Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Delta... This is New York!

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

This was supposed to be the summer that we returned to normal, here in New York City and in every major city around the world. Right? But now there’s increasing speculation that it might not happen, because of the Delta variant, and other variants that may hit us from the mutating virus. How should our government and public health leaders respond? How should we respond? We wanted to sit down with frequent Post-Corona guest John Podhoretz for a midsummer check-in on where we are with the City’s return. Specifically, we wanted to return to a topic John joined us to discuss last year - Broadway - when would Broadway really re-open, as that’s a proxy for New York’s return to its vibrant and striving pre-Corona past. John Podhoretz is the editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine, a columnist for the New York Post, and a long-time writer about live theater, films and popular culture. He’s also a fellow New Yorker, with whom I banter with on an ongoing basis about the state of our City. Keep in mind, pre-Corona, Broadway attracted some 15 million theater-goers and close to $2 billion in revenues in a typical year. And that doesn’t even include all the other derivative jobs that are generated from millions of theater-goers attending shows each year. According to New York City’s tourism agency, in a typical year, there are 66 million visitors to NYC, generating $72B in economic activity and $7B in tax revenues. According to the organization Broadway League, close to $15 billion of that economic activity and 100,000 jobs here come from people going to shows, and visiting restaurants, hotels, transportation, and all the other local services tied to the theater experience. Lots of excitement around Springsteen having re-opened his show on Broadway, but who else? Is this pop culture economy of New York coming back? If not, is that because of structural obstacles with New York’s overall return? Or is the Delta variant the new game-changer? And what about Eric Adams - the favorite to be New York’s next mayor - what do we think of his plans to bring this City back to life? We’ll get into all these topics against the backdrop of Delta and New York.

I don't think we're teetering. I think we're on the verge of a restoration of the masking and sort of moderate lockdown regime. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Delta, this is New York City. This was supposed to be the summer that we returned to normal, right? Here in New York City and in every major city around the world. But now there's increasing speculation that it might not happen because of the Delta variant and other variants that may hit us from the mutating virus. How should our government and public health leaders respond? How should we respond? We want to sit down with frequent post-corona guest, friend of the pod, John Podhoretz, for a midsummer check-in on where we are in the city's return. Specifically, we wanted to come back to a

topic John joined us to discuss last year about Broadway. When would Broadway really reopen? As that's a proxy for New York's return to its vibrant and striving pre-corona past. As our listeners know, John Podhoretz is the editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine. He's a columnist for the New York Post, and he's a longtime writer about live theater, films, and popular culture. He's also a fellow New Yorker with whom I banter with on an ongoing basis about the state of the city, sometimes on this podcast and sometimes not. Now, just for context, keep in mind when we talk about Broadway that pre-corona, Broadway attracted some 15 million theatergoers on an annual basis. That's close to $2 billion in revenues in a typical year. And that doesn't

even include all the other derivative jobs that are generated from millions of theatergoers attending shows each year. According to New York City's tourism agency, in a typical year, there are 66 million visitors to New York City, generating $72 billion in economic activity and $7 billion in tax revenues. According to the organization Broadway League, close to $15 billion of that economic activity and 100,000 jobs here come from people going to shows and visiting restaurants and hotels and using transportation and all the other local services tied to the theater experience. So there's lots of excitement you can imagine around Bruce Springsteen having reopened his show on Broadway. But who else?

Is the pop culture economy of New York coming back or not? And if not, is that because of structural obstacles with New York's return? Or is the Delta variant the new game changer? And what about Eric Adams, the favorite to be New York's next mayor? What do we think of his plans to bring the city back to life? We'll get into all these topics against the backdrop of Delta and New York. This is Post-Corona. And I'm pleased to welcome John Podhortz back to the Post-Corona podcast. John, this is your third visit on the Post-Corona podcast. It's my third Post-Corona podcast. I am honored.

I feel like the Francis McDormand of the podcast. Three Oscars. I'm three Post-corona appearances. There are few of us, and we're mighty. We don't have podcast swag, but if we did, you would be the first one to receive it. Unlike the merch from Commentary. Merch.commentary.org. That's right.

All the post-corona podcast listeners should go to the merchandise tab at the commentary website and order podcast merch. They actually have very cool merch. And if you're a regular listener to the commentary podcast, as I am, you will appreciate some of that merch. Okay. So, John, you were on this podcast in December of last year, and then in April of this year, we're going to focus on some of the predictions you made about where New York City would be now. But before we get to whether or not we can hold you accountable for your predictions, I want you to just describe, I want to set the table here in terms of where we are right now in the pandemic, because it's like this weird phase. Here we are in the middle of summer, and there was this sense for the beginning of the summer,

as everyone was getting vaccinated, as there was this pent-up demand for a return to economic and cultural normalcy, and everyone, you know, there was just unbelievable enthusiasm and energy, and now we're, like like teetering a little bit because some of that energy could be suffocated. So what's going on and why? I don't think we're teetering. I think we're on the verge of some kind of a restoration of the masking and sort of moderate lockdown regime. We already have it in the largest county in the United States. Los Angeles County.

