SumZero interview with Whitney Tilson and David Einhorn, 12/17/24

Hey, welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us again on Sizzler. This is going to be a really special discussion. I know many of you probably either live in New York or used to live in New York, or have New York interests. Anyway, I think this will be super relevant. Quick backstory: Whitney Tilson has been a member of Sizzler for a long time. I've known him for at least a decade now. The other day, I had the news open and it turned out there was an article about Whitney running for mayor. So I reached out and thought this would be a fun thing for us to do, to have a discussion with him about his thoughts on New York politics and what's in the future for New York. Whitney, as many of you know, is a former hedge fund manager, ran a fund that I think peaked at around $200 million in AUM. He's also been an educator, taught classes regarding investing. And I think when your parents were even educators themselves or teachers back in the day...

My parents were the third couple to meet and marry in the Peace Corps in 1962, and when I was born in 1966, they were union teachers in New Haven, Connecticut. So I come from that kind of background.

That's awesome. So, and David of course is a legend in the industry. I read somewhere that he started Greenlight almost 30 years ago now with $900,000 in capital. That's obviously into the billions now. So it will be very interesting to hear David sort of question Whitney. I don't, I mean obviously David knows Whitney much better than I do, so I'll let David kind of intro Whitney more properly. But just with that, David, do you want to kind of just give your quick intro and just tee up your relationship with Whitney, how you guys maybe first met, and then we can kind of dive into some of the policy stuff that I think folks are looking to hear about. Thank you again for joining us, guys.

Yeah, the all-white background I think is a little much, so I go with the dark.

Yeah, thank you, David. That's a wonderful introduction. You're a great friend. And in addition, we see each other probably most often out on the tennis courts. We're both avid tennis players, so we've connected.

Guys, I didn't know that. I think we should all hit, just as a completely unrelated point.

So let me, and David and I have, I would say, almost daily emails back and forth on politics. Both David and I are very interested in political matters and believe it's important to engage. You know, David has vastly more ability to write checks to people, but maybe there's an argument to be made that I have vastly more ability to run for mayor. I don't know. Or maybe I don't think, David, you're ever going to run for office. If you have, you have infinitely more ability to run for mayor.

So let me just give you two minutes, just a little bit of background for those of you who don't know me, and then let's open it up to Q&A. So the question I obviously get asked, you know, why are you running? Why are you doing this? As best we could tell, Whitney, you had a perfectly good life until a month ago. So the reason is I love New York. I think it's the greatest city in the world. It's why Susan and I, after we met at graduate school in Boston, why I followed her back here to New York. She finished law school a year before I finished business school. And we didn't flee to the suburbs when our three daughters were born in the 1990s. We raised our family right here in the city. And it's why our daughters, when they left the city to go to college in Minnesota and North Carolina, they all came back here to launch their careers. And soon, under lots of pressure from me, we'll hopefully be building families of their own. But here's the thing: I'm really concerned that on almost every metric, our great city is headed in the wrong direction, and it's causing families to flee. Get this: 77,000 people have left New York City just since 2020. That's the second-highest percentage loss of any large city in the country. That's 8% of our population has left in less than four years. And I'll bet you can guess which is the only city that's worse, that's lost 10% of its population: San Francisco. And so families are leaving because they can't afford skyrocketing rents, they aren't safe in their neighborhoods, and they're not satisfied with an educational system in which only half the kids are reading at grade level. Since 1970, New York State has lost 13 House seats, and the number one state New Yorkers flee to, Florida, has gained 13 House seats. And it's not just because Florida's got more sun. It's because we're not running things well here in New York. And we can't blame the Republicans; it's all on us. So while Mayor Adams and the other career politicians running in this race have been pandering to special interests, saddling us with high taxes and poor government services, in the last 31 years, I've been building a half-dozen small businesses right here in New York, fighting for better education for children as one of the founders of Teach for America, and more recently risking my life on the front lines in Ukraine providing aid to our allies who are fighting for their freedom. So in summary, I'm the only candidate in the race who isn't a career politician, who doesn't owe anything to anyone, and who's built a business. So I'll always do what's right for the people of New York. So that's my quick overview. And with that, I don't know, David, if you have any prepared questions or anything you want to launch with. But I already see some questions in the chat, and we've got a couple hundred people who I'm sure have plenty of questions. So happy to do Q&A for the remaining 45 minutes. I always think other people's questions are better than my questions. So if you see questions already, why don't we get at that. And if there's a lull, I'll jump in.

