Art Chang: Running for Mayor of NYC

Welcome to the new retirement podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Art Chang, an entrepreneur, public servant, and candidate for New York City mayor. He started 12 companies and served under four mayors and two governors. Art has spent his career helping people and solving problems in New York City, spanning real estate development, building the tech community, child welfare, and campaign finance. We're going to be talking with him about why he's running for mayor and about how anyone can bring positive change to their local communities. So with that, Art, welcome to our show. It's great to have you join us.

Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here.

Yeah, I appreciate your time. So I thought for our audience, it would be good just to kind of understand why you're running for mayor, or as you call it, kind of the chief problem solver for New York City. Like, what do you hope to accomplish?

Well, I spent my entire career solving problems. I'm running because our city isn't working for anyone, and I want to make it work for everyone. Our problems are interconnected, and I know from my experience that that's really the key to solving them.

Got it. So what are some of the big things that you want to address? I mean, I was looking at your website. You talk about universal childcare, affordable housing, things like that. What are the top kind of three to five things that you think you can bring change for? Right.

Well, right now, the top thing is we have to manage the COVID crisis. Vaccination rates are still very low in New York City, and we need to finish that process. The second is we have an eviction crisis, a looming eviction crisis with a lot of built up debt from eviction moratoria, and we need to fix that problem. We need to figure out how to engineer that debt away, keep people in their homes, and then lead to a more affordable city. The third thing is we really have to revitalize our small businesses. The economy is really based on small businesses here and the arts, and we need to revitalize and grow that. And then the fourth area is education. Everybody, every parent wants their kids to go back to school, but man, what a year that we've been under. And we've had almost 80 teachers die in New York City. We've had a lot of people who've been. We've had 30,000 people who died in the city overall. And so a lot of families have been impacted. And so we need to think about coming back to school also as a. As a mental health issue. Right. Because students are not going to be ready to learn and teachers are not going to be ready to teach unless we actually do something first.

Got it. Yeah. No, I mean, as a parent, I'm definitely interested in this topic and I've been watching New York City. It looks like they've been trying to get kids and successfully to some degree getting them back into schools. What do you think the timeline looks like for every student being back in school?

Well, if we were to believe the mayor, it's happening next week. The reality is quite different. A substantial percentage of the students have opted to go fully remote and schools are also closing based upon this arbitrary standard of two confirmed Covid cases in a school. There's been very little, there's very little subtlety around that. You could fairly say that the majority, the vast majority of students are not attending school and that many, many schools are still closed. I think the fall is a more realistic time to think about students being back in their class buildings.

Got it. And I mean, do you. Are they going to mandate that students go back to school or are they going to kind of try to support a hybrid environment?

I don't know. It hasn't been announced. The mayor's decision making process is extremely opaque. So he has the sole decision making power which he takes without consultation with the teachers unions or the parents or any other community elements, which is very frustrating as you can imagine. So we'll likely learn by reading about it in the press.

Right. Well, so these are real challenges. Right. And I can't imagine trying to solve this in a place like New York City which has what, 8 million residents, is that right?

Eight and a half million. Eight and a half million residents and 1.1 million kids in school.

Wow. So you're trying to bring together and solve this problem for the parents, the students, the teachers. And in the real estate space, you've got the landlords, right? They want to collect their rents and make pay their loans that they owe to the banks. But then you've got people that need housing and they need housing to be productive. And if they can't have it, then that's disruptive the economy as well. So how do you approach these problems differently and better than other candidates?

