The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Anthony Weiner - Rehabilitation, Atonement, and Contemplating the Great Comeback.

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner comes to discuss his past and future. His mistakes, life in prison, what he's learned and how it all can make him an even better leader for New York City.

This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous Comedy Cellar. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Available on YouTube. Available on demand on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. This is Dan Natterman, Comedy Cellar comedian. And I'll be at the Comedy Cellar Vegas location next week, by the way, if anybody's out in Vegas. I'm here with Noam Dorman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar. Periel Ashenbrand is with us. We have with us Anthony Weiner, a former congressman. Anthony Weiner joins us in studio.

Anthony, how do you do? I do well. Thank you for having me. And he's an Islanders fan, apparently, as well, which I didn't know. Did you introduce Periel? I believe I did. Periel Ashenbrand. I think I mentioned you, yeah. I zoned out for a second. Go ahead. So, I assume Noam is the one who invited Anthony. I assume he has particular reasons for doing so.

Well, yes. So I first heard from Anthony. He was exploring the idea of running to be our city councilman here in our district here where the Commissar is, which is the second district. Is that correct? Yeah, not that it matters. Yeah, it was second district. Okay, turn his mic up just a little bit, Tanner. And so, and then I met with you.

I liked you. And so I wanted to have you on. You're an important secondary opinion leader in our district. Maybe. As no one goes, so goes the second, I think they say. And, you know, you're going to have headwinds. And what you've expressed to me is that you're ready to talk about anything.

Here or in general? Both, right? Yeah, I'm just kidding. understand that um persuading people that they should look past your past and those headwinds is is your ticket to uh office and to the future that you want and um and i want to um explore that with you well let me just that is not the the obstacle to me getting elected as people see me as a good representative and they agree with the issues, I believe. And for some people, I mean, not to, I just want to make sure it's, my campaign is not about some level of redemption or telling my story or anything like that, but in as much as people ask about it. And, uh, and it's an obvious thing that people would ask about. Uh, it's part of the

campaign. So let me tell you that before, um, I had this interview with you today, I went around and I asked people who work for me, including our engineer, Tiana. I said, would you vote for Anthony Weiner? And 100% understood, you know, who you were. And every one of them said, yeah, I, you know, in this day and age, yeah, I would. Meaning, and they didn't mean that they knew your views on policies and stuff like that. They just meant that they wouldn't. It wasn't a barrier they couldn't get over.

It was not a barrier, which surprised me. Tiana, do you want to say anything about what you said? Yeah, it doesn't really matter to me. Cancel culture is a weird thing that I think I can look past. It's very dumb. So in this case, I don't know how to proceed. Let me just speak from my heart and then we'll get into it. I've been known to be taking the side of people who've gotten in trouble.

Before I make comparisons, I just want to say these are analytical comparisons, analytic comparisons. I don't mean to, the comparison meaning to put people on a better or worse plane as each other, just the issues require. So, you know, when Louis got in trouble, I went to the mat for him. And then I also have been friends with Mark Halperin and I've kind of gone to the mat for him too because of how I saw his particular story. Your story is actually tougher for me in one way because I'm a dad. I have a 15-year-old daughter. I'm a 13-year-old daughter. I'm sorry.

That's a big deal. On the other hand, you did hard time. Maybe that's where we should start because I was amazed to know that you did not get sentenced to any kind of minimum security prison. You were in the real prison, correct? Well, let me just say, I'm fascinated that you don't think you have to do any setup about who the fuck I even am. Like, you know, there's a lot of, I mean, I don't know. You can hear that. I'm uncomfortable, actually.

I chickened out of, like, saying Anthony Weiner was convicted of this, blah, blah, blah. No, I mean, here's the thing is that that tension that you felt about how to set it up is in, and with the fact that I interrupted you at one point and said, well, you should say this or that, is to some degree a reflection of the fact that my circumstances are sui generis, right? It was a kind of an unusual thing that i i did i was a known for being a pretty interesting politician who did things i ran for mayor had some success excellent politics well thank you but but ran ran you know i was a member of the united states congress etc then i had a weird thing with a photograph. But all of this happened a while ago now.

It has been a long time since I have been tabloid. Not to say that when I pop up every once in a while in the news, they don't put disgraced Anthony Weiner. But what I am finding as I walk the streets is it's really hard to even do that survey that you suggested because a lot of people are like, wait a minute, what did you do again? Like that kind of vibe so let me let me just just say this that that i i consider that this my story is i did things that were wrong not as wrong that they should have been prosecuted i agreed to plead guilty and i accepted responsibility i did so in with a very heavy force of the federal prosecutors on my head saying I could plead guilty to a thing

or I would be put on trial for a much more difficult thing that had a mandatory minimum. I had a six-year-old at home. I pled guilty to it. However, I accept responsibility for the things that I did. My side of the street was not clean.

I was engaged with interacting with people online. One of them turned out to be someone who was younger. I never met them, never tried to meet them. And even to the extent they didn't have any physical evidence that I exchanged any things, I had to say that I did in order to be eligible for the plea that they were offering me. But that was a long time ago. You had to say what? I had to... You had to say that you knew she was 15 years old? No, no, that there was clear evidence that she'd said she was different ages at different times. I went to prison for obscenity. That doesn't happen.

Okay, I'll say it. It never happened in the history of the Southern District that anyone went to prison for obscenity, for transferring obscene materials. But the facts of the case were that she said I sent obscene materials. They had no physical record. You'd think there would have if she had whatever it is. However, I was in the throes of what I now have come to realize. I was in an addictive space. I was like acting out left and right with people online.

Everything, sometimes sexual, sometimes had to fix their cars, sometimes arguing about politics. I was losing it. I was coming undone. I have some history of addiction in my family and all these other things. So by the time I was being sentenced, I was already in recovery, had gone to rehab, and I was in a place of, I'm going to accept responsibility for this. What were you addicted to? Alcohol? No. I since have given up drinking and everything else, but no, I have a sex addiction

that manifests not in going to massage parlors, not in pornography or the other things that people in the 12-step rooms that I go to are into. My thing seems to be interacting with people online that have a sexual nature. I don't do it with men, although a lot of men pretend to be women to engage in it with me. And when I'm in my addiction, it's hours of just looking at icons of people and going back and forth with them in the obsessive way, paying a higher and higher price for doing it, ignoring other elements of my life, et cetera. Not meeting them, not whatever it is, but I engaged in this kind of a very... Never in the hopes of meeting them.

No, no, it wasn't that. That wasn't the thing. The thing wasn't... It's hard to describe what exactly they were. I've been in a lot of therapy around it, but it seems to be something around the idea of feeding a sense of who I was as a fulsome person, as an interesting guy, as a funny guy, as a sexy guy and whatever it is.

So there was never any allegation that I had to try to meet anyone. There was never any allegation, frankly, that I had ever... It was a non-contact crime. That was obscenity. And it was pleaded down from what? Well, that's not the way the federal government works.

The federal government never loses a case. They have 98% success rate. And part of the reason is there's something in the federal judiciary called the trial penalty, that if you're arrested for something in New York State, you're arrested for robbing a store, they might be able to say, well, we will take that charge and we will charge you only for one count, not for everything you've stolen here, but it's the same crime. In the federal judiciary, what they do is they say, look,

we are going to charge you. We are going to charge you with this crime that has a five-year or a 15-year mandatory minimum. However, if you will plea bargain and agree to this other set of facts, we will allow you to plead to something that only has a 21-month penalty. Now, in the federal judiciary, it's different also because the judge gets to decide the penalty, and so it's just their recommendation. But if they were to charge me with a crime that had a mandatory minimum,

the judge would have no ability to give me anything but that. So what happens in a case like that is everyone pleads. I mean, almost mathematically, everybody. I know one guy who didn't, and one, Chris Gotti. I think maybe you met him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's an amazing story. That's the tremendous courage. Exception to the rule. Is Luigi Maggiambing charged federally? He's not. He murdered someone. There's not a federal murder. If they try to, it's because they've come up with some theory of the case

about terrorism or something like that. But the guys that I met inside prison, you're right. I didn't go to a camp. I didn't go to a low and medium security prison. So I'm with real criminals. And I don't, I can't remember five I met the entire time I was there actually went to trial. They, because the, they can make it very difficult. And, and, and part of the thing that I learned about this process is that this, this, this trial penalty is a real thing. I mean, we had, you know, I don't want to relitigate the case because it goes against my fundamental value of accepting responsibility.