Yeah, honestly, I've been super politically active in the Democratic Party. My parents met and married in the Peace Corps, so I grew up in Tanzania, Nicaragua, in a sort of a very lefty household. I'm actually the most conservative in my family, right? As a business-oriented, you know, Harvard Business School background, investing background, but always strongly, strongly believe in the ideals of the Democratic Party. So I was doing that for 20 years, but never, so I've been to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of events supporting politicians. And I always sort of thought, 'Gee, what a miserable job. I never want to be on the other side.' And that was where I was as recently as a month ago. My dear friend John Petry, those of you may recognize as one of the co-founders of Value Investors Club, he and Joel Greenblatt, and he runs Cessa Capital. He and I were co-founders of Democrats for Education Reform 20 years ago. So he and I have been pushing the Democratic Party to be more centrist, more pragmatic, etc., for 20 years. He texted me out of the blue and said, 'Whitney, you should run for mayor.' And I was like, 'Haha, you must be drunk. You must think I'm your silliest friend.' And then he said, 'No, I'm serious. Take a look.' And so I looked at basically just a handful of things over the course of one week. I decided to, from never having any aspirations to ever run for office, to deciding to run. Number one, I looked at the statistics around New York City. I had no idea we, in four years, we've lost 700,000 people. How bad that is. I looked at the crime statistics, and they're really bad. People are leaving the city because they don't feel safe. And it's not just because the New York Post is running headlines. It's not just a perception problem; it is a reality problem. Then I looked at the, so it's clear to me that New York's heading the wrong direction, and somebody's got to come in and turn that around. So then I looked at the current crop of candidates, and you have a completely corrupt and ineffective mayor under five indictments. And then the whole rest of the field, at least on the Democratic side, and that, by the way, is who will win the election. So anybody listening to this who's a Republican, I don't want to support a Democrat. A Democrat, whoever wins the Democratic primary on June 24th next year, is going to be the next mayor almost certainly. So my recommendation is support the best Democrat you can, even if you're not a Democrat yourself. So I looked at the field. Every single one is a career politician. Not a single one of them spent a day in business in their lives. So none of them, I believe, are going to be able to change the trajectory of this city. The last two things I looked at is, I actually am enjoying the process of campaigning. I like doing things like this. I like meeting new people. I like learning a lot. So I figured, well, the process of campaigning, I think I will lean into, and I'm determined to have fun doing it, fighting for causes I believe in, from charter schools to fighting anti-Semitism to improving the business environment, etc. And even if I lose, I'm bringing good ideas that I hope change. So win or lose, I think it's a win. And lastly, I looked at the New York City campaign finance law. And I don't have the ability to self-fund. Mike Bloomberg spent $73 million 23 years ago buying the mayoral seat. But the city is matching, not just me, but all the candidates. There's no self-funder like Bloomberg in the race. Every single one of us is taking matching money, which means anyone from New York City on this call, you're all investors. Let me show you an instantaneous 800% return on your capital, which is anything you give me from $10 to $250. Just go to WhitneyFor.com, right? Easy to remember. There's a donate link. Anyone around the country can give up to $2,100 per individual. But the key is, anyone from New York City, up to $250, there's an 8-to-1 match. So you give me $250, my campaign gets $2,250. And so for a guy who can't afford to self-fund, that was actually a very important factor in my decision to run. But in order to qualify for any matching money, I need 1,000 New York City donors, even $10 donors. So one of the things I'm asking everybody on this call, if you're from New York City, if you're not involved in politics, maybe you like somebody else or whatever, click the donate link at WhitneyFor.com and just give me 10 bucks, because that counts toward the 1,000 that I need to unlock the millions of dollars of matching money that I'm going to qualify for from my friends giving me $250 bucks. But I don't get that money till I get 1,000 New York City donors. So I see lots of questions. Go ahead and field them.

Yeah, let's start with the first. How do you convince anti-business constituents in New York that business experience is worthwhile and not the enemy of the people? I guess this is true for all political races.

Look, I'm running as an outsider, in many ways against my own party. I am not going, the teachers union, you know, I was employee number two, one of the founders of Teach for America. I've been on the board of KIPP for 25 years. You know, the teachers union is going to come out against me. There are some unions that I think I can get support, but basically I am entering without any endorsements from any major politicians, though again, I hope to get some. And so I am the, let me explain that Democratic Party machine in New York is screwing up this city, but they're making it very difficult for any outsider to run. They've scheduled it in 20, the mayor election is off-year in 2025. The primary is in the middle of the summer, June 24th. Like if you could pick a date that would reduce turnout, that would be it. And it's a partisan primary, meaning no independents, no Republicans can cross over and vote for me. You must be a registered Democrat. As a result, four years ago, only 24% of registered Democrats in the city voted. So it's not surprising that historically it's been the candidates who pander most to the biggest special interest groups who can deliver the votes when you only have 26% turnout elect the mayor, and that mayor then in turn is supposed to negotiate with the very people who he or she owes their job to. You can imagine what that negotiation looks like. That's part of the problem. So my route is think AOC in her first campaign running against old guard Democrat, or even think Donald Trump in 2016, you know, running an insurgent outsider campaign, going directly to the voters and pointing out, saying if you're not happy with the status quo, if you recognize that your own party and the party bosses are doing a lousy job and sort of screwing you, and you want change, I'm the only change candidate in the race. And in this environment, I think that message can sell. But first I got to raise enough money to hire a team. You know, we're hiring a person a day. We're going to have 30 people on my team within a month. The next financial filing deadline is January 15th, and if I can put up a big number, by the way, when you accept matching money, you agree to only spend $7.9 million. But my rough plan is to raise $1.5 million, mostly from New York City residents in $10 to $250 chunks. The city then matches me $6.4 million roughly speaking, and then I'm at the $7.9 million cap. And then I can spend the last five months before the primary, I don't have to spend one minute raising money. But the next four weeks are key. Got to raise the money as much as I can from New York City residents, get as much matching money, and then I can go out and just focus on all the working-class voters in New York who I can tell you are not happy with the direction this city is headed. They want change. And there's basically a very simple choice: you got a whole bunch of career politicians with no business background who I don't believe offer any prospect of changing the status quo, and me. I think that message sells in this environment.

Dave, you want to?