In Los Angeles County, which announced a masking policy indoors for everyone vaccinated or unvaccinated. The number of deaths in Los Angeles County from COVID, the last time I looked on a daily basis was two. New York City, I think. And hospitals aren't being overrun. They're not being overrun. In New York, just to give you an example of how this works,

there is the man who is going to be borough president of Manhattan, Mark Levine, who is the, who is the head of the health committee of the city council, and is a COVID hysteric, just, you know, put, breathlessly put up on Twitter the fact that hospitalizations are rising in New York City. And he put up a chart showing, you know, from the horrors of last April, May, June, to then the spike in January to now, there are 249 people in the hospital with COVID and 52 people in ICU. In the entirety of new york city a city of 8.4 million people

and levine is demanding a new masking regime for the vaccinated and unvaccinated this is he's not the only one the atlantic published two pieces today about why people should put masks back on. And there seems to be a mad rush in the wake of the Delta variant and the not really alarming numbers that the Delta variant is producing in terms of hospitalizations and deaths to compel nice respectable vaccinated people to uh sheep-like return to this uh regime in which we are no which we are not allowed to see other people's faces and in which we are supposed to sort of live in in in fear even as they're telling us that the delta that there is an 83 according to the latest study that there is 83 protection whatever that means from uh the mrna vaccinations against the delta variant so let's i want to stay on the numbers just for a minute here. So first of all, what we know is we still know, thanks to some kind of like, you know, divine intervention, that children are barely affected by COVID and so far what we know, barely affected by the Delta variant. That still holds, right and it's not look again if you look at the numbers you see an astoundingly small

number of children or people under the age of 18 who have been hospitalized or who have died the numbers remain out of uh 75 million people under the age of 18, 336 deaths, I believe, from COVID since the beginning of the pandemic. 336. There are 75 million Americans under the age of 18. Right. You can't even come up with a fraction to express that.

Just to make that clear, and the vast majority of people who cannot be vaccinated, as we know, are under the age of 12, right? According to the latest numbers that I've seen, as we are speaking, for the most threatened population in the United States, that is adults over the age of 18, and I mean, we can even break it down. 18 and up, 68% of Americans have at least one dose, 60% are fully vaccinated, which means that in a matter of a couple of days, we will hit that magical 70% number of at least partially vaccinated Americans,

and we are a couple of weeks away from having 70% of everybody over the age of 18 fully vaccinated. And we have a Delta variant for which these vaccinations are a perfect and extraordinary protection for everybody who has been vaccinated. So when we see these stories,

so we see these stories like the Democratic caucus from the state of Texas where they flew and three or four members from the state legislature got COVID. When we hear about Nancy Pelosi's office or the White House or the New York Yankees, we see these stories, they lack any kind of context, right? I mean, in terms of how to put them in perspective. Well, there are two possible perspectives.

One of which is, yeah, it's possible if you are in a small enclosed space with somebody who has COVID and you are vaccinated, you may end up testing positive for COVID with no symptoms. And you have absolutely no symptoms and it doesn no symptoms, and it doesn't bother you, and it doesn't affect you. It's not even the flu.

It's not even close to the flu. It's nothing, right? Or people aren't really telling the truth about whether they're vaccinated. So explain that. That's what we don't know. So the Yankees, right? I mean, whatever. They say they're vaccinated. How do we. That's what we don't know. Well, so people, so the Yankees, right? I mean, whatever, they say they're vaccinated. How do we know they're vaccinated? Oh, we know a lot of people under the age of 40 are refusing to get vaccinated. Why wouldn't somebody in sports refuse

to get vaccinated? Is there some, is there a vaccine cop that is ensuring that they have a vaccination card or the Excelsior pass that you get in New York State or something? I doubt it. I mean, I doubt that the players union would allow that to happen. So we're told they're all fully vaccinated, but we don't know if they're vaccinated. So one thing I was perplexed by, so I'm living now in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I, even before the news of the Delta variant had kicked in, I'd walk the streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or I'd walk through Central Park, and most of the people I would see were wearing masks.

Now, the numbers on vaccinations in New York City are high. I got to believe the numbers in Manhattan are even higher. And I got to believe if you were looking for a subset of the American population that is an outlier in terms of high numbers of vaccinations, it would be the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And yet in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, everybody was wearing masks. So what is going on? This is precisely the point. Because if you are going to push the button that says panic, the people who are going to panic are the people who are vaccinated. Because they are the onesalarm the American people about

the dangers of this variant, the people who are going to respond first are the ones who are the most responsive to these authorities who are talking about it, like Mark Levine, the head, the incoming borough president of Manhattan. And, go ahead. Yeah, no, so of course they're the ones who are going to mask up again. Because what did they say? They say, you know, look, I mean, it's really, the protection's very high. I mean, if you listen to the way Fauci says, he says,

everybody needs to get vaccinated. The protection's very high it's very high of course you know look things could be uh and we could be back in the position where people have to wear a mask I mean we're having these conversations every day so if you're like an a student if you're like the sort of person who goes through your life you know looking to get a gold star for your personal behavior your personal conduct you're gonna sort of person who goes through your life looking to get a gold star for your personal behavior and your personal conduct, you're going to sort of say, well, what am I waiting for? Am I going to wait for the CDC to say I've got to put a mask on again? They're going to say it, so I'll put it on now.

So I'll keep it on. I mean, I don't know. I mean, how do I know? How do we know? We don't even really know. And those are the people who are going to get vaccinated. And in my estimation, I mean, I don't have any evidence of this this is just sort of my understanding of human nature

the people who aren't have made a very considered decision that they're not going to get vaccinated it's been seven months it's been seven months since the vaccines are around anybody who isn't getting it is is is

not getting it for a reason they're not getting because they don't have access to it i mean that is a that's a bald-faced lie everybody has access to it in the united states it's free and all of that they don't want to be vaccinated well how do you react to the you know the the confusing i'll uh you know i'll i'll be um generous here and say some of the confusing information dissemination about the vaccines i mean i think it's very simple i think what what you say what i mean i don't know how you say this if you're biden or you know whatever or fauci or something but you say if you get vaccinated uh you're you're you're in the clear you really shouldn't be worried about getting COVID.

