What NYC's Most Powerful CEOs Think About Zohran Mamdani

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1:48Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lods podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. A former odd lot guest is very likely to be the next mayor of New York City. That's right. So we interviewed Zoran Mamdani. I think it was in early May. And right after that, I'm not saying I'm not going to take credit for this. But right after that, he really started to surge in the polls and he went on to win the Democratic nomination. I think we take very, very minor credit. I'm sure it was a coincidence. The thing actually that struck me after that episode was hearing from a lot of people who were basically like, I don't like any of his ideas at all, but I still like the guy and I still found him impressive and intelligent and very strong understanding of policy.

2:37And look, I don't think his victory is attributable to us, but I did think that was telling in the sense that a lot of people who may be on paper shouldn't or wouldn't really like some of his views didn't seem particularly threatened by him, which I thought was like really interesting and may have contributed to his sort of extraordinary margin, his extraordinary victory. I do think what's interesting about this whole story is the tension between New York City as this hub of capitalism, this hub of business. You have a lot of money here, a lot of billionaires, obviously, with their own interests.

3:12And now you have this Democratic Socialist candidate who's proposing something a little bit new, although some people would say we had something more similar to that in, say, the 1950s, 1960s New York. But that tension is what I find really fascinating right now. Yeah. So we have to we have to learn more. I mean, again, in the run up to the election, like what are New York City's business financial elites thinking right now? What do they think of a possible Mamdani mayoralty? What do they think about New York City in general? All of this stuff. There's a lot. There's a lot to learn. This is going to be a rich vein of interesting stuff for us for a while.

3:49We're going all New York local politics, I guess. But I do think it has national consequences. International. So we should talk about it. We should definitely talk about it. Anyway, I'm really excited. We do have indeed the perfect guest to talk about how the city's business elite, billionaires, et cetera, are thinking about the city, think about the election, the possibility of Omdani being the mayor. We are going to be speaking with Kathy Wild. She's the president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, which is an organization, a business leadership organization here, all kinds of major employers.

4:23If you read any article about Kathy in the media, described as sort of one of the ultimate power brokers of New York City. Yeah. Words like power brokers, power player comes up in every single one. And so truly the perfect guest. So, Kathy, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Thank you for having me, Joe and Teresa. Absolutely. We're really excited. Why don't you just before we move on, describe what the partnership for New York City is and what you basically do there. The partnership is business working in the interests of the city. It's not a chamber of commerce. It was organized after the city's 1975 fiscal crisis by David Rockefeller, who was then the chair of Chase Bank and other CEOs of the major corporations that were not just businesses headquartered in New York, but were real citizens of New York and trustees of its hospitals and museums and real contributors to the city as philanthropists.

5:20So it is very much a business organization that is designed to tap the expertise and the influence of the business community to support New York City and to maintain it as the city of great economic opportunity. What's the partnership's relationship like typically with the mayoral administration? And are there examples where you've worked together to effectively do something or maybe change the path of policy? Well, absolutely. The partnership's relationship to government is really as an intermediary between business and government. As I said, to provide expertise, to provide advice, to give feedback, really to be a resource more than an adversary with the local government, in particular local state government and to some extent the federal government when there are overriding issues that make a big impact on New York that are being considered in Washington.

6:23When did Zoran come on the radar of the people that you talked to, of the CEOs, etc.? Like in the run up, like was it a month before? Were they thinking about him at all three months before the election? I'm sort of curious, like when it may have flickered in their minds that the Democratic Party could nominate a socialist. I would have to say that it was primary night about 10 o 'clock. Really? Yeah, that's incredible to me. That's incredible to me. Well, I had forewarned them that it was a possibility, but I think Cuomo had been a figure in their lives as Mario's son, as attorney general, as governor for 20 -some years.

7:06And it was kind of a foregone conclusion is the guy we know who's now running for mayor is going to be mayor. Yeah. And especially after Mayor Adams announced he was not going to be in the Democratic primary. And so they had kind of zeroed in on accepting that it was going to be Cuomo. And really no one had met Zoran. What was the mood like on primary night? Did everyone immediately go home and start looking up socialism on the Internet, on chat GPT? Well, I would say hysteria would be a good word for it. Shock was first. Shock first. And what happened? And who is this person? And so I tried to provide some reassurance.