Well, let's just start with the school situation and then we can talk about the real estate situation with schools. And schools are really a great example of this siloed process this current mayor has. Everything is very top down. It's very decision oriented instead of collaboration oriented. The city has a number of major unions who are all have positive contributions to make. But the Mayor doesn't leverage those at all. The mayor has at his disposal parent, teacher, and even student committees that he could leverage for input. Yet he doesn't. They're largely window dressing. So there are models out there around the country that are great examples of how labor and management work together for how communities and parents, especially parents, work very well with the school system. But that doesn't happen here in the city, so we need to make that happen. The other area which has to do with the housing, and this is where, you know, we kind of like, you know, I think people who've been in government and only in government tend to think of themselves as very, very divorced from the private sector. But at the root of the problem for housing is really the question of both mortgages and property taxes. With respect to mortgages, tenants pay, landlords who pay mortgages. If you want to give tenants relief without destroying the landlords, you have to have some kind of mortgage relief, which means that you have to have the tools and the language to go in and interact with the financial services industry, which the current mayor is loathe to do. And then the other one on the property tax side, yeah, the city's revenues are down, but we can take the fact that so many of these property taxes are delinquent, and we can figure out a way to give some relief to those landlords. A lot of the owners of those property taxes, by the way, are very small landlords, people who live in small houses or small homes where they rent out one or two units. And so those folks are unable to pay their mortgages and unable to pay their property taxes. So the city is in a great position to be able to help them, yet we don't. And I don't really understand that.

Yeah, no, I. I see how it's. I mean, it's all linked together, and these challenges are real. It's interesting watching the federal level, how we're trying to stimulate our way out of this weaker economy that we're in right now and make sure that kind of the wheels don't completely come off, because they have come off for part of the population. A big part of the population. If you're a knowledge worker out here, I was actually remarked to my wife, I was like, for part of the economy, it's full speed ahead. We're busier than we've ever been before, full employment and more than that. And there's just no time and energy. And then for part of the population, people that work in restaurants and so on, travel, nothing's happening. It's crickets. And, you know, how do you bring that, that back together? I mean, do you think that there's like some kind of. It feels like where you're going is there's shared sacrifice on both sides, right? There has to be compromise on both sides. Is there some magic approach in here or is it just kind of negotiating with all these parties and trying to bring them to alignment? Or is there some secret in here?

What I have found in my life is the secret is conversation. You have to build trust with people. You have to acknowledge that mistakes were made. You have to give people an opportunity to venture and share their grief. And once you do that, then you're in a place to start figuring out how you move forward around a common vision. Instead of getting people to focus around how we divide the pie, which is really kind of where most people focus with the lack of vision, is to say, well, what do we want to accomplish in the next one, two, four years? Because if we set our sights on those things and we can reach the consensus and then we can make those things happen, we can then set up the data and the metrics to align everybody toward those common goals.

Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, I hear you that it's the key, like in our small team, right, is how do we create? How do we be clear about what we're trying to get done? How do we create alignment across everyone and all the stakeholders for decisions and make decisions that bring people together? I mean, it's not simple. And you're right, I think a lot of folks, they look at it and you're right, they're fighting for their position, not thinking about what other people need. So, yeah, I mean, this goes to your approach for paying for this. Right. So a city of eight and a half million people, what's the economic production or the GDP of New York City?

Well, I don't have the number off the top of my head. New York State, if it were a country, would be the 12th or 13th largest economy in the world. New York City represents about half of that. So it is really an incredibly huge economy with eight and a half million people. We have about 100,000 businesses. About 40% of those businesses are women owned. We have growing industries like the tech sector. We have a hugely important arts and entertainment sector. There has been a lot of movement in these industries across the board, but New York is still going to be a major economic driver. And I think actually it's going to become an increasingly important economic driver nationally over the coming years.

Yeah, for sure, yeah. So how do you harness and balance across these huge employers? Like in San Francisco, I've got Salesforce that has said, hey, they just built this giant tower right in the middle of San Francisco. And they've said to 75% of their popular, their employees, it's hybrid or remote work. So what happens with a lot office space and then. And then, yeah, you have all these mom and pop small employers that are probably bigger, employ more people, but, you know, how do you balance keeping them happy, keeping the city vital? Do you have a vision for what, where New York City goes over the next 10 years, 20 years?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, I, as mayor, New York City can and will become the best place to start and grow a business. Last year, New York City received the highest amount of venture capital investment that it has ever received. The last quarter was historic in that regard. We've had a huge growth in the tech sector. Facebook, Amazon and Google have all vastly increases the size of their headquarters here in New York. And we see that growth continuing. The remote work that you speak about, the growth, the Salesforce, for example, allowing its people to work remotely has resulted in an inflow of remote workers coming into the city. Because right now the rents are cheapest of the years. There are landlords who are giving up to five months of free rent. And so I've been meeting people who have moved here during the pandemic who are from San Francisco or Chicago or Denver because they've always wanted to live in New York City and this is a great time. And they're betting that the city is going to come back even better than before.

