I am socially awkward. You are?
Yes. I'm not. I'm extremely shy. I'm not comfortable-
Really? Yeah, oh.
Why are you doing this? My favorite day is, like,
being in my pajamas, watching reruns of Twilight Zone. Really?
Yes, yes, you know. What's your favorite
Twilight Zone episode? There's one where they put on a mask, and it fits the personality of everyone, and then they take off the mask, and it's no longer a mask,
it's their actual faces. What does that mean to you? We all wear a mask every day. We wear a mask of being a parent. We wear a mask of being an employee. But sometimes, if you keep that mask on, you forget who you are, and you take on the
characteristics of the mask. As a candidate for New York City Mayor, Eric Adams leaned into his
working-class upbringing, and former job as a police captain.

to pitch himself as a leader
who truly represented voters, and would restore stability
to a city reeling from Covid, on a human and economic level. And I said to them, I'm the mayor. His message resonated with voters, anxious about the pandemic,
and a spike in gun violence. Here was a moderate Democrat, who pledged to be a friend to unions, while tagging to the
right on police reforms, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, and the NYPD's often violent
response to protests. Now, more than two years into his term, Adams's approval rating has plummeted. While he points to his record of what he calls, Getting stuff done, he's had more success
in getting voters mad, with the homelessness crisis,
billions in budget cuts, hundreds of millions in
police misconduct payouts, and a widening federal
corruption investigation that saw the FBI seize his phones and raid the home of his chief fundraiser.

So, I spent the day with Adams to learn more about how he thinks about these challenges, and his vision for the remainder of his first term. This administration is going to be a retrospected appreciation administration. We already got that. We understand it. Is that how you're abiding the kinda negative interpretation? Yes, of some of what you're doing right now? 'Cause your approval ratings, they kinda suck right now. And I, but it's supposed to. It's supposed to. Because I'm doing all this- You were at, what, 60%, in the first year, I'm doing all this stuff, and now you're down to 28%, which is not just a historic low for you, but for any mayor in the history of that survey. Right, right. So. But what mayor has dealt with Covid, and 177,000 people dropped into this city without any federal support? Mm-hm.

These are hard decisions. And so, I would rather people say, We're gonna take it out on you, Eric, so I can navigate us through this. Yeah. It's my responsibility. I'm the mayor of the city. And I don't sit back and say, Oh my God, my poll numbers are down. No, people are gonna look back over this, and say, This guy managed us through the crises. Because the legacy is not what people think of you while you're there, it's what people look back. When you compare what I have done to any other mayor in the history of this city, people are going to see what I've done. New Yorkers are angry. And so, when you're angry, who you take it out on? The mayor. That's the script. So, you're Eric Adams? Yeah, **** you! This guy's giving me a New York wave, you know? I could walk down the block, some give me the thumbs up.

and others give me another finger, you know? But that's New Yorkers. You know, I wake up in the morning at some time, and look at myself, and I give myself the finger. I'm immune to hecklers. I've been heckled all my life. Okay, see ya later. We'll have a few disruptions as we go on. All my haters become my waiters, when I sit down at the table of success. Let's go! Thank you. She said I'm messing with homeless people. You know that? No? One should be happy if someone wants to make love to them. While many issues that land at Adams's feet are local, from public schools, to crime, to housing affordability, one of his biggest challenges has come from far outside the city's borders. They arrive with almost nothing, migrants bused from Texas to New York City and Washington, DC, by order of Texas Governor, Greg Abbott.

It comes two days after New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, rejected Abbott's offer to him and the DC mayor to come visit the Texas-Mexico border. They just packed 'em on a bus without any direction. They just specifically targeted New York, they, being the governor of Texas. So, how did you learn that that was happening? At 2:00 AM in the morning, I'm getting a call saying, Hey, Eric, we got five buses in here, with people that need to have a place to stay. And you, no warning? No warning, no information, no communication. So, what do you do? We had to step up to the plate, and deal with it, because our laws require. So, now- Where were you when you got this call? Probably in the bed, and laying down, getting ready for the next day. Now, think about this for a moment. Yeah.