Yeah, we don't have hours, and it really is a complex discussion. But let me give you a little bit of background. I co-chaired Central Synagogue's Criminal Justice Reform Initiative for the better part of 10 years. So I've been deeply involved in the criminal justice system, criminal justice reform as a reformer. By the way, you might wonder, Whitney Tilson, what do you mean Central Synagogue? The answer is I wasn't lucky to be born into the tribe, but I married into it. I told my wife on our first date we could raise our kids Jewish. By the way, the way I met her is Bill Ackman and I crashed the Harvard Law School Orientation booze cruise of Boston Harbor in September 1990. She and Bill grew up in Armonk and Chappaqua, adjacent towns in Westchester, and went to the same Hebrew school together as kids. She recognized him, came up, started talking to him. I, as I am wont to do, elbowed my way into the conversation. And as I've always been telling my wife since then, she married the wrong hedgie. So I promised her, literally no joke, on our first date, I told her we could raise our kids Jewish. A man of my word. So I'm very involved in Central Synagogue for over 20 years, very involved in Israel, anti-Semitism, etc. It's something very personal to me. So I digress a little bit here into crime, but that's how I got involved. I'm a very active member of Central Synagogue, and this was, criminal justice reform was an area that I got involved with. So if I were to characterize a 10-year campaign, our idea was to make New York's criminal justice system more fair. There were all sorts of terrible inequities and injustices and a very high degree in some pockets of over-incarceration. So we fought for things like raise the age, bail reform, close Rikers, a bunch of things, you know, which I can go into detail. But here's what happened: we went too far. And not me, but as a very simple example, the single worst piece of legislation that has contributed to a sharply rising crime rate and people fleeing New York City over the last four years was the bail reform law. And very simply, we pushed for a law that got rid of bail that Governor Cuomo signed. But New York State was the, to this day is the only state in the country that does not allow judges to consider a defendant's dangerousness when making a decision whether to let them go out onto the street or, for example, hold them at Rikers until their trial date or their plea bargain occurs. So we back, dating back to 1971, in some burst of insanity, a law was passed saying judges can only consider whether a defendant's likely to flee the country or something. They can't consider someone's dangerousness. That's obviously insane. But you had a bail system that judges were using to effectively keep dangerous people behind bars. So as a simple example, a guy who beat the hell out of his wife and has threatened to kill her is arrested. You do not want to let him back out because he'll probably kill her, right? But a judge wasn't allowed to consider that. So he would just set bail high enough to keep the guy behind bars, and that protected us. It was a crude and unfair system, but it sort of worked. Well, we said it's a crude and unfair system, let's get rid of bail. And I said, great, but you have to give judges dangerousness. There has to be a mechanism by which judges can use their judgment to protect us all from dangerous people who should not be out onto the streets. Well, in the middle of the night, the way things work in Albany, the legislation got passed, and the lefty activists in my coalition and the legislators in Albany passed a law that got rid of bail and didn't give judges dangerousness. And over the next year, 100,000 people statewide who would have been held under the old law were instead released. And is it any surprise that the murder rate in New York City that year, 2020, the year the law went into effect, January 1st, 2020, the murder rate went up 47% in a single year, and still has not come down to pre-pandemic levels. So that is one of at least a half-dozen major things that need to be addressed, because right now what we have is totally unacceptable. The Washington Square Park is an open-air drug market. In what universe are we allowing that to happen, right?

What are the things you can do as mayor to get at those problems? These are problems that are there to change legislation. Do you change police operating? What do you actually do as mayor once you've identified all the problems we can talk about to actually fix them?

So the answer is, the mayor, we have a very, fortunately, we have a strong mayoral system, so there's quite a bit. And I'll get to exactly what I would do as mayor. But also, realistically, I'm going to have to be a clever politician and get the city council to change or modify a couple things. And I'm going to have to go spend some time in Albany, make nice with people, and point out the mayhem that some of these laws, that I was part of advocating for, but that went too far. I'm not advocating going back to the old bail system, but we better give judges dangerousness like 49 other states and the federal system. So as mayor, I control a $112 billion budget and 306,000 employees, including all the police officers. So I can certainly increase the budget in selective areas for the police, so that they can better police our subway, so that they can go in. So part of it is a funding issue, part of it is legislative things need to change. And also I can just be a powerful advocate. Like I will show up in Washington Square Park as mayor, towing New York media behind me, and saying, 'Hey, this is going to stop. This is not acceptable.' Not just Washington Square Park, right? So I do have, would have as mayor, a lot of sort of power in the bully pulpit as well.

Whitney, you said this up, you know, kind of at the top, that over 700,000 people have left the city. One of the reasons, I think, you know, crime may be part of that, but also tax is a big topic of conversation, especially amongst younger folks, or you know, people who maybe are in their 20s or 30s contemplating having children. And when you add sort of the local tax on top of the state tax, on top of health care costs in New York, on top of education costs in New York, on top of just parking your car, it is an avalanche of expenses. What are your views on just the New York City tax setup, cost of living? I mean, inflation was obviously a huge topic of conversation at the federal level. It certainly affects New Yorkers. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that in terms of just creating a more efficient city that doesn't need to rely on extracting every last penny from its citizens.