Yeah, I hear you on that. It's interesting. One of our team members is, is from Brooklyn. She is actually opted to move to upstate New York, but I imagine she's still drawn to Brooklyn and the community there. And I do think that there's a giant kind of mixing that's happening. People are younger, sorry, younger people that are more flexible and can move anywhere are definitely taking advantage and they're moving to these mountain towns. But they're also. I could see the reverse happening. I mean, do you have the data? Is it, is it a net inflow or. Since the beginning of. I mean, we're still early in this process. It's probably going to play out of the next two or three years. You know, I'm sure people left. You know, are there are more coming back now?

There are, there is. Just by looking at the parking situation here, a lot of people have come back. But what's interesting here is that there's always. There's been, as long as I've been here in New York City, since 1985, there's been a migration pattern within New York. Right. You're young and you're single, you live in Manhattan, you know, you might, you know, have a baby or two toddlers, and you live on the Upper west side. Then maybe you move to Brooklyn, then you move out to New Jersey or Westchester or Connecticut. And then your kids become teenagers or in their 20s and you're an empty investor and you downsize and then you move back to the city. And that's what's happened until the 19, until the 2010s when the city became so attractive to families that they began to stay here and not leave. Which of course exacerbated the housing shortage here. I think what Covid did was it actually accelerated the pent up natural flow of families and people seeking more space out to the burbs that would have been more normal back in the 80s or 90s. And we're seeing this influx of young single people come back, we'll see where it comes out. I think in some respects a little bit of this migration is healthy for the city. The people that I really worry about are the people who are poor, who don't have the financial, economic or professional ability to work remotely or to move. And those are the folks that we really, really need to focus on over the coming years so that they're not left behind at the next economic recovery.

Right. I mean, this, this plays out in every town. In our, in our town, it's, it's a, it's a wealthier area. And it's like housing is ridiculously expensive. But hey, you know, teachers, firefighters, waiters and waitresses, whatever people in the service industry, they, they need to live somewhere. And without commuting, you know, 60 minutes or something or 30 miles to get to wherever they need to get to. And the same problems in New York City, I imagine, right? How do you make it a place that. And supports people, allows them to grow, lets people get a toehold in. Is that achievable?

I think it is. The fundamental problem with affordability in New York City is that over the past 30 years, the city's population grew by about a million people, but we only built about a quarter million units of housing. We also had a widening income gap between the rich and the poor. Naturally, people started flowing. More demand, less supply, and prices started going up. And then especially with folks who can't afford a lot of money. There's almost no low income housing construction over the past 30 years. So they became even tighter. And one of the examples is that NYCHA, which is the city's housing projects, is at 150% occupancy right now because people have doubled up because of this lack of low income housing.

Wow. And do you have a plan for, I mean, housing feels like it's the underlying problem in every attractive area that people want to live and it drives the cost of living housing and taxes. Do you have a plan for creating it?

Yes. Well, we have to focus on low income housing now. We've had a lot of focus over the past 20 years, 30 years in, in kind of middle income housing and what we call affordable. But it doesn't really address the large numbers of people who are really at the low end of the market. And until we actually fill that demand, we're not going to ease up on the demand in the middle income segment of the market. So we have to do this and we can do this. There are many different interesting financing ways that we can get there. And then, you know, the other aspect of this is really transportation. You know, we think about the city in terms of its subways, but it's very much of a radial system right where the hub is Manhattan. And then everything radiates from that. And so it means that between the arms there's lots of empty space that isn't as very, very poorly served by transportation. And we know from looking at the Lyft and Uber data that Lyft and Uber actually had got almost all of their growth in rides from going across these outer spokes of this, of this transportation system. And so we need to think about how we actually deliver better transportation into those transportation deserts so that you can have people live and work sort of wherever they are in New York City. And that will also ease up some of the problems in the housing issues.

Awesome. That makes sense. It's interesting. And I had, you know, it's, it's a multi dimensional problem. Do you, I mean, when I go to New York City, you know, you land in jfk, you know, take a taxi in, you drive by kind of lower income housing kind of farther out, tends to be pretty run down, not that attractive. Do you think that, you know, you can build higher quality or more livable, but higher density, lower income housing?

