they all did. And I started crying. Obviously, at that point, it was very emotional for me, and I left. And next day, I mean, I spent the day getting my stuff together, went back the next day, and then we were deployed to Camp Pendleton, which is in San Diego, to get our gas masks and all that for a couple weeks, then to Kuwait, and then the first wave of troops up to Baghdad. So it was quite a six, eight month deployment.

[A]

So the worldview you had going in. Right. So you grew up in a relatively comfortable situation. Know, you're at elite schools like Stern, Columbia, Goldman Sachs. I mean, you're sort of. And then all of a sudden, like you said, you're with people who were very different from you in your platoon. You're older than them, and now you're in a part of the world that just sees life in a totally different way. So coming out of it, both from what you saw from your own, you know, everyone else in the Marines that you were deployed with and then the Iraqis themselves, like, how did your perspective change?

[B]

Look, I mean, boot camp changed me, and then the deployment changed me because it gave me a perspective on how different people live. And a lot of the things that I took for granted, it changed my work ethic, it changed my viewpoints of the world. And I think that it didn't inspire some broader public service because I wasn't registered to vote. I wasn't involved in any of that stuff. Right. But I did have a different perspective on how difficult it was for people that didn't have my background to get an opportunity, move forward. A lot of those people that I were with were going to enlist in the military. Military or enlist in the Marine Corps because of the GI Bill, because it was their only opportunity or that their father served. Those were the two kind of driving factors on why most people were there at the time. So again, you're surrounded by people in a different environment. Of course it changed my view and. And I think that it set me on a different trajectory, although I didn't realize it at the time.

[A]

Yeah. So you finished the, you finished the service and the, the Marines come back and what happens?

[B]

So I come back, I'm one of the first deployed and one of the first back. And the mayor of Jersey City at the time where I was living was this guy by the name of Glenn Cunningham. He was the first African American mayor. He was a very popular guy and he was a Marine. And so he finds me somehow with a group of other people and wants to give everybody who was deployed a Proclamation or resolution at City Hall. So I go to City hall one day. It's my first time ever being in the building. Gives me a proclamation. And the guy, we had a great conversation. After maybe like, an hour, he invited me to his office because he was really, like, taken by the fact somebody would leave Goldman Sachs to enlist. A lot of questions about it.

[A]

Sure, sure.

[B]

And I didn't think anything of it at the time. I thought that he was just curious. Everybody was curious, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What was it like over there? What did your parents think? Did you see this? Did you see that? Lots of questions. I left and had a nice time with him. Thought I would never see the guy again in my life, and was trying to get my career back moving forward. So I went back to Goldman Sachs. They took me back. It was great. About six months later, I get a phone call, and it's deputy mayor. He asked for to hold. The mayor gets on the phone and he says, look, Steve, is there something time they could come in this week? I'd like to talk to you personally about something on my mind. And I said to him, I actually thought it was about a parking issue that I'd complained about. I knew nothing. And so, I mean, we go back and forth, and then we set a time for the next day after work, go to City Hall. It's the second time in office. I'm not registered to vote still. I'm not involved. Go into his office. And he starts talking to me a little bit about, you know, you could appreciate this, about people that go far in public office or elected office at the time. He says, you know, they have a couple clear character traits. He says most of them lose before they win. Even presidents, you know, Bill Clinton and George Bush, blah, blah, blah, blah. He says that most of them start when they're young and build slowly over time. I said, okay. And then he starts telling me a little bit about this fight that he has with then Congressman Menendez, who's our congressman. He became the senator, the gold bar guy, right?

[A]

Yeah, sure.

[B]

So he starts talking a little bit about kind of his relationship. And Menendez, this coming June primary is gonna run a whole slate of candidates. And Cunningham says, we're gonna run a whole slate of candidates. I didn't even know what that means. And Cunningham says, look, Menendez is gonna run somebody for Congress and then somebody himself for Congress and. And then somebody for Surrogate and then somebody for county clerk and then these committee seats underneath. And Cunningham says, we're gonna do the same. We're gonna run Somebody for Congress and then surrogate and clerk and committee seats underneath. And I was just kind of paying attention. Cause it didn't mean anything to me. I was like, being respectful. He says, we wanna tell you, you may have an adverse reaction to it first, but I want you to think about it. I said, okay. And he says, what I'd like you to do is run for Congress against Bob Menendez. And I said to him, can you repeat that? Obviously, right. And. And he says it again. And I said, look, Mayor, I'm not registered to vote. I'm not involved in any of this. I gotta think about it. And I left and I stood in front of City Hall. I called my friends, my family. I told them this conversation that I just had. And everybody had the same reaction. They said, are you sure? Is that what the mayor said to you? And I was like, yes. And so I thought about it, and I thought it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I registered a vote the next day, and I told him I would do it. Goldman was not happy, obviously. Again, like, in this kind of vortex with them. But I ended up running for Congress. A week before the election, Cunningham has a massive heart attack. He dies. I lose my election. Obviously, I would have lost anyway. I was the only one who thought I would win. I guess that's right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But I was bit by the bug. And the next year, I ran for counsel. Did a good job in Jersey City. Won an upset there and then.

[A]

Were you already living in Jersey City at the time?

[B]

I was. I was. I was a resident there. Although not involved in any of this stuff. Yeah, I was like, learning it on the fly. But like.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, but especially if you work downtown at Govin. I mean.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So. And then ran for mayor in 2013, and it was again outside the institution. It was one of two races in the country that President Obama then engaged, directly engaged, on behalf of Rahm Emanuel running for mayor of Chicago, and then Jeremiah Healey, who was the incumbent mayor of Jersey City. Those are the.

[A]

And why did he do that for Healy?

[B]

Because Jeremiah Healy and Cory Booker were the first two people outside of Illinois to help him when he ran for president. And so he was returning the favor. He was already elected a second time, so there was no downside. And I had Healy on the ropes, and they called in this favor. And Obama cut commercial. So it was a tough race and I won.