If you're not vaccinated, you should be worried about getting COVID, and it's on you. It is on you, buddy, and it's on your children. And if you want to walk around believing nonsense that you read on Reddit about how it's bad, because you might want to have children in three years, so you're not going to get vaccinated, you go right ahead. But the idea that your behavior, your considered decision not to do this, should have the effect of forcing the 70% of adults over the age of 18

who have basically gotten vaccinated already, and this incredible achievement. I mean, that's the other thing that gets me. We're now in this pessimistic phase about this and and a lot of this is democrats wanting to blame trump voters and and and and all that talk about how it's all tucker carlson's fault and all this you know just close to 200 million people in this country have been vaccinated in seven we've never we've never sought to have anything like this happen before it's a huge accomplishment you know there's been a national mobilization uh we don't we don't have the entire population as the as the you know as

the baseline because uh because there are i don't know what it is i think it's uh 50 or 60 million people under the age of 12 who can't get it, right? So it's 270 million people of whom, you know, among the adults, 70% have had at least one shot. And by, you know, the middle of August, there will be 70% will be fully vaccinated of the entire adult population of the United States. And the health messaging by the health, you know, by sort of the health media has gone in this entirely pessimistic talking down direction about the terror that we face in terms of this. And again, they're saying that children are going to have to wear masks in schools. You know, the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending masks for every child over the age of two,

as though there are not profound psychological consequences for making children walk around and not being able to see the faces of other kids and other adults, like the untold issues that are raised by that. It's a horror show. It is a horror show. And they're talking down the achievement of vaccination. And frankly, I think there is an interesting political fight

here because it cannot possibly be in Biden, in the political interest of this administration, not to declare victory over the virus. No, you know they wanted to. Their goal was to have their equivalent of their Yom Ha'atzmuth moment in Israel, which was July 4th, right? They were going to have whatever the goal was. They their equivalent of their Yom Ha'atzmuth moment in Israel, which was July 4th, right?

They were going to have... What was the... Whatever the goal was. They said it was going to be 70%. So basically, it's about... They were about a month early. But they're going to get to their 70%. And now they're not going to be able to have a celebration.

And what's more, if the CDC or whoever cdc is going to win this argument and there is going to be a mask recommendation made what are the economic consequences of that going to be i mean what are the spiritual i want to i want to stay on this okay so so then what are the motivations of government leaders like you said the incoming borough president of Manhattan? Whatever the logical extension of what they're diagnosing right now is a return to some version of these restrictions. restrictions and i can't believe i mean it's in their interest because it's going to slow down economic growth in new york city and in cities you know across the country so what are they thinking why is it levine's interest because he has a vaccine mr covid news on twitter uh you know he became a new york city celebrity in part because of that and it's the same incentive structure that the entire health

bureaucracy or the public health bureaucracy has in my view in relation to this which is that they uh they they like they like it they like it they you know fauci said i think people should wear masks whenever they're sick for the rest of eternity if they have a right we're not going to shake hands anymore yeah we shouldn't shake hands anymore he likes it he likes it it it. It's funny. He's an 80-year-old man. God love him, whatever. The consequences of what it is that he is suggesting are so far beyond his writ. do with social cohesion, the American spirit and all of that, and this whole notion that you can separate out all of that from these public health orders. I mean, the public health director of Los Angeles County, Barbara Frere, isn't even a doctor. She's some kind of PhD in communications from Brandeis. And her entire career has largely been about talking about how the healthcare system is unfair to minorities.

So what she knows about epidemiology can, is what I know about epidemiology, which is what she reads in the newspapers. And so she can say whatever she wants. I can't impose my views on everybody, but she can sort of impose her views on everybody. I noticed the sheriff of Los Angeles County said, hey, I'm not enforcing any of this.

Don't you get me involved in your nonsense. I'm not doing that. You can't get me to walk around arresting people with my guys for people who aren't wearing masks. And I'm not going to do that. So even there, you have a kind of interesting division between this world of people who are incentivized to be hawkish on this. And I think everybody else, and then people who, like I say, are sort of like good but what about the argument that some of the epidemiologists make that the masks the reimposition the reimposition of the

masks will help us reduce you know this variant mutating and getting new variants and it just slows down that entire process yeah well okay so, okay. So here's the ultimate problem with this is are you going to make policy about the single most disruptive event of our lifetimes on the basis of a fear of something that hasn't happened yet? But may, but you don't know if it will. But it could, but it won't, but it will. There are two other, there are two ways of looking at this. One of which is, are we actually now taking as our goal or our purpose, the eradication of COVID? Because the eradication of COVID is a matter lasting decades. We eradicated smallpox. You know, the first time anybody was vaccinated against smallpox was in the 18th century i mean this is not people exposing themselves to smallpox in order to

prevent them from getting larger smallpox happened in the 18th century we don't we you don't eradicate diseases with a snap of your fingers and it's like like, you know, what did Boris Johnson say when he announced that they were ending COVID restrictions? He said, we need to learn how to live with this disease, meaning that there's going to be some version of it around, there'll be variants, and this will happen just as they're, that's where it's like the flu. And if we don't, if we hold to this impossible standard, that we can't do anything unless we have 95% vaccination rates, human nature has taught us a very important lesson here, I think. I mean, social scientists who are serious people should be studying this forever, which

is you say to people, okay, here is this thing. It's a vaccine. It's going to help you with this and get your life restored and help your children and all of this. And you throw it out there and you tell people and you give them all the information. You tell them. And in the end, 60 to 70, you know, 20 to 40% of them aren't going to do it because they don't trust you and they don't trust this and they have their own ideas and they

don't like doctors. And, you know, when they went to a doctor, they were misdiagnosed with something and they read something on Facebook or they read something here or their mother told them something else or their uncle had something. And this is what it's going to be like. This is, and this was probably always true.

We just never had a kind of collective understanding. You know, we didn't have these kind of stats and a collective understanding that in the end, you ask people to do it, and if you get 70% of people to do it, that's pretty amazing. I have the numbers. I just pulled up the numbers. So

nearly 80% of those over 65 years old, so they're the ones at highest risk, are vaccinated. And 60% of all adults are vaccinated. Those are extraordinary numbers. Boris Johnson, I agree, has been very impressive.