And I'm not going to do that. But we had stuff to say. We had stuff to say. And never in the history of the Southern District had anyone ever been charged with obscenity. So you were facing potentially 15 years? I think what they had said, 15 years, they wanted, I think they were prepared to make the case that I was creating pornography because I had sent a picture, they said,

and that would be creating pornography and under that statute. Now, to their credit, the prosecutors were like, we know that's a lot to be charging you with, so let's just talk topless on this other thing and we'll do a deal on this other thing. But all the point that I'm making about all of this is not that I'm not guilty because I was responsible. I pled guilty. I don't have regrets about that.

But most people don't know the facts of the thing. And I am not particularly interested in having big conversations about it, except in as much as a voter comes up to me, they get to decide what they talk about. And if someone wants to say, I want to know every line, every specific about what you did, there are other people who are like, you're a pervert, I'm never going to vote for you in a thousand years. But it's entirely up to people

that have the conversation where they want to enter it. And all that is set up. All that is set up. Yeah, people have a kaleidoscopic dot type view of my thing. Sometimes it's people that have struggled themselves with shit. Sometimes it's people that have no tolerance because they've got a young daughter at home. Some of them believe the worst stories that they read about me online and say you're a pervert and whatever else. And all I can do is make a decision

at this moment, am I going to let that be an insurmountable obstacle to me presenting myself after having done my time, done my probation, done my halfway house, and not blaming anyone else? I mean, what we're doing now is describing this. And I have decided that I haven't announced that I'm running yet, but I've decided that I'm not going to say no, I'm not going to at least try because of the history that I haven't announced that I'm running yet, but I've decided that I'm not going to say no, I'm not going to at least try because of the history that I have. So let me tell you how I see it,

and then I'll ask you kind of like the $64,000 question. And I've been making this argument for many years now in many contexts, that in the end, we live under policies. We don't live under the character of the person and the people who make those policies. We live under those policies. When the police, when Mayor de Blasio told the BLM,

during the BLM riots, told the police to stand down, that was a policy I had to live under when our employees are mugged on the subway and they don't get any protection or the police don't follow up on it that in some ways a policy when the shoplifters are taking over stores that's a policy

what's going on now in Los Angeles to some extent obviously couldn't Los Angeles, to some extent, obviously, couldn't be avoided, but to some extent, clearly, there are policies that are failing there. At minimum, things that could have been proactively done that weren't done. We all lived through 9-11, and Giuliani's a good example,

because Giuliani is like a, you know, I forget which is the monster, Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, but he's Mr. Hyde now. Mr. Hyde's the monster, but Dr. Jekyll has the evil-sounding name. But when he was Dr. Jekyll, during a disaster in New York, he was masterful. also imagine Mayor Bloomberg during the fires that Los Angeles is having, behaving much more impressively than the current mayor of Los Angeles. And I can go on and on, you know, the homeless people everywhere in playgrounds, the fact that I'm two years with a building, I can't get permits. So we live under policies and anybody under these policies, Val, our manager, got mugged. If you asked her, listen,

would you prefer the guy making the laws who would have prevented you from being mugged or do you want the guy that didn't do something that you disapprove of? She would say, and we all would say, no, I want the guy who prevent me from getting mugged. I want the guy who prevent the store from being robbed. I want the guy who can get my permits. So we all live under policies. And most people, I think, will opt for the candidate who has policies that matter to them. And New York has become like a common sense desert. You look at what passes for conventional wisdom among our politicians, and you see it and you say, how could anybody support these things?

So yet there are people out there, and I might be in that group with a young daughter who say, Anthony, just tell me what I need to know that I can get past this feeling that I have that this particular thing that you're accused of, it's not like robbing a bank where you've done your time and I can say whatever. There's something somehow viscerally deeper about what you were accused of that makes it somewhat harder for me just to get over it, even though I understand people who've done their time. What is your answer to those people? I don't know how to answer that question.

I don't know what you're trying to ask me. Are you trying to ask me whether somehow the crime I committed is unforgivable? I'm asking for people who can't understand it, for them to be able to say, yeah, I get it. Okay, I can forgive that. I didn't seek to interact with someone who was underage.

At the risk of litigating the case, the person targeted me. I don't want to litigate the case. No, you don't have to. But I don't know how to get it. All I can tell you is that I was charged with a single act of obscenity. Okay? And the obscenity was words. And the words were not enough to make the case withstand.

It's the last thing. I don't want to make you squirm for an hour on this. No, I just don't know how to answer. So in your statement to the court, you said, this was the headline, you said, I have a sickness and I don't have an excuse. Correct. So that seemed to be that you were not then saying, listen, this is just obscenity. I don't know how to advance this conversation. I will accept responsibility for the things I did. I will accept responsibility for the things I did.

I will not accept responsibility for things I did not do. I have tried to contextualize it in that prosecutors have a lot of ability. When you plead guilty, they get to say what they want. I had a six-year-old at home. I would have said that I had four heads. However, I am not in a place right now that I am seeking in any way to deflect responsibility. But these are facts about the way law gets prosecuted and the way things get done. I should not have been prosecuted. It's insane that I was. I was in recovery. I was going to meetings. The facts did not bear anything. It would never have

happened if my name was Jones and I wasn't on Fox News every day. If your name was Trump, it would have happened. I don't even know that. But I also recognize, and I say this on my radio show all the time, The Middle on 77 WABC Radio, available as a podcast. I say all the time on my show that as a public figure, I know public figures get charged for shit that other people don't. The higher the monkey climbs, the more you can see his ass.

I totally get that. I'm not an idiot. I understand that. But that doesn't mean me stating that is not part of the story that people should use to contextualize. No, I actually think it's really valuable to hear that. I think it's very valuable to hear both sides of what you just articulated. It's very hard because I'll tell you why. Anyone can tease out any sentence from this and say, he's rationalizing. But now that I'm in a conversation

about this, all I can do is do the best I can to answer the question as it's asked. And I reiterate, I accept responsibility that I put myself in that position. They talk about when you're in recovery that, yes, you are not responsible for your illness. You are responsible for taking your medicine for that illness. That is your – and to the extent that you didn't do that and it was on me, I was doing that. I had gotten into recovery. I'm glad that I did.

But getting back to your previous point, well, you didn't – when the post and all the tabloids, you had the wiener and the Carlos Danger and everything else, my pulse plummeted. I didn't win for mayor, and you got Bill de Blasio. So fuck you. Right? Yes. Now, and of the things that people ask me about outside, when people are talking about things, that's the thing they're even more pissed off about than my crime. Yes.

When they say to you, you owe me amends, all right? You owe me amends because you gave me eight years of Bill de Blasio. I want to get to those policies. I'll say one other thing. But as far as your concern, your visceral concerns, this is the challenge I face because some people don't have even a connection to that. They're like, why are they breaking your hump so much about this stuff?

And yet some people feel it so deeply that even if they want to root for me and they believe with 90% of what I'm saying and know I'd be a great councilman, still have trouble getting over it. This is the problem I have in this race. I actually – yeah. the Senate and Tim Kaine was just raking him over the coals for infidelity, for accusing him of or implying that he had sexually assaulted his wife, even though there's no accusation whatsoever. And I was just revolted at the hypocrisy of this guy who was fully ensconced in Clinton world. And we know Clinton had seven Jane Doe's

and we know Clinton was credible. Like this guy has the nerve to be complaining about infidelity. No, but that's not what that exchange was about. That exchange was about giving Hexeth a chance to say, yeah, I shouldn't have done that stuff. I feel bad about it.

I've made amends. Here's the things that I've done. I don't think Tim Kaine was trying to give Hegseth an off ramp. But anyway, that's the way I took it. And I was revolted, and I am always revolted by the hypocrisy because, Anthony, we all know that we all know people in our lives who have done bad things. I used to joke that if everyone who'd done a bad thing would disintegrate in front of our eyes like the last scene of Infinity Wars at Thanksgiving dinner, like, Grandma! What happened? So part of the reason I'm inclined to want to be on your side here is just my anger at the fact that people, the pretense that not only that people

have done these things themselves, but they don't know people close to them who have done things that they've forgiven, that they've excused, that they've rationalized. We are a flawed people. And the fact that if somebody says they did it and they seeked help, sought help, and they've gone to prison,

and liberal people who believe in rehabilitation and redemption and all this fucking stuff that they say, then there's something about me that says just on principle, even if you don't feel okay with it, you should force yourself on principle because these are the principles you claim you actually believe in. So now you're being put to the test. Somebody did their time. Somebody is upfront about what they did. Someone's seeking help. You agree with their policies.