The answer is yes. There's no question that it's doable. The question is really the government's will. When I'm there, we will have a plan that compasses the entire city so that we can see where the opportunities are to build with more density, where build transportation that will go to those places, connect people to their work environments. I have this vision of 15 minute communities like the one that I live in in Prospect Heights where you live here, you can work here, you can shop, you can have your Entertainment within a 15 minute walk. That's really the ideal for a place like New York City. I think we can make that happen. In fact, I know we can. But we can create some of these new mixed income places and it's really, unless we have a plan that everyone can see and then we're going to continue having the NIMBYISM that prevents us from moving forward to be able to do things like have more affordable housing and low income housing and to be able to house homeless people across the city.

Yep, I hear you, I hear you. On the NIMBYism. Have you talked, is there a discussion with companies like Google or Toyota? I know that these companies are building smart cities or trying to partner up with cities to deliver kind of more planned out smart cities that are higher density, more walkable, super Internet connectivity and everything else. Is that discussion happening?

It's not happening and that's not for lack of trying. On the part of Google and Amazon and Facebook. We have, Bloomberg is here as well. We have a number of tech companies from J.P. morgan to Bloomberg and others who have tried to engage with the city to really help the city advance. Technology is obviously a clear way to do that. The city has not been a good partner. It could be a much better partner. The city's procurement rules, for example, really get in the way of innovation and with engagement on a commercial basis with some of these tech companies. So when I'm here, we're going to have to overhaul the procurement system to really orient toward innovation, toward being able to deliver services more efficiently and more effectively to all the residents of the city. To think about them as our end user in the same way that a software company would think about anybody who uses their platform.

Right. Yeah, I know if you walk into some of these tech firms now, it's like stepping into the future where you see how they organize their workers, how they communicate, how they use their space and also how quickly they can adapt even in the age of COVID to more flexible work environments, keep people happy. They're very focused on the happiness of their employees. So if you could extend that and say, okay, we're going to create a win win partnership between these companies and the workforce and the city. So that people can afford to live. We can keep costs down. I mean, you could see how if the city would let it happen, maybe huge change could happen quickly.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's time for the city to have a mayor who's a technologist, because we're going to have to have a digital transformation of the city for us to be able to interface with all of these new technologies. We can't even put up universal broadband because the mayor and the administration doesn't fundamentally understand how broadband works and what's needed to put it in place. There are things that we could do to actually expedite that broadband, to deliver it where it's needed to ensure that everybody has a device, every student has a device so that they can learn remotely, and then we can use that technology as also as a platform to get this into a much more resilient and flexible city as a whole, where some of that direct impact can be felt most profoundly in education.

Yeah, it's a tough choice. I can see why it. You know, when it's like when you're building a house, you can go in and fix an existing house. It's actually much more expensive to, like, remodel a house, you know, keep the core frame than to just knock it down. But if you knock it down, you lose a lot of the character that makes this interesting. And same thing with New York. Right. There's fantastic history there and, you know, great cultural institutions that you don't want to just like, hey, we're going to scrape the. Scrape the earth and rebuild it from the ground up is like this techno utopia. So there's somewhere in between. All right, so I want to talk a little bit more about what's motivating this. And just for our users and listeners, it's like, if they want to get involved in politics, why did you take this on? And why have you spent. I mean, you've spent your career, 30 years doing both businesses and working in the city. You know, what. What motivated this?

I've always felt, since I was a kid, that I had to give back. I've always felt that I was incredibly lucky to have all the advantages that I've had, even in times when I've had a struggle. And I've always recognized that there are people who didn't have it as good as I had. And so I've always wanted to try to lift people up wherever I was, whether it was in a startup or in a large company or at the city. And working in the public sector is actually a fantastic place. To begin to do that now, it's a very tough place to work. So if you're coming from the private sector and you want to go into the public sector, going and getting a public sector job is not going to probably fulfill that. You have to be aware of what you're getting into. So many people burn out very quickly after going into the public sector. But there are places like switching it to teaching, where you can see your impact on kids that are super important. If you have professional skills that can be offered on a pro bono basis and you can find a receptive administrator or leader within the government who can embrace you and say, yes, we need that thinking, then you can actually begin to start to influence some of those decisions. But I'd say it's always great to, to think about for yourself. Like if you're trying to do something good, what's the best avenue for doing that? Is government work the best place to start or is it nonprofit or somewhere else? And I'd say that for most people it's a government funded nonprofit is the easiest place to start because you see the direct impact of the, of the government's interaction with that nonprofit. You see the services that the nonprofit fulfills. You understand some of the challenges that the nonprofit has in fulfilling the needs of the government. But then you're also doing something productive. And if that works well, and then that puts you in a very good position to think about upping the ante and going to work inside a government or maybe even thinking about elected or appointed office.