[A]

Did it get pretty racial?

[B]

You know, I thought it was making traction headway in the African American community. And then when Obama came in, it recalibrated the whole race. Obviously, my money dried up and. And I had a hard time obviously, getting that traction moving forward.

[A]

How far before the election was this month?

[B]

A month. Long enough. Long enough time.

[A]

Sometimes they screw up and do it too close to the election, and they actually don't have the impact they want. A month. I was hoping you like a week. I was like, you can survive that.

[B]

I mean.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The guy I was running against had a lot of relationships. I mean, Bloomberg engaged and cut a commercial because he was very good on guns. The guy who I was with. Yeah. And obviously they had a relationship across the river. Right.

[A]

And there was also, by the way, it was a moment of black mayors that kind of had this coalition. It was like a lot of really exciting at Corey in Newark, you had Nutter, you had Fenty. So, like, you could see how, like, I remember this just from my own time working with Mike, you know, just like, you're in. There was that world, and it was really intoxicating in a way, you know, So I could see how that all kind of drove it.

[B]

So. Yeah. And what we won and then was 12 years as mayor and won three more. Three elections total as mayor. So first three term, elected mayor in 70 years. So something I did was right. And. And then what's the population of Jersey city? More than 300,000 people.

[A]

And what's the budget?

[B]

The budget is a little bit. 800 million on the. 800 million on the city side and a billion on the school side.

[A]

Right. So my son took the SAT on Saturday at St. Peter's Print. And when we were kind of driving there, I guess he hadn't been there before, and he's looking around and he's like, it's not a suburb and it's not a city. What is it? I'm like. I don't like. I'm like. It's a really. You know, I've obviously been a couple, you know, enough to have a perspective like. Like, I'm not sure either because it's unique in a way. Right. Like, how. How would you describe Jersey City?

[B]

Well, look, we're. We're very densely populated, much like New York City, so. So we build big buildings. It's only, you know, 20 square miles, including Liberty State Park. So it's very, very dense. So it's definitely city feel.

[A]

Yeah, it does.

[B]

But there are parts of it that definitely feel more like Queens and Brooklyn as well.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But, you know, I had coffee.

[A]

I was at Nick's Diner. You familiar with that place in Jersey City?

[B]

Where is that?

[A]

Common paw. Because I had to.

[B]

Communal paw.

[A]

Communal paw. It's on communal paw. That definitely felt like parts of Brooklyn and Quincy.

[B]

Yeah. So, I mean, the city's got. It's a. It's a special place, whereas it's the. One of the single most diverse cities in the country. It's very densely populated. It's in this New York City ecosystem. It's in the media market, although much smaller, but very similar challenges. Yeah.

[A]

Right. So, and your mayor, how do you like it? I mean, is it the kind of thing where you're like, okay, I'm responsible for basically things in a fact that people every day, and my job is to make their lives. Is it that, or is it this is pain in the ass? Cause shit always goes wrong. You don't get enough attention, and the media's all focused on New York City.

[B]

I loved that job. And I chose not to run for a fourth term because I thought it was a healthy thing to have transition. But, I mean, I love the job that I'm in now. I'm really excited about it every day. But I was excited about that job the same way every day. I mean, the good thing about being mayor is that in a city like that is every day there's a different set of circumstances and challenges. And we dealt with everything from unfortunate circumstances like mass shootings to Covid to economic development to ambulatory issues.

[A]

By the way, I mean, had you won the governor's race, we'll get to a second. But I've worked in city government, state government, federal government, and to me, whenever someone young is like, oh, would you like the best? Oh, city government. By. I mean, it's not even close.

[B]

Not even close.

[A]

Like, my first job out of college was at the New York City Parks Department. There's a guy named Henry Stern, who was the Parks Commissioner, who's a crazy guy. But what I realized pretty quickly was when the city is, you know, when the parks are clean and safe and there's stuff to do, the eight and a half million people that live in New York City have a higher quality of life than when they're dirty and dangerous and they see it. Yeah. And it's tangible and it's direct, and everything is like that.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

In fact, the mobile voting stuff we're doing, one of the reasons that we're staring at the municipal level is because to me, it is the greatest disparity between participation, especially in things like council primaries and things like that compared to actual impact on people's lives. Right. The Impact, I would argue, is typically the greatest. And yet oftentimes the participation can be the lowest. Exactly. It's like, how can we fix this?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So what made you choose to run for governor?

[B]

So I felt that transition from mayor was healthy. As I touched on earlier, I thought that, you know, I had no interest in being on the legislative side as a senator or a congressman or any of that stuff. I thought there were a lot of challenges that you could fix in the state from being governor. And I was very solution oriented. And so I kind of figured in a crowded primary, there's a route for me to be successful.

[A]

Yeah. What do you think the path was?

[B]

So every one of the elections, I was always kind of this lane outside the establishment building, organically, a base. I thought at the time that if 550,000 people came out in the primary, which was a big turnout historically, that If I got 120, 130,000 people and really focused on policy, single issue, voters and Trenton, then the six person primary, that is crowded, I'll get through the primary. And I did a lot of work to build to that 120, 130,000. Outside of the political structure, outside the organization of the machine. We were successful on that going into election day. If you asked me, and I'm a pragmatic person, but if you asked me if I was going to win on election day, I would have told you. Yes, I would have told you that. Uber the weekend before, which was a data company, to give you indication of what other people thought, they wrote a million dollar check to my super PAC. 500,000 to Sheryl, 500,000 to Cittarelli, CNN, New York Times. I mean, they embedded reporters with our campaign. Really only for most of the day. Okay. To get footage for the next day. I thought all indications were there. What I miscalculated was that where I thought 550,000 people were coming out, it ended up being 850,000. So a massive surge.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the voters that came out, which I didn't anticipate, that 300,000, which is a huge number, were energized by Trump. And my message was, you know, Trenton is broken.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And you know, Cheryl's message was, I'm a helicopter pilot, fight Trump. Right. And she had the better message for that demographic. And the thing was over in five minutes. Yep. And so it was a little bit of a bitter pill because I think I ran the right race in the wrong moment. And a lot of things have to do with timing and circumstances. But, you know, it Took a little bit for me to kind of recalibrate and figure out what to do.