I want to get to the policies. So that's what I think should be allowed. That's angel on one shoulder. And the other shoulder is certain. I told you. Look, I run into this a lot. I'm running in this district, and for your listeners and viewers who are not from New York, this is the heart of progressive New York. The East Village, a little bit of the West Village, you know, things like Union Square Park, where all these protests are going on, and Washington Square Park, these iconic liberal places. And these are places where the notion of over-incarceration, the notion of prosecutorial abuse, the notion of people being incarcerated for long periods of time for things they could

have gone through prison for a short period of time, the idea, like we have laws in New York that say you can't even ask if someone's ever served time in prison. When I got out of prison, I went to work running a countertop company out in Brooklyn. We only hired the formerly incarcerated for the factory floor because I'm like, yeah, I get how hard this is now. And afterwards, I got all kinds of letters from people that were inside, like, when I get out, can I get a job there

because there's so few other options. The hypocrisy is that these very same people who talk about that all the time, then someone applies for a job in the city council who's running against them, and suddenly, oh, he's a scumbag. Let's put this guy behind him. And I don't mind that level of conversation I'm eager to have, because in a way, I'm going to make the argument that me in the city council, a guy of relative privilege, a skinny white guy, you know, who

is inside, I can speak to this thing, and I can be somewhat fearless about it. But I don't want it, I'm not proud of it. It was the darkest moment. I lost access to my son when he and I were like, you know, it's everything to me. I'm still dealing with that with him. And you'll deal with it the rest of your life. And I'll deal with it. And then they do this other thing. All right, here's another. This is just facts now. The thing that I was charged with does not, obscenity does not require

you to be on any sex offender list at all. But the prosecutor, knowing the New York Post was watching, knowing the world was watching, said, it's part of the deal that we will not walk away from is we want you to agree that as part of your sentence, you will agree to this. And listen, and people can now, that is like attached to my name forever. Now that's fine because I can handle it. I can go on a talk show like this. If someone wants to argue with me about this and call me names, I can handle it. But there are a lot, there are millions of people on these lists now. And by the way, level one people, you get that for basically, I don't know what it means. I shouldn't start saying.

But it's anonymous. No one knows except they've got for 10 years they're on a list somewhere. Outrageous. Well, I don't know. It's the way, this is the last remaining thing. When they do evacuations in Florida and they say, everyone, take shelter somewhere. You can bring your dogs, but if you're a registered sex offender, you're not allowed to go. Okay?

And these are emergency things. Because it is the mother of all thing to be called in American society. But all kinds of shit gets thrown in there. I mean, you know, I'm sure there are really bad people who do really bad sex offenses. I'm just saying that I'm going to try to run for office and try to try the – if people want to talk about it, we can talk about it. This is the longest I've ever talked about it with anybody. What would you do – so I'm a dad. And one of my biggest fears, although I try everything to lock it down, but I know it's a quixotic notion.

Sooner or later, my daughter is going to find her way around all the protections, and I'm always worried about some guy online tricking her, talking to her, flattering her in some way, and traumatizing her, and God forbid arranging to meet her, but just traumatizing her. And I'm not saying that's what you did. I don't believe that's what you did. But I could see a lot of the laws which are righteously promulgated to protect our children from this new threat, and that threat has really matured even since eight years ago when you got in trouble.

I'm not even sure you're aware at what a state of nature, a jungle it is online now for our kids. What would you recommend in terms of laws to... I have no idea, and I'm not the right person to ask. I don't... You recognize it's a serious problem, right? I recognize it's a serious problem. I also recognize that the entire ecosystem

of social media is created to increase these tensions, not reduce them. I recently did a podcast, and the person that was doing the podcast, this woman, something you could tell she was, I don't know what her claim to fame is. And I don't have much of a presence in social media, but when I did this interview, hundreds of

comments and hearts and everything else were popping up in the feed for these stories which I was linked in they're all fake okay they're all fake names they're all at the same time they're all created at about the same time but the relevance for this conversation is every one of their icons is a super hot young woman that's what they all are pretending to be. All the time, people are pretending to be other things. I think 95% of all of our problems online, including political shit, would be if we all had to somehow put our name and our actual identity to everything that we said or did online, I think a lot of our problems would be solved because a lot of what it is

is fake people doing fake things look I and the victims subject to this stuff non-stop people pretending to be someone else and trying to whatever and then on even on old people

social media like Facebook the number like just because I'm now a 60 year old single guy I'm now a 60-year-old single guy, I'm getting all of these fake bot enticements and everything else. It is a cesspool. And the rooms of these recovery things, of people dealing with shit around pornography, dealing with shit around social media,

dealing with shit around all kinds of stuff, that it's not like going out and doing something venal to someone, but getting sucked into the vortex of this stuff is a real problem. I mean, it really is. I don't know what the answer is, because I can tell you it's at the core of what apparently is what I'm looking for is like these interactions. The answer is, Noam, that you're very lucky that your daughter is an intelligent young woman, and I think'll be able to navigate these rough waters with aplomb. I think you should – Anyway, look, I want to let you off the hook.

So that's a lot. I would wrap up this section of the conversation by saying, and I've interviewed a lot of people now, you're forthright. You're ready to answer any question, you're not evasive, and these are, I think, part of the reasons that I would give to somebody as to why they should be willing to overlook this or get past it, if that's a better way to put it.

You know, Hugh, can I offer a different framing? It's part of the cocktail. It's part of, yes. And I think that very often when we choose people for leadership positions in public life, we sometimes say, I don't like that about him, but I like it. Sometimes people don't refuse to vote for me because I'm a Zionist.

In a district where now they're chanting, Zionists, get out. I don't know where they want me to go. So people have different reasons for not voting. So what I would say, and I'm even going further, I'm saying this journey, this thing, this experience I've now had with the criminal justice system, with prisons, with being in with a lot of guys

who are serving time for doing drugs, for consuming drugs, I think it gives me an ability to, one, to speak frankly about these things, but also, you know, the problem that we have, and as we transition to talk about issues, is I see too many people in public life who they deconstruct life like this. Okay, here's a problem. Who's on this side? Who's on this side? And I'm going to choose which side I'm on.

So they see someone who is chronically homeless, someone who's got mental issues on their street. And they said, am I with the ACLU or am I with the cops? No, the way to deconstruct that problem is we all agree that person should not be there. We all agree that person should have care. We all agree that public spaces are for all of us in the public. Okay, now let's embark on trying to figure out how we solve this problem. And the people that I'm running against, too many people in civic life, are so concerned about what camp they're going to be in

that the way we deal with problems has kind of reached a standstill. Because invariably, you're going to have people who don't like what you say. And if that becomes the stopping point of a conversation, if someone doesn't, you know, then problems don't get solved. Inertia is the single strongest force in American civic life. Stopping shit from

happening is so easy, okay? Doing stuff requires people taking some criticism, arguing why your idea is better, arguing why your solution is better, arguing why the ACLU is doing their job defending that person's right to be there, but it doesn't mean they speak for us. It doesn't mean they speak for the greater good. So I just think it's one of the things to include in kind of the cocktail of how you assess who you want leading your community. So go through the issues. What changes do you want to help make in New York City?

Look, I mean, I don't, for one thing, I don't think, despite the way some people want to, there's not a kind of a conservative liberal divide when it comes to urban and city management, right? We're all basically in the same firmament trying to solve problems that, by and large, people agree are problems. When you get into the subway in New York City and you have three people coming behind you who don't pay their fare, I don't care how progressive or conservative you are, that's offensive. It's offensive because it's money that we're not going to have for the system, but it's offensive to your fundamental sense of fairness. I mean, everyone, whatever your political affiliation believes in a certain element of fairness. And so when we have a solution to that problem that we're losing all this revenue and we need to support the subway system,

and we create kind of this system which has clear winners and clear losers, when we collect a fee to kind of backfill that, I think it's perfectly reasonable for citizens to say, wait a minute, if you, this organ, this EMTA, no one knows what it is, before we dump millions or billions of dollars to you, can you first solve the problem of people coming into the system illegally? And secondly, I don't have any problem, for example, charging people for the uninitiated who are listening outside of New York City. We recently started to charge people a fee to drive into most of lower Manhattan, most of Manhattan, frankly, most of central Manhattan.

