Valuetainment - July 15, 2025


＂Playing With Fire＂ - Mayor Eric Adams WARNS NYC Permits Crisis Could Spark DISASTER

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Eric Matt Fraser Jimmy Otto Austin Duffy Trump Adams Musk
＂Don't Complain, Do Something!＂ - Eric Adams REVEALS The Crime Crisis That Pushed Him Into POWER ＂Reeks Of An Inside Job＂ - Was Trump Shooting A Security FAILURE Or A DEEP STATE Cover-Up？

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

187.59

Word count

2,189

Sentence count

131

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we sit down with California Governor Gavin Newsom to talk about his vision for the future of the state and how he wants to fix the infrastructure in his state. We discuss the need for infrastructure improvements, the need to fix our roads and bridges, and how to get construction companies to work on projects.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 permits. When, when you look at real estate, okay. And you go to roads and one thing, when you're
00:00:07.340 driving around New York, there's a lot of unfinished projects that are kind of sitting
00:00:11.600 around. And when you look at why, like right now, California, it's a worse time to be Newsom,
00:00:17.980 you know, no matter how much he tries to spin it, what he's going through in his state with all the
00:00:21.780 stuff that's going on with the Palisades, what happened Malibu, you know, out of all the homes
00:00:27.320 that went through it. I think only six have been rebuilt and only 14% have permits to start
00:00:34.380 rebuilding. So think about the permit issue that's taking place in California. You got it as well.
00:00:39.640 When you look at New York city, and I wonder how much of it is you can do something about,
00:00:44.140 or it's got to be a governor, like a bigger position than you. The number of highways,
00:00:49.940 over 60% of the highways were built after 1970 in New York city. They're built, they're built past
00:00:59.700 their expected lifespan. Most of these. So when they build it, they're like, this is good to be for
00:01:05.120 40 years, 50 years, but you guys are kind of playing with fire right now, right? The department
00:01:11.500 of transportation says over 200 city bridges are structurally deficient as of 2024. Okay.
00:01:17.540 The Brooklyn queen expressway being one of them, you know, some of these other ones. Then I said,
00:01:21.880 I'm curious, the average highway compared to other cities in New York city, it's 60 to 80 years.
00:01:28.520 The average age LA is 40 to 60 years. Houston is 30 to 50 years. Chicago is 50 to seven years. You have
00:01:35.180 the oldest. And when you look at these numbers, like the oldest of the oldest, then when you go to the
00:01:40.160 cost, okay, slowest and the most expensive construction timelines in the world, it takes two to four
00:01:46.860 years compared to some other places, you know, six to 12 months, 12 to 18 months to build a mile
00:01:52.720 bridge in your area. The average subway extension in New York city, not bridge subway extension, two
00:01:59.500 and a half billion to three and a half billion per mile compared to Paris. It's only a half a million
00:02:05.360 per mile. Seoul is 300 million per mile, 120 per mile in Madrid. You're five to seven times more than
00:02:11.840 Paris. So people are sitting there saying, Hey man, we cannot have our city. That's D city,
00:02:18.500 the headquarters, financial capital. But then where do you get the money from? How do you fund
00:02:24.240 this? Who do you work with? How do you get construction companies to work? How do you put
00:02:27.960 the incentive for people to say, I want to clean up the roads? And it takes such a long time to go
00:02:32.520 through this. How do you manage all of this stuff when it comes down to updating your roads? Because
00:02:38.060 all it takes is one bad accident with a bridge, one bad accident with that. And then that's a big
00:02:42.720 story. Everyone's talking about a doubt, without a doubt. And as you mentioned, the BQE, these are
00:02:47.220 problems that were canned, that was kicked down the road for years. I had and invited Secretary Duffy,
00:02:55.360 Secretary of Transportation to come and walk with me and see the BQE in the erosion because those type of
00:03:03.080 large projects, we need help and sign off also from the federal government. And so when you look at some
00:03:09.320 of the roads that you mentioned in the bridges, some is under city, state and federal. And we need a
00:03:16.220 combination of those things. And when I ran for office, I stated that it takes too long and with
00:03:23.200 too much bureaucracy to get things done. And remember, remember, while I was brought up on a diamond, I was
00:03:33.080 saying to the FDNY, go goddamn inspect the building. If you're going to pass it or fail, and that's up to 0.97
00:03:40.300 them. But at least go in and do the inspection. I was hearing on the campaign trail from building owners who was
00:03:47.180 telling me, Eric, to get a fire inspection, it takes years. And it was my mindset that we have to speed up
00:03:57.020 the bureaucracy. Because if I have a building owner developing a skyscraper, and they have to wait to
00:04:04.600 get an inspection, and they have a 200-man crew that they're paying for every day, it just hurts
00:04:10.100 business. And here's why. The whole concept of government is a flawed concept in the manner in
00:04:16.300 which, if you don't incentivize the action, if I have a person who opened a hotel, is paying $35,000 a
00:04:24.700 month in rent, yet they can't have someone come in and turn on their gas and turn on their electricity,
00:04:30.800 or come and give them a CFO for an inspection. And no one is incentivizing. If government is saying,
00:04:37.560 I'm getting my salary if I open you or not, that's wrong. I started judging our agencies based on
00:04:44.300 the end product. How many restaurants did we open? How many citations did you issue? How many
00:04:49.940 building permits did we approve? We have to incentivize government and judge based on the 0.96
00:04:56.660 end product. How much control do you have to accelerate permit, the speed of permitting? Is