[A]

Did you feel like you should have seen that sort of surge coming?

[B]

You know, I look back and I think about it. I don't know, Bradley, because, you know, I saw the voter file creeping up on turnout early on early voting. I thought at the time that it was in Voter from Election Day that was so energized and displaced voting early. And so I never imagined that it was an entirely new voter to that scale.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so I don't know what I could have done differently now. Had I moderated my message and been more broad and generic, then I wouldn't have had the same traction that I did. So that wouldn't have worked for me. Right. And I think a lot about kind of where the Democratic Party is. You know, as a white, straight male running in a Democratic primary, it's a very, very hard path today because the party is generally sympathetic to. Towards different demographics today. Okay. In a good way, I think. You know, I'm not saying that as a negative, I think in a good way, generally speaking. But I thought that my message had to be a little bit different in order to kind of get traction, very substantive. And if I changed that, I wouldn't have been able to get the traction that I got anyway.

[A]

Right. So then the kind of twist happens, which is at the same time, this is all happening. Cassie Wilde, who had been running the XV partnership for.

[B]

I had no idea. I had no idea any of this stuff.

[A]

And they started this search. And I remember talking to the consulting firm that was running a call and say, hey, what do you think? I think they were aware that I was already a critic of the partnership. And it's funny, the names that I had been heard that I kind of heard floating around were all, to me, a lot of younger Kathies. Right. Like, they knew everyone. They're good connectors. They're good at managing a board. They're good at events.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And my point to them was, you need someone like the partnership should, and we'll get in a second. But my point was, if you don't get someone that really knows electoral politics and does something about. Doesn't matter who you pick, it's all a waste. And that I actually hadn't thought of it didn't even occur to me they would go across the river, which was interesting. But, like, the names I gave them were often people who had either run for office or were really worked on a lot of campaigns, political people, as opposed to People kind of in some industry where they kind of, you know, are in and around it, but kind of like how Kathy was.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So what happens? You just get a call one day?

[B]

No, not at all. So about two weeks after I lost the primary, and for those people that have lost elections or on the outs politically, your phone goes dead, relatively speaking. It turns off pretty quick. And you realize a lot of these relationships are very transactional. But at the time, look, I was kind of thinking a lot about the primary results. And then two weeks later, I got a voicemail from this guy named Jim Simpson, who was Chris Christie's DOT chair. He owned a logistics company, a substantial logistics. Really nice guy. And I haven't spoken to Jim Simpson in 12 years. And I worked with him on the Pulaski Skyway. And even when Chris Christie was coming after me personally with the whole bridge gate stuff, Jim Simpson was a guy who would be like, look, I gotta work with Steve on this Pulaski Skyway highway revamp. And he would probably say, 12 years later, Steve was a good guy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So he left me a voicemail, and I was kind of like, in the dumps. So I didn't really want to call him back. It took me four days to call him back. I said, I'm eventually going to call him back. And Jim Simpson, when I called him back, he was very thankful that I remembered him. And he says, you know, Steve, I. I figured out the issue. I had an issue that I was trying to understand how the Jersey building department works on a warehouse. That I have figured it out. Thanks for calling me back. Okay, great. Right. Wasn't what I wanted to deal with at the time. See you later, Jim Simpson. And he says, you know what? He goes, I live in Pennsylvania now. Sometimes I'm in New York. I've been seeing you for 12 years. Why don't we figure out a time if I'm ever up there, to connect? And I said, jim, I'm free for the next six months. Just tell me when you're here. I don't really care. And he calls me a week and a half later and says, look, I got something in New York. I'm gonna be in the area. Do you wanna grab breakfast? I said, sure. I met at a diner, and I got there, like, five minutes late. And when I got there, he was like, googling me. He knew nothing about me. He was like, wow, you were in the military? Like, he knew nothing about me. Right? And we were just talk. I thought it would be entertaining to tell Chris Christie stories okay. Cause he came after me. Jim Simpson knows him. So it was some way to pass an hour of my time at that point, and we had a nice breakfast. At the end of the breakfast, he says to me, he goes, what are you doing next? And I said to him, I have no idea. I haven't really thought about it. And he says, you know who you should talk to? He goes, I don't really have a great relationship with her anymore, but, you know, you should talk to. And she knows everybody is this woman named Cathy Wilde. And I said, I met her once. I don't really know how I could get in front of her or if she would help me, but I appreciate the gesture. And he says to me, he goes, we got to figure it out. He's like a nice guy. He's like. And I said, all right, Jim. Or whatever. And, you know, the breakfast ended. I didn't think anything of it. And four days later, Jim Simpson calls me back and says to me, he goes, you know, I was thinking about our breakfast, doing some research on who can connect you to Kathy Wilde, and I came across these articles that she's retiring. You should apply. And I said to him, I don't know anybody in that orbit personally. It's a good idea, but I don't really know. He's like, we need to figure it out. And I said, all right. And I looked at the board, and I knew, out of the 30 board members, I knew two of them. And so, coincidentally, I was going to be at a conference with one of them, I thought, potentially in a couple weeks. So I texted him, and I said, hey, are you going to be at this conference? He said, yes. I said, could I grab you for a couple minutes if you're there? I said, sure. I saw him at the conference, and I said to this guy, I said, look, I saw your involvement in the partnership. He said, yeah. I said, I saw you guys are doing a search. I would be killer at that job. And he said, why? I never really thought about that. And he said, we're really focused on New York. And I said, listen, these are the reasons why I think I would be good at it. And he said. He said the right stuff. He said, look, there's 12 people on the search committee. They're all people that run major corporations. They all have opinions. He says, even if I wanted to help you, I couldn't help you other than connecting you to the recruiting firm.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I said, that's all I asked for. It's totally fine.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so I followed up with him on the following Monday and I sent him a resume and he connected me to the recruiting from the recruiting firm would have told you that they did a courtesy interview and they thought it was not gonna go anywhere. But I kept moving through the process. Cuz every one of these interviews I would talk about the political structure of the partnership and I would talk about what it can be and how it's perceived today versus what it can be.