Got it. And have you been, I mean, you've done this over the course of your career, you've been starting companies and then I guess volunteering your time in the city, in the public sector. I think for audience. Many of them, they've, they've had fulfilling careers, they've made a fair amount of money and now they're thinking about, okay, how do I get back? What's the most impactful way to give back? Right to their families, to their community. So, you know, I like what you're laying out here, which is go work or find a government funded nonprofit. Any other kind of, you know, like, I guess, what kind of populations do you find doing this kind of work? Is it people that are later in their career or is it people that are earlier?

I find people who are. There are a lot of mid career switchers into this. People who say, you know, I've worked for 20, 25 years in the corporate world and it's been great, I made some money, but I really it's not fulfilling from a personal perspective. And so they end up going to teach or something like that. And that's a very, very common pathway. It's somewhat also common for younger folks because I think a lot of people end up having their quarter quarter century career crisis when they're in their 20s and they are not happy, they don't feel fulfilled and they say, well, let me go actually do something that better aligns my beliefs with my work.

And do you, do you find that these folks are satisfied? They do they get the fulfillment and purpose that they're looking for? Or do you, do you see that people like, they get in and they have this ideal world of what it's going to be like and then it doesn't meet that expectation, they grind it out.

So the, the, the latter is a more common experience that you come in with all of these, you know, starry eyed ideas of how much you can accomplish in a very short period of time and you find that the system is very resistant to changing or moving quickly. A lot of this for people is thinking, well, I think you have to find the right setting. Then you also have to figure out where you're willing to break glass because sometimes you have to, sometimes that means actually working a lot more than you might think. And sometimes it means doing something that you weren't asked to do. I'll just give you an example. In my first job for the city, I was working at the city's corporation council's office, which is essentially their legal department. I was working in a group that was prosecuting massive litigation against asbestos manufacturers. I was hired because I had a knowledge of construction and architecture, but what they really needed was actually a relational database and it didn't work with the city's AS400 system. So I got my boss to buy me a dozen PC XTS and a copy of DBASE 2+ and a license to Alpha 4, which is a relational plugin. And I set that thing up by myself after hours so that the unions wouldn't see me doing this. And then I configured the database. We stood it up, we made it happen and it made, it created tremendous efficiency in that particular thing. But I worked around the clock for about three months making this thing happen. So if you're willing to go above and beyond and you find the people who are receptive to this and then you can actually make some real progress happen and that gives you confidence to go out and do that again and again and again and again. And that's kind of been my path through life in general, both in the private and the public sector.

That's an awesome story. I appreciate the extra effort that you put in. Do you think that there's. Why is this structural rigidity there that makes you someone like you have to jump through all those hoops? Why isn't there alignment to. In businesses it's like, hey, there's a problem. What's the fastest way we can solve this problem? The most efficient way. And then you kind of knock the barriers out of the way and you get it done. Why does this happen with government where it's like it's pain in the neck, there's so much rigidity and things don't happen fast.