00:05:04.720 that influence on you? At what level is somebody able to accelerate the speed of people getting
00:05:10.100 permits? That's a great question. Part of the problem is, is the permanency of government.
00:05:15.200 You know, many people, you know, who don't want to see this productivity, those who are in government,
00:05:22.240 they have a mindset, we'll wait you out. You know, you're here for what, four years, eight years? I've
00:05:26.000 been here for 35 years. You know, I've been here for 35 years. So when you go in, and you put your folks
00:05:33.440 at the top, and we have modernized many of our systems, I have a great chief technology officer,
00:05:40.660 a lot of this stuff, you could use real good artificial intelligence technology, should not
00:05:46.500 have to go through this long series of interactions. And that's the way I attempted to do. So in three
00:05:52.840 and a half years, we've modernized a lot. But at the same time, remember, I had to go to those top
00:05:58.320 issues, building the housing, making the city safe. Well, I guess what I'm trying to say is,
00:06:03.580 can the campaign be that we're going to go through the following permits that are taking
00:06:10.160 so long to get approved, because nine people need to sign off? And here's what we're doing
00:06:15.560 moving forward. Moving forward, we're going to split the time for campaign, because we need
00:06:20.520 to approve the bridges to be rebuilt. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, enough of the business,
00:06:25.320 you know, buildings that are not being built, people are sitting on the sidelines. And one
00:06:29.160 of the reasons why it's not is permitting. What can be a direct statement that you can
00:06:34.780 make to accelerate people getting permits?
00:06:37.740 Modernizing our system so we don't have all those layers. And that's what I...
00:06:42.380 How do you do that?
00:06:43.720 We're doing that now with Commissioner Jimmy Otto, former borough president, my chief technology
00:06:50.220 officer, Matt Frazier. We're going in and looking at all of these systems, and we're asking the
00:06:54.800 question, do we need all of these layers? For example, prior to, before coming mayor,
00:07:01.160 we would do something called stop work orders, because there's a problem on a job site.
00:07:06.920 What we've learned, there could be a problem with the carpentry, has nothing to do with
00:07:11.840 the electricity, or dealing with the painters, or what have you. So why are we stopping the
00:07:17.320 whole job? Let's stop the part of the job that's the issue. And now to get us to get a stop
00:07:23.260 work order of a whole job, you have to get signed off from the hierarchy of the building
00:07:28.780 department. My contractors said, Eric, this was a home run for us, because they were holding
00:07:33.840 up our jobs. And that's the same thing we're looking at with building permits and other
00:07:38.160 types of permits as well.
00:07:40.000 Yeah, I would. Rob, where is New York City in the speed of permits of all the cities in
00:07:45.560 America? Are you guys known as one of the slowest? Would you say New York City is known?
00:07:49.560 I would say yes, because we have so many rules and regulations that were put in place,
00:07:55.080 that was put in place not only by the agencies, but safety rules and regulations that were put
00:08:00.040 in place by laws and rules and proposals.
00:08:05.380 Is this a permits, Rob? Is this a zoning permit?
00:08:07.760 I believe so.
00:08:08.260 I mean, look at this.
00:08:09.000 Yes.
00:08:09.420 Look at this, New York City, two to four plus years, time for approval, building restriction,
00:08:15.660 very high zoning, reviews, landmark. You got Houston's zero to six months.
00:08:19.560 By the way, Houston just became the number three city in America. They passed up Chicago.
00:08:23.420 I believe they did. If not, they're there now. Austin's six to 12 months. That's where
00:08:26.820 everybody is moving right now. You got, you know, Musk is there, a bunch of guys. Even
00:08:31.620 LA is one or two years. Miami is yours. Chicago is 12 to 14 months. You guys are two to four
00:08:36.980 years.
00:08:37.440 Now, let's break that down for a moment, because, and here's the solution to it also. We have all
00:08:44.280 of these different procedures that community groups, like the community board must sign
00:08:49.260 off. There's a lot of latest. That's not ULIP. ULIP is the uniform land use process. So what
00:08:54.340 did we do this year? We put an amendment on the ballot that will cut that time down to
00:09:03.600 a year. Voters must vote on it now. We had an entire, what we call, you know, the review
00:09:10.640 committee come in and look at how we modify the proposal to do this. Everything from zoning
00:09:17.480 to reviews to landmark to rules. That's what's on the ballot right now that people will be
00:09:22.780 voting on. So New York is must determine that, hey, we no longer want to go through this lengthy
00:09:27.440 process. We knew it was a problem. And that's why we put this battle, this ballot amendment
00:09:32.160 on the ballot.
00:09:33.040 I think this is very big because, you know, and that's why I asked you when you said, did
00:09:37.840 Duffy end up coming in or he never came in?
00:09:39.540 No, he came. We walked through together. He spent, he spent a couple hours with me.
00:09:42.120 That's good. He's the right guy. So if he came in and I, and I, this is a big investment
00:09:46.240 for the city and to show that you can collaborate with the existing administration and get a level
00:09:54.600 of commitment from them that if you get elected, so strategically for me would be if all of a
00:09:58.960 sudden you get a president Trump to say, Hey, I love New York city. If you guys go and
00:10:05.360 support Mayor Adams, we're going to be involved as a federal government to help come clean up
00:10:09.340 New York. Cause I love that place. I grew up in that place, but there's no way we're doing
00:10:12.760 that. If mom done, if there's something like that to be said, and I know he's aggressively
00:10:16.740 not a fan of what mom done, he was doing, but I think this would be very big to me.
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