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How 617 Day became Cambridge’s small business holiday
It was a bright summer day when business owners, local leaders and community members filed into Harvard Square’s dimly lit and aesthetically retro Comedy Studio. As people mingled, sipping coffee and feasting on a full service breakfast, they eagerly awaited a day of learning and networking. What they didn’t anticipate was a day defined by […]
Business owner fined: Collier, Naples and Marco Island projects impacted
Naples business owner has agreed to pay a $100,000 fine for using a retired architect's seal on building plans.
How Business Schools & Industry Can Collaborate To Support Societal Impact Leadership
The most effective partnerships are not defined only by program structure but built through shared values and a common sense of purpose.
Decades in the making, Deb Haaland's political rise spurs both inspiration and scrutiny
Former U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s political career has been defined by historic milestones
‘She should get fined’: Angel Reese faces criticism for ‘flopping’
Tuesday night’s matchup between the Connecticut Sun and the Atlanta Dream featured a marquee battle in the paint between Brittney Griner and Angel Reese. In the fourth quarter, that battle turned a little too physical, though many fans seem to think Reese was embellishing things a bit. Although Atlanta cruised to a 91-75 victory over…
Why Are Politicians Swearing More?
n American politics, cursing and “four-letter words” are no longer confined to hot mics or hidden behind closed doors. Politicians and pundits are increasingly using so-called “bad words” in speeches, social media posts and campaign ads. Benjamin Bergen, professor of cognitive science and Pamela Ban, associate professor of political science, both from UC San Diego’s School of Social Sciences, examine why swearing among politicians is on the rise and what it reveals about persuasion,
Cubs' June Schedule Sets Them Up Well
After a dismal May defined by injuries and a ten-game skid, the North Siders eye a resurgence through a favorable June schedule packed with struggling sub-.500 opponents.
Live Nation Entertainment (NYSE:LYV) Shows Strong Technical Breakout Setup with High Ratings
Live Nation Entertainment shows strong technical breakout potential with an 8/10 TA Rating and 9/10 Setup Quality, offering a defined entry above $174.08 resistance and controlled risk near $165.65.
Why Are Politicians Swearing More?
In American In American politics, cursing and “four-letter words” are no longer confined to hot mics or hidden behind closed doors. Politicians and pundits are increasingly using so-called “bad words.
Baby Steps Dev Says Mario Sunshine Hate Has 'Confined' Nintendo Devs
How the summery heat of Isle Delfino inspired the grueling hike of Baby Steps
AMD Wants You To Keep Using Your Old Hardware For A Lot Longer
With the growing cost of PC hardware and no defined end in sight, AMD is leveraging older hardware and promising extended support of existing platforms as its business strategy for the foreseeable future. AMD made a variety of announcements at Computex, but two of the most important involved hardware that many PC builders have been...
Adolfo Daniel Vallejo: Paraguayan player fined nearly £50,000 at French Open for 'unacceptable' comments about female umpire
Adolfo Daniel Vallejo has been given one of the biggest fines in tennis Grand Slam history after his comments about umpire Ana Carvalho; Vallejo stated after his defeat to French teenager Moise Kouame that his match should have been umpired by a man
California contests for governor, LA mayor head toward primary election with no clear leaders
California heads toward an election Tuesday with its two marquee races defined by uncertainty, while a pair of outsider candidates looked to crack open the state’s durable Democratic hierarchy
California contests for governor, LA mayor head toward primary election with no clear leaders
California heads toward an election Tuesday with its two marquee races defined by uncertainty, while a pair of outsider candidates looked to crack open the state’s durable Democratic hierarchy.
California contests for governor, LA mayor head toward primary election with no clear leaders
California heads toward an election Tuesday with its two marquee races defined by uncertainty, while a pair of outsider candidates looked to crack open the state’s durable Democratic hierarchy.
California Contests for Governor, LA Mayor Head Toward Primary Election With No Clear Leaders
LOS ANGELES (AP) — California spiraled toward a primary election Tuesday with its two marquee races defined by uncertainty and with a pair of outsider candidates looking to crack open the state’s durable Democratic hierarchy. In the governor's race, former Fox News TV host and British political ...
Australian state regulator fines Star Sydney $7.2 million for risk management failures
The New South Wales gaming regulator on Monday said that it has fined Star Entertainment's Sydney casino a total of A$10 million ($7.18 million) to strengthen the technology surrounding its financial crime risk management operations.
Protective Gear, Essential Medicines Bound for DRC Health Providers Treating Ebola
Over the past week, Direct Relief has delivered 196 shipments of requested medical aid to 35 U.S. states and territories and 13 countries worldwide. The shipments contained 3.6 million defined dail…
French Open: Adolfo Daniel Vallejo to be fined after saying second-round match shouldn't have been umpired by a woman
Vallejo, according to CLAY, said his match, which featured palpable fan support for France's Moïse Kouamé, required the strength of a male umpire "to go against the crowd."
Harvard Business School fetes Class Day for the M.B.A. Class of 2026
HBS celebrated Class Day for the M.B.A. Class of 2026 on May 27, recognizing the accomplishments of 925 graduating students and honoring the leadership, service, and community that defined their two years at the School.
Primary care as public utility: Imagine that, researchers urge
A team of healthcare scholars is making U.S. states an offer they hope the border-defined polities won’t refuse: If you’ll pay for the reinvention of primary care, we’ll help sell the public on the rightness of measured, state-level efforts to preserve the profession.
Preview: Expectations mount for UNC's Fall sports in 2026
Dubbed “the University of National Champions,” with 52 team national titles across eight different sports, UNC athletics has long been defined by excellence and expectation. Heading into the 2026 season, here’s a look at some of UNC’s most renowned programs.
Mina the Hollower Review - Refined Throwback
Mina the Hollower looks like a nostalgic throwback, and it undeniably is, but its thoughtful design and larger sensibilities make it play and feel like a contemporary video game – one that has taken the right lessons from the medium’s history.
Our 5 standout men of the La Liga season
It's time to hand out the gold stars.FC Barcelona cruised to the La Liga title this season.Before all eyes turn to the 2026 World Cup, here are the five players who defined the 2025-2026 season in Spa...
What The Most Resilient Small Businesses Have In Common
Small businesses have always been defined by resilience. They adapt quickly, move decisively, and operate with a level of urgency
From prevention to lifelong care: How Ochsner Health supports women’s wellness
Women’s health is not defined by a single moment or milestone. Instead, it is a journey that evolves from adolescence into young adulthood, midlife, then into menopause and beyond. Ochsner
Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Deathwatch: Redefined Brutal Turn-Based Tactics on XBOX
Complex Games Studio Head Jonas Van Niekerk lays out everything you need to know to get excited about the newly announced Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Deathwatch.
How Oana Olteanu became a top early-stage startup investor
After stints at Scale Venture Partners and SignalFire, Oana Olteanu is building a venture firm around the kind of drive that has defined her career.
Steve Bellamy Launches TYPTI, Tennis Channel to Air Championships
"The points are long, the rallies are dramatic, the action is constant, there is a refined bedlam, and the strategy reads so beautifully on camera," Bellamy says of TYPTI.
YOLO for GOP members? What unencumbered Republicans could mean for Trump's agenda
In a Republican-led Congress defined by deference to President Donald Trump, there's a small but steadily growing cohort who have found themselves more willing to break with the White House.
Omar Farha Receives Inaugural Reticular Science Prize
The honor is for major advances in the design, discovery, and application of molecularly defined materials.
A new Middle-earth open world game is coming from Kingdom Come developers
Warhorse is heading into Tolkien territory for a new Lord Of The Rings-adjacent game. Read more at Empire.
NHL Denies Appeal for John Tortorella, Golden Knights
Tortorella was fined $100,000 and the team was docked a draft pick.
Spurs-Thunder Game 1: 12 numbers that defined Victor Wembanyama's and San Antonio's historic double-OT victory over OKC
Photoinduced radical emission from flexible organic crystals
Light: Science & Applications - Photoinduced radical doping strategy enables blue luminescence and elastic bending (>180°) in organic crystals. Confined oxygen radicals and dynamic...
PAID POST: Connecticut fined every major insurer for blocking mental health care. Now what?
Connecticut fined all five major health insurers for mental health parity violations. Here's what the enforcement action means and what still has to change.
Hundreds show up to support Rehovot businesses fined for opening on Shabbat
Ice cream parlor Otello and cafe Nook are cited after operating on Saturdays for over a year, leading residents to complain about uneven enforcement of Shabbat policy
Ranking college football's 26 most-feared defensive players ahead of the 2026 season
The 2026 season will largely be defined by these elite pass rushers, linebackers and defensive backs
From chessboards to computer science
Naveen Prabakar (‘26 computer science) is wrapping up more than just a degree. He’s closing out a college experience defined by growth, persistence, and hands-on learning.
‘Renovation Aloha’ Stars Reportedly Fined Thousands for Illegal Airbnbs in Hawaii
Tristyn and Kamohai Kalama are facing legal issues over properties they own.
Why joining the family business was James Reed’s hardest decision — and why it paid off
James Reed reflects on the decision that defined his career — taking the risk of joining the family business. The Reed CEO discusses failure, purpose and why standing still is the worst decision of all.
UT Health Henderson Achieves Elite National Status with Straight “As” For Patient Safety
Eighth consecutive ‘A’ grades demonstrate dedication to patients Henderson, Texas (May 6, 2026) — UT Health Henderson was awarded an “A” Hospital Safety Grade for the eight consecutive grading rounds by The Leapfrog Group, an independent national nonprofit watchdog focused on patient safety. This designates UT Health Henderson as a “Straight A” hospital, defined as […]
Forum: The story behind the Sports Business Awards
Inside the making of the Sports Business Awards, born in a Charlotte conference room and refined in New York.