I have no problem with a user fee for using scarce resources. We have a gas tax. Raise the gas tax. Say we're going to raise the gas tax, which we can do as a state, raise the tax, that goes to mass transit. We've done it forever. Raise the gas tax. This system we came up with, if you're a poor person who lives in the public housing on the edge of this rim, you are getting deluged with traffic right now. OK, you didn't do anything except be politically vulnerable. And on the on the altar of raising a bunch of money, we made losers out of the most vulnerable people around. So I think that's a mistake. And secondly, I think we are not in an apocalypse as it relates to crime, but we do have a problem now that people feel less safe. They feel less safe because I think there are people on the street that make them uneasy, but I also feel unsafe that we don't have enough cops out

doing the things they should be doing. And what they should be doing is we should hire more of them and get them out of their cars, get them out walking around, get them out on a bike, get them out being visible, being a deterrent, being a comforting thing that we all see. And we also organize our city in a way that we know who our neighborhood beat cop is. You've been here a while. We used to have this system that, you know, officer whatever, we knew who he was. Officer friendly. And that guy had some responsibility for knowing stuff going on.

And also, we got to know them a little bit and then finally you know i think the third or fourth biggest economic driver in new york city is health care we're closing hospitals left and right mostly because hospitals say well we don't need all these beds anymore we're losing money on all these beds let us close it down politicians have protests get everyone all up in arms, and then they close anyway. No one is thinking affirmatively about how we don't have a shortage of health care in the city. We do have too many beds. And I think that we have to, we should be doing what San Francisco did 25 years ago, experimenting with coming with our own single payer version of health care, where the city, which we own hospitals, we employ doctors, we have clinics, all of these resources, and yet, and we insure 400, almost 500,000 people between our active

workforce and our retirees, and yet we throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can do when we lose these resources. We don't have hospitals downtown anymore. And so, like, coming up with new ideas that don't just go into the category of we're going to protest really hard when you do something wrong. I mean, this has been going on for 15 years. We've been closing hospitals and things don't get better. And then the final one, and this is a little bit of a pet peeve. You might not share it. Your audience might not share it. We did a really smart thing by decriminalizing marijuana, that small amounts of marijuana, too many people going to prison for. But the way we went headlong in such a disorganized way of going into the marijuana business ourselves has been utterly chaotic. It has led to marijuana being consumed

in parks left and right, guys selling it out on card tables left and right, and a relationship with that vice that I think is ultimately going to be very dangerous. I lost my brother to addiction. Marijuana was a gateway drug for him. And I think that the chaos around it to many liberal progressive New Yorkers who saw the problem with criminalizing small amounts of marijuana, now we've gone into this recreational program. And again, for those who are not New Yorkers, unlike in Colorado, unlike in Massachusetts, unlike in New Jersey, when we opened the legal ones, but then we made a good job of cracking down anyone who tried to get in there illegally, we had everything. We had legal guys competing against every corner bodega was selling marijuana behind the counter, and it had become chaotic. It's gotten a little

bit better. But one of the guys I'm running against is an assemblyman who now wants a promotion for creating that program. And I think for a lot of citizens who are not anti-drug jihadists, they're not conservatives, they just want a little bit of order around these things. We keep doing this. And this will be my coda. Democrats in a city like New York, if we are going to be a city that is run,

our state is run by Democrats, our city is run by Democrats, we are the shining city on the hill as it comes to democratic ideals. That means when we do stuff, it has to be on us to audit them and to fix them and to make them better and to make them work better. Okay. We can't just curse the darkness and blame Donald Trump. Donald Trump didn't make that pot law. Okay. Democrats in the legislature did. And one of the things I'm saying to my party is half a million Democrats stayed home for the most important election of our lifetime, stayed on their hands. And that's not because they became Republicans. That's because no one is talking English language to them about the things they care about and how we have to get things better. It's more this constituency or that constituency doesn't want anything done, so we're going to stop. And that's kind of my rationale for running. By the way, speaking of fair beaters, you know these buses

that are, you know, you get on... Express buses, yeah. You get on them and you buy a ticket and theoretically, once in a while, there'll be people to make sure you bought the ticket. But you don't have to show the bus driver that you bought the ticket. Two-thirds. Are they even

doing that anymore? I haven't seen that in six years. Nobody pays on the bus anymore. This is a true fact. We think a lot of people jump on the turnstiles because more people take subways than take buses. Two-thirds of people don't pay on the bus. Two-thirds. It's like $700 million a year between the subways and the buses that we're not collecting. Well, yeah, listen, there's something going on with the left, with this obsession, with equity. Even though I feel it, I'm concerned about the poor. If I hear that somebody jumps

the turnstile because they don't have the money and then they get hit with $150 fine, I don't feel good about that. But this kind of descending into what you use the word order, no order anywhere. We don't have the will any longer to make people pay to get on the subway, to make people to get on, pay to get on the bus, to stop shoplifting, to keep homeless people. Let's just start with the playgrounds that our kids play in. Let's just start there. Like what kind of society doesn't have the will to have their kids playing in a wholesome environment? Yeah, but hold on.

Go to Washington Square Park and see the kids playing among bums with shit in their pants. Right, so here's the thing. First of all, let's dial down the apocalypse stuff a little bit. We live in a great city. The city's a safe place. It's not the crime. Okay, can I interrupt you on this crime thing? Because I was very mindful for a long time.

People were saying, no, crime is not getting worse. Look at the stats. Look at the stats. I'm telling you, based on my anecdotal evidence, which is so copious at this point, that statistically it has to represent something real. I'm having multiple employees assaulted. We had two different cases of people being robbed at gunpoint on McDougal Street over the summer

I'm seeing things that I haven't seen I had two murders on 14th Street I'm seeing things that I haven't seen in 20 years with such regularity and then the reports inevitably from the victims what do the cops say the cops just told me there's nothing we're going to be able

to do. Even if we arrest the guy, if we find the guy, they're going to let him out. The cops are totally demoralized. I think we have to admit there is a problem which is much worse, somewhat worse than what the statistics are indicating. Those cases don't even enter the statistics.

Yeah, they do. I don't buy the whole of the statistics are cooked. I mean, because of the things, there's all kinds of ways that... But hold on a second. You're kind of missing a point. I'm not going to dispute that crime is a problem. I just think that I've been in the city a long time. I've seen it really bad.

We're not there. We don't want to go back. But here, that's right, and that's fair enough. But here's what we do. Here's the scenario. Washington Square Park, Tompkins Square Park, we have invested an enormous amount in making those parks different than they were in the 70s, but here's what we do here's this the scenario the washington square park tompkins square park we have invested enormous on making those parks different than they were in the 70s like when they used to be uninhabited you would never have your kids go there we invested a great deal and

to a degree new york city is so much better than it used to be okay let's stipulate to that we're having the wrong conversation if we think oh my god the 70s or 90s were worse or whatever it is what's important now is that today we have problems to solve today. Even if this conversation of all, how are we doing relative to some other statistic or relative to some other time is irrelevant. We have problems to solve today. And the solutions to the problems, I'm not saying that sometimes that they're an on-off switch. I mean, look, what I say to people who say, oh, it's inhumane to crack down on fare beating. I say, if you want to have as a policy the subways and buses should be free, I'm open to having that. That's an idea at least.

That's an idea that means that we save a lot on infrastructure and we don't have whatever it is. And maybe that's the way you reduce it. It's going to cost a lot of money or maybe people just sleep. But at least that's an idea. Defending the status quo where we say there's a standard, meaning you pay $2.90 and you get on the train, or you don't pay $2.90 and you don't get on the train, and saying, but we're just going to let people violate the law, is not an acceptable outcome. And too many people, you're right, adopt that position of like, I don't know,

maybe it's not so bad, because that's where the disorder kind of comes from. If we can't even agree on the fundamental premise that everyone plays by these rules, if you want to provide care, if you want to provide free MetroCards for someone, knock yourself out. But that's not, the presence, the status quo is not that. And I'll say this also about the parks.

When the cops are demoralized, and I think there is a post-COVID, you know, we've always seen, we've seen this historically and trying to figure out why crime goes up or down, people literally spend their lives studying this stuff to try to figure it out. But I do think that there, it was this period after COVID where cops were kind of said, you know what, let's let people blow off the steam, maybe don't do as many prosecutor arrests, etc., that a lot of people who joined the force relatively recently,

that's all that they've known. And then something else that I think I might have been wrong about. I assumed body-worn cameras were going to be a solution to a lot of problems, that it was going to stop the police, give the police an opportunity to defend themselves from false charges. It was going to give us more context to understand crimes, which would bring us closer together. We all kind of agree when we see something on the camera. I think the effect of having cameras everywhere might be, and I don't

know what the answer to this is, might be that everyone is like, who's in a position to get in trouble for interceding in crimes are just skittish about it. I do think the morale is a problem. That's why I say, whenever I say hire more cops, I said, we can talk about how we deploy them, how we discipline them, how we train them. I'm willing to have any conversation around that. But I do think as a function of just dealing with the problems we have, we need more of them. It's not just the body cams. It's also that all the citizens have cameras. Body cams are still usually exculpatory. You use them, don't you, now? We use them with our security guys, yeah. I mean, I think, look, I was a big advocate for it

before it was kind of cool to be that, but I think that there is, I think that very often people in public life, they dismiss the notion that whether the cops feel really motivated, you know, maybe sometimes it gets them in trouble, but you need to strike that balance where cops feel like they want to go out and do the job.