177,000 people come here.
Mm-hm. You're Miss Jones, and
you're struggling, you know, to put food on the table.
Mm-hm. All of a sudden, you see people show up, and you're saying, Hey,
Mayor, stop the buses. Right.
I can't. It's against the law.
Right. Hey, Mayor, deport the people. I can't. It's against the law. Hey, Mayor, don't feed
them and house them. I can't. It's against the law. Hey, Mayor, this person
committed a serious felony. He should be deported. I can't. It's against the law. So, New Yorkers are saying, Mayor, why are you doing this to us, not knowing the laws prevent me from doing anything but
house, clothe, feed, educate. If those were not the
laws, what would you do? A combination of things.

Number one, if you commit a serious crime in this city, you will be turned over to ICE, and you will be deported. It is a luxury to be in this city, and in this country, and you will not bring your criminality in the process of doing so. Overwhelming number of migrants want to come here, and take their next steps on the American journey. Mm-hm. Number two, I would let them work. What is more anti-American than telling people, You can't work? All of our ancestors that came here from somewhere, the reason we are where we are is because they had the right to work. Mm-hm. My food service workers are needed, my nurses are needed, my lifeguards are needed. How do you put someone in a position, and tell them, You cannot survive for your family? That is unacceptable, to do so. And that mere part of letting people work

would be a game-changer in this entire migrant asylum-seeker process. Do you blame Trump for any of this? No, I think that what I blame Trump, and what I blame the national leaders, we need real true immigration reform. But you don't see any through-line between Trump's rhetoric, and his policies, and his administration, and what Governor Abbott decided to do. No, I think Governor Abbott- Really? No, I think Governor Abbott's actions were his actions. I think President Trump's actions of, even when we did the Muslim ban, I thought that was wrong. And I think his behavior and comments about it were anti-American, as I believe Governor Abbott's actions are anti-American. But we can't let our national elected leaders off the hook. There are things we can do right now that can resolve this issue, properly funding this. We should not be spending $12 billion. 'Cause Miss Jones, again,

she see cuts in her library services. She see cuts in her afterschool programs. Those are your cuts, though, right? Right. Yeah. Right. Because I have to find $12 billion from somewhere. So, if libraries are closed now on Sundays because of those cuts, I mean, is that fair to then be spending $12 billion to help people who were bused here, when kids who were here, whose parents pay taxes, can't take them to the library on a Sunday? No, it's not fair, but that's the law. Yeah. I can't break the law. The law tells me, You are going to house, feed, clothe, whoever comes here, from anywhere on the globe, for as long as they want it. Mm-hm. That's the law. Either I break the law, and if I break the law, I can be sanctioned as a city, I could be received daily fines.

Legal aid took me to court several times around this issue. My 30-day programs of saying, You're only staying in our care for 30 days, and then you have to be self-sustaining, I was sued around. I was sued for around not having someone in a bed at a certain period of time. So, I'm in court, defending what I believe we should not be using city resources on a national crisis. While many connect New York's recent influx of migrants to the actions of Governor Abbott, those sent from Texas account for a relatively small part of the nearly 200,000 total who've arrived in the city since the spring of 2022. Today, the city's shelter system houses around 65,000 migrants. That's on top of the non-migrant homeless population, which has surged in recent years. So, the economic recovery, post-Covid, has not been perfect, right?

No, it has not.
Homelessness. Mm-hm.
It's a big problem. Mm-hm.
Child homelessness. Mm-hm.
What is it, one in four children?
Right, in poverty. Living in poverty, right.
Living in poverty now. Can you talk a little bit about that and how the recovery has been uneasy? And first, I think it's so important to look at what we
inherited January 1st, 2022. Not only did we inherit Covid, unemployment was a real problem, private-sector jobs were
tanked, all of those things. Now, two years later, two
years and two months later, people are back on our subway system, as I stated, about 4.1 million people, more private-sector jobs
in the history of the city, 62 million tourists
are coming to our city. We propped up permanent
programs with temporary dollars. The sunsetting of those stimulus dollars.

it created this rush of,
Yeah, instead of having those programs in place. We would have traditionally
been able to say, Okay, we're gonna manage those closing, like what we're doing, and some of the afterschool
programs, some are rising. But added on that, we had
177,000 migrant asylum seekers. That's costing us $12 billion.
Right. Can you talk, what have your discussions with the White House been like? 10 trips.
10 trips to Washington? Yes.
And what's that like when you go there? Explaining the urgency of the moment, and- To the president, or to who? I had conversation with
the president early on. We had two conversations around this. What do you think of him? Listen, I think Biden
has done an amazing job. President Biden, you know, has done, he has done a great job. No one thought our economy
was going to survive. We're coming back in our economy.