Right. Well, look, let me start. It's a super complex question, and I'm not known for concise answers, but I'm going to try. Let's start with the fact that New York City is unbelievably wealthy. We have 2.5% of the US population, and we're 4.6% of US GDP. Stop and think about that. New York City, not the tri-state area, not New York State, New York City alone is almost 5% of US GDP. And we have the highest marginal tax rate of any major city, which means there's a huge city budget. So I do not have experience managing a $112 billion entity with 306,000 employees, but I know a lot of people who do. And the mayor, like I said, it's a strong mayor system. The mayor appoints 155 people basically unilaterally, doesn't require city council confirmation or whatever. Okay. One of the things I'd like to think I bring to the table is, I'd like to think I'm honest and smart or whatever, but I also have some humility. Like I know what I'm good at, I know what I'm not good at. I could never run a system that big, but I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room. My goal is to hire 155 people, every single one of whom is smarter than I am in fighting crime, building affordable housing, filling potholes, operating parks, operating our subway system, etc., etc. Right? And my job, my message to them is twofold, and this gets to your question about the budget and taxes and all, which is: message number one is, only 24% of New Yorkers think the city government is providing good or excellent services, and they're right, it's not. Despite much higher spending, our municipal spending per capita is by far higher than any other major city in the country. We're the second-highest spending city after Chicago. We spend 36% more than Chicago. We're at $13,400 per citizen. Chicago's like under $10,000, right? And every other city is half or one-third our spending, right? So the problem isn't that we don't have the money. A super-rich city with a super-high tax rate, so we got loads of money. It's just not being spent very efficiently. So number one, my message to all those people I hire is twofold. Number one, do a better job, provide better services, cut crime, make our parks cleaner, fill more potholes, etc., etc. Right? Number two, find me all the fraud and waste and inefficiency. We can't raise taxes, but we need more money for the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless people that we see out there on the streets every day, right? The solution is not to lock them up at Rikers. It is not a crime to be homeless. Some of them are out there committing mayhem and crimes, and yeah, absolutely there should not be a revolving door that's endangering all of us, right? But the vast majority of them are suffering. They are mentally ill, they suffer from addictions. It costs a lot of money to help people like that. Well, where are we going to get that money? I can look at the top-level numbers, how much we're spending, and I can talk to everybody in the system bottom-up, and I can tell you there's lots of fat in there. But I'm not coming in with some DOGE from people outside the system. My second message to the people inside the system is, go in there and find the fat and cut that fat and give me money back that we can reallocate for things we need. But don't cut the bone and the muscle. That's why it has to be done by experts inside each agency. You can't just parachute in from outside and claim that we're going to save $2 trillion when you don't know jack about the actual system. I actually believe in good government, but good, efficient government. So once they find me, I mean, in a $112 billion budget, when we're spending this much more than anybody else, I cannot believe that you can't get me 10% savings across the system, right? That's $10 billion that maybe we can selectively lower some excessive taxes that are driving businesses to close, etc. I think what Portugal did recently, where they cut the tax rate for people under age 30, again selectively, up to 30,000 euros a year of income, young people in Portugal are paying less. I want to make New York, young people in this country are doing worse than any other group of young people in history. They're not doing as well as their parents. They're suffering from off-the-charts rates of anxiety, depression, not holding jobs. They're still living at home. They're not getting married or having kids. You know, so I'd like to do something there, right? I'd like to channel more money into the highest-crime pockets of the city, to flood those areas with more drug and alcohol counseling, fix the street lights, etc., because not just police, because you got to comprehensively address these problems. So that's, I'm not out there promising huge tax cuts across the board. New York, I don't think that's very likely. But I think we can find a lot of savings, and we can make New York a heck of a lot more livable than it is right now. And by the way, the single biggest issue on affordability is housing. And if you'll give me 30 seconds to digress on that, we've lost 77,000 people in New York in the last four years, and the vacancy rate in New York right now is 1.4%. Now, I'm probably the only candidate in the race who understands basic supply and demand. We need people coming back to New York. What happens when more people come? There's no place to live. That's just going to jam prices higher. We need to build a lot more housing in this city. And we've had zoning rules dating back to the 1960s that make it virtually impossible to build new housing in this city. So it's not surprising housing costs are skyrocketing every year. So the city council just passed a watered-down bill, the far-lefties, you know, the NIMBY types, that's going to be 80,000 new units of housing in 15 years, and that is less than 10% of what we need. I want to be the person that lifts all these horrible zoning laws, regulations, restrictions. Ask anyone who tries to build and operate housing in New York versus any other city in the country, and they just start laughing. They hold their head in their hands. They're like, a two-week environmental review in Nashville is a two-year environmental review in New York. I mean, we're just punching ourselves in the face.

Well, plenty and nothing, in the sense that, you know, the bar is again very low. I have never sexually harassed, assaulted, or raped any woman, nor will I ever. Now that I think puts me ahead of half the field, right? Given Governor Cuomo's looming over this race as a potential entrance, to start with. I cannot, I cannot, bought, sorry, no white-collar crime. I have, I mean, I'm sort of in many ways ridiculously squeaky clean. I don't like the taste of alcohol. I've had one beer in my life. I have never had a puff of a marijuana cigarette, much less any kind of drug. So, and I have been, 20 years ago, David will relate to this, he and I got dragged through the, you know, Eliot Spitzer, the New York AG, and the SEC tried to put both of us, and Bill Ackman, and I think Guy Spier got drawn into it as well. Like, you know, they went through us with a fine-tooth comb. So there's nothing they're going to find in my hedge fund career or anything like that. So the oppo research is very simple, though. I'm a rich white guy from the Upper East Side who needs a lot of votes from working-class people of color in outer boroughs, right? And so my opponents are all just going to say he has no experience, he's a rich dilettante, he knows nothing about what real New Yorkers think about and care about. And to that, I will say a couple things. One is, I grew up in Tanzania, Nicaragua. I speak some functional Spanish. But I've traveled to 86 countries. I have a real appreciation, having lived in very poor countries. And my parents have retired in Kenya, and so I spent a lot of time there. I have had a lifelong commitment to helping give others the opportunities that I had. But for example, the education that my parents sacrificed to give me has made all the difference in my life. And it fills me with outrage, and it has for 35 years since I helped found Teach for America, that we have an educational system in this city and in this country where the quality of education your child gets is a function of two things: the color of your skin and your ZIP code. That pretty much determines whether you get a good public school or not. And that is so wrong and so un-American. So that's why I helped start Teach for America, why I've been on the board of KIPP for 25 years, and done a lot of other things on education reform. Last thing, other thing I will mention is, I graduated from Harvard Business School in 1994. I had worked two years at BCG. There was a job offer waiting for me. They would have paid off all my business school debt. Instead, I hooked up, I turned that down, I hooked up with Michael Porter, the famous guru of competitiveness and strategy, on a...