Samsung Finally Fixed the Fold: First Look at the Z Fold 8 Wide Design
Get a first look at the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Wide design changes, including a refined dual-camera setup and updated screen dimensions.
Dignity Health Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital Achieves 6th Consecutive Hospital ‘A’ Safety Grade in Patient Safety
GRASS VALLEY, Calif. MAY 9, 2026 – Dignity Health Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital (SNMH), a member of CommonSpirit, earned an “A” Hospital Safety Grade for the sixth consecutive grading round by The Leapfrog Group, an independent national nonprofit watchdog focused on patient safety. This recent award continues the Hospital’s “Straight A” designation, defined as hospitals […]
A deadly crisis of violent manhood spills into our politics, again
Two recent incidents of gender-based violence involving elected officials highlight the need for a shift in the way masculinity is defined, from one of control and domination to one of care and con…
Scientists split gentoo penguins into four species, one totally new to science
The four-foot-tall Emperor penguin of Antarctica may be the most iconic member of this unique family of birds, but 17 other species of penguins populate the Southern Hemisphere, many of them confined ...
Following the call of purpose - UT Health San Antonio
As a nurse, Laquonda Finney, RN, wanted to make a difference on an even larger scale. “I didn’t want to stop at nursing,” Finney said. “I liked the idea of not being confined to a space, where I can go out within the community to see what those needs are and to try to […]
The brain's memory center doesn't start as a blank slate, study suggests
Early in life, neural networks in the brain's memory center are highly connected, and they are only later refined into precise systems, a mouse study finds.
Ted Turner, CNN founder, media magnate and former Braves owner, dies
Ted Turner, visionary Atlanta businessman, dies.
Jaylen Brown fined again by NBA for latest ref complaints from Celtics' Game 7 loss
Brown accused officials of having an "agenda" against him and even declared that referees told him as much.
Who is all-time greatest North Carolina girls high school basketball player?
From Shea Ralph to Sarah Strong, these 10 players have defined North Carolina girls high school hoops.
Football club fined for not doing enough to remove player from field during mental health issue
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australian rules football club Carlton has been fined 75,000 Australian dollars ($54,000) for its lapse handling of a player's on-field mental health episode.
First Entertainment Credit Union Relaunches The A‑List Relationship‑Based Banking Program
/PRNewswire/ -- In an economy where financial stability is increasingly defined by flexibility rather than predictability, First Entertainment Credit Union has...
Carlton fined $75,000 for mishandling of Elijah Hollands’ mental health episode
Review finds Blues player should have been removed from game, as AFL require all clubs employ full-time psychologist
MinnPost analysis: How Minnesota’s remarkable response to Operation Metro Surge changed politics
The pushback to Operation Metro Surge impacted policy and congressional politics, it’s also redefined how Americans relate to immigrants.
Backed by tech money, a moderate Democrat from Silicon Valley mounts a bid for California governor
The race to lead the country’s biggest blue state has been defined by voter concerns about their quality of life in California and the influence of special interests in Sacramento.
‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field
‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field ‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field A field that once seemed like a direct path to stable, lucrative work is becoming less certain under AI, students and faculty told Spectator. By Ria Vasishtha and Arjun Menon May 3, 2026 Shanying Liu / Deputy Illustrations Editor Asia Genawi, SEAS ’29, first encountered artificial intelligence during her sophomore year at her high school in Indiana. Back in 2023, policies on AI varied widely—even within the same district—and some schools had no guidance at all. As Genawi began to see the effects of AI trickle into her classroom, she turned to guidance from her home state’s Department of Education, which she said she found “outdated and inaccessible.” Genawi spent the rest of her high school career dedicated to the issue, including writing a 15-page memo exploring varying AI policies across Indiana schools, which she sent to every Indiana state senator and representative whose contact information she was able to find. She later helped draft a bill that would have required public high schools to establish and share their own AI policies with students in an accessible format. But with so many other bills already awaiting referral, hers never made it to committee. When Genawi arrived at Columbia to study computer science, she found that the gaps she had spent years trying to address in Indiana had followed her there. Many students and professors were also grappling with what AI meant for the field. Across Columbia’s undergraduate schools, computer science has become the most popular major—accounting for around 11 percent of degrees awarded in Columbia College, 32 percent in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and 12 percent in the School of General Studies in 2024. While the number of computer science majors in SEAS grew from 166 to 173 during the 2024-25 academic year, the total number across the three schools fell around 4.5 percent from 393 to 375, driven by declines at Columbia College and General Studies. At Barnard, it has grown to become the second most popular major as of 2025, up from third the year prior. The number of degrees awarded have grown fivefold since 2016. Faculty members and students in the department told Spectator that the surge in the major’s popularity has been driven in large part by its apparent promise of a secure, well-paid career path. However, they noted that the recent rise of generative AI has compromised the sense of stability that once defined the field, even as interest in technical skills among students persists. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2024, out of 74 majors tracked, computer science had the fifth highest unemployment rate among majors at 7 percent, while computer engineering had the second highest at 7.8 percent. “Anecdotally, people are moving away from CS as a major,” Daniel Bauer, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, said. “They’re still taking some of our classes, right, because they think they need that, but they’re instead majoring in other things.” Bauer described a field that had shifted from what he called a “nerdy outlier discipline” to one that “everyone needs,” a sign that technical skills have become a baseline expectation across industries with the emergence of AI. “A lot of people thought, ‘Oh, it’s a guaranteed path to a stable income. You get a six-figure job right out of your undergrad,’” Bauer said. Now, companies may see AI as a way to reduce demand for entry-level programmers, especially in what he calls “code monkey jobs,” roles where a large number of employees are “just writing out code nine-to-five.” Chris Murphy, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, described the current moment as the convergence of two forces: the downturn of the job market and generative AI coming onto the scene. “Things kind of started to really pick up in 2014, 16,” he said, recalling the years after the weaker 2010 market. Murphy added that this was also a period where “students were getting more experience outside of class than they were inside of class” through internships, jobs, and side projects. Murphy suggested that the earlier momentum helped make computer science feel like both an academic program and a reliable pathway into work. That feeling is harder to sustain now as the industry reconfigures, which is a shift that students are seeing firsthand. Rebecca Yu, SEAS ’27, said that during a recent internship in Big Tech, she saw that “every single tech company was racing to integrate” large language models. She added that her manager said her intern class was the first to complete their assigned projects, which she attributed to the increased efficiency that comes with AI. Frank Liu, SEAS ’29, said that with AI lowering the barrier to coding, companies now expect everyone to write code. “A lot of companies outright say if you’re not using coding in your job, you might get fired for not being productive enough,” Liu said. Yu similarly expressed that students increasingly have to accept AI being a part of industry workflow, adding that many also “make use of it to maximize their productivity.” Richard Li, CC ’28, described a “franticness” among his peers as the pace of change accelerates. He explained how “some new tool” is released regularly, noting that tools rise and fall in prominence within weeks. He has come to believe that he doesn’t need to “match that speed all the time” and keep up with every development. Li has learned that AI tools allow him to “take a breath” and “get back into the loop much easier than before” when he needs to. While some companies specifically target Columbia when hiring, sending representatives to campus career fairs and recruiting large numbers from Columbia, a computer science degree cannot be treated as a static credential, Yu described. “You can’t just get your degree and stop learning after that. You have to always be learning,” Yu said. “That is something you basically have to expect for your job.” AI has not only affected students’ decisions to major in computer science, but also reshaped how the subject is taught. Across departments, faculty members no longer treat work done outside the classroom as a reliable measure of understanding, shifting instead toward in-person exams, quizzes, and attendance checks. While homework once made up as much as 60 to 70 percent of a student’s grade in computer science classes, Murphy said that breakdown has since flipped, with exams and quizzes now accounting for the majority. “The assumption—especially among pessimists—is that they’re using it to do their homework,” Murphy said. “They take the homework assignment. They put it into generative AI. Out comes the solution. Submit solution. The end.” Murphy said that faculty members ranged in their responses from fully prohibiting AI use to actively teaching students how to effectively work with AI. He said he shifted his approach this year after his teaching assistants called his belief that students weren’t using the technology “naïve,” and now permits students to use AI on assignments. His surveys of students in his introductory classes have told a more complicated story than the one so-called pessimists offer: Around 60 to 70 percent of students who reported using AI said they used it to have concepts explained to them, to clarify assignment instructions, to generate test cases, or to create practice questions. “Those are all ways that you might have had a tutor in the past to do that, and now you have this AI essentially as your tutor,” he said. Bauer has taken a different approach, teaching students how to use AI productively without sacrificing the core principles of the discipline. “People who are trained to actually use AI tools productively, while being in charge of designing the overall project, will be very much in demand in the next couple of years,” he said. Over the past year, a working group of computer science faculty has been redesigning the introductory and intermediate programming sequence to integrate generative AI as both a subject and a tool, representatives from SEAS wrote in a statement to Spectator. The effort is “coordinated” across the department, “not course-by-course,” with a systematic assessment of how AI integration is affecting student outcomes underway to shape the next round of changes. The goal, the department explained, is for students to be able to “read, verify, and reason about code, whether they or a model wrote it.” Tony Dear, senior lecturer in the computer science department, is piloting individualized AI feedback in a discrete mathematics course, while a machine learning course is also testing a Socratic AI dialogue system designed to “guide inquiry rather than supply answers,” the statement reads. Beyond individual courses, SEAS funded seven cross-departmental faculty projects in generative AI this past academic year, spanning biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, industrial engineering, and computer science, according to the statement. This phenomenon extends beyond the computer science department. SEAS’ new AI minor, which it announced in November 2025, reflects the University’s attempt to adapt. The minor is specifically designed for noncomputer science majors and aims to provide “essential AI knowledge” while emphasizing practical and responsible use across disciplines, according to the SEAS website. At the center of the minor is AI in Context, a course taught by a team of faculty from the departments of computer science, applied