[A]

So what was you. So you're across the river, right? You're like literally in Jersey City, a couple of miles from where the partnership's office is. What was your perception of that?

[B]

So look, I thought at the time, and I still believe this, when I would say in the interview process that if the partnership is perceived as the mouthpiece of super wealthy people, then it's going to fail to exist in five or 10 years. And the reason it will fail to exist in five or 10 years is because the reality is that politics has shifted over the last 10 years. That people are more worker centric and you have 800,000 people and, and the risk to the partnership is that that ecosystem of CEOs is predicated on them coming because they think it's value add for their time. Yeah. If it's not effective, they're going to try to think of other things to do with their time. And then once the biggest ones stop coming, then the middle one stop coming and the smaller ones stop coming and the thing no longer exists. Which would be unfortunate.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You have 800,000 employees. I would say to them, which is true, you have the ability to communicate at scale with financial resources, which is true. And you have a message that is fairly centrist and reasonable to most New Yorkers. You should be punching well above where you are right now from a political standpoint. And when we would get into like they would ask a lot of people

[A]

where does you think they were politically?

[B]

I think that, you know, there's disagreement over time on what that looks like. I think that some of them would think that it's been effective on certain issues, the partnership. And then there's a lot of them that would say, I don't understand why we don't have more clout with organizing our employees. And that was kind of, you know, kind of bubbling kind of under the surface a little bit. And so I would probably say that they felt that politically the trend is against them and that they're constantly whacked in the head for things that they think are unreasonable or unreasonable.

[A]

When you ask them why aren't you doing these A dozen things that any smart political organization would do. What's our answer?

[B]

Well, I think they would say that it's been difficult to organize employees or with.

[A]

That's only one component of.

[B]

Well, if I would say that

[A]

how

[B]

muscular are we on the fundraising stuff and influence? They would say we don't really do that stuff.

[A]

What would they say they do? Because I still can't. Other than events and white papers, I still can't tell you.

[B]

So I think there's some things that people don't realize that happen at the partnership, which also needs to be elevated. So, first of all, they have a venture fund. While it's not the largest, it's a $200 million fund. It sees a lot of early stage New York companies that grow to be fairly significant. The board of that is a who's who of the VC world. So they do shape early technology companies at the intersection of the public and private sector, and they've been very successful on that.

[A]

Which company?

[B]

Use Datadog as an example. We were the first dollars into DataDog. It's a $25 billion company. There's tons of those. I posted yesterday that they. We just invested in a company called Origin that does, you know, some education tools for incarcerated folk. Right. So that they're employable after. So a lot of good work. Right. You could argue 37, 38,000 jobs have been created via that work. They don't get the traction for that. They have a lab component where they partner with the mta, the Port Authority, the Office of Sustainability, and they facilitate trials on new companies and technology, circumventing some of the procurement processes. And in order to work with, let's say, the MTA on signaling technology. Okay. And that's been tremendously successful. So those are two components that exist in no other business organization in the country that the partnership actually does, which they don't get credit for. They have a research arm which, you know, we're working on to be more, you know, timely and relevant in the cadence of the politics, because I don't think that we've been that way before, but they are very, very good their work.

[A]

But, but what are they researching?

[B]

What are, what are they doing now? So, like right now they're working on a blueprint for New York City economically, a proactive plan on things that we can be doing to make ourselves and tangible things. Not just like pie in the sky stuff. Yeah, no, look, I would give them a hard time when I got, when I first came in there because they would do things like, they had a big report on the fashion industry. And I said, who reads this? Right? Like. And, well, they would say, I think some people in the fashion industry, because the fashion industry is leaving here. I said, do they read it? Like, I don't know. And, and what's the tangible takeaway from that? I just.

[A]

For whatever it's worth.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I've been in and around New York politics for most of the last 30 years. No one has ever once in my life said, oh, did you see that partnership report? Or brought it up in any way, shape or form.

[B]

But Bradley, I'll tell you something. Let's use the research for a second. So we polled our companies, right. And what we found on child care, because it's a relevant conversation. So we're talking about things that people that the mayor and the governor are talking about to be more relevant in the research space. And two thirds of our companies offer some sort of child care right now, either on site, off site, subsidies to low income employees, tax credits. We probably have more familiarity with the childcare, practicing it than most in the city. Okay. And what I've said is we should be a bigger part of that conversation. We need to insert ourselves because of the knowledge base we have. Right. And so working on that right now, as opposed to writing abstract reports that are less relevant to the moment. And to me, what I've said to the team is that sometimes it's hard to dictate the cadence of the politics because that's dictated by the mayor or the governor. Right.

[A]

Okay. But let's. Okay, so there are more abstract reports now. There are less abstract reports. There's still reports. Right.

[B]

So we have a C4, which is a new thing.

[A]

Okay, that's great.

[B]

So the C4, which is a tool for overt advocacy with $10 million into it.

[A]

So what will it actually do?

[B]

So what we are doing now is using it to organize employees. We've started with kind of these town halls within our employ employee. Because the best person to communicate the importance of communication from the partnership is the CEO saying to their employees. This is important to me for these reasons. Once you migrate the employees into a place where they're being communicated with by the partnership or the C4 arm of it, as opposed to having general counsels putting up obstacles all the time, you start to get into a place that you could have a more effective tool. Look, the employees for JP Morgan are never gonna be asked to knock on doors. That's not who they were wired. But they are practical people that if you lay out an issue, they could make a decision on whether it's good or bad for them. And most of the time, I think that we are in a place that they would be sympathetic to. And if there's an actionable step beyond voting, whether it's a email or a phone call or advocacy, they will do that, right?