I founded and ran the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City for five years after business school. I came back down here to New York and I think I'm probably the only graduate of Harvard Business School in history who spent the first five years after graduating from HBS starting and running a nonprofit where I spent all of my time with small, mostly minority-owned businesses in the South Bronx, the South Side of Chicago, etc. I helped both as a research project but then actually practically helping them with strategic issues, bringing in teams of consultants to help them, and very importantly founded an investment firm that is going to this day called Inner City Ventures which has raised well over a billion dollars that has invested because most of these companies are just like, we need access to capital.

I think I've got, if I can raise the money and get out there and spend time telling my story and get in front of small business people, get in front of parents who live in the inner city who don't have access to good schools, I think I can tell a pretty compelling story that hey, I really care about you and as mayor, I'm not just going to be the mayor of where I live on the Upper East Side and just rich white people because that's honestly, that's probably what they're going to see initially when they first see me and that's what all my opponents are going to try and paint me as well. For what it's worth, I think just being authentic goes a long way and I think a lot of politicians sound too scripted so if you can kind of be yourself, I think that helps.

There's one question here about like, have you spoken to folks who have done this in the past, you know, be it a Bloomberg or an Andrew Yang or someone like that, kind of outsiders who then kind of, you know, forayed into politics and were able to make that breakout. I mean even AOC is an interesting one because she kind of came out of left field and sort of mastered social media marketing and now has a huge following. I'm just curious, you've had those conversations, what you've learned in terms of how to break in in the mold?

Yes, well I'll tell you the funniest conversation. I've spoken with a few dozen people ranging from, you know, Cory Booker who's an old friend, down to people you haven't heard of but they ran in the last mayoral election, you know, Shaun Donovan, Ray McGuire, people like that, and Andrew Yang. And in fact one of Andrew Yang's people who still works with him is working for my campaign part-time right now. So I'm definitely trying to learn best and very importantly worst practices. But the funniest conversation, you guys will laugh at this, I hope I'm not violating his confidence, but I know Laura Spitzer who introduced me to her, I think brother or cousin, Eliot. And here's the ironic thing, I don't think he remembers and I didn't bring this up, but he made my life and David's life and Bill Ackman's life absolutely miserable for a fairly extended period investigating us for manipulating the stock of MBIA when this was 22 years ago when all we were doing was exposing and bringing attention. This was in the days where there were no activist short sellers, you know, you weren't supposed to say anything negative about a company you were shorting. He got so NB sicked the SEC and Spitzer on us and of course we were squeaky clean and later we had the last laugh because MBIA basically almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis when every single thing we predicted came true. So I digress. I went and sat, had breakfast with Eliot last week and he sort of walked through and he said, okay, you're unknown. I said, yep. And he said, okay, well there are only two ways then to become known and therefore have a chance of winning. Number one is, can you fund like Bloomberg, $73 million self-fund? I said, absolutely not, I can't self-fund at all, I'm totally reliant on raising small dollar amounts from all my friends and then getting the matching money and I'm going to be limited to $7.9 million, that's my max as is with every other candidate. So then I said, that's off the table. So then he looked at me and said, well there's another way. Then he paused and he sort of winked at me and he said, you could have a scandal. I said, I was like, respect Eliot, it's been, you know, it's now been long enough that he can sort of joke about what happened to him, right? And I said, there are no scandals and I'm not going to go create one, right? So I said, but there is a third route. There's a third route that particularly only has a chance in this environment, which is go run against the party bosses and the special interests all feeding at the trough, run against the career politicians who are every single one of my opponents and go straight to the people with a message saying you're getting screwed, you're being overtaxed and you're not getting good services for the high taxes you're paying. And I am the person who's going to fight for you and I'm the change agent and everybody else is going to talk change but their version of change is reshuffling the special interests feeding at the trough, right? That's their version of change. I am the only real change agent in the race and if you haven't noticed, not just here, not just around the US, not just in the last election, in every country in the world this year, the change agent has won.

Yeah, I mean a lot of the questions revolve around the broken nature of New York City politics and one of the questions asked about, you know, how do you get to the people who matter and these are the primary voters obviously. What is the angle there? I mean, I don't know who those people are. I feel like most, I know New York kind of just, you know, maybe they vote and when they do because it's a foregone conclusion in New York, but in terms...