mathematics, philosophy, music, literature, and the Writing Center, the representatives told Spectator. Bauer described it as targeted at students who want to bring AI into fields like economics or biology, rather than as a path into software engineering itself. At the graduate level, SEAS announced a new Master of Science in artificial intelligence in February, with the inaugural cohort starting in the fall. While recognizing how AI has helped them navigate coursework, students also described its rise as isolating, even among members of the Application Development Initiative, one of Columbia’s largest computer science clubs. “As people start to ask AI for questions that they would normally ask students and members, it starts to isolate people” Li said. Alexa Kafka, BC ’27, echoed Li’s sentiment, pointing out that computer science has always been a collaborative discipline with code reviews and pull requests, even as AI makes independent work easier. Despite this, Kafka noted that she hasn’t been to office hours “in at least a year.” Bauer added that faculty are exploring long-term solutions to the assessment problem. “One of the things that we’re trying to do at the department or school level is to maybe move towards computerized testing facilities,” Bauer said, referring to ideas in the department to revitalize computer labs as an alternative to pen-and-paper exams. “We have to accept that this is the reality, for better or worse.” But more exams, students say, does not mean better learning, nor does it reflect how computer science is actually done. “Code is so variable and can be approached in so many directions, there’s never just going to be one correct answer. There can be multiple optimal solutions,” Kafka said. Students also expressed concern that the shift toward exam-heavy grading pulls focus away from the applied, project-based work that better reflects both discipline and industry expectations. ADI has tried to respond more quickly than the curriculum can. Through a vibe coding workshop this past semester, club members said they wanted to help students understand not just that AI exists, but how to use it deliberately. “Vibe coding” refers to the practice of prompting AI to write code for a task or project, and has become widespread enough that ADI felt the gap in formal instruction was worth addressing, according to Sophia Huang, BC ’29. The workshop introduced students to the concept of context engineering, which Shaina Sahu, SEAS ’27, described as not just writing a prompt, but optimizing “the rest of the relevant information that you would feed into the model.” Without that, students said that AI-generated code can fail at scale or introduce difficult-to-detect bugs. Genawi said the shift toward AI has changed what it means to be good at computer science. “I think the shift has kind of gone towards what can you create and what can you do, instead of, what do you know,” she said. Indeed, during ADI DevFest, its annual hackathon, Li said more teams are trying to complete their projects than in years past. While sign-ups have historically outpaced submissions, Li said this is beginning to change because teams “have a tool that completes the vision for them.” While many students see AI as an equalizer that lowers the barrier to entry for coding and technical work, Murphy said it also creates new equity concerns inside the classroom around who can afford stronger tools and who already knows how to use them. “The equity issues I worry about are students who have access to paid versions of things versus free versions of things,” he said. Although popular AI models like ChatGPT and Claude have free versions available, both have paid models that can reach over $100 per month, which output different qualities of code. Murphy also pointed to differences in prior exposure to AI literacy itself. “Students who go to high schools or K-12 education, where they’re taught AI literacy, prompt engineering, context engineering, they understand how to do this, as opposed to students who go to schools who don’t teach that,” he said. “Then they come in, and then they’re somehow expected to know how to use these tools.” For Genawi, those disparities begin long before students arrive on campus. “It’s very interesting to consider how lucky you were geographically,” she said. “To be born where you were is influencing your ability to get access to these spaces.” Students like Yu, though broadly apprehensive about the future of computer science, are not without hope. “I’m optimistic, because I think if you’re truly passionate about CS, there will definitely be a place in the field to do something you want to do,” she said. Senior Staff Writer Ria Vasishtha can be contacted at ria.vasishtha@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on X @ColumbiaSpec. Staff Writer Arjun Menon can be contacted at arjun.menon@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on X @ColumbiaSpec. Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter and like Spectator on Facebook. Produced with Spectate by Emily Ta
Florida Yacht Charter Business Fights $1.5 Million Tax Bill
A Florida yachting venture that participated in high-stakes offshore fishing tournaments before unforeseen setbacks forced a pivot to luxury charters told the US Tax Court the IRS wrongly defined its business as a hobby and assessed more than $1.5 million in tax liabilities.
Who is all-time greatest North Carolina high school football player?
From Keenan Allen to Julius Peppers, these 15 players defined North Carolina high school football before their college and NFL careers.
Proposal exempting some IT equipment from Colorado’s ‘right to repair’ law fails
A bill proposing an exemption to Colorado’s “right to repair” laws for “critical infrastructure” failed to pass its first committee in the House after clearing the Senate. Senate Bill 090 would have exempted information technology equipment considered “critical infrastructure” — defined by the federal government as physical and information systems and assets essential to the […]
Australia becomes the 30th country to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem
The World Health Organization (WHO) has validated Australia for eliminating trachoma as a public health problem, marking a significant milestone in the health of indigenous peoples and in global efforts to combat neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, no longer represents a public health problem in the country.Australia is among a growing number of countries that have successfully eliminated trachoma, contributing to global progress towards the targets set out in the WHO road map for NTDs 2021–2030.Trachoma is caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis and spreads through close contact with infected individuals, contaminated surfaces, and flies that carry eye and nose discharge. Repeated infections can lead to scarring of the eyelids, turning eyelashes inward, and ultimately causing blindness if untreated.“WHO congratulates Australia on this important achievement,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “This success reflects sustained commitment, strong partnerships, and a focus on reaching populations most affected by health inequities. It brings us closer to a world free from the suffering caused by trachoma.”Australia’s journey to eliminationAustralia’s achievement reflects decades of targeted public health action, particularly in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, where trachoma persisted despite its earlier disappearance from the rest of the country.National efforts intensified with the establishment of the National Trachoma Management Programme in 2006, which implemented the WHO-recommended SAFE strategy: surgery for trichiasis, antibiotics to treat infection, promotion of facial cleanliness, and environmental improvement. Regular screening of all communities classified as at-risk of trachoma by teams of qualified health workers formed an important part of the Programme. Interventions were delivered through coordinated partnerships between federal and state governments, Aboriginal community-controlled health services, and local communities.Over time, sustained screening, treatment, and prevention activities, including improvements in housing, water, sanitation and hygiene, led to a steady decline in trachoma prevalence. Australia’s approach included adaptations to reflect its context, such as targeted treatment based on community-level data rather than mass drug administration, and strong integration with environmental health programmes.“Elimination of trachoma is a win for the eye health of communities across Australia, particularly those whose lives have been impacted by a disease that is entirely preventable,” said Mark Butler, Minister for Health and Ageing, Australia. “This major milestone is thanks to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership, community commitment and sustained investment over many decades.“The lessons from this work will inform how we approach other preventable health conditions in remote and regional Australia. Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations and local health workers have been central to this success, delivering culturally safe care and community-led solutions.”“This recognition from the World Health Organization reflects decades of work led by Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations, alongside local health workers in remote First Nations communities,” said Malarndirri McCarthy, Minister for Indigenous Australians. “Their work has been critical to eliminating trachoma as a public health problem in Australia.”Advancing global efforts against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)Trachoma is one of 21 diseases and disease groups that are regarded by WHO as NTDs. Together, NTDs affect more than 1 billion people worldwide, primarily in underserved populations with limited access to essential services such as clean water, sanitation, and health care.Australia’s elimination of trachoma as a public health problem highlights the importance of sustained political commitment and cross-sectoral collaboration in addressing the underlying determinants of health. It also underscores the feasibility of eliminating trachoma even in geographically challenging settings.In addition to trachoma, Australia has several endemic NTDs, including Buruli ulcer, leprosy and scabies. Validation of elimination of trachoma as a public health problem marks the first time that WHO has confirmed the elimination of an NTD in Australia, which becomes the 63rd country globally and 16th in the Western Pacific Region to have eliminated at least one NTD.“Tackling neglected tropical diseases in the Western Pacific Region has long been a challenge for countries across the socioeconomic spectrum, given the complexities in reaching the most vulnerable communities, including in remote areas,” said Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific. “As a doctor from Tonga, I’ve experienced these challenges for myself. But I also know that with strategic commitment underpinned by optimal resources and partnerships in health, success is possible as other countries in our region have also demonstrated. I commend Australia on eliminating trachoma as a public health problem and urge all involved to remain vigilant to ensure this status is maintained.”WHO continues to support countries working to eliminate trachoma and other NTDs, ensuring that progress reaches those most in need and that gains are sustained through strong surveillance, appropriately integrated into national health systems, and mainstreamed within the wider health sector and beyond.Editor’s notesNeglected tropical diseases and trachoma elimination effortsNeglected tropical diseases are associated with devastating health, social and economic consequences. Their burden is mainly felt among impoverished communities in tropical areas.Public health targets for the control, elimination and eradication of these conditions were set in the road map for neglected tropical diseases 2021–2030 (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240010352).In 1996, WHO launched the WHO Alliance for the Global Elimination of Trachoma by 2020 (GET2020), creating a network of governments, non-governmental organizations and academic institutions dedicated to the fight against trachoma. WHO continues to support endemic countries to accelerate progress towards the global target of eliminating trachoma as a public health problem worldwide; 2030 is the new target date.Elimination of trachoma as a public health problem is defined as: (i) a prevalence of trachomatous trichiasis (TT) “unknown to the health system” of < 0.2% in ≥15-year-olds; and (ii) a prevalence of trachomatous inflammation—follicular (TF) in children aged 1–9 years of < 5%, in each formerly endemic district, plus (iii) the existence of a system to identify and manage incident cases of TT.Other countries validated by WHO as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem are: Algeria, Benin, Burundi, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, India, Iraq, Islamic Republic of Iran, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Togo, Vanuatu and Viet Nam.