7:49We had, for the past 20 years, led efforts to bring congestion pricing to New York City to both manage traffic, but to really make the city a more efficient place. Excess traffic congestion was costing the city$20 billion a year with lost time, lost productivity. And what makes New York a great place to work is the productive workforce. So we'd been an advocate of congestion pricing, and I had actually met Zoran in that context at the Riders' Alliance, which is a group of subway riders, advocates, and had found him to be a very smart, interesting young man. So I had known him, and then he reached out to me last September and said, I'd like to talk to you about my mayoral prospects when he was polling at 1%.

8:41And so I met him for coffee at the LPQ at 85 Broad, and we had a conversation, and I found him to be smart, and I took him seriously from then on. I'm impressed from his perspective that that early on he wanted to sort of build that connection or make that connection with you. Before you talk more about him, a friend of mine described you as a therapist to the New York City billionaires. They're hysterical on or they're experiencing hysteria on primary night. Did you feel like that was your role in that night? Did you feel like a therapist to the members of the partnership? To provide reassurance to the business community.

9:25I mean, number one, to remind them that many of the things they were most worried about from a democratic socialist candidate were things that he has absolutely no capacity to execute on. So, for example, raising corporate and income taxes is not something that the city or the mayor can do. Free buses is not something the mayor can do and figuring out where you make up that$800 million in revenues. So that was number one, reassuring them that we have a moderate governor who's watching out for business interests, who says she's not going to further raise taxes in New York, which is the highest tax city in the country and in most cases the world for both individual income tax and corporate tax.

10:19So that was number one, providing reassurance that as mayor he would have an agenda, but there are a lot of checks and balances to work through in New York, and it's not a unilateral post. Now, that was more difficult with the real estate community because their concerns having to do with land use proceedings and approvals and construction permits, et cetera, that the mayor does control. Basically, a huge amount of control over that process. That is the one thing that's local and real estate taxes where the mayor has significant influence. So it was more difficult with members of the real estate community who, after the primary, quickly pivoted to remembering what a good friend Mayor Adams was.

11:06So I want to talk more about the concerns of the business community, obviously. But before we do, I can't resist asking, when you first met Zoran over coffee, what advice did you give him? What did you actually say to him about a mayoral run? Number one, I said that you can't lead New York City unless you have a constructive relationship with the Jewish community, because that was the most obvious source of concern that he seemed not able to address. That worried me a lot. Number two, that the solution to affordability is not for government, local government to spend more money. That the money that local government spends has to be accounted for, that you need to raise taxes to support it.

12:01And ultimately, that just ups the cost of living and the cost of doing business in New York. and that all ends up getting passed along to consumers. So the affordability question, which he was absolutely right to emphasize and emphasized from the beginning that we've got to make New York more affordable to not just poor people, to the middle class, to those people who rent an apartment and now the average rent's almost$4 ,000 a month. This is the big concern of employers. And I said, this is their number one concern. How do we keep and retain young talent if they can't afford to rent an apartment in New York City.

12:39Big frustration. So that was kind of the conversation that we had. And he was open to that conversation and interested in learning. I mean, he impressed me right away as somebody who is interested in learning more, but who has very strong opinions and is very committed. And I mean, he's 33 years old and the world is his oyster. Yeah. You mentioned the importance of relations with the Jewish community. And I saw I watched that. I didn't watch the whole debate, but I did watch the last debate. And there was that question about which country you're going to visit first. And every candidate, Bud Soran, said he was going to they were going to visit Israel.

13:21He said he wasn't thinking about who he's going to visit. Can you explain from the perspective of the business leaders, New York City, Why do they perceive that good relations with Israel is such an important aspect of the job? Yeah. Why does the mayor of New York have to have a foreign policy? Well, their fear is that he has a foreign policy. I don't think anybody thinks the mayor of New York has to have a foreign policy, but he has a record of speaking out on issues that impact the Jewish community about Israel that they're very concerned about. So their concern is not having—New York City has a long history of values that are very strong on supporting a diversity of people, are very tolerant of various religious beliefs, and a long history with Israel.

14:20I mean, when Cornell Technion partnered on Technion's, the university in Israel that really led the startup nation movement in Israel and did so much to propel their economy, and they were selected under the Bloomberg administration to establish a first-class engineering school in New York on Roosevelt Island, which has been very successful and is producing a great number of PhDs. And so at the time that they came in, Technion came in, they told me how they had been funded originally. It was New York Jewish philanthropists that funded that effort. So there's this long-term relationship. And obviously, we have many people in New York who are family of Holocaust victims and survivors, and for whom the fact of a Jewish homeland, a safe space for Jews around the world, is of top area of importance.