And we have a car that sits in front of the target not far from where I live on 14th Street. Two of them sit there all day. I bet you crime is way down at that target. I don't dispute that. I don't dispute that. I don't dispute that. But is that really the best way, even in a city that's 35,000 cops, is that really the best way to impact as many people as possible, feeling a sense of safety? Would it be better if we had... And then the criminal justice system bears some responsibility. I mean, I think that if you have a situation where a relatively small number of people are

committing an enormous amount of crimes, you've got to figure out what to do. And one of the things I think we should do is got to be something besides prison and nothing you know there used to be a system in New York City of probation that was not just probation you put people cleaning the sidewalks you'd put people cleaning up graffiti you put people cleaning up abandoned stores you know the the no it's not a chain gang but the notion of having people on the side of the road in other cities and states that are cleaning up and instead of being in prison that doesn't in prison, it's not rocket science. That seems like a reasonable thing

to do in New York City. Yeah. The theories about what causes crime, even lead paint, Jonathan Haidt, the great social scientist and psychologist, believes that lead paint was part of it. But of course, it's multifactorial. And anybody who doesn't understand that once you create an expectation that you can do a certain thing and get away with it and not get punished doesn't increase crime, you've lost me. Obviously, at some point, if people start seeing people do stuff and they know they can get away with it, this spreads and then it reaches a certain critical mass and then things descend even more quickly into what we did see in the 70s you and i are old enough to remember when charles bronson starred in death wish and this was a slightly exaggerated version of what really life was like on the upper west side right i lived right there you know right but we're a long way from that i was gonna. But it starts somewhere.

And either we react to it now or we risk the trend. I think, listen, crime is lower than it's, crime is relatively low compared to those times. But that doesn't, who cares? Well, New York is a lot wealthier now. We don't have burnt out buildings. We don't have abandoned buildings by and large. I didn't live here during that time, but I do remember Archie Bunker always complaining about the subway and, of course, the line in Annie Hall about,

you should be doing Shakespeare in the Park. And Tony Roberts, is his name? He said, I did Shakespeare in the Park. I got mugged. Which is a joke I don't think would really fly today. No, you remember the famous, in 1977, during the World Series Howard Cosell, like they used to shoot from the blimp. And there were fires going on in the Bronx. Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.

What I had to do with Howard Cosell, I forget. The Bronx is burning because we literally had people, whole swaths. And by the way, you know what saved us? The Dominican immigration. Like just Dominicans flooded into our city and made everything a lot better and a lot safer and suddenly abandoned properties. And Ed Koch said, let's sell all these abandoned properties

and let's see if anyone wants to build on them. And sure enough, people did. I mean, we have been, I used to- Because people cannot conceive. I should probably turn some video to cut into this podcast. What it was like to go for block after block after block of burnt out buildings in New York City.

Find the video of Jimmy Carter touring the Bronx. I'll find that. That would be good. They used to have those decals on the window. Abandoned buildings, but they put a decal with a flower pot. Hey, there was all kinds

of this kind of stuff was going on. We have different types of problems, but they put a decal with a flower pot. Hey, there was all kinds of this kind of stuff was going on. We have different types of problems, but it's of no consolation to someone who either feels unsafe or has been a victim of crime or whatever it is. I think... By the way, are there certain hours in the day or certain places where you would simply not let your daughter or your wife or your mother take a subway to?

Certain hours, certain stations. Well, you know the most dangerous time on the subway, right? Do you know that? No. It's basically three to five when the kids are coming out of school. Because lots of kids and they're doing their things and whatever it is, that's when the most crime happens. No, no, no. But I used to ride the subways and I grew up in Queens and I've been in and out of every corner of the city my whole life.

Before COVID, I work at night and I would come home after being here or whatever. And I would ride the subway until 12, 1 o'clock in the morning. And after COVID, I mean, I would never ride the subway at 1 o'clock in the morning by myself now. Oh, you should. It's's it's it's safe no no no anthony i'm telling you you have to speak to my staff it is not it is no longer safe to me i'm on the subways i mean but i know so what are you you're dealing with more people that more homeless people yeah for sure yeah no that's definitely it's insane we here's what happened after covid during covid we turned a lot of people out into the street

who hadn't been in the street in a long time, and now they're out there, and we can't get them back. And we have no place to put them. But you're from Queens. They're developing the area around Creedmoor as housing, okay? Creedmoor, a psychiatric hospital, add another 40% capacity for a psychiatric hospital so we have some place to put the people taking them up the street.

100%. I mean, yes, we need housing, but the people in Queens don't want the housing. Make Creedmoor a little. Look, it's not like these, but these are... But I'm talking about in the city. Like, I've lived in the city since I was, you know, 20-something years old. Like, I'm talking about... I used to take, again, I don't want to sound like the old guy, but the L train, which runs in Manhattan and then goes out to East New York.

You would get on the L train if you wanted to get mugged. Like that was you. Why would I go get mugged? Let me, and now between Williamsburg blowing up and Bushwick blowing up and everything else, it's, it's much safer. It's much safer. I had a, I had this, um, Uber driver in Brooklyn the other night and, uh, young, by the way, super, super informed guy.

Like he knew facts and figures. Like I don't know if he's a news junkie or whatever it is. Like I speak to a lot of like super informed people. This guy shocked me at how informed and sophisticated his understanding was. Anyway, but he was talking about congestion pricing. He says, look, I would never let my mother take the subway.

I will not let, I said, I don't care how much money I need, I will never let my mother take the subway. Too many bad things happen to my friends on the subways. I didn't ask him what neighborhood he lived in. But obviously he doesn't live on the Upper East Side, Upper West Side. He's taking the subway to the Bronx or out somewhere in Brooklyn, which

is not where the hippies and the yuppies and the hipsters are living. And this gets to the congestion pricing. The notion that we are trying to coerce people to take that subway, the people who have the least ability to resist it. When we know ourselves, because we can afford it, we would always tell our moms, no, no, it's midnight, take an Uber. It's midnight, take a taxi. So they're like, no, no, these people should take a subway. This just is something to be progressives

behind this kind of heartless coercion. Who are they coercing? The people who can't afford it, right? Like the whole policy in the end is like, okay, who are you going to get to take the subway? That's our congestion pricing guys coming right up. The issue is... Who are you going to get to take the subways?

Not me, not the people, well-to-do people. We're going to get the people who just can't afford it to take the subways. Yeah, we're going to get... That's our policy. We're going to get... I mean, look, here's what's going to happen. It's not going to reduce congestion.

It has presently, because that's always the arc. In London, when they did it, the first three, six months was amazing in London. By the one-year mark, it was at 104% of when they started. All you're doing is making it more of a luxury product. It's more like, look, the people who are thrilled with congestion pricing are the people for whom $9 doesn't mean anything. Now they have a much clearer drive. I get that. I don't believe it reduces

congestion in the long term. It is a revenue raise for mass transit, and I'm okay with that. I'm okay with people being charged more to drive so that you're taking a scarce resource, whatever it is, to put it towards the subways. The problem I have is the artifice around it, like,

oh, we're doing this for the environment, or we're doing it because we need a funding stream for our subways. That's fine. That's fine. We need the revenue. You sound like a fucking Republican. But are they going to take that revenue and actually clean up the subways? Well, here's the problem that I have with it.

And it ultimately is a foundational thing I have that I talk about a lot. In the 1970s and the 60s and even something in the 50s, we created these independent boards that politicians created because they didn't want to make tough decisions. Long story short. So we created the MTA because politicians didn't want to say, I don't want to raise anyone's token. I don't want to raise anyone's fare. So they create these things. And then governors make appointments and mayors make appointments and county officials make appointments. But at this table, four informed

people would not, if there was a member of the MTA board sitting right here, we wouldn't know who they are. Okay? So fundamentally, I have a problem with any time we are doing a civic act like this, and we don't know who to hold accountable. Isn't it Paul McCartney's old lady? Yes. I think you're right.