The chief medical officer of the U.K. said, quote, we could get into trouble again surprisingly fast. And despite the chief medical officer saying that, that things could get really bad quickly, Prime Minister Johnson is saying full steam ahead. We're reopening. Right. I mean, it's not, I mean, the odd thing is, right, so it's not really full steam ahead.

It's, okay, we have the vaccines. Either the vaccines keep you from getting, give you immunity against or they they they weaken its effect on you dramatically extraordinarily and so that's what happens if you're vaccinated and if you're not vaccinated fine that's your responsibility then the obvious rejoinder to that is well, you can't say that about kids You can't say that about people under 12. You can't say that because they're it's not approved for them and their children and you can't just you know, leave them to the hazards of A terrible, you know of a terrible, you know, of a terrible virus. And guess what?

They don't get it. They don't get it. They don't transmit it. And they don't have it. And they don't die from it. And they're not hospitalized from it. An infinitesimal number of them get this. And so that theory, which is what undergirds the American Academy of Pediatrics

saying kids over two should wear masks, is an extremist theory. It is extremism to say that what we're trying to do is okay. If you reduce the replication of the virus by 50%, you reduce the number of variants by 50%. Isn't that important? Yeah, but how do we know in which direction? Like, I mean, this is the thing about the variants. It's like apparently there could be an Iota variant or an Epsilon variant or whatever. Delta Airlines, I'm sure, wished that they picked one of those.

Yeah, right. Yeah. It could be stronger or it could be weaker. I mean, it could evade certain things and strengthen in others. It could wreak havoc in other countries and have no effect here. I mean, that's part of the problem here is it's not going away. And so either you're telling people that we are living in an atmosphere in which every couple of months they could say, you know what, your kids have to come home from school for another two weeks and go on Zoom, or you have to wear a mask everywhere,

or at the worst, you're not allowed to go into your office, or you can't go to a stadium, or you can't go to a movie theater, and all of that. And then, really? We're going to live like that? We've already seen, we're living with the consequences. We have this roaring recovery, right? You were talking about it. We were going to get the GDP numbers and they're going to be like, your eyes are going to pop out of your head when you get the second quarter GDP numbers. But we already have this massive supply chain disruption all over the place

because of what happened last year. Are we going to go back into that and choke the recovery off, like, you know, the third quarter numbers if we have some kind of a resurgence of a lockdown, even mildly? What happens to the supply chain then? What happens to, we're already hearing there's, you know, terrible labor shortages.

Then you're imposing new forms of labor shortage. I just don't. And you know, yeah, Biden and Ron Klain, the chief of staff and all of this are chicken. I think they're chicken. I think they won't go and say, all right, enough. Like I'm the president of the United States, enough already. We did this for a year and a half. Ganoog, we're done. We got to live with it. We got to recover. Our entire political future is based on this. Everything we want to do is based on it. It's based on a roaring recovery and things being good. You are not going to talk this country down into another emotional tailspin.

Right. But they can't do it. July 20th, Wall Street Journal editorial, I'll quote from it. COVID was always destined to become endemic. As with other viruses, the hope is that as it mutates, it will become less deadly, even if it becomes more contagious. The policy goal all along has been to minimize COVID's impact on society and the healthcare system with vaccines and testing, Right. And there's been this weird transformation of the entire logic of everything, which was we had to stop the spread and go into lockdown in order to save the healthcare system from exploding or being overrun with patients who couldn't be treated.

And then since they couldn't be treated, COVID would then ravage everywhere. And now this is sort of locking down for the sake of locking down for an eradication goal that is nonsensical. And in part it's nonsensical because we now know that it's not reachable. We know this is the United States of America.

You cannot get 100% participation in the vaccination regime. This is very clear. And you know, people who don't get vaccinated are idiots, but so what? So, you know, people- Let's just stay on that for one second. So you recently on your podcast had MBD, Michael Brendan-Doherty on from National Review to talk about what I thought was an excellent piece about how we've basically bungled our communication with those who are vaccine skeptical, vaccine resistant.

I think he doesn't like the term anti-vaxxers. He thinks there are plenty of people who don't have the vaccine that aren't anti-vaxxers. They're just skeptical. A friend of mine who's a professor of behavioral economics argues, a liberal guy, argues that we should be more candid in our messaging, more candid than you're prescribing that President Biden be, which is to say there are risks. You know, this professor, I don't want to name him. I don't know if he wants to be quoted, but he says, he says, we shouldn't say the vaccine is safe and effective, even if we believe it. We should say there are, we believe the vaccine is safe and effective and we believe there are still risks with it. But there are also risks with getting COVID.

And the risks with getting COVID are greater than the risks, any risk you could possibly imagine with the vaccine. In other words, just change the way we talk about it to those who are skeptical. Right. Well, look, so one of the numbers is floating around in the conspiracy theory world is that the, you know, the sort of the national health care statistic thing, VAERS, says that, you know, 6,800 people have died of COVID who've been vaccinated or have been vaccinated have died. But that's 6,800 people who have died vaccinated in the United States. People die every day and they die of things that aren't COVID, even if they've been vaccinated and all of that. But it's very easy to sort of take these stats and kind of mush them

into something that is, that is recognizably something that will cause people to increase their vaccine hesitancy. What I took away from, from Michael Brendan Doherty's appearance and his piece and all that is, this is a fool's errand. We've said what we've said. The vaccines are out there. People know people who've gotten vaccinated and whatever. And they know a lot of people who've gotten vaccinated. And it is now a deliberate, conscious, considered choice not to get vaccinated. And as you know, as I say, as my grandmother would say,

Zai Gesund, like to your health. Good. You've made this choice. We're now in a bizarre position where the vaccinated are being governed by the unvaccinated. There was a time when we, the whole notion of this was, you know, we all had to live under these restrictions because there was no way of preventing the transmission of the virus otherwise. And so better to be safe than sorry, there was no other way other than keeping people apart to the extent possible to restrain the transmission of the virus. And now it's in order to uh i don't know what in order

in order to allow the unvaccinated to remain unvaccinated i mean not that they there's no way to force them but in order to allow that then you have to go around in masks all right well i mean screw them you know it's like, fine. You know, I'm not wearing a, I mean, the whole point of wearing a mask is so that you don't give somebody else COVID. It's not so you don't breathe in COVID as far as I understand it.