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A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
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Give us a little of that bifurcation of where the minds met in terms of the priorities and the leadership for the new era. **Steven Fulop**Let me explain to you how I ended up in the job, OK? That’s probably a good starting point, because I don’t think anybody initially thought that I was the pick that they coveted or thought that would be an ideal fit for this position. I’d run for [New Jersey] governor, as you guys know, and I was very deliberate in the lane that I was taking as a candidate for governor. The same candidate when I ran for mayor and city council — it was outside the establishment. It was building on issues, single-issue voters — very, very concentrated on detailed policy. And I thought that if I could build an organization, outside of the typical political organization, of single-issue voters, you could become viable because they’re passionate people generally, OK? And one is mayor, outside the establishment doing that. You won two races in the country that Obama actually engaged in as president. Rahm Emanuel and Jeremiah Healy, my predecessor, was a ten-year incumbent. So we won based on this structure. Run for governor, kind of in that same model. And I thought at the time that 550,000 people would turn out in the election. That was based on history in a similar election, when Chris Christie left and it was Trump’s first-year primary, you know, changeover in governor. There was five hundred or four eighty-seven [thousand]. So I thought five-fifty was a bump up. Same numbers Sherrill had, Ras Baraka had. I thought five hundred and fifty thousand people in the election, six candidates running that are viable — two congresspeople, two mayors, senate president, and the teachers’ union president — that if I got to a hundred and thirty thousand votes, single-issue passionate voters, I would get in through the primary with twenty, twenty-five percent, and then put it back together even though I was kind of the outside establishment guy. I think I did everything perfect during that election, OK? With the exception of winning. Which is the big deal. But I miscalculated one thing. And I don’t know in hindsight how I could have changed anything. But I miscalculated that the turnout ended up spiking to eight-fifty, OK? So I said five-fifty. We all said five-fifty. Going into Election Day on Tuesday, and I’m a pretty pragmatic person. Going into Election Day on Tuesday, if you said, Steve, are you gonna win? I would have told you, we caught them and we’re gonna win, OK? We have more volunteers. I mean, to give you perspective on it: Uber, which is a data company, like, the week before, they wrote a million-dollar check to my super PAC, five hundred [thousand] to Sherrill, five hundred [thousand] to Ciattarelli. Election Day, the New York Times embedded one reporter, photographer for most of the day with only one of us, me. CNN, the day before, me, right? The trend was there. I miscalculated that there was an additional 300,000 people that came out. I saw, similar to here [in New York City], the voter numbers surging early, and I just thought it was a displaced Election-Day voter. I thought you were so excited to vote that you were voting early. I never imagined that there were 300,000 additional people voting. And if you tuned in late, then you would have ultimately– I had the wrong message. My message was, Trenton was broken, these are the things we would fix. And Sherrill, for example, was: I’m a helicopter pilot to fight Trump, right? Her message was better for that. It was over in five minutes. So why do I tell you that? I was shell-shocked, didn’t really know what happened, and the way this business works is when you lose, your phone goes dead. Nobody calls. It’s just, that’s it. Silence. And so, I’m trying to think about what happened and two weeks after the fact, I get a phone call by this guy. His name is Jim Simpson. He was Christie’s DOT chair, OK? Commissioner. And he worked on the widening of the Pulaski Skyway with me as the mayor of Jersey City. And Christie went after me with Bridgegate, and I was a government witness during Bridgegate. But even when nobody in the Christie administration could talk to me, Jim Simpson was always like, I have this major project going through Hudson County, predominantly Jersey City. I’m gonna deal with the guy. And he would tell you that Steve was a professional, good guy to deal with. I think that’s what Jim Simpson would say. I didn’t talk to Jim Simpson for 12 years. I lose the election. Two weeks after, I get a phone call. He leaves a voicemail. Hey, Steve, it’s Jim Simpson. Can you give me a call back? And I was kind of like fuck the world at that point. I didn’t want to call anybody back. And I called Jim Simpson back, and I was like, Hey, Jim. How’s it going? And he says to me, he says, Look, I’m very thankful you remember who I am, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said, Look, I had an issue in a warehouse I own in Jersey City. Didn’t know really how to navigate the building department. I figured it out, right? But thanks for calling me back. That was the conversation, OK? And I’m like, OK, great. You know? Whatever. So the conversation ended. He says, You know, I moved to Pennsylvania, but I’m sometimes up in New York. If I’m up there again, why don’t we just get together? I said Sure. I got nothing but time, right? And so he calls again about a week-and-a-half later, says, I’m gonna be in New York tomorrow. Wanna grab breakfast? Sure. So we meet for breakfast, and he knew nothing about me. When I got there, he was googling me, OK? Like, he knew nothing about my deeds. He’s like, Oh, you were in the military. That’s amazing. Like, it was a weird conversation. And, you know, towards the end of the conversation, he says, What are you gonna do next? And I said, I honestly don’t know. You know, I think maybe this, maybe that. And he says, You know who you should call? I said, No idea. Who, Jim? And he says, I don’t get along with her, he said. I used to be a Rockefeller fellow. I do not get along with her. We do not see eye to eye, but you should call this woman named Kathy Wylde. And I said, I met Kathy, ten years ago once. I don’t know if I would call her, and I don’t…That’s a weird conversation, just to call a stranger and ask for help with a job, right? And he says, No, you should figure out how to call her. We’re gonna figure out how to get you in touch with her again. I gotta think about it. I said, OK. We left. I never thought anything of it. He calls me four days later, and he says, I was giving it some thought. I was googling and I saw she’s leaving [as President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City]. You should apply for the job. And I said, I don’t know anybody. It’s a weird dynamic. And he said, We gotta figure it out. You know? Good guy. A couple weeks later, I was going to a conference in Montana, and three years earlier, I had met Rob Speyer at the conference. Spoke to Rob probably twice in my life since then, OK? But, we had a night we sat next to each other at a dinner, had a nice conversation. So I texted him. I said, Are you going to this conference by chance, in a couple weeks? He said, I am going, right? I said, Oh, can I grab you when you’re there for a couple minutes? He said, Sure. I go with my wife. He comes over, says hello. He knew my wife from a couple years ago, pleasantries. I said, Hey, Rob. you know, I texted you, if I could speak to you. He said, Yeah, yeah. What’s up? And I was, like, nervous at this point. I’m, like, sweating. Like, I’m gonna give a pitch. I said, I see you’re very involved with the Partnership. I think I’d be killer at that job. And he says, Why? And I gave him a pitch, which I’ll tell you in a second. And he said, Honestly, he said, Steve, there’s 12 people in the search committee. He says, I couldn’t even help you if I wanted to, nor would I. But what I can do when people ask me is just get in touch with Heidrick & Struggles and, go through the process. I said, That’s all I could ask. It’s fine. So I send him a text two days later with my resume, and I said I was serious about this. Can you connect me to the person? He says, Sure. Heidrick & Struggles would tell you that they did the interview as a courtesy. And that they thought that it was going nowhere, largely because when the search committee, which is a who’s who of business, outlined who they wanted, they said they wanted somebody from New York City, and they wanted somebody who was not in elected office. So here I am. I would go through these interviews, and I would outline what I thought the Partnership was doing wrong, and how politics has changed, and where I thought the potential was. Largely that the model of shuttle diplomacy, of relationships in the way that it worked 20, 30 years ago, doesn’t work anymore. And today you see, both with Mamdani and Trump— The assets that they [Partnership member companies] have are that they have 800,000 employees. They have the ability to communicate at scale, and they have a general centrist message, and none of those things are leveraged in any meaningful way, is what I would outline. And I really believe, and I continue to believe, that if the Partnership is perceived as a voice of very wealthy people and the CEOs, it will no longer exist in five or ten years. And the reason I say that is because one of the assets that people value is this convening component. And it’s a convening component because you have everybody from, you know, the CEO of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs towards mid-level to low-level CEOs, and they want to be in the room with the next person in that food chain, so to speak. And when people view it as not good use of their time, because it’s not effective, you start seeing deterioration and you no longer get that involvement. And I would explain this to them, and I would say, This is how we’re going to organize employees, and I think is the most effective way to do it. It’s something that I did as a [mayor] or a candidate when I was running these campaigns, so it’s something I know. And they would ask a lot of questions, and we would go through this model in detail, and they would ask, and they would just move me along in the campaign in, in this situation. And then at the end, probably ten interviews in, the woman from, you know, Heidrick says, You know, I think, you know, as crazy it is, you might land this plane. And I said I knew I was going to land the plane. But— **Josh Greenman**Can I ask? So you mentioned— **Steven Fulop**Sorry to take so much time on that, but— **Josh Greenman**Three hundred thousand, or I forget the number. **Steven Fulop**Eight hundred thousand. **Josh Greenman**Eight hundred thousand employees. And correct me if any of the assumptions embedded in the question are wrong. But you’re a membership organization, you’re supposed to be speaking for the large employers. **Steven Fulop**Yes. Large employees. Employers and employees. **Josh Greenman**Employers and employees. But you don’t canvas them every time an issue comes up. You described it as centrist. OK. An issue comes up. First of all, how do you, as the head of the Partnership, decide whether to get engaged and involved in that particular issue? And second of all, how do you decide what the posture of the Partnership is, if it’s not predefined? How much of it is your instinct? How much of it is, Let me take the temperature of the employees and the employers first? **Steven Fulop**The honest answer is I think it’s a hybrid. At the last board meeting, I spoke about being more narrow in the things that we’re going to be involved in. I think it’s very important we’re very deliberate and specific on issues that we care about and being less involved in kind of broad