Whose name, go ahead. I don't know. I don't remember. Oh, Chevelle or something like that. I don't know what her name is. And I'm a fairly insider guy. I don't think maybe if I – with a gun to my head, I might be able to name. So when you say, yes, they have a plan on a piece of paper, and even if you think, oh, the executive director or they're doing smart things and the people of the MTA work very hard and they're on the level and everything else, the fundamental lack of accountability around how money gets spent, as a predicate for doing any of this, I would have at very least said,

at the minimum, give the mayor of the city of New York a majority of the board, since this is taking place in New York City, at a minimum. And what you really should do, if you believe in creating a tax to pay for a service,

raise a tax to pay for a service, and then stand for election and justify why you did it. That's the way we should have a system. And we have to acknowledge, is the word sclerotic? Government can't get anything done anymore for whatever reason. And it just takes years and years. You look at what's happening with the fast train in Los Angeles. You saw how long we had a hole in the ground. Big civic works are really hard to do.

There's no doubt about that. Here, Biden raised all that money to build charging stations, and they built like one charging station in four years. This is the classic story now. Civic works are hard to do for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is we're no longer building in open spaces. And that, by the way, is the argument for creating these boards and authorities.

We can guess this is the Robert Moses argument. Oh, but we've got to get stuff done. And now we can't get stuff done. My view is we... Oh, the Second Avenue subway, right? We live... Well, the Second Avenue subway... Took years and years, way over budget. The Second Avenue subway was also an example of something else. That you want to make a subway.

Have you ever gone on 72nd and gone down that? You know how deep they had to go for that? No. Because a whole city has grown up below the surface that they had to go underneath it. It goes, it's the steepest thing, the same way with the Grand Central Terminal for the Long Island Railroad now.

You go up, it's like straight. Grand Central Madison. Grand Central Madison. It's like descending into heaven. It's insane. But putting that aside, this gets back to the things we talked about earlier. Status quo is super, super powerful. And so if someone says,

I want to raise taxes to go pay for this new thing, and they stand up on their soapbox and they say to the voters, here's what you're going to get. Here's what it's going to cost. Here's how we're going to distribute that cost. What they're trying to do with this congestion pricing is to kind of weirdly make everyone feel like, oh, no, no, it's excellent for everybody.

No, there are winners and there are losers. Anthony, can I ask, if we raised the gas tax, wouldn't that similarly impact, that would be a regressive tax because it's not related to income. It's a user fee. We pay it now. There's a federal portion, there not related to income. It's a user fee. We pay it now. There's a federal portion. There's a state portion. It's a user fee.

And by the way, traditionally those federal tax dollars go back for things like buses and trains and also highways in Texas and things like that. But the whole idea is that if you're using this amenity, this roadway, and the same was true in New York City. And yes, it is regressive in that it's a user fee. It's only people who are using it. However, it is more progressive as it's spread out over a wider base of people. And it's a model that we already are aware of. And again, it's a very clear thing. You're raising a tax to pay for a thing. That's the way conversations around civic action be. Isn't there something disturbing about the fact that taxes have gone up and up?

Andrew Cuomo had said, we're already like this with property taxes. The rich are already leaving. New York is at its most affluent and wealthy watermark that it's ever been in its history. And we built all these things years ago when we didn't have this kind of money, when we weren't this successful. We can't build a subway any longer.

We're just pampering over the fact that there's total mismanagement of billions and billions of dollars that are coming in. I don't know. I mean, look, you want to build a subway. The obvious thing, you take the N train that goes out into Queens and you continue it to LaGuardia Airport for three stops. You're basically there. It's the most common sense civic act we can do.

We can do it. It makes all the sense in the world. Let me just finish my point. Sorry, sorry. But now that's someone's backyard in Astoria that now no one wants to have drilling in their backyard, and so we haven't done it. It's the most obvious thing in the world. That's politics's backyard in Astoria that now no one wants to have drilling in their backyard, and so we haven't done it. It's the most obvious thing in the world.

That's politics, man. Politics is people get to decide whether stuff gets built or not, and if we can't convince people to do it, I mean, we build stuff sometimes. Sometimes we do dumb things. Look at that thing we built out at JFK. It's a train that doesn't go anywhere. The air train?

Yeah. I use it all the time. I love the air train. Where do you take it to? Jamaica. Exactly. Do you take it to? Jamaica. Exactly. Do you live in Jamaica? No, but it's not that tough to take the LIRR from Jamaica.

You're taking it to a train, to a subway, to go into the city. 95% of the traffic is going into the city. If you're going to do a train, keep going. You were already going up to Van Wyck. Keep freaking going. Well, ideally, but I'm saying it's- Yeah, that's the point. The point is it's a white elephant.

It's a white elephant. Yes, you created a thing that everyone can kind of agree on. A two-seat ride. I'm saying it's... Yeah, that's the point. The point is it's a white elephant. It's a white elephant. Yes, you created a thing that everyone can kind of agree on. A two-seat ride. I'm going to get with my bags. I'm going to go on to a different thing. I'm going to go down an elevator onto the E train and take that into the city. This is America. This is New York City.

Go all the way into the city. But there's another fact here, which is that the subways are disgusting. Oh, okay. Hold on a second. The subways are a lot better than they were. Whatever. The subways are disgusting. Oh, okay. Hold on a second. The subways are a lot better than they were. Whatever. The subways are gross. I went to a basketball, a Nets game a couple years ago at the Barclays.

You don't like the fact that there are more homeless people there. The subways are gross. I was just on Broadway in Lafayette. There are homeless people just splayed out with their pants full. Yeah, but that's a different thing. I thought you were making a different point. I thought you were making a point that they're dirty and not as clean as they used to be.

The point is that, so I took a subway to the Barclays Center a couple years ago. I don't know why I didn't drive or take an Uber. I said, it'll be faster. Take the subway. Listen, take the subway. Barclays is right on the subway. It's like 15 subways. I had the most disturbing experience in my life. I had bad luck. There was some violent homeless guy who shoved a lady

next to me. No one was arrested. Just who would do this? I'm never taking that fucking subway again. The point is this. If they would clean up the subway, if it was clean and safe and pleasant, that's where a lot of revenue can be found.

90% of it is removing people who live in the subways from there. Right now, it costs thousands of dollars to have a car, to drive the car, tolls, gas. You should take the subway, man. Insurance. The subway is $2.90 without congestion pricing. Hold on. Without congestion pricing.

Don't people understand? Already, people are opting to spend thousands of dollars when a $2.90 option is available to them. We have an amazing subway system. It does an amazing job. So they must have a very good reason that they don't want to do it. That's not true. People are doing it more

than they've ever done it in New York history. We're far beyond we were post-COVID, pre-COVID. Millions and millions of people take rides. We double the amount of murders on the subways. From five to ten. We're up to pre-COVID subway ridership? We are. We are.

Pre-COVID tourism numbers. Tourism, I don't know. Wait, wait. The numbers for murder on the subway have doubled? Yes, from five to ten. Listen, murder is... Don't we want it to go in the other direction? Totally.

It's terrible. You went up 100%. But from five to ten, when there are millions and millions, 455 million rides every year or something like that. Listen, that seems like a pretty shitty number. It's better than any city on earth. Murder is not the...

It can't be better than Tokyo. 455 million rides? I thought you meant the murder number. Yeah, the murder number compared to the number of people that are bouncing off each other. Murder should not be the metric, especially for a woman, not having to be frightened. We just need something that's not subjective so we can have our conversation around. That's all I'm saying.

There's always going to be a few murders. I'm saying like every woman I know takes a subway, if they take it five days, at least one of those days of the week, their pulse is up because they're worried they're in a dangerous situation. Can I say, here's... Am I wrong, Pearl?

I usually feel fortunate that I'm not getting set on fire when I ride this. I know. Listen, here's what... Let's see what I deal with. Here's what... By the way, that is not an inconsiderable thing. The idea that we go through these cycles in these spasms in New York where we have these

stories that become terrifying. Legit, that guy that got pushed on 18th Street. That was insane. Horrible. Okay, terrible. Terrible, terrible. legit that guy that got pushed on on 18th street that was insane horrible okay terrible terrible terrible but and we're in one of those moments now that oh my god the world's going crazy that everyone's whatever yeah hundreds of millions of people get into the subway every single day bounce off each other like molecules in a microwave get off the subway at their work in a

in a system that is amazing that it exists. But it doesn't matter if people, even people like us are like, oh my God, it's terrible. It's not terrible, but it needs to get better. And we need to be responsive to the idea that some people think it's not getting better. But let's remember something. There used to be, you're too young for this,

there was no such thing as a non- She's older than she looks. There's no such thing as a non-graffiti subway train. Now you don't have graffiti. I mean, how does that- They just decided we're going to start putting the subways at night behind fences and lock the gates so no one gets graffitied anymore.