Well, just to be clear, when you use the word business, we have to be careful which businesses we're referring to because businesses are often inefficient and also resistant to change as well. My last job was at JPMorgan Chase where I was the managing director implementing a new ground up program in their legal department. So I can tell you that there are a lot of commonalities between the two environments. But what you have to be willing to do is to say there's this thing that you can accomplish that is far more important than the bureaucracy. But instead of beating the individuals up, the people are there to try to protect the organization. It's all about fear. The fear of failing, the fear of breaking something, the fear of getting in trouble with a regulator or somebody else. You have to reassure people in a meaningful way about what the risks are. Sometimes it's not by diminishing the risks by saying, yeah, this is a risk. Well, let's look at how this plays out and how important this is. I've had to have lots and lots of those conversations and ultimately you can't actually get everything done. But you have to find those people who are in a position of power high enough where they can say, okay, I see the risk, I understand it, I'm going to back you on this. Let's take it up one level just to make sure that we got the right people involved and then let's give it a shot. And then you have a more iterative approach, leveraging the tools of agile, where you can actually start to advance things step wise so that you can actually retreat if something isn't working right. And then you can kind of adapt and pivot from there.

Yeah, and one thing that's occurring to me with this discussion of in your point about big businesses can be rigid as well is that with big businesses they can be Rigid and then there's venture and then there are small companies. I run a small company and why can I exist? Our company exists in a world where there's JP Morgan, Fidelity, Vanguard, etc. And the reason is, is that, yeah, very often those companies are slow moving, they're afraid of change, they're protecting their existing way of doing business and business model. And so we can go over here and spin up what we're doing, which is a different way of doing this. Compete with them, potentially dislocate them. Right. In an ideal world, disrupt them. So with government, same problems, right. You're big, established, don't want to. Why rock the boat? What you need is competition. Can you create a situation where there's competitive competition inside the government or even to the government somehow red team it can that exist? I mean, I think if you can't get there, it's going to be hard to create disruptive change, which is probably what's needed to, to go faster.

Yes, I guess I might differ from that. I think maybe there's a world in which having some of this red, green, blue team kind of competition might be a good thing. But government is so far away from there and there's so much that has to get done. I've been listening a lot and reading Roger McNamee's work. He's the partner at New Enterprise Associates, one of the leading Silicon Valley firms and he's begun talking a lot about low profit, low growth startups that if you want to accomplish real change and do it in an environment that is regulated, where people's lives, safety and health are at stake, that in some respects the measuring points are not the same as it is for a consumer based startup that you actually need to think about going a little bit more slowly, a little more carefully thinking about what the issues are that you can address. I like to think about it as to going slow in order to go fast. I led in partnership with the Annie Casey foundation as a tech partner on building a new government child welfare case management system. We came up with a five year strategy for implementing and then deploying that. And it was a very much of a go fast in increments and then go slow and really prove things out. And then once you could flip the switch, then you actually had full system adoption. Because unlike you, you're fighting for market share in government. Once you flip the switch and you offer your tool, you could have 100% market adoption because it's required.

Yep.

It's a very, very different animal because you're now doing, you have to deal with the long tail of users in addition to dealing with that.

That.

That's. That those two standard deviations in the middle.

Right. Yeah. It just feels like there's an opportunity to create. Introduce some more competition or new ideas in the, you know, in the. In the. In support of getting towards this ultimate goal. But it's great that you're tapping into folks like Roger McNamee and the thinking that's happening in technology because there's, I think, lots of good ideas here. Yeah.

So the competition among ideas is a great one. And I'll give you a great example of how this works. I mean, Kaiser Permanente has the. I think the model labor management partnership in the country. And the labor unions are rewarded for two primary things, innovation and cost efficiency. Believe it or not, because they're the front line. They see the things that are happening and the opportunities to help. They're taking their learnings and they're turning those things into technologies for observations. And then the union gets rewarded. If there's an efficiency, they get a financial credit. And if there's an innovation, even if it doesn't generate cost savings, you know, they at least can get reputation credit for that. A big thank you. And that's. And that changes the whole game. So I know we could do a lot more of that in New York City because it's not being done at all. We don't leverage our frontline workers. We don't leverage the learnings. We don't bring them together. We don't have hackathons. We don't have think a thons. And we need to do a lot more of that. Because when you're paying 330,000 people to work in the city, and then we need to be taking that intellectual capital and actually mining it for the things that will help make our city a better place.