things that don’t necessarily touch 250 of the different companies. **Josh Greenman**Even though you made a statement about antisemitism. **Steven Fulop**I made a statement on antisemitism because it touches a lot of our companies, if not all of them, because they have Jewish employees, and they’re all very invested here. **Ben Smith**What’s something that you think the Partnership should get out of? **Steven Fulop**We had a lot of time last year in the fashion industry. I think the fashion industry is important. I don’t know who reads that report ultimately or how you move the needle ultimately on the fashion industry. We did some work very publicly on short-term rentals. Not really sure that that’s the best place to be spending a lot of time, because I don’t think it pertains to every single person here. I think that there are things that do pertain, quality-of-life issues that touch everybody. How do those things come to light? So I spoke broadly at the executive board meeting about things that I thought were important. They had lots of questions, Why this, that, and I outlined things both in a framework of government and politics: This is what I think. This is where the opportunity is. This is where the vulnerability is, et cetera, and we went through some of that stuff. When we’re working, for example, now, I gotta review it. We’ve been going back and forth on a blueprint of things to change for New York City that I think, or our team thinks, are meaningful, practical, and tangible things that you could change that would impact the budget in a meaningful way. And a normal person would say, You’re probably right about that. And the politics could be tough for those. So put a litany of, let’s say, 330 of them together. A lot of it’s our team’s ideas. Some of them are a little bit maybe venturing into a place that the Partnership historically has felt maybe uncomfortable. Those are broader conversations because I don’t yet have 20 years of trust with those people. So I say, Here’s what I’m looking to do. Here’s the reasons why. And we have those conversations with the executive board. **Liena Žagare**Does universal childcare fit into that? **Steven Fulop**Universal childcare is a part of it ‘cause— universal childcare is a part of it. It’s definitely in there. And I’ll tell you this. We polled our employee base because we were curious. It’s something again that touches, I believe, the affordability crisis. I think Mamdani and Hochul are right on this. It touches everybody who lives here in some way or another. Roughly two-thirds of our employers provide some sort of childcare today. Some is on-site, some is off-site, some is subsidies for low-income, some is subsidies for everybody, some is using a tax credit. And I’ve said this to the mayor before, that our knowledge of this space is vast because we have experience, practical experience on this sort of thing that others don’t have. They may have abstract experience or be ideological in a certain way. We experience it. We can tell you what works and what doesn’t work in the Building Department, what the challenges are in the bureaucracy, what the issues are in accomplishing this in a different way, because a lot of us have tried to provide that, right? So how do we communicate that publicly in a way that makes sense from our objective, which is improving New York, and at the same time in a way that’s value-added to the mayor or the administration, is kind of where we are. But it’s a hundred-percent part of that blueprint. There is a section on this. **Akash Mehta**It’s interesting to hear you emphasize that you represent the employees, not just the employers. Are there formal structures that put that into practice? Are there elected board positions from the employee base, or anything like that? **Steven Fulop**What we’re starting to do now— So it’s a shift, OK? And what we’re doing now, the short answer is no. What we’re doing now is starting a lot of these town hall-type conversations with the CEOs and me. It is an April, May, June, two, three-year initiative, where we’re talking about civic involvement, the importance of New York, and people can opt to sign up for information from us. So we’re communicating in that way. People will opt in, and then we’ll have the ability to better communicate with the employee base with regards to what we’re doing. You know, there’s no secrets to what I’m saying. I mean— **Ben Smith**But you think the opportunity is to mobilize employees? **Steven Fulop**The opportunity is to better communicate because I think there’s a disconnect between a lot of the things that happen, and how and when we communicate to employees things that may impact them. Because you have all sorts of legalities, and general counsels, obviously, that put obstacles in place on this stuff. And we need to figure out a way, because people are invested here in a meaningful way, so they should have knowledge of this. I don’t believe– Of course, our employee base is different than working for the Hotel Trade Council or Carpenters [union] or whatever, right? They’re monolithic, told to do something, they’re gonna do it. Employee bases aren’t that. I think that’s an asset. Having a generally college-educated employee base, if you lay out an issue in a reasonable way, they could make an informed decision whether that works for them or doesn’t work for them. The— **Akash Mehta**Wait, the carpenters can’t make an informed decision? **Steven Fulop**I didn’t say they can’t make an informed decision. I’m gonna say they’re more monolithic in what they do, and it’s driven by the decision of a leader, specifically in the Carpenters. The Carpenters would say from their executive board, maybe in Washington, maybe in New York, maybe in New Jersey, say, Directionally, we are supporting Ben. And then we support Ben. We don’t have that luxury. That’s not the way we’re structured. **Akash Mehta**What does that have to do with them being college-educated? **Steven Fulop**Well, it doesn’t have to. I mean, I think that you don’t have to necessarily be college-educated, it’s a fair question, to weigh something. But I think generally somebody that’s gone through some sort of rigorous education and training on pragmatic thinking has a better chance because they’ve been educated to think that way. I don’t think it’s a referendum on, you only could understand an issue if you’re college-educated. **Alyssa Katz**But I want to dig in a little more to that when you’re talking about pragmatic thinking, because it’s not an elephant exactly, but the sort-of power in the room is the mayor, who’s elected with actually a lot of college-educated support. And also based on a sort of different way of looking at pretty much everything in some ways, right? Like around– OK, we’re gonna start with principles, we’ll figure out the practicalities later. And also around mobilizing large numbers of people who have interests potentially at odds with capitalism, right? Tenants, people who generally think that money and politics and billionaires are the core problem, or a core problem to address, and on and on. So I’m interested in your efforts to mobilize people in that light. I mean, are you looking to build a counterforce? How does that factor in? **Steven Fulop**I don’t use a “counter force.” I don’t think people are generally sympathetic or upset with capitalism or sympathetic to socialism. I view it more as a couple of things were true in the November election. A, you had an alternative to Mamdani that was tremendously flawed. So they had a ceiling. It was an exact situation that happened in Jersey City, where you had a former governor who resigned in disgrace running for mayor, my old seat, same exact outcome. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a reflection of, everybody’s sympathetic to socialism. I think elections are choices ultimately, and these are the four choices that you ultimately had. Do I think that people are frustrated and more fiscally liberal than they’ve ever been before? Yeah, absolutely. I think that when people say that I, people say, a twenty-year model ago would say, I am, you know, fiscally conservative and socially liberal, that model has flipped really. People are fiscally liberal because what’s going on today isn’t working for them. They’re not necessarily sympathetic to socialism, but they’re open to trying things because there’s an acknowledgement that what’s happening isn’t working. And we see that too. We’re not blind to that. So do I think that you can organize a counterweight, was the question? Is that what it is? I don’t know if I would frame it as a counterweight. I think that you need to organize something that has a voice that is relevant in the political atmosphere, definitely. **Josh Greenman**Can you just explain both the number and percentage of people the Partnership represents of employees, versus the employment base of the city as a whole? **Steven Fulop**Yeah, I don’t know the— **Josh Greenman**What’s happened to that over time? I’m curious, like, is it— **Steven Fulop**I can get that to you. I don’t know. I don’t know that— **Josh Greenman**And then the other is inside the Partnership. What are the constituent companies and groups, and…Are there a couple of companies that have a highly disproportionate share of Partnership members? **Steven Fulop**No. **Josh Greenman**So how broad-based is it? Can you just describe it? **Steven Fulop**I mean, there’s 350 companies. They range in size from– I mean, they would be significant companies, maybe 50 employees, OK, to several thousand employees. But on the executive board, you can see from the site and the broader board, they vary in size and background. Most of the companies you would have some familiarity with. But, they vary in size. **Josh Greenman**How is it determined whether you’re part of the Partnership as a company in New York City? **Steven Fulop**As part of the Partnership, is generally we go through a process of meetings. I meet with them initially, provide them some information. They express that they’re interested, I express that we’re interested. I take it to the board to make sure that we’re moving in that direction, and then the board validates that. This year we’ve had, I mean, a bunch more have joined, and we’ve restructured some things so some have left intentionally. It’s not intentionally, but I guess– **Nicole Gelinas**You’re running pretty hard against the two income-tax hike proposals that the mayor ran for office and won on. Do you see the employee base as part of the battle against those tax increases? Would Partnership company employees go up to Albany to make their point known against that? **Steven Fulop**Yeah. But I don’t think you’re gonna have that same sort of advocacy group that the DSA does. It’s a totally different type of person that would engage, number one. Do I think that a lot of the employees would be opposed to an increased tax structure in New York? I think without clear parameters on what that tax structure looks like, I think the answer is yes. And it’s not only the income taxes that we’re concerned about. So we’ll go into that, too. The reality on this is, if you look at it from a reasonable point of view, if you added the income tax, the payroll, the PTET tax, which is one that we care a lot about and we’re concerned about, the corporate tax, the estate tax, and the property taxes: You put all of those together, right? And you said, OK, we’re gonna do them all. And without some structural changes to the budget, you will be at the trough again in three years. And I think a reasonable person who’s even supportive of, maybe, the highest earners paying more would say, Does it make sense to do this every two or three years, and at what point is there a tripwire? So I think, yeah, the people would be sympathetic. It depends how and what information you provide and how those taxes are. But we don’t have that structure in place