Let me give you some statistics. Last election there were 8.8 million New Yorkers, 3.4 million registered Democrats, but with only 26% turnout, Mayor Adams won the primary in the eighth round of ranked-choice voting with 404,000 votes. Think about that, 404,000 votes in a city of 8.8 million. At the time, today we're down to 8.1 million people, 3.1 million are registered Democrats. So in other words, more than half the people who left the city were registered Democrats. Keep in mind, a lot of children and so forth. By the way, the number of registered Republicans in the city is actually up fractionally while the Democratic part has lost a quarter million people. It's working-class, non-college educated people who are the vast majority of people leaving this city because they just can't afford it and their neighborhoods aren't safe and they're not happy with the schools their kids are in. So that's my number, they're 3.1 million voters but I don't need half of them because most of them aren't going to vote. I need somewhere probably not even 400,000 votes because our population's down 8%. So the question is where do I get those 400,000 votes and that's a good question. My simple answer is the 99% of New Yorkers who think this city is headed in the wrong direction who are looking for a change candidate and I'm the only one. But to be more specific, if I can raise the last couple weeks since I entered the race, three weeks now, and the next four weeks until the January 15th deadline, I'm spending all my time trying to raise all the money so I can announce a big number on January 15th and hopefully be done with fundraising. Okay, then my campaign pivots completely which is I don't have to spend one minute raising money, I don't have to be on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side where all the rich people are and my friends are who I'm twisting their arm to not give me big money, just give me $250 so that gets levered 8 to 1 and I get $2,500. But I need thousands and thousands of people like that, not 100,000 but three or four thousand, right? Then I'm going to spend all my time out speaking in front of church groups, community groups, small business associations. But here's the thing, none of them are going to invite me to come speak if I'm not viewed as a credible, you know, one of the top contending candidates, right? And that's why I need to raise all the money on January 15th. Like by January 15th I got to report a big number that shocks everybody. This guy nobody's ever heard of comes out of nowhere and wait, he just out-raised everybody else, all the career politicians who've been building their political databases and mining it and sending out thousands of spam emails and I come out and out-raise all of them by far in six weeks since I entered the race. That shocks the system, the media takes me seriously, all the community groups, everybody I need to reach out around the city of New York. If I can't raise the money, I'll never get in front of them. So it's a cycle I got to... but the catalyst to getting this virtuous cycle going, and you know, I got to dominate every media cycle. Like I'm good on TV, I know a lot of reporters and all of that. If you check my website at whitneyformayor.com, like I was on Fox and Friends, I was in the New York Post, I was in Bloomberg, etc. I got some nice initial publicity but the media isn't going to pay any attention to me and nor will anybody else unless they think I'm a serious candidate. And the first step to becoming a serious candidate is raising a lot of money by the first financial filing deadline. So that's why I'm asking everybody's help. Just go to whitneyformayor.com and click that donate button and literally even a $10 donation is important because it's not just how much you raise, it's how many people you raise money from, right? People are going to assume, oh, it's just going to be all your rich hedge fund friends giving you the max $2,100, right? If I can show a few thousand voters at $10, $25, $100, particularly if it's getting matched 8 to 1, that is a huge political boost.

No, no, you're one of the friends I need $2,100 from.

How about this, get five of your friends and family independently to each give me $250 and then you're off the hook for $2,100. How's that?

So if you're going to be the change candidate, what are the couple changes that are going to be evident in relatively short order when you take office?

Yeah, great question. Again, I wish we had hours. I've written a 25-page paper laying this out but let's just go down the list. The number one thing is we have to change the business environment. I am a pro-growth, pro-business Democrat. I understand that to fund affordable housing, mental health treatment for homeless people and all, we need to have a tax base. So it drives me crazy when the people, fellow Democrats but on the far left, you know, when Jeff Bezos shows up in New York and wants to build his second Amazon headquarters here and invest $10 billion and create 20,000 jobs, a handful of loudmouthed idiots drove him away and he's investing all that money outside DC. Like personally, I would have given him my cell phone number, driven to Teterboro, met his private jet, driven him into the city. We would have sat in City Hall with my real estate people, my permitting people, my environmental people, everything and said, Jeff, we know you want to be here, Facebook's here, Google's here, of course Amazon should be here. Let's make a deal. But I'm not going to give you a huge tax giveaway, that's not, you know, but we know New York is the place. And instead we drove them away. So the whole attitude around business, I think we can grow New York's GDP, which again is 5% of all US GDP, I think we can grow GDP here by 50% in the next 10 years. That's 4% compounded, which is doable, right? It's not crazy. And it involves changing the business environment. It's helping not just the big businesses, you know, the Amazon of the world, but working with the real estate community to reduce all the unnecessary stuff that's hampering their investment. And I'm talking to a lot of small businesses that are just getting squeezed and crushed on all sides and there are things that we can do. A lot of it, you know, I would say, I mean look, it's been 50 years or more that it's basically been a one-party city, a one-party state. And good Democratic ideas like appropriate zoning rules have over the years, when there's no opposition party, have been taken to extreme where the zoning rules are so extreme nobody can build anything, right? Where you should have an environmental review but that should take two weeks and instead it takes two years before you can begin construction, right? So I could give you so many examples. So business, business front number one, because once our economy starts growing, jobs are being created, wages are going up, that of course helps address the affordability issue. That probably gives more jobs to people who otherwise might be dealing with crime, right? It improves our tax base. Get this, 1% of New Yorkers pay 47% of the city taxes. And again, people on the far left out there picketing billionaires and saying we don't want you, you're all selfish greedy bastards and not surprisingly they're moving to Florida. That's insane. That is the ultimate punching yourself in the face is to drive your tax base out of this city. So I've talked about building, I think we can build 500,000 affordable middle-class housing units in this city in the next 10 years versus what the city council just passed which is 880,000 in 15 years. Like do 10x more on housing. I've already talked earlier about the things we can do. Every single person I've talked to from DAs to beat police officers, if you tweak some of these laws and let police do their job and let judges do their job and all, we can cut violent crime in this city by 50% in four or five years. And I'm telling the voters, if I can't, I mean some of it's out of my hands as mayor, City Council's got to reform some things, the state legislature, not completely repeal but reform some of this legislation that went too far, we can get a 50% reduction. Violent crime just gets us back to where we were six years ago. That is absolutely doable. So those are, I'd say, oh and the whole school system. That's $40 billion of spending of our $112 billion budget goes into the DOE where we've gone from 1.2 million down to 938,000 students. So we're spending more than $40,000 a kid and we are not getting anywhere close to bang for the buck. I know how much waste is in that system because I've been up to my eyeballs in it.