So you don't give somebody else, I'm not going to give anybody COVID. So if you tell me, Mark Levine or whoever's in New York or, you know, Barbara for whatever, that I'm supposed to wear a mask, I want to throw an egg at your head. I mean, I did what I was supposed to do. You're telling me all the health stats say I'm not going to give anybody else COVID. Don't tell me to put a mask on. I did what you told me to do. And now you're telling me I got

to wear a mask. Well, I don't have to wear a mask. You tell them to wear a mask. And if they don't wear a mask, and they get other people sick, then I hope they feel really sorry about it. But where else are we in relation to this? OK, so where we are is we're in the middle of summer in New York City. We were all excited about New York City's return to normalcy. And I think it applies. New York City can be a proxy for cities all over the world. I want to go back to some predictions you made in our earlier podcast, so I'm going

to make you uncomfortable and play a few choice soundbites that you made, and then you'll tell us where you think we are relative to what you predicted. So the first one was about Broadway and the return to Broadway and why you believe Broadway would never be the same so let's play that first one this is from December of last year the presumption that you know we're just going to reopen and it's going to reopen and then all the shows that were hits before are going to come back and be hits I think think, again, is very questionable. The bloom is off the rose on some of these things. The feeling that you have to see Hamilton or you'll die, whatever that pressure was, isn't really there anymore. That cultural pressure

has lessened. You'll need new things that people are desperate to see. Okay. So why were we talking about that in December of 2020? Because New York City pre-pandemic, the Broadway industry was generated about $2 billion in revenues. You know, it was, it was, you know, directly, I think it was about 500 million directly, but then obviously there's all these ancillary businesses. So it's in a really important part of the New York City economy. Employees, about 100,000 people. I think something like 15 million people a year were going to Broadway shows in the last years, last few years during this boom in Broadway. And you were saying in December, it's over. It's never going to be the same. Do you still feel that way? I do.

I do for a couple of reasons. I mean, I'm struck, by the way, that some of the reopening plans are interesting because they take account of what I'm saying. There are shows that are reopening that are reopening for a limited run. I assume they're reopening for a limited run because they can't get fully staged new shows up pretty much until the end of December. And so you have shows that have closed, like a musical called Waitress. I think they probably have the set somewhere in storage, and they can go back into the theater that they were in, and they can run it for 12 weeks or 15 weeks or something like that and like get people re-acclimated to the theater that's one show that's doing that there's

another show called jagged little pill that's reopening that i think probably they figure only has a short shelf life but you know we'll see um there's one musical that's opening in September called Six, which was a highly anticipated show about the wives of Henry VIII that was a hit in London. But it's a small-scale show with a cast of six, and they're the wives of Henry VIII, and it's like 80 minutes long and apparently can be staged in a limited way. I think I'm going to use a peculiar analogy for you,

which is for Broadway, which is Black Widow. So Black Widow is the Marvel movie, the first Marvel movie in two years. And it came out a couple weeks ago. Marvel is the cash cow of the 21st century. It's the single greatest entertainment. The Marvel Cinematic Universe starting in 2008 is the single greatest entertainment cash cow that we have almost ever seen.

24 straight money-making hits. Some of them bringing Disney, who bought Marvel at some point, to 60% to 70% of market share in theaters in 2019, largely through showing these Marvel movies and stuff like that. So Black Widow opens. It opens in theaters. It opens on Disney. There's a $30. You can get it on Disney Plus for $30.

And it doesn't do that well. And you know why? First of all, it's not that good a movie, don't think that you know there was good word of mouth but again like not that fresh like it's been two years and you know what like there was a kind of momentum and it was going and it was part of the national cultural conversation they kind of kept it going with these shows on disney plus that are marvel cinematicematic Universe shows, but they're TV shows. They're not movies. You've had a lot of Marvel product and it's free and it's on Disney Plus, which you're paying $6 a month for, and go to the theater. And so I'm very struck by this

because you would have thought this was the impregnable fortress of popular culture. That people were excited by it. They haven't been as excited by anything really in decades. You put something, it says Marvel, and you go. The only thing like it is Pixar. And I don't know. I think that the brand name value of this stuff, two years of silence or a year and a half, whatever, is, you know, absence hasn't made the heart grow fonder. It's just sort of like,

all right, you know, we'll do something else. And so I think that the current, the hit fare on Broadway, Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, Lion King, there's three or four other things, are just not going to have the oomph that they had when they were constantly continuing and going things. And there are these weird renovations. Like there's this Harry Potter two-part play, Cursed Child. I've actually seen it twice with my kids two plays wow spend you know spend hundreds of dollars per show to see five and a half hours of this they've they've renovated

it it's reopening as a single show they edited it down to a single show uh why because they they know they can't pull the business anymore and so if they want to run it they got to run it to make it clear that you only have to buy one ticket because telling people by they're going to go now i'm not i had a few weeks ago we had jonathan pollock on from black the blackstone group who's a senior executive there on the real estate investing. And he says that a lot of the tourism you're going to see in New York City is going to act, may not be people that travel here by plane, but people coming from the tri-state area because there's this pent-up demand post-COVID. So you can see all these people from the broader area willing to spend money on

quote-unquote tourism slash entertainment, whereas before they would have traveled elsewhere in the country. Is it possible that we could build up market and demand from people just around here who are looking for stuff to do? Sure. I mean, that was the story of Broadway before the 1970s. I mean, before the city got unsafe and nobody wanted to come in from the suburbs, the audience for Broadway was a New York tri-state area audience. That's who went to shows.