He was extremely helpful around public safety. So, all of this seems-
We're gonna have to wrap it here. Who said it's time to bounce? Yeah, we have a 2:30 p.m. In spite of the low approval ratings, there was no shortage of New Yorkers scrambling for selfies outside of the coffee shop where I met with Mayor Adams. You got it, man. Keep it real, flip it over. And as a politician who makes policing his primary issue, it never seemed far from his mind. Watch your step, watch your step. Watch your step, watch your step. Thank you, thank you. That's a New York welcoming. Watch your step, man. It's not often you get a picture with the mayor. Thanks for reaching out. All right, you take care. Okay, take care. Have a good day, man. All right, brother. Sometimes, you know, you do some stuff.

and my team will cringe. They're like, Oh my God, I
can see the headline tomorrow. You know? But if I try to be who
people want me to be, I will never be myself. If I wanna wear my earring,
I'm gonna wear my earring. Are you the only mayor in
history with an earring? That's a great question. I'm probably the only. I know I'm the only mayor in New York City who's baldheaded and Black. You know? But people are looking
for authentic leaders. They're not looking for perfect leaders. They, you know, 'cause
none of us are perfect. And so, you know, I
just think that this is, people have shifted in their needs, 'cause they're no longer listening to you. Mm-hm.
They are feeling you. Right.
They don't wanna know what you're saying. It's like, What am I feeling,

that's coming through,
Right. when you're in a room with me, when I'm seeing you at an interview, when you're walking the streets? And that is just where we are right now. So, the authenticity thing is sort of like a, just
a vibe-level thing. Right.
Yeah. Right, right, right, right.
Is that right? Without a doubt. Like, I'm a Wim Hof guy. I do a lot, you know,
the whole cold baths. You know.
Do you do the cold plunge for the health benefits, or for mental? Combination, combination.
Yeah. If someone would have told me that, Eric, you are going to be taking
cold showers every morning, I would say, You outta your mind. So, you get into, like, a meditative state when you do it, or, yeah?
Yeah, and it's just a peaceful state. Yeah.
You know? When you get into the
shower, and it's cold,

the first thing you do is what? You hold your breath.
Yeah. Instead of just breathing. Just allow, you know, the breath work. And when I found, after listening to him, and say, Don't fight it, just go into it. Enjoy the beauty of the cold water.
Right. It helps you understand,
your mind is more powerful than what we've realized. And it teaches you that you are
the controller of your body. Your body's not the
controller of your mind. And so, do you apply that to any situation where you have to experience
discomfort or pain? Think about it. Think about the role of being the mayor of
the city of New York. Well, tell me about it. You are, anything bad that
happens, you are blamed. Guys stop me and say,
I'm getting divorced. It's your problem. You know what I'm saying? You're the-
Is it ever your problem?

It won't even matter when you're the mayor of a city. Yeah, you are the closest to the concerns that people have. And when you're the mayor of a city like New York, 8.3 million people, 35 million opinions, any given day, you are going to feel the brunt of everything. So, all of these things are happening at once. And you have to be able to say to yourself, Listen, discomfort comes with the job. If you wake up every day hoping that you don't have discomfort, 5:30 this morning, I get information about someone being shot on my subway system that I want to make safer, and that we're getting riders back on. You have to be ready for that every day. Every day, I know when I wake up and I finish my meditation and my breathing and my smoothie and I start to look at the communications, I'm dealing with some form of crises that has happened.

According to the Adams administration, gun crime and homicides have decreased during his tenure. But several violent incidents on subways, along with persistent poverty and homelessness, have undermined his efforts to portray the city as safer. We felt many years of disorder and chaos in our subway system. We felt that. We saw encampments, we saw people with severe mental health illnesses, high-profile cases. We have over 4 million riders a day, with about six crime, felony crimes, that take place on our subway system, a day. Think about that. 4 million riders, 4.1, 4.2, six felony crimes a day. But if you're the victim of one of those six crimes, I'm sure you don't Without a doubt. think it matters, right? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And that's why my job is to get rid of those six, and to create an atmosphere, when you're in the subway system.