15:23I think that they are very concerned that the mayor of New York City respect and understand the importance of Israel and our long-term relationship. And that worries them a lot. And that's an issue that I think he has yet to resolve. I think it's difficult because he has strong support in the young Jewish community. And so I'm sure he feels that he's got a lot of people who are with him on the issues of protecting the rights of the Palestinians and concerns about that. So it's this is an area, again, where the fact that he ran a campaign and had built relationships that are a piece of New York City.

16:13He expanded the electorate to folks who have not participated, but he really did not develop much of a relationship with the historic electorate. He was running against the Democratic establishment, not with it. And so the communities where much of the Jewish population is concentrated were not communities he was necessarily reaching out to, except for the young people and the social media crowd. And that's not the people who are most concerned.

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18:45Go to public.com and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com. Paid for by public investing. All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principle. Brokerage services for US listed registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by Backed Crypto Solutions, LLC. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosure. So on the topic of the campaign, I mean, this was one of the really surprising things of him winning. He had this sort of grassroots campaign, which was very much focused on social media, lots of merchandise with really interesting designs.

19:21I've seen the Hot Girls for Zoran t-shirts, people wearing those around town, usually young women, as you mentioned. And I'm curious, are any of the people you're speaking to perhaps thinking differently about campaign donations going forward if they donated billions of dollars for Cuomo and Zoran won? Well, not billions, but millions. Yes. Yes. I would say that But for the most part, what I'm hearing is that people feel that they contributed to Cuomo and that they don't feel they got a very good campaign out of it. They want to meet Zoran. And I think they're making, there are many, particularly in the real estate community, that are stepping up to transfer whatever donations they were making to Cuomo to Eric Adams.

20:20if you will, somebody that they know they can do business with and who has been supportive of tremendously positive growth in the city from the nadir of the pandemic and where our economy was, where our real estate situation. Eric Adams, it should not be ignored that he has, his administration has led rezoning efforts and really changed the zoning code for the first time since 1961. So he's made a tremendous investment in trying to begin the process of making it easier and less expensive to develop housing in the city and supported economic growth overall. So there was concern. I mean, obviously, he's the first mayor that's been indicted.

21:08And when he dropped out of the Democratic primary, I think that solidified most of the money going to Cuomo. But Eric is back in the general and in good form. I noticed you said something, I think your first answer, that the business elite had accepted Cuomo as who was going to be the nominee. Accepted, it does not sound the same as enthusiastically support. I hear that as sort of resigned. Yeah, okay. Status Cuomo. Yeah. And so I'm curious. Come on. You have to laugh at that. Good line. Thank you. Right. Status quo. That's a good one. Thank you. Thank you. That was good. But how did they feel actually about Cuomo?

21:49And also, like, I know there's some questions. It's still unclear whether he's going to run actively in November. But if they do coalesce around someone, does it definitely seem like it's going to be Adams? So far, I think, yes, I think it's going to be Adams. And again, it is the real estate community that's most concerned. You understand that the financial industry in New York basically is prohibited by federal regulation, SEC and FINRA and other regulation, from contributing to state and local candidates beyond a nominal amount of a few hundred dollars. So they are not, for the most part, money players in state and local elections, which has really disadvantaged New York's business community, which represents like 40 percent of our tax base, who can't participate in supporting candidates of their choice.

22:45Well, they can knock on doors like the Zoran volunteers did. They just can't donate gobs of money. And that would be great, but not happening. OK. Right. Yeah. It's most of them are beyond the door knocking age. But your question about Cuomo, Cuomo was attorney general during the financial crisis and was not very friendly toward the financial industry and did not develop relationships that were very positive during his tenure as attorney general with the business community. So that was his job to be an enforcer. And during his term as governor, he came in with a very strong agenda to try and get state spending under control and get taxes under control.

23:30But having made some real progress there on Medicaid reform and pension reform, as the political winds changed, there wasn't that same relationship with the business community. So with the exception of real estate, where he was very pro-growth, investing in infrastructure, supporting real estate development. So I would say that he had relative enthusiasm in the real estate community, but not broadly based in the business community. So on this note, you've emphasized a number of times that a lot of business leaders obviously want to talk to Zoran. They want to get in the room with him. And you are organizing, I believe, discussions between the business community and the mayoral candidate, I think, next week.