And, you know, they had the same number of theaters and they had the same size audiences and all of that. You could sustain a pretty serious Broadway theater with a really engaged tri-state audience. Let's go to the next quote, which is what the implications of all of this are for the creative class that has historically been drawn to New York City. So let's listen to what you said on that front back in December. 100,000 jobs.

The steel industry in the United States doesn't employ many more than 100,000 people. If you think about it, it doesn't sound like that than 100,000 people. If you think about it, it doesn't sound like that many people out of 330 million people, but that is a major American employer that was literally cut off. It was folded up and put into hibernation. So there you're talking about the 100,000 people that worked in and around Broadway. Yeah.

Well, if they haven't moved away, if they haven't established different life choices and life experiences and all of that, but a lot of them did move away, maybe not all, and maybe they sublet or their they sublet or they paid their rent or whatever um you are gonna have a labor short you're gonna have a labor shortage uh i think in in in this realm now it won't last broadway is what broadway is the most commercial aspect of american theater uh so know, if people don't want to come and be stagehands, you know, I know 50 people who are theater crazed, who would, who would do it, you know, if, if, if the jobs were open and you didn't, and somehow they relaxed some of the,

relaxed some of the, the union rules or something like that so that they could do it. You know, it's like, it's like the story about the guy, people will run away with the circus and do anything, including clean up after the elephants. Show business has that glamour, and you could have that. But it's going to be a slower build. One of the reasons that I think you're seeing broad people say that it's not really until in the middle of 2022 that they can get

the really big shows up it's in part because they they have they may not be able to get everything they need to get in time they may not be able to build the sets in time they may not have the they may not have the labor back in time and all of that and so that could that could slow things down and the slower and this is like baseball strikes and stuff like that. The longer people live without this stuff, the more they become aware that they can live without this stuff. Every time a sport goes on strike, it loses 10% of its audience and they don't come back. So, I don't know. Or I could be wrong. Because this is all unnatural.

It really could zing back. But who knows? Let's talk about what it's like to walk these days through Times Square and Midtown generally. I mean, I'm working on right now. I'm pandemic did a story on 1271 Avenue of the Americas on 6th Avenue, which is former Time Life building, which pre-COVID had 8,000 employees coming into it every single day. And when the Times article was written by Michael Wilson, it was like 500 employees coming in a day. I think the numbers have apparently gone up a little bit, but not much. Midtown is still pretty empty.

Let's listen to what you're saying in today. I think the numbers have apparently gone up a little bit, but not much. Midtown is still pretty empty. Let's listen to what you were saying in December. Yogi Berra once said of a restaurant that it's so crowded nobody goes there anymore. You know, it was like that. Like the last place you wanted to be was walking through Times Square because it was so busy and alive. Now I work just south of Times Square. You walk through it and it is horrifying and heartbreaking because it's you, three guys in an Elmo costume, and five junkies lying on the sidewalk. So? It's not much better.

Right. That's exactly how I feel. It really isn't much better, and it's like these stats on the subways and the commuter railroads into New York City. I mean, they're still like, no one is riding them. And some of this, I think, is the result. There's sort of large-scale reasons for this. New York is one of the states that, if you're unemployed, you're getting $600 a week between the state and the federal government. You're getting $30,000 a year as an

unemployed person. That's a $15 an hour job that lasts until September 24th of this year when the federal benefit is cut off. And so maybe a week after that, you won't be able to get a seat on the subway anymore because people will be, okay, I got my time off here. You competed for my salary and I did fine staying home. And now my kids are back and so I'm going to go back to work. And so maybe in October, it'll be better. And the whole thing is that the streetscape relies on a workforce working in Midtown. And it's not back yet. You hear, oh my God, so New York is coming back and people are in restaurants and all that. And yeah, people live here going out at night to restaurants. But by the way, during the day, they're not going into restaurants. Like you can get a table anywhere in the city at any place you couldn't get into before and they're half empty. And so, you know, then all of that just speaks to, again, I think that the fear that I have of this second or, you know, second wave of mini lockdown, which is you're just punching the heart out of this recovery. And, you know, I mean, are there long-term consequences from that?

You know, never bet against New York, never bet against the, you know, American spirit and growth and stick to it and all this, but it's just going to be, you know, it's just bad for no, for bad reason. Let's listen to the next sound bite, this sound you had from that time where you had hope that there was all this talent that was going to, like young, entrepreneurial,

you know, resourceful, creative talent for whom the city was unaffordable pre-COVID, and now places like Midtown, who knows? I speak to developers who say maybe Midtown Manhattan will transform to some version of what Greenwich Village was in the 60s, maybe not that extreme. But it becomes this cluster of young,

inexpensive, striving, hardworking talent who would have never thought about being in Manhattan because it was too cost prohibitive before now. Let's listen to what you said. commercial real estate, this and that and the other. One of the positive ancillary consequences would be that it would suddenly again be affordable for a creative class of young people who have increasingly found it impossible to live in the city and create work in the city to come in. They can rent some space and start a black box theater somewhere. Maybe there'll be deregulatory efforts made by the city council or the city of New York to encourage this because there's going to be so much excess capacity.

That's how Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway were created from the 50s to the 80s. Look, you know, you sent me, you've been sending me texts every now and then with a quote or two from the almost certain to be new mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. I think you pegged his chances at 70% to be the next mayor. It's got to be even higher than that, probably. But let's say, so Eric Adams is going to be the new mayor of New York. He sat down with Bret Stephens the other day. Bret did a column about him. Brett Stevens of the New York Times and columnist for Commentary Magazine. That's right.