So now there's no graffiti. On the other hand, brand new C-trains. You've ridden a C-train? Yeah, I've ridden a C-train. Beautiful. They're taking them all out of service sooner than they wanted to because something is on the C- C train track on 8th Avenue that's causing the wheels to wear out. And why is that happening?

Because we have such an old system. It's from the 1930s that the way we inspect our tracks is not with sensors and everything else that other train tracks. We have some guy that walks around with a flashlight to try to find where the problem is. And then there's no one who makes any of these parts anymore. The city of New York has its own shop that makes parts now because they're so old at this point. And we got – the point I'm making is that we do need to invest in the system and we do need revenue to invest in the system. I just think that the way that we've chosen to raise that revenue and the responsiveness of the agency that we chose is not the way to do it. Well, I agree with you.

I would encourage you to please get on that. Yeah. The nice thing about that train is you can see all the way down. It doesn't have doors in between cars. So I would imagine that a cop at one end would be effective as a deterrent because he can see all the way down. Well, also, yeah. Also, it's more space because you don't need to have the space for the doors. Like if you're on one of those extended express buses like you and I travel on, you have that area between the –

Articulation. Attenuated, I think it's. Articulated, I think. Articulated, yeah. It's a great word. Yeah, there's like – we buy more subway trains than any other system on earth. Like we got a lot of – but these were like brand new and they're colorful and nice. And anyway.

We were just admiring them. Yeah. I'm seeing here that the subway is still, this is the controller, nyc.gov, transit ridership in New York City remains significantly below 2019 levels. When is this from? This is the current page. I don't know what it's from and um chat gpt which you know can i mean not always be reliable but it says that uh same thing recovery 75 percent of post 2024 was 75 percent uh what i what i the the 65 to 70 the numbers that that i saw is that

when you take the fair and you add in the people that are jumping the turnstile we're basically at where we were but that doesn't say jumping turnstiles. Fair enough. Do they count? I have no idea how they count this stuff. By the way that's the other thing now the MTA has hired a whole bunch of guys in windbreakers to stand at the doors as people come in illegally

but I don't know what those guys are supposed to They're not doing anything there's one I'm not 100% sure what the answer is because you don't want I don't know if you want to arrest to do. They're not doing anything. There's one. I'm not 100% sure what the answer is because you don't want, I don't know if you want to arrest everybody and take the cop off the beat and have them go down and give the guy a desk appearance ticket

and come back. I don't know. I happen to think that the way to do it is to have the cop right there in front of everyone and seize it as a deterrent rather than try to stand in the corner and catch one guy. Deterrent is always better than arresting people.

I think so. Who did we have on the show who was the transit expert? You loved her. Oh, she's fantastic. It's a New York Times columnist. Nicole Golanus. Yeah, she's true.

She was saying that the thing with the subways is you can't let little minor things happen. That's like the broken window. That's the Manhattan Institute. That's their answer to everything. But there's something to that. She's a liberal. The Manhattan Institute is conservative. She's to everything. But there's something to that. She's a liberal. The Manhattan Institute is conservative.

She's a conservative. She's a – but I like her. I think she does very good work, and she really does a good job drilling into the numbers. Very reasonable woman. I'm very, very impressed with her. Yeah, she – I like her. I've heard her on my show too. I like her, and I like – and she also goes below the surface and really looks at stuff and tries to figure it out.

Look, there is an element of this broken windows conversation. Everything gets so bumper stickerized at this point. You know, broken window, Rudy Giuliani, therefore we don't like it. Yeah, but there are elements of all of this stuff. The same time that we were doing, you know, all the broken windows means is that we're going to enforce crimes. I mean, that there won't be a category of crimes that we don't enforce. So the district attorney here in Manhattan

did something he quickly regretted where he said, we're not going to prosecute this series of crimes anymore. Some of them, there was plenty of reason to think they were being overcharged, but any kind of a pronouncement that there are some crimes we're not going to do, it's not that people are reading press releases

from the district attorney and then go committing crimes, but it did create this environment that led people to believe that, all right, maybe minor crimes are not going to be charged. And the point being, we can agree, again, getting back to the way we started this conversation, nobody wants a system where there's wide-scale shoplifting going on, right? So let's figure out how we solve that problem. Now, if you are in the camp of someone that believes, okay, this is a form of social justice and I believe they should be allowed to do it, take that position then. And then say, I don't believe that's a problem to solve. But right now, all that's happening is people say, oh, you oppose higher sentences.

You oppose hiring more judges. You oppose putting cops there. We all are just getting into this place that we're just responding to the things we're against rather than starting the conversation. All right, let's sit down and see how we solve this problem. And the answer is not putting everything behind, you know, plastic, whatever it is.

And I think, by the way, the drugstores are full of shit too. They're doing that to be performative and they're doing it for their own reasons. Listen, they've already been using the spikes in crime as reason to close places. You know that part of the reason they're closing is they have these giant real estate deals

that were terrible to put one of these things on every corner of the most expensive real estate in our neighborhood. And they're stuck with these extraordinarily expensive bills now and they're not making that much money on them. That's why they're closing them, not because they had shoplifting. Anthony, I don't know that you're right.

I am always open to the idea that somebody is using something as a pretext for something else. I get it. But these places, I mean, I run businesses. I know other people who run businesses. I don't know anybody who runs a drugstore, but businesses can operate on very, very narrow margins,

very narrow margins, and you just can't have people walking off with it. I understand, but there was – You've seen these videos. But they – I know you – that's the – there it is. We've seen these videos. But they're real. I have a friend who works in a prosecutor's office in Los Angeles, and he tells me it's just astounding what's going on. I have to say, we still are in an environment where

I have seen a video becomes a substitute for having a rational conversation about whether something is or isn't a problem. It's expensive. This is why you have to be wrong. It's expensive to put everything behind plastic. It's expensive in two ways. The cost of putting everything behind plastic,

but more so the inconvenience of the customer. I walk into a drugstore and I see everything behind plastic. I'm like, fuck it. I'll get it somewhere else. I don't even bother. Well, where could you get it? On Amazon or some, or I'll wait till I get home. The point is that it is chasing customers out the door

to add 10 minutes and all that, you know, rigmarole to get razor blades. I don't think that it's being done. I don't think that it's – I don't know why it's being done. It doesn't seem to be like it was a decision I would make if I was a general manager of a store. You don't do it if you have to. I don't think you would do it – I don't know that you're reducing anything. I don't know.

You should walk into one of these. You have the cashier to do it. You should walk into one of these. You have the cachet to do it. You should ask the manager of the store. You should get one of these guys on your radio show. Yeah. I mean, I just think that the conversation come on

sometimes just because how terrible everything is in New York City. That's not my vibe. I don't think that we have challenges in New York City. I've seen a lot of times. I'm 60 years old now, I've been in public life, you know, I haven't been done doing it for 10 years, but I've been living here this whole time. We'd never imagine leaving. I think that, you know, Ed Koch used to do a thing when people would come up to say, Mr. Mayor, why isn't it like it used to be? And his standard line was, madam, it was never the way you think it used to be. Like, we have shit in our city. We're a bunch of people bouncing

off each other. We're a lot better city than we used to be. We're a the way you think it used to be. Like, we have shit in our city. We're a bunch of people bouncing off each other. We're a lot better city than we used to be. We're a lot safer city than it used to be. We're a lot cleaner city than it used to be. But that is meaningless to someone who is dissatisfied with the condition of their block. I think you're right. Look, the good old days is something we're all prone to.