yet. I just got started. So we’re just building that stuff out, which I’ve told you, but it’s new days on this. **Nicole Gelinas**So there’s, there’s a reasonable person, and then there’s Albany. Now that the budget is— **Steven Fulop**No, I gotta be careful ‘cause I gotta work with people. So I can’t say they’re unreasonable. **Nicole Gelinas**Now that the budget is just a week-and-a-half away, what do you see as your prospects for stopping those tax hikes? And if you don’t stop them, does that hurt your power early on? **Steven Fulop**No. I don’t think any reasonable person would say that there’s a structure in place today, after two months of me being there, that is gonna push back against everything in Albany from a political standpoint. I don’t think that’s a fair thing to say. I don’t think the Partnership leadership think of it that way, and I think that most people wouldn’t think of it that way. I think the governor has been very strong [against tax increases], so that’s good. That pass-through tax that was put in place when the SALT reduction was eliminated, and now there’s a proposal to eliminate that, that would be an income tax increase on not only the wealthiest people, it would be an income tax increase on business owners throughout the city. And that is one that we’re keeping track of right now that I think doesn’t get the scrutiny that it deserves. Everybody focuses on the income tax and the corporate tax, which the governor is fairly clear, at least now, that she’s not supportive of, but we’ll see. **Josh Greenman**On the corporate tax, Mamdani has repeatedly said it shouldn’t harm the climate here in New York City because it applies to anyone who does business in the state, not if you’re headquartered here, so it shouldn’t lead to corporate flight of any kind. Is that how you see it? **Steven Fulop**No. So first of all, it’s challenging when it’s depicted as corporate flight, because then it becomes a conversation around, Well, you didn’t leave. You didn’t leave. So I know what I did is OK because you didn’t leave. The reality of how this works is that it’s attrition over time, and decisions on where to scale outside of New York. That’s generally how this works. And because the immediacy isn’t there, people don’t view it as, Well, I made this decision, and tomorrow you left. And that’s a challenge for us, because the argument we lose, even though what we’re saying happens to be true, that people constantly are making decisions to scale [businesses] elsewhere. You see it. You see it. So I think that his argument is flawed, although it’s a political argument ultimately is what he’s making, and I understand that. But if you do change the tax rate as he proposes, you will be one hundred percent higher than New Jersey, right, which is at 11 percent, and you would be at 22 percent, according to the CBC, when you layer in all these other things. So at that point, you start saying, Well, I have the same talent pool that I’m pulling from here in the New York system. I’m no longer making the decision to go to Texas or Florida or Tennessee, where it’s a geographic total distance, but at a hundred percent premium to be in New York City, is that worth it, and should I be elsewhere? Your competition is elsewhere at that point in proximity. That’s the dangerous thing to what he’s saying. **Ben Smith**Do you think even more broadly, there is just this sense among— ’cause I think you’re right. You talk to business leaders, and most of the really big businesses in New York don’t care about New York anymore. They’re not New York businesses. They’re global businesses that happen to be here, and New York taxes are a diminishing share of the thing they worry about. Because they’re so global now, they don’t have the kind of commitment they did when David Rockefeller was running the Partnership. And I think a lot of them and a lot of people just think, long-term, New York is cooked. There’s a flight not to Jersey, but to the Sun Belt — to Houston, to Dallas, to Atlanta, to Miami — that’s kind of unstoppable at this point. And you see just the growth of those cities demographically. You see it in terms of their businesses. You know, maybe that’s not this year or next, but I think if you just literally look at the lines on paper of New York, Philadelphia, Boston…these northeastern cities, versus the Sun Belt. Just feels like an irreversible trend: these places are in decline, these places are rising. This is probably beyond our professional careers even, we’ll be fine. But do you think long-term that it’s true, that New York is just sort of irreversibly declining? **Steven Fulop**I think it’s fragile. There’s a lot of indicators and pressure to push people away, and there isn’t an easy solution to it. First, let’s just talk about last week. Regardless of what you say about the corporate tax conversation, we could disagree or agree, regardless. You know, your job isn’t to agree or disagree. But using the estate tax that was proposed last week, OK, or two weeks ago, nobody above the age of 60 would live in New York City if that happened to be approved. Period. End of story. You would see flight, because no sane person would do that? Because the tax rates, that you’re not talking about the one percent, you’re talking about somebody who has a $750,000 home or apartment, OK? You know who that is. So you have pressure because of the dialogue that’s happening there for sure. You definitely have gradual attrition and people moving jobs elsewhere because they’re more portable. There’s no question about that. You have pressure at the bottom because it is very hard for entry-level people to find jobs, and at the same time to find housing. It’s a true thing here in New York, the pressure. So you have a lot of difficult situations going on and absence of a tough political solution, meaning willing to make decisions that are not popular, you won’t be able to change the trajectory. And that is only one that the mayor can actually drive, OK? So the property tax reform stuff that de Blasio and Adams both tried to do, it’s necessary. It’s really necessary, but it’s gotta be driven by the mayor leaning into it, making that a number one priority. Use things like FHEPS, OK? You guys have all written about that. **Ben Smith**I don’t know what that is, sorry. **Steven Fulop**It’s the rental assistance program, OK? It’s growing at four percent per month. It’s a billion-dollar-plus program. Four percent per month! It’s not sustainable. And if the mayor was sitting here, he would say, Well, I didn’t approve the expansion of the program. That’s what he would say. Because I had a conversation with one of his people last night on this, and I said, Yeah, but the expansion would have made it worse. The existing program is four percent per month, right? We need to solve for that. How do you solve for that? That program is a byproduct of the de Blasio administration when Cuomo got rid of the rental assistance program at the state, and so the city inherited that. There isn’t another city in the country that has a similar entitlement program. It’s not sustainable. That program belongs at the state or at the federal government, but it is a politically tough thing to do. So you gotta be able to make decisions like the property tax reform, that. Those are not easy things to do. But outside of that, your trajectory for the city is very, very dangerous. It’s a fact, you know? [Note: After this interview occurred but before it was published, the Mamdani administration continued the appeal of a court ruling requiring the city to expand the FHEPS program as dictated in a law passed by the City Council, while the two sides of City Hall negotiate a potential settlement.] **Akash Mehta**Do you broadly agree with Mamdani’s analysis that Cuomo shafted New York City — that Albany shafted New York City under Cuomo? **Steven Fulop**Honestly, it predates me, so it’s hard for me to kind of give you a fair assessment on that. I would tell you that I was mayor for 12 years in Jersey City, economic backbone for New Jersey. We drive jobs, we drive the statewide economy, we drive every number. It’s disproportionately housing growth. Everything is Jersey City. And I used to say, We don’t get what we put in. We don’t get that back. It’s true, OK. I know New Jersey and New York both say to the federal government, you know, they both pay much more to the federal government than what they get back. I mean, this is a narrative that people say. It’s probably true. Does it get corrected? I don’t know. You know, it’s on the governor’s situation. I have no idea, is the short answer, ‘cause I’m not in the weeds on that. **Akash Mehta**One quick question on the tax battle. The Partnership has a [501] C4 that was seeded with $10 million. What are your plans for the group? Are you planning to spend that money on this battle? **Steven Fulop**Um…unclear. And, conversations this week on that. You know— **Josh Greenman**Do you run the C4? **Steven Fulop**We hired an executive director this week. There is a willingness, we had a call this week and there is a willingness to spend real money to make sure that New York City stays competitive. So this was literally this week. There was a call. I would tell you that there is a serious appetite there. It’s literally a ripe conversation that’s happening in the last 24 hours. Good question, though. **Nicole Gelinas**Large donors proved last year that they’re very good at spending a lot of money — but it didn’t work. In fact, it may have worked against them. Are you confident that beyond the money, you understand local and state politics well enough that some of these people are actually listening? I mean, is [State Assembly Speaker] Carl Heastie, is [State Senate Majority Leader] Andrea Stewart-Cousins listening to these arguments and saying, We didn’t realize that the potential for attrition in the corporate side was this great. Because the money hasn’t worked before. **Steven Fulop**The short answer is, I’ve been there two months. I doubt at this stage, we don’t have that relationship. I mean, I’ve met everybody. I doubt that I have the standing or credibility with them to make, or the structure in place to make that argument today more compelling than it was made six months ago. It’s just the reality of the situation. I think that you have two types of people that exist in any political sphere. You have ideologues and opportunistic people, OK, that just think about their next election. Those are the two types only. And absent somebody that has an alternative, the opportunistic person will only always be sympathetic to the ideologue, because they view that as their best route to get reelected because that’s where the gravity of energy is. **Josh Greenman**What were you? **Steven Fulop**It’s a good question. I was a hybrid. **Josh Greenman**Oh, the only one. **Steven Fulop**[Laughing] That’s right. I was unique. I think that when you look at Albany, you have a growing DSA base for sure. The question that I would have as I get into it is how much of those— the rest of the people that aren’t pure ideologues are there because there’s not an alternative that they see, can be supportive, and helpful to a pragmatic view. So I don’t know what they’ll listen to — Carl and Andrea — in the next week-and-a-half. I mean, who knows? **Josh Greenman**Should we charge more for street parking? **Steven Fulop**It’s a good question. I happen to be a supporter of some of those proposals on street safety and better streets. I don’t think it’s a broader position that the Partnership has taken, and I don’t think it’s something, going back to what I said earlier, narrowing view and going back to your question earlier on how we approve things. I’ll tell you that, as I wrote out this idea of a blueprint of things that, pragmatically, that are politically difficult to change that I believe are the right things to do, I included it in there. And going back