[A]

Yeah. I mean, that's the upside is that. And just. I think most listeners know this, but we're talking about, especially for the New York City Council or the New York State Legislature, turnout is tiny. Right. People win in the most important city in the world, you can win a council seat with 5,000 votes. Right. And in a city of 8.5 million people. And, you know, to me, and I'll just sort of. Obviously, you've heard my criticisms before. They're not of you, they're of Kathy. But I would argue that Kathy was a massive failure. I don't believe she accomplished anything. The one thing that I sort of see people point to is congestion pricing. And even then, like, okay, she supported it, great. But it's one bill. And what we know for sure is that it's a tax and it looks like it is reducing traffic. And I very much support it if it can do that. But in London and a lot of places, they would tell you that it worked for a year or two and they kind of went back to normal. So. So to me, that's not the end all, be all. I believe, as you know, we've discussed that every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. And because of gerrymandering, the only election that typically matters is the primary, especially in a place like New York. There are some very rare circumstances where 9, 11 happens. Someone like Mike Bloomberg gets propelled to mayoralty as a result, but very rare, right? So when a couple thousand people are ultimately determining who's going to win an election, then they determine what those politicians will do once they're in office. And right now, in a Democratic primary in New York, the vast majority of the voters are exceptionally progressive. And as a result, they now control City Hall. They control the city council in many ways, not the speaker, but a lot of the members. And the same thing up in Albany. Again, not the governor, but a lot of the legislature. And in my experience, politicians will take you seriously in one of two cases. They believe that working with you and doing what you want can help them win their next election, or that not doing it could potentially in some way hurt their next election. If they don't believe any either of those two things, you don't matter. And this is true in my view, across democracy. So anywhere that has rule of law and free and fair elections. And from everything I saw, Kathy's strategy was consistently that she seemed like she truly believed this, that she would sit down with the council member from Staten island and say, jamie Dimon thinks this.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No one voting in that primary for basically all 51 of the council seats, other than maybe one on the upper east side, has any fucking idea who Jamie Dimon is. And they don't care. And because you guys. Let me finish. Because the partnership did 00 politically, you didn't. You didn't do field, you didn't do coalitions, you didn't do any kind of real organizing. Maybe you talked about your companies doing stuff, but the minute some GC said no, everyone just threw up their hands. No one in New York politics believes that the New York City Partnership can any way shape or form impact their next election. As a result, you're not only functionally irrelevant, I would argue that unless you can change this, and that's my hope and why we're keeping talking if you can, the best thing for New York would be for the partnership to go away. Because you do something even worse than being inactive and totally ineffective, you create the impression among other people that you're going to be an effective political voice for the business community, for the centrist community. And because you are so the opposite of that, nothing else gets done either. And so there's a total void on one side, the far left. As much as I disagree with, often not even the intent of a lot of their views, but just sort of the way that they think the world would work to apply them. I've been watching them now for 30 years. The Working Families Party was created about 30 years ago, doing a tremendous amount of hard work on a Tuesday at 10pm in a room with six people, organizing them and training them or whatever it is. It's not wildly expensive, it's not rocket science, but it's a ton of fucking work. And to their tremendous credit, they, the DSA make the Rose, have put that work in and it has succeeded. I think organizing some JP Morgan traders to send an email occasionally is better than not. Totally a capability of many you'd want to have, but it's like barely anything. So tell me how you're going to unpack there.

[B]

Let me start with. Let me remember the points that you have. Let me start by saying that I would disagree with. I've spent two months in this Job, and it was announced in October, and so let's call it five months Net. And I've spoken to a lot of people, and I do think Kathy was effective. Different effective, how you would define it. I think that her relationships is a huge value that sometimes didn't get seen in the public sphere.

[A]

So give me an example.

[B]

Look, I think that she was, you know, little things from LGBTQ museum opening. Okay. Like the board saying, hey, Kathy was able to help us with XYZ to the casino, Steve Cohen's casino, and helping with some legislators there. I think that there's a tangible track record of effective advocacy that always wasn't in the public view.

[A]

Okay, but let's even take the two examples that you chose to.

[B]

I just. I. Yeah, go ahead.

[A]

Fine. I'm all for an LGBT museum, but when a.

[B]

Well, those are two.

[A]

Like when a small business owner says, I can't make it in New York because I'm getting crushed with taxes and regulations and everything else. You say, but there's an LGBTQ museum now.

[B]

It's not one or the other or,

[A]

quite frankly, even the casino. And my consulting firm worked on that. And, you know, Chantel, my team is the one that passed the law you're talking about, so we're grateful. But with that said, there wasn't gonna not be three casinos in New York City, whether it was us or someone else. So there's no tangible good that she. For the local con. Do I think our plan is better than the others? Yes, absolutely. But nonetheless, I don't see that as a real effective response to what I said.

[B]

Well, it's the same thing. I'm not here to litigate her 20 or 30 years. I think most people would say that she's been effective. I think we could disagree on that. Okay. Congestion, by the way.

[A]

I don't know anyone in New York politics privately who would say that. And when I made some pretty incendiary comments in New York magazine a couple weeks ago, there were people who emailed me to say, right on, or text, whatever. There are people who reached out to say, well, here's the reasons why they suffer. They have so many problems. Here's what not a single person said. You're wrong. They're effective. So I actually don't think there's anyone in New York politics. I might be the only person willing to say the quiet parts out loud, but I disagree with you. I don't think anybody.

[B]

Okay, let's move to the next part. About your comment about the growing left. Right. Which is true. True. Clearly. Question on that is how much of those people are in going with what you said about everybody's focus on the next election. Right. Which I agree with that. How much of those people are ideologues versus pragmatic people? That view, per your point, that there is an alternative to being the electeds.