Right. No, that's powerful. I mean, I had no idea there were over 300,000 employees there. But, yeah, listening to people. I mean, I'm a. So. And by the way, I'm a Kaiser customer. And it is shocking, shockingly good to be a client of theirs, because having come from kind of more traditional medicine, where my old doctor, you know, you'd go, he was a great guy. Everything was written down by hand, barely legible, stuck on the wall in this paper file. When I go into Kaiser, everything's digital. Setting the appointment, showing up, you're talking with someone, they're punching everything into the computer in real time. So there's an electronic medical record that Follows you around. I once had to go in for some heart thing, and they were like, okay, I met with someone. I got an ekg, I got blood work. I did a stress test in less than an hour, and I just, boom, boom, boom, went down through the building. And then I walked out and I was like, okay, I see the future is here for healthcare, and you can see all the efficiencies. And this is an industry that like government, slow moving, rigid, but you see the power of doing that. So it's pretty interesting if, yeah, if you can get folks, the police officers and firefighters and teachers saying, hey, this is what's wrong. Here's how to fix it. Actually implement the change so they can see it. And they're like, oh, positive change is happening. It's good. We're getting more efficient. And then, yeah, give them a financial incentive where, hey, we're going to raise teacher pay if we can educate kids better, improve outcomes, make this more efficient. That makes a lot of sense. That's cool. All right, so let's talk about your campaign a little bit. So you're, I mean, relatively unknown person. You've got people like Andrew Yang in there. You know, do you. How do you feel like, you know, what's your path to victory?

You know, it changes every week. A poll came out just today where the leading candidate with 50% of the polling is called undecided. Andrew Yang has gone from 38% in his first polls down to 16%. We're looking at this huge disconnect between name recognition because his is over 90%, but, you know, only 16% are now saying that he should be the mayor. So you see the negatives growing despite the fact that his name brand recognition is so high. And then the other candidates are all kind of like, you know, kind of clustered in this kind of 5 to 12%. I broke out in the polls two weeks ago to be the. Not tied for ninth, right behind Ray McGuire, who has raised over 100 times more money than I have. And so I'm on this very, very different path, speaking to people directly, like on things like this, leveraging zoom and the tools of the modern era of remote work, meeting with lots and lots of people and trying to really focus on the ideas. And I think the thing that. I think what all of our analysis of this political market is that people now, you can't be a. You can't win office in New York City today if you're not a progressive. Well, I'm a real progressive. I mean, I have a heart of Progressive and have a life story of a progressive. But I also come from business. What people are looking for here is somebody who is a progressive who is also pro business, and that's who I am. And I believe that that's going to really come out in April and May as we go toward the primary in June.

That's awesome. Well, congrats on the momentum in your, in your campaign. Yeah. So what are the. Yeah, what are the big dates that are coming up? It sounds like when we talked briefly in the lead up, you were saying April 6th is a big decision point, and then that I think the Democratic primary is June 22. And that's really like the deciding, you know, deciding time, because whoever wins the Democratic primary is essentially probably going to win the election.

That's right. That's right. The April 6th is an important date because the State Board of Elections finalizes who's on the ballot. So everybody, you know, that will separate the people who can and the people who can't. I mean, super, super easily. So I expect to clear that hurdle. We've collected, you know, almost four times the number of signatures required to get on the ballot. So. So I feel pretty good about that. We have a couple other minor hurdles in between, but it's really, at this point, fighting for name recognition, getting the message out. The way that the press is covering this is the top eight candidates get all the press. So I need to just move up one position.

Good luck.

Be able to get a place. I believe we can do that. I have a lot of confidence. I have a small but mighty team.

Yeah, it sounds like you're, you're on your way. And, you know, so do you have any, you mentioned, like some secret weapons, you know, in terms of advisors or, you know, strategic approaches to this? Yeah.

So we have, we have a couple, we're in the running for a couple of big endorsements. And, you know, one of those should come out this week. Another one should come out in a couple weeks, but you never know for sure. But just getting into the final round of some of these endorsements is a super, super strong sign. We have some national political strategists who are volunteering on our campaign because they think it's so interesting, this idea that New York City, the largest city in the United States, doesn't have a clear front runner, that people asking to have coalesced around creates a very interesting challenge for some of these strategists. So they're looking at my campaign, they're looking at the polling, and they're saying well, here's a guy who seems to fit the bill for what New Yorkers really want at the heart. And so it's a matter of trying to play this classic win from behind strategy and see if we can actually turn that into a win in June.