One of the most important. Contributing editor of Commentary. And the thing about Eric Adams that's interesting is that he is leaning very heavily into this. I'm not an ideologue. I want to do whatever works to help the city line and regulatory, deregulatory efforts to help spur, you know, a more vital streetscape and things going on, you know, in the city. That's everything, right? There are three aspects of where we are. One is public safety. So he's going to do what he can to stop crime.

Well, he's talking actually pretty boldly. He's talking about seeking overturning in some way or reforming the bail reform law law that was passed that is you know a huge source of the of the rise in violent crime and he's talking about reimposing some version he uses some qualifying language but some version of stop and frisk i mean and and so that's public safety then there is this stuff about how i understand that we can't tax, we cannot tax and spend our way into prosperity or, you know, or social equity. 50,000 people pay, I looked this up, by the way, it's like $15 billion in personal income taxes in New York City. $15 billion.

The overwhelming amount of that is paid by 50,000 people, a lot of whom and people that we know are hightailing it out of New York. And one really, really wealthy person who doesn't live entirely on investments leaves the city and that could be a couple million dollars out of the budget right there. In Brett's New York Times column, he quotes Adams saying, 65,000 families pay 51% of our income taxes. Those income taxes are— Right. Go ahead.

That's $7.5 billion, right? Right. 65,000 families paying $7.5 billion. So he's aware of that so he's got to just he's he's going to do what he can to try to make sure that they don't think that this is an inhospitable place and then the third element is if he's so non-ideological the things that i'm talking about here are things that you could really encourage which is there's a lot of empty retail space. Do what you can as a leader to push developers and people like that through the process of deregulation for saying,

do what you can to let people fool around, futz around with this space. If you can, you're not going to get another bank. You're not going to get somebody who's going to take a 20-year contract for $150 a square foot for your space. Let them try. Give them a year. Let them put something in that might be an art space. Who knows? Maybe it'll really work. That can only happen, A, in a moment of crisis, and B, with somebody who isn't beholden to an ideological understanding that

capitalism and entrepreneurship are bad. That's a hope. He says in this interview with Brett, he says, I'm quoting Eric Adams, how do you have a small business services, so there's this agency, small business services, how do you have a small business services that's trying to get restaurants open but you have the department of buildings that takes a year and a half to give someone their cfo to get inside their their

certificate of occupancy try opening hotel if you can get their sprinkler system inspected in two years you're a miracle maker so he's like mocking the bureaucracy of city government that is so unwelcoming to capital. And we've seen, the one thing we've seen in the city that happened with blinding speed out of nowhere was this construction of these outdoor dining spaces, which are totally not up to code. You know, there's no, you know, the inspectors can't, you know, all they had to do was fit in this space so that, you know, the cars wouldn't smash into it. And it happened because it was Armageddon without it, right? I mean, they weren't allowing people indoors, so let them dine outdoors outdoors and it showed what you can do when you say okay we're just gonna we're we're gonna drop these restrictions and we're gonna see what happens it was it's astonishing i'm not that crazy about them myself but i mean look what happened

you know it was it was it was amazing thousands and thousands of restaurants put up these jerry-billed shacks to to try to keep themselves alive in terms of eric adams now that we're talking about him it seems like if he wants to do the things he's talking about doing this the the items the agenda items he ticked off in his meeting with Brett, he's going to have to risk basically going to war with the New York Times editorial board. I'm not saying he's going to have to be Giuliani in 94 and 95, but pretty close. If he wants to reimpose stop and frisk, if he wants to take on the bail reform laws if he wants to put together uh re you know reinstitute that that um plain clothes detective unit that de blasio disbanded this will become in this environment

hugely controversial do you think he's okay well he's got it we don't know i mean we'll see but there's there are reasons to think that he should lean into this. They didn't endorse him. They, the New York Times. The New York Times didn't endorse him. They endorsed Catherine Garcia. And all the progressive political leaders endorsed other candidates too. Yeah, everybody wanted somebody else.

Who endorsed him was my paper, the New York Post. That's who endorsed him. And he won because he won middle class and working class black voters all over the city and others. He didn't win Manhattan. He didn't win the white people in Manhattan who are the New York Times' people. And he's not beholden to them. And he has laid out very clearly, I would say, a pretty firm, in an odd way, a pretty firm outer borough, what we used to call classically an outer borough strategy, which is he wants to talk to the working people of New York City.

Progressives are always talking about helping the working people of New York City. Progressives are always talking about helping the working people of New York City, but what do they do? They side with unions and they side with labor unions who insist on contracts with city and state that make it impossible for non-union labor to get any work. And therefore, they shackle young entrepreneurs who could maybe get some work from the city to install smoke detectors in city housing. I mean, who the hell knows what? And all of that stuff. And he needs, and because he is

aware that he needs this atm this atm that is the ultra wealthy of new york city to remain here he needs to do all this in tandem but he also it will mean something to them that the city has a responsive mayor who is friendly to the effort to reestablish New York as a place to do business. And I just mean their kind of business. I mean just a place to do business, a hustler's town, a hustler's city, and a place where if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. So he has every incentive, but it's hard because when you get attacked, you have to have the perversity in some sense of a Rudy Giuliani.

Rudy liked it. He took fuel, rage fuel from the New York Times' hatred of him. Right. de Blasio, I mean, not de Blasio, Adam says in the interview with Brett, he says when he talks about what happens when taxpayers leave the city, their income taxes are going to, you know, the importance of keeping them is because their income taxes are going to the police, the teachers, the Department of Sanitation.