[A]

You know, it's a little bit of both, I think. I think that we're moving towards more ideologues, unfortunately, because the left is not just turning people out there that influence what the people in office do, but they're actually turning out candidates who truly believe a lot of this shit. But either way, if you needed 12,000 votes to win a council seat instead of 5,000 votes, and the partnership were able to drive those other 7,000 people into the thing, whether they're an ideologue or a pragmatist looking to just win their next election, either way, they're no longer governed by the needs of an extreme group.

[B]

True. That's fair. It's a fair point. So the trend is adverse. But I would say, look, I would say it's a hybrid. Some of them are ideologues and some of them are obviously pragmatic people. But at the end of the day, I do believe that we will be able to organize a big subset of our employees in a way that is effective and that we could call upon. It'll take a little bit of time. Yeah.

[A]

There's total value in it. If it's the entire of what you

[B]

do, I think you will fail if it's okay. Well, I think that there's communication publicly, overtly. I think there's people, I think there's. We're effective and down the road, I think it's TBD on candidates.

[A]

Why not take another 10 million and create. You hire some people. You know what you're talking about. Like, that's the best thing about you being here is you actually understand what

[B]

you're doing really well.

[A]

Right. So, like that. That's the most encouraging thing by far. Right. But you get another 10 million bucks and you just start hiring organizers and you start building coalitions of all kinds of local groups. Like, for example, I was asked to speak to the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce board the other day because they saw what I'd been saying and I think thought there was some utility in exploring it. There are so many different businesses, local groups, community also, that are not far left, that if someone put the effort in to bring them all together and come up with the best candidates out of it and build coalitions and have real field operations, Everything else. That's what makes the difference to get you from 5,000 to 10,000 in the next primary.

[B]

Well, the next primary, that's true. We have two years to the next primary. I think that some of this stuff I have to grow organically because it's not a place that the board has historically been. Okay. So our last executive board meeting, I outlined a lot of this political framework in detail. Here's where I think we are. Here's where vulnerabilities are. Here's where I think the opportunity is. And they were very receptive. I don't think I'm at a place today where I could say, tomorrow I need another $10 million. I do think I'm in a place where we start to get traction. And I say, hey, we need.

[A]

So what creates. Because my concern just is not you in the slide. My hope is you. My concern is your boards. I actually wrote down why I think your board's not going to let you do what you need to do to be effective.

[B]

Wait a second. I'm going to go to that in a second. I think, first of all, you'd be surprised how much leeway they've granted me up to now. We'll see where that goes. But I think that they've been tremendously supportive. I think that the first step is employees. The second step is the broader public on a centrist message. I think you have to do that in phases. Otherwise you're not going to have credibility with your board. Well, I think that.

[A]

Look, maybe with the board, but not in terms of if you were trying to win the next election, or at

[B]

least a couple years till the next election.

[A]

If you were trying to be competitive in it, you'd start. I mean, again, the far left started all the stuff they were doing in the mid-90s, and they didn't elect Bill de Blasio to the mayoralty till 2013. Right. It takes a while.

[B]

It takes a while, but you could have an impact before. Look, we've done the following. It's been too much. Okay, so let me start internally. We changed the due structures in order to change who our membership is. Okay. And we've prioritized everybody contributing to the C4 because we're. That muscle situation.

[A]

Yeah, definitely.

[B]

We're being more involved in the political fundraising space, because I think that that's important as well. To build those relationships, we hired a Director for the C4. For the first time, we have somebody. We just came in, we're going to start building that Whole infrastructure out on the. On the government presence side, for the first time, we have an RFP out for. To staff for both Albany and City Hall, a lobbyist presence that we should be a little bit more engaged on that front to cover the field. A little bit more engaged, Yes. A lot more engaged in that. I think that there are a lot of pieces that those are the external parts, a lot of that, or some of those are internal. And then there's things that were changing structurally within the team. I think some of this stuff takes a little bit of time to change, but the board has been very receptive. In fairness. Let me hear your points about what

[A]

you think is like, yeah, that's why I'm worried about your board. I'm not worried about you.

[B]

Go ahead.

[A]

1. And keep in mind, I know a lot of these people personally won't wear it out.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So, one, they don't know what they don't know, meaning these are people who have been very successful and impressive in other walks of life, and they're not unlike a lot of the hedge fund guys who thought that if Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams just had enough money, they would clearly win. They don't know what they don't know, and they don't realize that. So therefore, you're starting not with people who are saying, oh, this is not my expertise. What should I do? But people who are working from assumptions that aren't right. That's number one.

[B]

Before you go, I think that's an unfair character.

[A]

Maybe. I hope that.

[B]

I think these are people that run massive corporations, and sometimes you have a CEO from one industry that's interchangeable to an entirely different industry. They connect dots very quickly, these people. They ask. I see it already. They ask a lot of questions, smart questions. They push back, challenge. But do they know how wildly.

[A]

Okay, you gave me an LGBT museum and a report. Do they know how wildly ineffective they have been for the past 30 years?

[B]

I think. I think that they view that the political landscape has shifted and we could be more effective. I don't think they view themselves as being totally ineffective because we disagree on that point to begin with.

[A]

Well, I'll tell you this much. In the 12 years of Bloomberg, the partnership had zero impact whatsoever.

[B]

But, Mike, Bloomberg was a unique.