to what you said and questioned earlier in how we get these things approved, because the nature of what we wrote, you know, once we get it to a place, I will circulate that a little bit more to the executive board and get some more feedback on whether we wanna go down this road at this point or not, or not at this time. So there’s a process on this stuff. **Ben Max**What are a few other examples? So property tax reform, some streetscape stuff, universal childcare, what else? **Steven Fulop**If you can wait till next week, it’ll be better. OK. Like– **Josh Greenman**Are you fast enough for the political world? What I’m saying is, if you’ve got to go through that process, and these conversations are happening, the budget’s gonna be cooked in ten days, are you gonna be behind the curve? **Steven Fulop**I am obsessed with the political world. I mean, I, I lived in this— Ben MaxHe means the Partnership. **Josh Greenman**The Partnership. Is the Partnership behind the curve if it’s got to deliberate on all this? **Steven Fulop**Look, I think the answer is yes. The short answer is, I don’t know, right? Like, I don’t know. I’ve not been in long enough to have a gauge on all of this. But my gut tells me yes, because the leadership there is hyper-engaged in New York City and the Partnership, it’s not something where they just kind of parachute in once every three months and think about, kind of the Partnership and what’s happening in Albany and happening in New York City. They happen to be very engaged here on a regular basis. So I think the short answer is yes. They will be able to turn stuff around relatively quickly, and I feel pretty good about that. It’s not where I think about obstacles. **Ben Max**So big picture, I’m still trying to figure out right now: What does the Partnership care about, big picture. I know you’re working on a blueprint. I know you’re rethinking some of this, but is it first and foremost, the business climate and economic growth? **Steven Fulop**Right now, I wouldn’t say this is in perpetuity. I mean, obviously, in this moment in time, it’s competitiveness and the business climate. But when the C4 was launched initially last year, they spent money on one initiative, OK? Spent a couple million dollars on the discovery bill. It had nothing to do with finances, taxes. It had to do with public safety and what they viewed as in the best interest of quality of life. So their interests aren’t necessarily only about taxes. We happen just to be in this fire drill at this moment that I got thrown into, where there’s a new tax proposal every other day. So trying to deal with that is where we are right now. I think broadly speaking, the place of the Partnership is really wanting to have a relationship where we’re kind of helping bridge the gap between the public and private sector, and helping find solutions. We have a venture fund, a $200 million venture fund, which I don’t think gets the recognition it deserves. It’s been involved in creating 37,000 jobs, seeding very early-stage New York companies that do a lot of good here. We have a tech lab that partners with DOT, with the Port Authority, with New Jersey Transit, experimenting on technologies to make government more efficient. It is a collaboration that has happened for 15 or 20 years. A lot of companies are a part of that, new companies helping on that on-ramp. It is a unique and special thing. We actually, I think, at the end of this month, have kind of that shark tank at our office where everybody comes in and pitches, and the board of that is like a who’s who. So, I mean, there’s a lot of things beyond what you guys see on the C4 and the advocacy and the lobbying sort-of side. **Nicole Gelinas**So on the Transit Tech Lab, some of the ideas that have come out of there have been very good ideas. But more broadly, for the MTA or the state and local government to actually save enough money so that we don’t have what you described with them coming back for new revenue every couple years, you have to confront the unions on some big issues, whether it’s work rules on the construction side, whether it’s two people on every single subway train, whether it’s Department of Education rules that mean they can’t be as flexible as charter schools. Do you see the Partnership taking on the unions in any sense? **Steven Fulop**Going back to the pragmatic that you said, I would use the word pragmatic and then you asked me about kind of a little bit more about that. You brought up the conductors on the trains and the proposals on that. It is very expensive. There isn’t a city in the country that has that structure. If you outline that to an employee of XYZ Corporation, and you said to them, Here’s the landscape, OK, We need help with XYZ, I would venture to say that they would be sympathetic to our point of view. That’s what I was getting at, just to give that to you earlier. You know, the New York Post called me the day that Mamdani entered into the— he said at the end of a press conference, I wasn’t there, obviously, but he mentioned that he wasn’t gonna do the sweeps of the homeless encampment. And it was probably my second or third day on the job. And the Post called and said, Do you want to comment on this? And I said, Yeah. And I said something critical of him at the time. Prior to doing that, because it was like my second or third day, I did say to some of the people on the team, going back to how nimble the organization is, I said, Hey, I would like to comment on this, OK? Because I think it’s wrong, his approach, and I think he’s gonna have to move off of where he is, ultimately. And some people said, Well, is that really the hill you wanna climb? Is that really that important to us? And I said, It absolutely is. Because, A, he’s wrong on the issue, and B, it’s a quality-of-life issue. Going back to the fact that it ended up being right, he ended up moving on, and you could see it from, like, far away, just based on being a legislator versus an executive and accountability. But I think our job is to call balls and strikes and just be fair about it. So do I think– Let me say it this way better. If you are gonna grow housing, OK, ‘cause he says it’s a priority. During his election, when he was a candidate, he would tell you if he was sitting here, he would tell you, you look at his CBS, the debates, he would talk about Jersey City and Tokyo, Jersey City and Tokyo as housing growth models. He would tell you that if he was sitting here — he said it on TV multiple times. Now, he followed that about what we did in Jersey City ‘cause we grew a lot. How are we able to grow? OK, A, you had layers of government here that we do not have there, so you need to clean that up. We upzoned, of course, more aggressively than the City of Yes around transit centers, which you have to do here for sure. And then the third part about it is that if you mandate affordable housing, community givebacks, the union labor, et cetera, et cetera, the projects financially cannot handle that. They don’t pencil out. So what we would generally do is that, on the union labor front, because the people that get squeezed the most were the ones that pressure the building trades better, because their jobs are usually the ones that get–are most competitive, are the less skilled parts of the building trades. So when you build a high-rise building, the electricians, the plumbers, the operating engineers, the ironworkers are generally gonna be union, because it’s a more complicated thing. Carpenters, laborers, painters generally are the ones that have competition from non-union, and that’s really where it is ultimately. And we would say in Jersey City, on the projects that are important to us, if they were coming to the city for some sort of subsidies or big zoning changes, and it was an important project, we would work with the developer to give the unions a last look to be competitive with the open-shop bid, and some sort of grace between five and ten percent to be competitive. Now, absent that, there is no way to get it built in union labor. So if the mayor continues to be strident that everything is gonna be a hundred percent building trades, you’re never gonna meet the objective of whatever he has a hundred, two hundred thousand units. So I think that our voice is gonna be that you need some practical reforms to these incentives, and practical reforms means that you cannot pay a 30 percent premium for the carpenters. **Nicole Gelinas**So something very simple on that, though. Two people on a train. Would you see yourself making a statement similar to the encampments that, you know, Hey, intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to leave people in encampments. Intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to mandate two people on a train. Would you just call up the Post and say that, or that’s a different— **Steven Fulop**I don’t think that— I think if you called me and you said to me, What do you think? I’d probably just answer you, that I think it’s not something that any other city does, and in a financial crisis, you probably gotta be reasonable about that. **Ben Max**This is what you got hired in part for, right? To be out there more and to be a voice pushing back. **Steven Fulop**I think that it’s just my personality. I don’t know if it’s necessarily, it’s just like this is— You’d ask me, and I would say it. I wouldn’t go call up the Post and say, Let me-- Carl [Campanile], let me comment on this, right? I wouldn’t do that. Like, that’s not how I would think about it, right? I’d be going with my day, and then Carl would say, Do you care to comment on this? Or he would call, and I would just be like, Yeah, I think so and so. And he would say, Is that on the record? And generally, I’m not gonna say, This is off the record, on anything. I generally just talk. OK? So— **Josh Greenman**You talked about incentives, government incentives. I want to talk about literal government incentives, like, Amazon, right? Remember how many years ago, half of Amazon’s HQ2 was gonna be here. **Steven Fulop**Yeah, I remember. We tried to pitch it too. **Josh Greenman**It didn’t happen. You tried to pitch it, too. What do you think of the state’s current corporate incentives? Do they make sense as currently structured? To try to attract businesses to New York State, to try and attract businesses to New York City, there are various programs. There’s been a lot of talk about restructuring those programs to make them more rational, and there’s a larger question of, should we have this environment in which cities chase corporations by throwing money at them or tax abatements at them, or should there be some kind of compact where cities agree that they don’t do this to each other? **Steven Fulop**Yeah. I generally think — putting on my mayor’s hat — that the structure exists today is a race to zero, and it’s not healthy from the public side. But you cannot unilaterally disarm, is the unfortunate part of the conversation. And so absent governors getting together and having some sort of détente where they’re no longer doing that, I do not see how a state doesn’t participate in this. That said, I think that the competitiveness conversation in New York and New York City is more complicated than just incentives. I think that, you think about other places in the country, where people have mobility to get to, and there’s opportunity, there’s more of a deliberate effort to attract beyond just the incentives. Texas reordered their entire court system to replicate Delaware, to make it more friendly for corporations. They’re having a Texas stock exchange to have better access to capital markets. It’s more of a deliberate strategy than just saying, Hey, we’re gonna give incentives. Now, it is not helpful– you know, people, absent certainty on communication, they try to interpret a lot of what somebody means or what they say. So, governor or mayor says X, Y, Z in a statement, they try