The good old days were never as good as they seem in your memory. You want to be optimistic. You want to try to put things in perspective for people who might be prone to becoming negative and pessimistic and overly emphasizing what's going wrong. On the other hand,

you don't want to accuse people of bellyaching when they are seeing an actual turn for the worse in their everyday lives, and they will resent somebody telling oh what are you talking about i used to be able to take the subway now i can't yeah i used to be able to go to the drugstore now i can't yeah i used to be able to have my kid play in washington square park now i can't i totally get that fuck yourself and tell me it's not real i totally get that and that's why i thought i had done a little bit of column a and

column b in my answer but yes i think you have But let me say a little something else. And this is there is a permanent economy around telling people how bad shit is. Yes. It's called the New York Post. It's called Fox News. There's a permanent thing. I'm on a radio station. Thank God MSNBC never does that. Before years with Trump, they never

once exaggerated this threat. But I am on a radio station, a conservative radio station. It's all everyone does all the time. How terrible things are. If it bleeds, it leads. Right. And so that also has to be, when you're a representative of a community

and you sometimes have to say to Mrs. Crappellucci, Madam, I hear what you're saying. I'm going to try to solve your problem. But no, you're not going to get mugged on the way home today from our meeting. You're going to be okay. It's going to be okay. Leave it to me to try to improve the conditions on your block. But I don't like people listening to this who are living in St. Louis

and think about visiting New York City are going to think we're in some kind of apocalypse. You're going to fly here. You're going to take that stupid air train to the E train and you're going to be like, what kind of crazy setup is this? And you're going to come to New York. You're going to find your hotel is more expensive than it needs to be because we have a lot of hotel rooms

for migrants right now because the city didn't plan very well for all this. You're going to have some things like that but you're going to go out to the Lion King. You're going to have some things like that, but you're going to go out to... Go to the Lion King. You're going to go to the Lion King. You're going to go to the Comedy Cellar. You're going to have the time of your life.

You're going to put five stars next to everything on Yelp and everything else, and you're going to say, oh, my God, New York's amazing, just like everyone else does, because it's the most amazing city. Here's one thing about New York that hasn't declined. Anthony Weiner. He looks great.

60 years old. You wouldn't know. Inside, the picture of Dorian Gray in my attic. there's a portrait that is decaying gradually, but yes. Listen, you're a throwback to a better kind of politician who's speaking less ideologically and more common sense. You're ready to acknowledge problems in an empirical manner. And as I said, New York has become kind of a common sense desert. It's very rare to hear any politician speaking anything that seems to make sense anymore. And for those reasons, I think you should be a very powerful candidate here.

Well, thank you. Well, America loves a comeback. And I'm to the right of you, obviously, on some things probably, maybe just because I have experience running a business. Maybe if you and I became better friends. One of the reasons I like you. If you and I became better friends and you were more privy to the kind of challenges

that I'm facing, I think you might move in my direction. I totally get that. Push you to the right. No, we are facing, I think you might move in my direction. I totally get that. Push you to the right. No, we are all, we're all some degree, we're products of our own experience. My brother was a restaurateur in this town, couldn't do it anymore after COVID.

But I totally get it. I resist the left-right thing when it comes to this, as I said when I sat down. But one of the things that I am, what I'm going to be as I run this race, anthonywiener.com, if someone wants to read my ideas, is I value this. I don't want to run away from this. I like having conversations with people. I represent a fairly conservative district in Queens and Brooklyn when I was in Congress, and I supported gay marriage in the 1990s, even though I had a

heavy Orthodox district. I stood up for Obamacare, but now people are yelling at me because I say I'm a Zionist when people ask me. All of these things, I don't think, make us a less healthy democracy and a less healthy community. I think they make us more healthy, and I value the idea that you and I share that idea. You know, when I offered, just so you know,

when I offered, and I was always, you know, I wanted Obamacare to work. And it definitely did. I agreed with the Supreme Court decision. I thought Roberts was very courageous in what he did. However, just so you know, when I offered Obamacare to my staff at the time, when based on ownership we had over 100 employees. Not a single employee took it. Well, Obamacare is just a... I don't know what that even means.

It means that there's the gold, you know, the bronze plan, silver plan, whatever it was. Although Obamacare did, was offered people subsidies to buy private insurance and then organize the private insurance workers. The way it worked was that I would have to pay a certain amount of money to match what they were paying.

Correct. And even with that, not a single employee. Now, they're a particular demographic. They're young. They think they're going to live forever. There's a $6,000 deductible, which is interesting. And they're required to. Look, I don't like the employer-based model. I think it's stupid.

However, if we're going to do the employer-based model, Obamacare made it a lot better. Now, far fewer people are not insured. And yes, you're still going to have people who are under 25 who think they're invincible, who aren't on their parents' plan, who if they get hit by a bus and people are not insured. And yes, you're still going to have people who are under 25 who think they're invincible, who aren't on their parents' plan, who if they get hit by a bus and they're not insured, it's not the bill fare. It's not going to pay for it. We're going to pay for it through higher

taxes. You are in favor of a single-payer, Canadian-style? No, American-style. It's called Medicare. Medicare starts at $65, started at $60, and then started at $55, and then started at $45 before you know what you're coming up with. We've got to wrap it up. So I was thinking about, so Tom Green, the comedian,

he's Canadian. He's, he's left-wing guy. How long ago was he here? Like a few years, seven, eight years ago. No,

it wasn't that long. It was before Colby. It was a few years. Anyway, whenever it was, he was hanging out and he was talking all the liberal claptrap and how much better is in Canada. And,

um, and then he says, yeah, but I had, then he's drinking. He says, I got to admit, you know, my father, I think it's prostate cancer. So my father came down with prostate cancer. And they told him it was going to be like nine months to be able to get it operated on in Canada.

So I said, well, you know, so we brought him to, I think it was Michigan. So there's this relief valve of our horrible system, and obviously this is, you know, it has to be factored. How old am I? 62. Give me 65 and you'll see how good Medicare is. Everyone loves Medicare. People love Medicare. And I'm not saying the Canadians don't. No, no. Medicare is

great, but maybe there would be yin and yang to this, that you have this kind of single-payer thing while at the same time the market is active in creating innovation and... Yeah, but all Medicare is is how we pay for it. It's a single-payer system. Medicare doesn't hire doctors. Medicare just how we...

Why do we need insurance companies taking 25% off the top? What do they get for us? What do they do for us? They just take your money, give some to doctors and pocket the rest. What are they doing? They're doing nothing in the system. They're pooling risk is what they're doing. No, no, no. They're not pooling any risk. Insurance companies? Yeah, because

people are getting it from the employer. And by the way, the biggest risk pooler of all is Medicare. They're pooling risk, yeah. They're pooling risk because if I get really, really sick, I will pay much less money to cure myself because many young people have paid in. I know, and so what do they do for that?

They don't take sick people until you pass Obamacare. Well, no. Yeah, that's right. No pre-existing disease. Medicare, you know what the overhead rate is? Medicare is 1.7% is the overhead. And average insurance companies between 30% and 40%. And all I ask you is what do we get for that?

Yeah, I can't debate this with you because this is something you know about and I'd have to bone up on. I will if I'm going to learn about it. If you're going to run for office in council district too. I used to think about it. We got to wrap it up. Anthony Weiner, you're, you know.

AnthonyWeiner.com. He'll give you all his positions and all his policies. 25 ideas for 2025. Why a Jewish guy has a name Anthony is another question. I don't know if you address that on your website or not. But for all policy stuff, AnthonyWeiner.com. I am David Ben-Mordecai. Thank you. Too Jew-y, too's another question. I don't know if you addressed that on your website or not, but for all policy stuff, anthonywiener.com. I am David Ben-Mordecai. Okay.

Thank you. Yeah, too Jew-y, too Jew-y. All right, well, thank you, sir. And, you know, good luck to you, and maybe become a friend of the show. Love it. I should just say, I would say it off the air, but I should say it on the air,

that I hope I didn't upset you by concentrating at the top on the blemishes or whatever you want to call them. But I think you have to. Can I tell you, in a way, you're doing me a service because I think a lot of people have it and they have the questions and don't raise them. Yes. Giving me a chance to try out what feels right to say and what doesn't. It doesn't do me any favor. This is part of who I am and part of who I'm asking people to vote is my history. And so you do me a great service, actually, when you ask the question and I can

workshop a little bit about what I feel comfortable saying and not. And I think I'm going to try to lead with kind of rigorous honesty as best I can on it, even though it's uncomfortable. But I appreciate you giving me a chance. People respond to that. Can I say something? Yeah. I just want to tell you that I think it's very refreshing, your honesty. And respond to that. Can I say something? Yeah. I just want to tell you that I think it's very refreshing, your honesty. And I think that people have forgiven far greater indiscretions. And I think that like hearing about when you break it down makes a lot more sense and leaves a lot of questions answered as opposed to people making assumptions that probably aren't the case.

So... Well, I appreciate it. And one thing I will observe is that, you know, it used to be in public life, you would say, all right, let's get an interviewer who's going to be gentle and get the questions in advance and everything else. In my view, having been in politics for a while,

that does not do anyone a service because ultimately the candidate benefits by showing that he or she can answer and has an answer. And if there's a question that's out there lingering that doesn't get answered, no one benefits. He, she, or they. You forgot the they. Correct. We got to go. Thank you very much, Anthony Wiener. Thank you.