[A]

Didn't need, obviously, Kathy Wilde or anything else.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

But I didn't see that, really. I think she probably got her calls returned. Ironically, in a weird way, if your goal is to be needed and liked by the mayor, the partnership's better off with someone like a Bill de Blasio or an Eric Adams who thinks that they need, you know, Bloomer didn't need, obviously, advice on business policy from anyone on the board. You know, it's a challenge when the mayor is actually more successful with the thing that everyone on the board is good at doing, which is making money, then obviously it limits it. But that's number one. Number two would be, which is kind of a corollary, the mistake of thinking that money is the solution to everything. And I think, especially in politics today, money is less and less important. Andrew Cuomo, between the IES and in the direct campaign, spent about 70 million. Zoron spent about 17 million. The race wasn't even close. And the reason why, I would argue, is a lot of the things that traditionally people believe matter. Ads on Channel 4 at 6pm direct mail. Oh, we got this assembly member to endorse us. Whatever the fuck it is don't really matter anymore. And the ways of winning are far more based on being able to reach people with the right narrative through the right medium, which is usually not paid media, and then being able to have real field operations, which cost some money, but not tremendous amounts of money. And so therefore, the role of money in politics, I think, more broadly, is changing. And as a result, there's two problems. One is one of the partnership's bigger structural advantages I think is less of an advantage than it used to be, which is money. But two, the people on the board have all been very successful at making money, and that's their perspective. So how do you convince them that they have to do real politics? They can't just throw money.

[B]

People are more politically astute than you give credit for.

[A]

Yes, maybe so, because I don't think they are.

[B]

And. And I think they acknowledge the fact that money is not everything in politics, although it's not a fair thing to say that the Cuomo Mamdani election is a representation of the broader narrative overall that money's irrelevant. The problem with the election, you're a very flawed candidate in the fact that for sure, it's the same thing as well.

[A]

Kamala Harris spent.

[B]

Wait, wait a second.

[A]

Much more than Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton spent much more than Donald Trump.

[B]

In. In. In Jersey city, we had Governor McGreevey run. Same narrative again as in New York. Governor McGreevey running for my old job, left in disgrace. Very similar narrative against the progressive young guy. Same situation, same outcome. Yeah. Reason is because you had a ceiling, and nobody recognized that early enough. Okay? So it's not fair to say in hindsight that it was a money issue, it was a candidate issue. Okay? So if you had a. If you had a candidate that was sellable, you probably would have had an outcome that was different.

[A]

Wouldn't you guys be better off recruiting candidates that, you know, are sellable as opposed to dealing with the best of what.

[B]

I think they probably should have recognized the landscape earlier, and I think they probably should have been vocal. I mean, I said. Anybody who would listen to me in Jersey City, I said from the beginning that McGreevey had a ceiling and was never going to win.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Okay. And I would have said the same about Cuomo, that there's too many people that have a formed opinion about him at the time. Okay. And so it was a miss. But. But again, these people probably rely on counsel from the partnership and others in order to say, hey, this is the ground over here. This is the landscape. And that didn't happen at the time. Right. So.

[A]

But, like, that was probably mystical, right? Like the left. Zoran was an assembly member, and I think he kind of learned the ropes to a certain extent, and that made him a more like Tish de Blasio. When you look at the people in New York City from the far left who have ascended to higher office, they didn't start there. Right. They started at lower office. And they started because there was an infrastructure on the left to find candidates, recruit candidates, run them for lower office, and then ascend. So if you're only engaging when everyone closes up their house in Bridgehampton on Labor Day and then says, oh, shit, shit, the Social is going to be mayor, not a, here's a bunch of

[B]

money, but go ahead, keep going.

[A]

If you only do that, it's too late. Right? So why not, Rather than just trying to mobilize employees, which is great, but why. Why not try to start recruiting candidates now?

[B]

I think for lower office? Well, I agree with you. You got to start at lower office. You start City council, and you grow to the assembly and you go to the Senate. Yes, I agree with that. Because I think you need to build an infrastructure in order to support these things. To start, you cross that bridge down the road when you get to a place of, okay, we have some sort of infrastructure that could transfer over towards supporting a candidate. You're gonna have a hard time if you start out of the gate with candidate recruitment as opposed to infrastructure building. To me, I think you gotta do it in phases. That's the only thing that I've known, and I've been effective on it. The only way I've known.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I think you can walk and chew gun more. All right, next one.

[B]

I don't think so, but go ahead.

[A]

Is I took a look at the board and kind of the broader board or whatever it is. You have like a direct board and something bigger. There's almost no one on there with real government experience. Couple people worked at treasury at high levels. You have one guy, Bob Steele, who's, you know. I know Bob. I worked with Bob, who did work in city government, but in a role that was so removed from politics most of the time that like, I don't know how much Bob adds. You don't have a board that has any real world experience with the things that you need to do. And maybe you'll throw out the real estate guys. But I would argue Rebny has just as failed of an entity over the past decade or two as the partnership.

[B]

Let me just respond again, Bradley. Not a fair characterization. You have people there that have been tremendously involved in, well, not necessarily in local government. They've been involved in national politics at a serious level. Okay. Some of them have been secretary, board members, senior appointed positions as you touched on.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

You have people that have been gauged on the political apparatus of fundraising at a significant level, although it's different than what you would do. But they have background and these are smart people. None of this business is rocket science. I think we would attest to that. Right. So like if you're willing to put in the work, as you said earlier, the working families and organize and grow, which I have a track record of doing, and you have the resources and the trust of the board, which I do have, I think you have a pathway to be successful. And when we talk in a year, I'm going to be able to tell you, hey, here's where we are. And you don't need to win every race. Let me just say, you don't need to win every race. You need to be able to demonstrate that you're capable of winning every race. It's a totally different animal. Right. And so I am comfortable that we will get there.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

The last one, which was, and Kathy was very clear about this, she said our job is to be liked by whoever's in power. I don't know anyone in politics that has ever been effective that is unwilling to be disliked. You have to be willing to piss people off. You have to be willing to, to take people's heads off. You have to be willing to do really tough oppo and put it out there, all kinds of Stuff. It seems to me that the partnership truly had a philosophical objection to that in the prior iteration. How do you feel about it? And let's say that you are more open to the sort of binary nature of politics. Do you think your board will let you do it?