to interpret, what does that ultimately mean? How should I envision that to manifest itself for what I’m trying to do? And the thing that we are trying to calibrate for, and I say this publicly and privately, is that a lot of the rhetoric out of City Hall, which is consistent tax, tax, tax on any front that’s possible, whether you make $500,000, whether you have a house that’s $750,000, whether it’s a pass-through and you have a small business, it creates a very volatile environment. And that’s the problem ultimately. So I think you need certainty on that. **Josh Greenman**I have one other topic that we haven’t talked about that I just wanna make sure we discuss, which is AI. You represent a lot of employees. And AI is going to be increasingly a large employer, in theory in the city, but it’s also coming for some of those employees’ jobs, maybe many of those employees’ jobs. **Ben Smith**And the employers are very excited about it. **Josh Greenman**And some of the employers, the CEOs, are excited about being able to save dollars and innovate in various ways. **Steven Fulop**Well, they don’t communicate that with me, but just go ahead. **Josh Greenman**So how do you, how do you balance those tensions, which are very, very real, among employees who might be excited and employers who might be excited about AI, and those who might say, Holy shit, my job is gonna be gone in 10 years, or five? **Steven Fulop**I think that that is— I said this, maybe I touched on it a little bit earlier, I think that young people not being able to find jobs and the housing crisis was pressure from the bottom that is one of the most at-risk situations for New York. AI is part of that conversation, potentially — so you have macro environment, why people aren’t hiring, and then AI might be part of that too. You know, though they don’t clarify that with me. They don’t say, Here’s the reason I’m doing this or doing that. I do think that one of the biggest risks over the next 12 or 18 months is the AI impact on jobs. I agree. And I don’t think anybody has a good solution, both in the Partnership or in City Hall, yet on that. And in order to kind of figure out how to do that and solve for that, I think that you need to have some sort of broader conversation on implications. I will tell you that one of the things that we outlined in kind of what we were talking about on this blueprint was that, I do think that part of the procurement process for city government services needs to factor in who is training and who is factoring in the AI conversation, and those scores should be appropriately weighted, beneficial for companies that are thinking about training or have a training program as part of it. So we’re trying to think of ways to kinda think about training people and getting people into another space and using the leverage of City Hall to do that. I don’t think there’s a broad enough plan yet to solve for it. It is the biggest risk for New York, because New York City relies on white-collar jobs disproportionately for its budget. And where AI is coming is directly at the white-collar jobs as opposed to the blue-collar jobs. And so New York City is poised to get hit in a different sort-of way than anybody else. Short answer is, I don’t think anybody has a clear-eyed solution on that. Some of that’s gotta be set by the mayor, you know, that’s the truth too. I said earlier in the conversation, we had a roundtable on childcare in December with the mayor. And the mayor, at the end of it, I said to his staff, I said, You know, we outlined some of the inefficiencies and bureaucracies to getting these childcare centers open, which we’re familiar with. I told you earlier. We can help you with that from a technology standpoint, okay? And this goes back to making tough decisions. You’ve seen employee headcount since COVID skyrocket at City Hall. Whole, another conversation. I mean, that’s a fair thing to say. We said we’d help you with some efficiencies on that from a technology standpoint. And they were nice in their response but there was really no follow-up on that. And, and my point on that is we can only do so much from the Partnership. You need a dance partner in order to dance, right? Like, that’s really the reality of this. So, I do not know the solution, and I push back. People aren’t— They don’t, at least they don’t express to me they’re happy about, you know, not hiring jobs. You know, maybe to you, Ben. But, and AI displacement, I think people are very concerned about it in the Partnership too. **Harry Siegel**You said maybe without some changes, the Partnership won’t be there in five to ten years. We just did have a big turnout election, that led to an avowedly socialist mayor. Can you just step back and say— **Steven Fulop**No, I think the Partnership— I think I clarified that on the, that current trajectory of how it positions itself needed to change. So I think that’s part of the reason we’re here, to make sure it’s relevant for the next ten years, but— **Harry Siegel**But the business community seems increasingly less relevant to the political direction of the city. The Partnership seems less relevant. This is a bit of an inside conversation. For people who maybe vaguely know what it is or just spot its name in headlines or whatever, what is the point of the Partnership? And frankly, what is the good and utility that the business community brings to the city, if you just want to explain that? **Steven Fulop**What does the Partnership add to the city? **Harry Siegel**Sure. **Steven Fulop**Or the politics shifting left. **Harry Siegel**However you want to take it. **Steven Fulop**I think, forget about the Partnership as an organization for a second. I think the big corporations add a disproportionate amount of philanthropy, revenue, budget help, employee help to the ecosystem here in New York City. If those larger corporations migrate out, you would have a massive budget problem, you would have significant more unemployment, and the amount of philanthropy, which is tens of millions of dollars a year across, which sometimes is underreported or undershared, is a good thing ultimately, helps private institutions or public institutions, culture and arts institutions disproportionately, hospitals disproportionately. So I think that the business community here has a huge impact. The Partnership acts as a conduit from them to the public sector, and has multiple layers to it as I touched on earlier, where we help incubate early companies, facilitate connection to New York City, help advocate for policy change, et cetera, et cetera. **Harry Siegel**Outside of real estate, the business community, as you and Ben [Smith] were talking about, is less and less rooted here, and the problem is sort of a slow trickle to other regions, as opposed to people just pushing out and moving. Lots more people are voting. They seem less interested in the priorities of the business community. You’re talking about employees as a sort of base for the organization, 800,000 of them. I’m just trying to understand how business makes itself more relevant. **Steven Fulop**That’s a little bit of a process that I touched on earlier, a little bit of the transition that I touched on earlier on why we’re here. I think that people, as you saw in this last election, are struggling, an affordability crisis is real. There’s a lot of pressure, whether it’s jobs or housing. I think that’s all real. And I think that people have become, as I said earlier, fiscally more liberal because what’s working for them today and not working today has shifted from 10 years ago. So in order to be relevant, we need to be cognizant of that. **Alyssa Katz**People mentioned earlier that antisemitism is a priority for you, fighting it, and you know, I know you— **Steven Fulop**It’s a priority for us, yeah. **Alyssa Katz**Yeah, and we had a couple incidents that may have coincided with right when you arrived at the Partnership, right? The most visible one was, you know, this Israeli drone company. **Steven Fulop**Oh, the Israeli drone company, Easy Aerial? Yeah. OK. **Alyssa Katz**Yeah. What’s the other one? **Steven Fulop**It was the Park East Synagogue situation. **Alyssa Katz**Oh, right. Well, listen, but I’m talking purely on the business side. We can talk about it more broadly. But you know, there’s a company that was in a city-owned property. The city says it was a lease issue but it had been the target of a campaign saying, Well, you’re providing drones to the Israeli military, and we need you out of here. And then sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. And I’m just kind of curious about how you are approaching that kind of pressure on Israeli individuals and their businesses to get out of town, basically. How do you address that? **Steven Fulop**I think it’s a new conversation, obviously. We do think that antisemitism is rising, and it’s a significant concern. The BDS conversation and singling out one country to different standards than other countries that the U.S. or the public agrees with or disagrees with, or that has human rights violations or doesn’t have human rights violations, is a totally different conversation that we don’t agree with — singling out a single country. And the reality is that that BDS conversation, building on that, is not acceptable to us. And as you see elected officials more vocal in this space, unfortunately, if that ends up being, I think that is a place you’d definitely see us spend money. **Liena Žagare**Do you think Mayor Mamdani is doing a good job, and where would you— **Steven Fulop**Doing a good job? **Liena Žagare**Yeah. Doing a good job in the city and— **Steven Fulop**I think— Yeah, look, I think— **Liena Žagare**Where should he be more careful? **Steven Fulop**I think, I think there is— The short answer is, it’s been two-and-a-half months, so it’s hard to tell. I think that there’s a lot of mixed signals between things he says sometimes in smaller meetings versus what he says publicly. I think that, there’s been some missteps along the way, like for example the real estate tax proposal I thought was a misstep. I think that there’s been some really encouraging things. How he’s handled the president has been terrific. And I think that the city is in a better place than anybody would have thought post-election with regards to the president as a result of his communication there. I think that he has shown some willingness to move away from an extreme left position that he came in. That transition from a legislator to an executive is a transition, and from being a backbench Assemblyperson to a prominent front and center mayor, that transition is always complicated. Homeless encampments, the library funding, the FHEPS situation, he’s moderated some of those views, which are good. And at the same time, I think sometimes going back to how we interpret things that he puts out there, sometimes he’ll put something out that we’ll interpret in a way that I – ‘cause you have no choice but to interpret this stuff – you’re concerned about. You know, like, and I’ve said to them, Look, when American Express announced their headquarters, right? It’s a big deal. You know, a big American brand establishing a significant presence again here, recommitting. It’s good for his narrative ultimately, right? You know, that was in the works for some time. Or the Bank of America situation. If you look at the kind of statements that came out as a result of that, they never acknowledged the corporate side. They talked about the building trades. And that signals to us, A, questions about the housing conversation, right? And B, whether you understand the ecosystem that American Express employs thousands of people here, and they’re hugely involved philanthropically and committed to the city, and what that means. So I would say it’s mixed. **Nicole Gelinas**One thing that’s been missing from the ecosystem is a person like Dick Ravitch, who passed a...