So jump in on that a little bit deeper because you've done the Democrats for Education Reform with me and others for I don't know 20 years or something like that. And so, you know, we've been punching from the outside to try to make improvement. If you become mayor, you can actually effectuate stuff from the inside. How do you push that agenda forward in light of all the structural stuff that we've been fighting with for decades?

Yeah, it's again, we need to do about a hundred smaller things different. There's no magic bullet. But you know, as a starting point, we have some of the greatest charter schools in the country here, like the one I was on the board of for 25 years, you know, John Petrie and Joel Greenblatt founded Success Academy, etc. There's an artificial cap right now that is hampering their growth and that's crazy. There shouldn't be any artificial cap. If proven operators want to expand, we should be encouraging that all day long. So that's an easy first step. That will require state legislative approval unfortunately, but there are things that the mayor can do, like Mayor Bloomberg did, making, because keep in mind the New York City school system is now under-enrolled. There are empty floors, empty buildings that we could turn over because finding real estate to open a school is the single biggest barrier to places like KIPP, you know, opening up a new school. So that would be, but you also got to address the beast itself, not just the charter schools that might be five or 10% of the market, right? So it's complex. But there has to be, you know, the key is having good leaders. You need good principals and good teachers. And by the way, I honor the people like my parents who were teachers, public school teachers in New Haven, Connecticut, the day I was born. But we also need to hold underperformers accountable and that's a big flaw in the system. You get a lifetime tenure if you stay for 20 years and there are teachers out there who are just punching the clock for the last five years and not getting the job done, not educating students. And there's a small percentage of teachers that are really actively doing harm to children who are yelling at them or berating them. And the vast majority of teachers, I want to do right by and they work in a big bureaucratic system and I want to make it a better system for them, provide better training and support, etc. But there is a piece of this and I have to be careful with my language because, you know, people take something out of context, say, oh, Whitney's anti-teacher and saying all the teachers are bad. I'm saying nothing of the sort. But I am telling you, like go talk to Joel Klein who ran New York City's school system for eight years and he's like, Whitney, you know, 1% of my teachers, but okay, out of 90,000 teachers that's almost a thousand teachers need to be fired tomorrow. Like they're doing harm to children. And he said, good luck, I cannot get rid of those teachers under any circumstances short of not indictment but conviction for a major felony, right? So we got to do something to better manage the workforce. And by the way, I'll just throw in two other quick things. I am absolutely banning smartphones from all New York City public schools. I think we're running a horrific experiment on our youth that is actively contributing to increasing social isolation, loneliness, anxiety, suicide, etc. among our youth that is a function of these phones and what's on them. They have no place being in the school building. And by the way, I think what Ron DeSantis passed down in Florida, banning all social media by age, this would be a statewide thing, anyone under age 16, you may not sign up for social media. That's not really school related but those are two things that would really help our youth.

Why don't we shift gears a little bit. You talked a little bit about anti-Semitism. You know, when I walk home from Midtown to SoHo, I often run into protests and protesters and it's alarming to me to see people, and I believe in freedom of speech, but it's very strange to me. After 9/11, I don't remember anybody running around the city supporting, you know, the people who bombed the World Trade Center. There are no pro-Taliban picketers in New York. I don't remember that. So things have changed a bit. What do you do as mayor to sort of change the tone of the daily walk through Washington Square Park and by NYU and stuff like this?

Yeah, this is something very personal to me. As I mentioned earlier, my wife and three daughters are Jewish. I've been a member of Central Synagogue for almost 25 years. My daughter currently in college right now wears the Star of David and it really upsets me that I worry about her safety wearing that little Star of David. Like that's crazy. It blows my mind. And look, even I'll give you a simple example. She goes to Carleton College in Minnesota. It's a wonderful small liberal arts college that my oldest daughter went to as well. Think of it like as a Middlebury of the Midwest. And the Students for Justice in Palestine Carleton chapter sent around an email to every student in the school six months ago, or this spring I guess it was, with the standard stuff that we've all seen, totally deeply anti-Semitic. It wasn't just expressing sympathy for the plight of Palestinian civilians, it was accusing Israel's apartheid state, committing genocide, blah, blah, blah, right? Really anti-Semitic stuff. And my daughter sent it to me and I said, Katherine, you have to write a letter to the editor of the school paper and rebut these outrageous lies about a country we've been to, a country I love. And she said, oh no, Daddy, I can't do that, I'd lose half my friends. And I was just floored. And Carleton's not Columbia or Harvard or any of these schools, it's luckily stayed out of the spotlight but that's like the environment. And she's right, by the way, I went and checked and talked to... So what do you actually do as mayor? Well, there's a, we have to put this, there is a big context problem that for many years I think we've sort of been asleep as things like TikTok and social media, there's just been this almost casual anti-Israel viewpoint that's spread particularly among the left but particularly among youth in this country that is of course contributing to all of this. And so I think there are some root causes. And by the way, I hold TikTok more than any other social media. If you look at the studies of the anti-Semitic stuff and pro-Hamas stuff there, it's worse than any of the other social media. So big picture as mayor, there have to be, like you said, I honor the right to protest, right? But when protesters are out there committing vandalism, are shutting down traffic, I was once driving to JFK and they tried to shut down the entire airport by blocking all the roads with their cars, the stuff that's going on on college campuses, I would have a very low tolerance for behavior as opposed to words. Protesting and calling for a ceasefire, that kind of thing, I will defend that all day, right? But when the behavior starts to create an unsafe environment for Jewish students on campus because protesters are storming a library, occupying buildings, when they're out there at Grand Central attacking police officers and all, I will take a very, very hard line on that.