24:14We're recording this on, let's see, July 9th. How do you decide who gets to be in the room with Zoran? Well, the first meeting we're doing, and I set this up with Zoran. He called me right after the election and said he wanted to establish those relationships. and I said, well, let's, so we set up a meeting with the CEOs of the partnership that's on Tuesday. And so there'll be, some will join virtually, but it's going to be mostly an in-person 150 maybe CEOs of major companies, major employers in the city who have never met him and will be for the first time getting an opportunity. And that's going to be a conversation with our co-chairs, Rob Speyer of Tishman Speyer and Dr.

25:02Albert Bourla of Pfizer. And so they'll be having a conversation with Zoran and then we'll have some Q &A with our members. And so that's number one. And then - You'll come back next week, right? And we'll do a follow-up to this episode and you just tell us all about how - It'll be interesting, yes. I'm looking forward to that conversation. But I think, again, it's an introduction and I have full confidence, as you know, having met him, Zoran is pretty good at presenting himself and very fast in terms of his thoughtful responses on issues. So I'm looking forward to that because it'll save me a lot of time reassuring him that he's not the devil.

25:43He's okay. And then on Wednesday, Kevin Ryan, who is kind of the father of Silicon Alley, Alley Corp is the name of his corporation, has a prolific history of creating tech companies in New York. Kevin is going to moderate a conversation with him, which will be heavily tech-focused, more entrepreneurs than corporate finance types. So that'll be on Wednesday. And then I should add that on Thursday, we'll be doing breakfast with Mayor Eric Adams and speaking to him about his path forward. And as I said, there's been a lot of support for the policies that Eric Adams has. He started out as mayor. I had the same conversation with Eric.

26:32I'm a Brooklyn person. So I've known Eric for many years and most recently in his capacity as Brooklyn Borough President. But when we started out, he didn't know anybody in the New York business community either. But he introduced himself as saying, my number one priority is public safety. and my number two priority is a thriving economy and I'm with you. And having lived through eight years of Bill de Blasio as mayor, who had nothing to do or to say to them except you're awful people. And as Jamie Dimon famously said, for eight years, I never got a call from Bill de Blasio when he was mayor and have never had a conversation with him.

27:12So Eric immediately reversed the de Blasio big business is bad for New York. And Eric said, I want wealthy people in New York. I want big business in New York. So I don't expect that from Zoran next week. I think that he's not going to have the same unbridled enthusiasm for billionaires. But I do expect that he will come across as a responsible person who's thinking seriously and is open to learning, which is most important, to listening and learning. And I think that the number one concern is, is this a dogmatic, ideological person who is going to be not interested in what we can contribute to the city or what employers contribute?

28:02You mentioned Kevin Ryan. I used to work for Business Insider, which is one of the Alley Corp companies. So I'm a beneficiary of his New York City investments. You know, when the night of the primary, I got some random messages online like, are you going to leave New York City? I'm never going to leave New York City. Like, it's the best city in the world, obviously. But, you know, people do leave. And in 2021 and 2022, people pretended to think that Miami was a better option for them. I think a bunch of them came back or they spent just the minimum amount of time there so they could qualify for their local taxes, etc.

28:39In your view or in the view of the employers of New York City, what are the threats, the substantive threats that would say, OK, this would meaningfully change the desirability of doing business in this town? Number one is public safety. And that's, again, they've appreciated, particularly under Commissioner Tisch and originally under Commissioner Keechan Sewell, they have appreciated that the Adams administration has focused on public safety and that we're— And that's more important than things like taxes for them. Yes, absolutely. Because the whole basis of business being here is the talent pool.

29:14And if talent doesn't want to be here, if they're scared to be in New York City, if they're worried to go on the subway because they might get mugged or pushed in front of a train, that's the worst thing that could happen to New York. And importantly, Zoran has acknowledged that keeping New York a destination for talent is a priority for him. So I think that message is very important. So public safety, number one. And then, as I said before, affordable housing and affordability that, again, allows talent to be here and doesn't have a premium cost. I mean, already in most sectors, New York City salaries have a 20 % premium at least over if you're going to locate in Texas or Florida, whatever.

30:02When it gets higher than that, it becomes hard to explain to shareholders why you're here and why you're creating jobs here. So that's the other consideration. So it's really having a safe city and having an affordable city are the top criteria. And at least in terms of having an affordable city, they've got common cause with Zoran's campaign. This is what I was going to ask you. Are there any areas of, I guess, overlap or agreement between Zoran's agenda and the concerns or the desires of the business community? Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned, one of the big questions that will come up next week, probably the first question that will come up, is what is your commitment to public safety?