you're seeing the omnipresence
of a police officer. 'Cause I'm, you must feel safe. To many, the omnipresence of police, later joined by a deployment of several hundred heavily-armed
National Guard troops, created an atmosphere akin to a war zone. Civil rights groups called
it over-militarized, and an overreaction. I'm curious, that strikes me
as the type of policy decision that's made out of fear, right? That's made in kind of a gut reaction to something terrible and traumatizing that happens in the city.
Right. And I think you see that
a lot in government. You could look at the federal government, and say that the creation of
DHS is an example of that, Mm-hm.
after 9/11, right? So, how do you think about creating policy in the middle of real-world events? And how do you, I guess,
do you ever think about making sure that you're
not being overly reactive

to things that have just happened? It is extremely challenging, particularly in the political environment. Because if something is happening, like, when you get a
Michelle Go-type incident, a young woman, successful financier, pushed on the subway track by a person with mental health crises. If you were to become deaf
to the call of the public, and say, That was one incident, I'm not going to respond to it, that's a dangerous scenario. So, you have to, what you wanna do is you want to put in place policies that are going to be
smart and long-lasting. So, when we looked at what happened there, we did an analysis, we stated, we're having too many people with severe mental health crises, who can't take care of themselves, and they're a danger to themselves. So, we put in place an
involuntary removal to hospital for necessary care. We built an infrastructure around that. We got a lot of pushback.
Mm-hm.

A lot of people said that people who are dealing with severe mental health illness should be allowed to walk the streets. And I said no to that. The policy we put in place, around involuntary removals, was to make sure that it's a real policy, and not a symbolic policy. We wanna give people the care. I could easily remove you, and just shut you in somewhere. But no, I wanna remove you, and I want to give you the care and wraparound services. So, in that response to the needs, you must make sure you have policies that are real substantive in nature. 'Cause being mayor is being symbolic and substantive. It seems like crime is an area where conservative principles sort of go out the window. Typically, you have conservatives talking about small government, liberty, not denying people their freedom, their rights, right? I mean, in theory, in a perfect form of conservatism, philosophically, that's what you're talking about.

And then, when you're talking about crime, nobody seems to care about denying people liberty, or, you know, trading safety, right? So, how do you think about, you know, you're talking about putting cameras in the subway cars. You're talking about having police in there, monitoring things. You're talking about locking people up who have mental health problems. How do you weigh liberty versus security? Public safety is our prerequisite to prosperity. I say that over and over again. I have a lot of one-liners, you know? I have noticed that, yeah. Do you spend a lot of time coming up with them, or they come naturally? No, they just flow, you know? We have to be safe. Yeah. And I'm not gonna, I'm not going to compromise on that. And a lot of people are idealistic, but I am realistic, about what it takes to be safe in a city.

You were talking about waking up to some terrible news about a shooting, and then you were talking about the kind of energy, having migrants in the city, or all the different facets of life here, and challenges. Mm-hm. Are you someone who absorbs the emotions of other people, or how do you process all of the vacillating emotions of the people around you? And that's a great question. As much as we don't want to acknowledge it, vicarious trauma is real. Mm-hm. And as a city employee, all day, every day, you are feeling the pains of people. And so, if you're an emergency room doctor, every day you're coming in, you're experiencing the trauma of people. And you know, I'm the mayor. It's my job to keep them safe. As a police officer, I just had to worry about my beat. As a captain, I just had to worry about my precinct.

But now, as the mayor, I
have to worry about the city. And, you know, there are
days that you're saying, you know, Did I drop the ball? Did I miss something? Could
I have done it better? And you have to really understand that, you know, are you committed? You know, I've learned that
I have one responsibility. Do the best I can. Get up every day, don't
shortchange New Yorkers. You can lie to people, but
you can't lie to yourself. At the end of the night, you know, when I'm on my knees
praying, I ask myself, Did you do the best you can today? What do you normally say?
Damn right. Have you ever felt like you didn't? I leave everything I have. Not a single day where you were like, Eh, I could've handled that
a little bit better, or? There are days I say I
could've handled it better.

Yeah, but it wasn't because I wasn't trying to do the best I can, right. I can only do the best I can. New Yorkers are going to have a mayor that gave them every ounce. I think of the great one, Wayne Gretzky, when he lost his first Stanley Cup, and he went into his locker room, and they were all arguing with each other. And then, being the gentleman he was, he went into the locker room of the opposing team, and he stated that he saw them all lay down on the benches. It was quiet. They left everything they had on the ice. I'm going to leave everything I have on the ice.

Why NYC Mayor Eric Adams Isn't Worried About Approval Ratings

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