Great. So David, are we running up towards the time or should we keep going for a couple more?

Yeah, thank you David. I'll just add, to your earlier question, Div, like why I decided to run, there's another important, very important factor which alluded to what David just said, which is if the only path for me to win was to say things I don't believe, go pander to interest groups that I hate, and whatever, and to prostitute myself and to be phony, if that was what was required to maximize my chances of winning this race, even if I thought I'd have a great chance of winning, I would never run. I see one of the reasons I have never, had never thought until a month ago or so of ever running to be a politician because even the good politicians I've seen, I know when I see them give their stump speech and answer questions and all, I know at least a portion of what they were saying is absolutely stupid stuff that they don't believe and we know they don't believe but they have to say it because otherwise, you know, it cost them the vote of an important constituency and they literally could lose their job. The beauty of what I'm doing is I don't care. Like all of my competitors, this is their life, they will do anything, say anything, promise anything to anybody to try and win this seat. I won't. I had a perfectly good life a month ago. I'm having a blast running. Like what I said earlier about it's just in my sweet spot, I love fighting the good fight. And when people criticize me, I'll give it right back, right? Like I've been doing that for decades. But it was very important to me that I just be able to say the things I believe and fight for the things I believe in and I don't care what the polls say, even if some of that hurts me because I want people at the end of the day to say, you know what, I don't always agree with him, he said a couple things I disagree with, whatever, but at least I think the guy speaks his mind and that is so rare in politics because almost ask any American, what do you think of politicians? And they say, I think they're gutless weasels who'll say anything to pander to whatever special interest group. So the beauty of my campaign is I'm running to win and in this environment, being an outsider, saying exactly what I think, taking provocative positions and saying I'm going to shake things up, etc., is not only what is absolutely true and consistent with what I've been doing for 20 plus years but it is in fact the winning strategy, the only strategy by which an outsider insurgent candidate like me can possibly win. So it was the melding of those two things, that doing, being true to myself and doing where at the end of the race if I lose I can look in the mirror and say, okay, at least I didn't sell out my principles and damage my reputation and people think that I became another mealy-mouthed weasel. Okay, they'll be like, it's a win-win for our city. But it's also important to me that I emerge from this with people thinking, okay, maybe he didn't win but he fought the good fight and he spoke some important truths and maybe some of those ideas will filter into the zeitgeist and improve our city even if I don't win. So that's part of the reason I'm having fun here is I don't have to do the worst part of what most politicians have to do which is take out positions that they don't believe in and say ridiculous things and so forth.

So that's great to hear. I can certainly attest the fact that you are having fun at least as of a month ago based on your Facebook feed. I feel like I keep seeing Whitney climbing mountains and doing Tough Mudders.

I've had to cut back on that fun but I am having, I'm completely exhausted but I am having so much fun. You know, just two days ago, like actually the nuts and bolts of politicking, I went to one of my first events out in the field. It was on Sunday and it was a Christmas party at a public school but it was organized by a charity for homeless families and their children so that they could have, you know, people who are really living in tough circumstances could have a happy time in the holiday, whatever. And I showed up and I showed up with my little puppy Phoebe and I just mingled and the kids wanted to come up and pet the dog and I was talking to the parents, I was talking to the people who work in the public school who've been in the belly of the beast of the DOE. They were there volunteering their time on a weekend in a public school building. And I met so many interesting people and heard their story. And a woman who's been here for so many years, she's as soon as she gets her pension she's like, I'm moving out of this city, the city is unlivable. And I was like, tell me more, like how can we fix that? Because, you know, this is a woman who's been in the city a long time and she's exactly the profile of the 77,000 people who've left that we need to stop. We need to make this city more livable for working-class people. And she's doing everything right. She works full-time for the Department of Education during the day and then she has a second job at the school, an after-school program. So she's like, I'm working myself to the bone and I can't afford to live anywhere near the school. I'm out in Staten Island so I got to drive an hour each way. And I'm like, well why don't you just take the subway? And she's like, because I'm a single woman and I come in at 7 in the morning, I go home at 7 at night and I do not feel safe on the subway. Right? So you see all these problems start to interrelate. But her conclusion is this city is unlivable, I'm out of here the moment I qualify for my full pension. That in a nutshell is what we as a city have to fix and that's going to be my first priority.

Well it's great that you recognize that. David, did you have any final questions before we close out? I think that's a good spot to leave it for everybody. So why don't we thank the 100 people who are still left.

Yeah, we're at 200 people, there's 100 hardcore people have stayed. So if I can just leave one final message is, you know, thanks, I see a lot of people posting nice stuff and all, but for the next month I'm 100% focused on just raising the max and being done. After that, spending all the time out there with working-class and, you know, New York voters. But the people on this call, whether you live in New York City or not, whether you qualify for the match or not, any donation matters. And so I have to put on my begging hat as a politician and just say go to whitneyformayor.com, you can read a little more about my campaign, about me, but most importantly click the donate button and literally if it's only $10, I will be grateful.

All righty, well thanks Whitney and thanks David. I know you guys have a lot on your plate and we do appreciate it. Hopefully this was helpful and, you know, wish you the best of luck Whitney. I think you're gonna do great. Thank you so much. Thank you to Subzero for hosting this and thank you David for coming on and co-hosting. Good show. All right, thanks guys. Bye.

Bye y'all.