[B]

Okay. My brand in New Jersey was always outside the establishment and building it organically. And nobody would tell you that. I would just was a go along to get along type of person. They would respect me and they would say he's good at his job, but we don't always agree with how he does it or at times he is in a different place for us from a government standpoint and too vocal about it. Rocking the boat.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Track record is with track record, who I am, what I've said to the board and I'm gonna, is that as long as they give me the leeway, which they have up till now, it's early, I'm going to push. I've tried to be more vocal, certainly on taxes, than our predecessors have been. At the last board meeting, I'll give you an example, the last executive board meeting when I was outlining issues that I think where both City hall and Albany might differ with some of our communities and what they see. One of the things I touched on was anti Semitism, obviously, and is a place that some on the board were very, very vocal about that. It's a place that they feel uncomfortable with, with the tone and rhetoric and how things are moving.

[A]

Yeah, okay.

[B]

I was outlining this. I obviously, as a Holocaust survivor family, have my personal views on it, but I was outlining it purely from a political standpoint. And they honed in on that and they said, look, you know, if the opportunity arises and the trend continues, we should spend money, be more vocal on it. I said, look, you need to understand that going down that road is a very personal thing, certainly for City hall, it feels like. And some of the people in the administration that have been appointed there and they said, look, there's right and wrong is what the CEO said. There's right and wrong. Put politics aside. And I said to them, look, I'm encouraged that you give me that leeway and I understand who I work for. So I'm okay with that. Okay. I'm okay with being the aggressive guy and the guy being out there. It's a different tone. But I think that that's important if you're going to be effective. So the short answer is, yeah, I'm not somebody who's going to capitulate on my views or the partnership's views in order to just build a friendship. My job is to push an agenda and I'm going to be good at it.

[A]

Right. So the last part would be. And then again to me, none of this is me questioning whether you have the right ability to do it. I think you do. That's why we're talking about. I worry for you that the board won't. I'll give you an example. So we have been working on a little campaign. The climate industry guys came to us and said, listen, we got destroyed in the big beautiful bill. We don't want people to fuck with us. How do we do that? And our answer was people have to fear you. If they don't fear you, it doesn't really matter. And you need scalps and say, okay, so should we try to help flip that house? And I said no, there's 20 swing races in which every one of their mothers gonna be playing. In that race. You can't accomplish anything. Let's find the people who you really have a problem with and figure out how to go after them in ways that they will really notice. And so they gave us a list of the people that they thought really hurt them the most. And we started with a name, Chip Roy, who was a congressman from Texas who was running for Texas Ag. And we started making ads going after him, but not about climate change. Cause certainly no one voting Republican primary cares about that. We ran two ads and they only ran on Rumble, Truth Social and a whole bunch of other ultra right wing sites. That Chip Roy was not MAGA enough and that Chip Roy was mixed up with Epstein because he voted to block the release of the files. Chip Roy was up 14 when we started, he came in second. There's a runoff and we will keep working on this until he's dead and then shifting into other races as well. That's what in my view, in my experience that's what it takes is that the people in Washington now if to do this enough times, they say shit, those climate guys are actually pretty rough and they spend money and they don't care. They'll go at us in any way that they need to and that hopefully over time will change the dynamic. My hope is that if some council member is creating some issue for you, the board will say great, do all the oppo you need to. We don't care what the issue is. Make their life a living hell until they finally submit and do it enough times that people realize that they can't just fuck with us. Do you think you will be given the freedom to do that kind of stuff.

[B]

I don't think that that is the exact conversation the way you say it. I think that they're gonna give me a lot of flexibility. I do. I do think that their end objective is to make sure that New York City moves forward in a responsible way. And let me just say, responsible way is not just a text conversation. I don't want somebody to say for sure just one thing on that, because I think it's an important point that people don't understand. Last year, they launched the C4, and there was some disagreement in the partnership board on whether they should launch a C4 or not. Okay. Because of the history and some pushed back because of your exact points. They want it to be friends with everybody. And some people wanted to be more aggressive. Ultimately, the people that wanted to be more aggressive won the conversation. And at that board meeting, they put $10 million in immediately. So it's just the capabilities.

[A]

Yep. Yep.

[B]

They cut commercials that were very, very aggressive. And I think Kathy would tell you that it burned some of the relationships she has in Albany. The partnership would tell you that we spent a couple million dollars and we moved the needle on a public safety initiative that we thought was important. And it shows you that, A, there's an appetite to spend money, and B, there's a willingness to be aggressive, and they got a taste for it, and they want to move the agenda forward.

[A]

So that's great.

[B]

I would say, again, these are smart people. They connect dots very quickly, and while they may not spend the day thinking about politics all day, they're capable of understanding. And maybe not to the same degree that you who live it every single day, but when you explain something to them, it's not hard for them to get their head around whether a decision makes sense or it doesn't make sense.

[A]

Right. Good. All right, last. Because I know we're way, way over, flipping away from. From the partnership itself. Today is March 16th, so I think technically, the budget is due two weeks from tomorrow. You mentioned taxes a few times. Where do you think happens on that?

[B]

We have a call Tomorrow on the C4 on, you know, spending some resources, some real resources in. In support of, you know, the governor, because we think she's been responsible in a very, very tough situation.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

We got to get a feel for what the sentiment is in different districts overall on the. On the primary side. And if we need to engage in specific things like you talked about, we

[A]

actually have a call tomorrow on that. So good.

[B]

Those things are happening.

[A]

Good. That's what needs happen. How do people follow your work in the partnerships work?

[B]

Well, they could follow me on social media. I do a lot. It's pretty much intertwined with the partnership and or they could sign up on the poly on the WE website for Coalition for New York's Future.

[A]

There we go. Steve Folk, thanks for joining us.

[B]

Thank you, Bradley. I appreciate it.

[A]

Firewall is recorded at my bookstore, PNT Netware, located at 180 Orchard street on the lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from you with questions, feedbacks or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradley Firewall Media or find me on LinkedIn. And to keep up with what's on my mind and my latest writing, please follow my new substack@bradley substack.com thanks again for listening.