We have people who say, who cares whether the rich leave? You'd better connect the dots. I care, he says. Yeah, no, I mean, all I'm saying is it's a very, he is saying very interesting things. Governing, according to what he's saying, will take backbone to resist the yelling and to resist, frankly frankly unintelligent people

like mark levine who you know seems to think that you can run run a run a city by being a you know whining crybaby scaredy cat uh on the one hand and then you know resisting sort of you know npr liberal progressive aoc stuff uh even though you know there's no one defending you except let's say the except say the new york post well there weren't many people defending Rudy except the New York Post. And he barely got elected the first time and he won in a romp the second. So results are what are going to matter here. Let's play, I want to play one more piece of sound

from that interview because I asked you at the end of that interview in December to lay out specifically Broadway, but it was more like a symbol for the city turning around, kind of tell us your big idea for how to create energy and excitement in the creative culture scene in New York. Here was your idea. If there's one thing you could prescribe to restart Broadway post-corona, what would it be? I would say that the thing that could get people back to Broadway is bring in 10 huge stars to do shows for six months. If you had 10 major across-the-board stars who were all appearing in Broadway at the same moment. That would be my prescription. And

who cares what it costs? So, John, isn't that what Springsteen is doing right now? He's got a limited... He reopened... His show was supposed to end. He ended it before the pandemic. Nothing to do with the pandemic. And he's decided to reopen it to, I think, to a version of what you prescribed there, and I think it goes right through Labor Day weekend. Right, he's doing that, and then David Byrne is reopening his show, American Utopia, which has already been on, both these shows have actually already been on HBO, but somehow that doesn't seem to hurt.

But, I mean, the big thing that's like this, but I think it's kind of weird, is that there's supposed to be this huge concert in Central Park that Springsteen is going to be in and Paul Simon should be in. Yeah, I think someone under the age of 300 should probably be in that concert. I mean, you know, this is really a fantastic, you know, who else is going to, you know, what are they going to get, like

Harry James and Benny Goodman? I mean, fine. People, you want to get half a million people to go into the park? Get somebody, get Olivia Rodrigo. Get, I don't know, Billie Eilish. I mean, I know they're not New Yorkers, but I mean, that's what you need for real energy and juice. You've got to get young people. The one thing that is happening on Broadway, which was planned before the pandemic is going to happen after the pandemic,

is Hugh Jackman is going to do The Music Man. That's supposed to open in February. It doesn't really fit my model because it was already going to happen, number one, and it's kind of late, number two, but they could still do it. I'm almost talking about how I don't see that there's a consortium of New York theater people who are sitting there saying, we're in code red. We need to do whatever we can to bring audiences enthusiastically back. And we know what has done that in the last four or five years. Bette Midler in Hello Dolly.

Granted, old. She was old, and I'm making fun of the old. But theater is a very expensive proposition. You know, I don't know. Frances McDormand has won three Oscars. She could come and do a play on Broadway. There are various things. Ben Platt could come back and do Dear Evan Hansen.

That's a famous performance. It's about to be in a movie. Maybe the movie will be a hit. He could come back and do it live. Just whatever it can be so it's not just like a play. Lin-Manuel Miranda and In the Heights. Lin-Manuel Miranda going back and taking... Right.

Lin-Manuel Miranda. Exactly. So... Minus the woke backlash. Minus the woke backlash. To In the Heights. Yes. Before we wrap, what's your quick take on the In the Heights?

What did we learn from that, from the release of the movie? Never apologize. Never apologize. Fight back. They say, oh, you made us invisible. We're Afro-Latino and you made us invisible, Lin-Manuel Miranda, because you didn't cast anybody. And then what he should say is, drop dead.

Because if you don't say drop dead, they own you. And he said, Rita Moreno, who isn't even in In the Heights, but is it a documentary about herself that Lin-Manuel produced, went on Stephen Colbert and basically said, what's wrong with you people? Lin-Manuel is the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Ricans. And 16 hours later, she was- And he's done more to put a spotlight on them. Yeah. Which is true. Right. And then

16 hours later, she was like, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I feel so terrible. So why? Why did she roll back? Okay, very simply, she's in West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg, which is coming out in the late fall or the early... And I think Spielberg didn't want any trouble, and he wanted

to get on the right side of this. And he is in for a bruising because if you can accuse Lin-Manuel Miranda of rewriting Latino history for your own horrible, selfish cultural ends, imagine what they're going to say about Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, the screenwriter,

making a musical about Puerto Ricans in the late 1950s in New York City. Neither one of whom is... They have more in common with you and me, Dan, than they do with Puerto Ricans, let's just say

in the circumcisional category. If I bring you back here after West Side Story comes out, and we replay the tape from this conversation, your prediction that there's going to be a woke, politically correct, motivated backlash against West Side Story? There will absolutely be one, even though I suspect that the story of West Side Story is going to be that the Sharks are the good guys and the Jets are the bad guys.

That's the only real reason that you would remake it, is to go with that spin. And even so, it's going to be bad. Why? Because, you know, anybody will publish anything now and it'll look fun and there'll be a whole talk about it. And then they panic and they shouldn't panic. And Lin-Manman shouldn't have panicked he should have gotten his back up and said don't talk don't talk about me that way how dare you you know uh you know you're not gonna you're not

gonna talk about me that way who do you think you are my my favorite prescription from you john from this conversation is that the way president biden should declare the end of the pandemic is to say zygazoon wouldn't that be great seriously yes if if president biden or kamala either one vice president harris one of them says zyg Gesund, we're done lecturing you. You don't want to get vaccinated, don't get vaccinated. You know, Dayenu. Yeah. See, this is all I want, and I'm not going to get it, but, you know, maybe I'll get it,

and then you're really, really going to have to give me some merch. Exactly. John Podhoretz, thank you again for the third visit to the Post-Corona Podcast. And I hope by the time you're back on, we actually are post-corona. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure. All right. Take care. That's our show for today.

If you want to follow John Podhorez's work, subscribe to Commentary Magazine. Go to commentarymagazine.com. And be sure to subscribe to the Commentary Magazine podcast. You can also follow Commentary on Twitter, at Commentary. And when you go to the Commentary website, by the way, order some merchandise. I say that full disclosure as a board member of commentary. Post Corona is produced by Elan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.