All right, so last question. Just on funding it, can you just give us a brief description about how you fund this and how you raise money and how that whole process.

Yeah, it's a really interesting game. I'll just give you a couple data points. If you are an existing politician like Eric Adams or Scott Stringer, you can take your unspent campaign war chest from your previous races and roll it over into this one. Scott and Eric started off this race with over a couple million bucks already. If you have a huge following and brand name recognition like Andrew Yang, and then you leverage your national presence to drive contributions, and he's done that quite effectively. He set fundraising records in New York City because of that reach. And you know, just to kind of give him credit, he had a fair amount of reach in New York City as well. So that was, that was pretty impressive. And then, you know, for the others, you know, people have been at this for over a year and slogging away at this and give them a lot of credit for that long haul. And for those folks, they've by and large crossed the threshold. And then there's One person, Ray McGuire, who is self funding. He's self funding. He's also getting some contributions, but he's opted out of the campaign finance program. For me, I'm running a very different race. I'm running a race that is very akin to my super bootstrapping experience doing startups. So far to date, we've raised $85,000, which is about 1% of what Ray McGuire has raised. The small contributions. We're really focusing on getting the word out in these types of person to person interactions with social media, social media advertising, and then really focusing on the message and the substance of the campaign. In some ways, if I were to translate this into a kind of a tech startup passion, we're really focusing on the product and the message and we're putting ourselves in a position to really start to scale the marketing.

Nice. What's your goal for fundraising?

Well, ideally, we cross over the $250,000 threshold with over a thousand contributors by early May, and that would unlock an 8 to 1 match from the city campaign finance board. New York City has the largest public matching fund system in the country to be able to allow small candidates like me to be able to compete effectively with much deeper pocketed candidates. That's our goal. And obviously, if anybody who's watching this wants to contribute, I would be delighted. People from anywhere in the country, any US Citizen can contribute to my campaign.

Got it. And you're capped at $2,000 per individual contribution. Okay. Okay. So you need to get to 250,000 bucks. Then you get eight to one on your money. And you need to get to this, to that amount by what date again? May 13th. All right, so you have a, you have a couple months here. All right, well, good luck. Yeah. So folks, we'll put the links up. If folks want to contribute. I think it's cool to kind of hear the inside baseball and like how this works and how you can, I mean, the fact that you can run a campaign, be in ninth place for mayor of New York City with essentially no money to start. I mean, you've got a reputation, but you're, you know, obviously putting your, your a lot of effort into this. It's impressive though, right? And have, you know, feel like there's an approach to getting there. That's cool. Yeah. So, okay, so I just want, as we wrap up, you know, for folks interested in kind of getting involved in their communities, we talked about a little bit before, kind of how to, how to kind of get started. You know, do you think that, like, hey, this is a good use of time, like they can create effective change and, you know, do we need more people kind of getting involved in their communities?

Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that that Eise Mayor would create is urban Innovation core and it would bring students from the business schools together with experienced executives and retired executives together to actually go into the small business community and start to mentor small business owners one at a time. There's a huge need for this. In fact, this is something that anybody who's watching this could do right now is that you could go and talk to your local chamber of commerce and start a program like this. Go talk to the economic development authority in your city or town and go do this. Because I can tell you that the level of sophistication among small businesses, especially brick and mortar small businesses, is so low compared to what you might think of. And they all need advice, they all need help. So that's very, very low hanging fruit. And then there are lots of students who are trying to start businesses or young people who are doing first time entrepreneurs. We're also going to see, by the way, a huge boom in startup businesses coming after Covid because A lot of moms who left the workforce, their brains didn't turn off. They actually have been starting cottage businesses in their bedrooms and in their living rooms, and they're going to be ready to start scaling pretty soon.

Yeah, no, I'm a firm believer in entrepreneurship and getting remote work, capturing people's human capital in a consulting company that I was doing before this. We were actually, this is, you know, 15 years ago, but we were employing, you know, moms with young kids who were highly educated, you know, had left the workforce, still had a lot to contribute, but they couldn't necessarily go full time. And that was it. You know, a huge hack for us. And then another quick story is that, you know, I was talking with our CTO earlier, and he's mentoring a kid in Ohio who was in high school, and he was telling me how they have a business plan competition, and I guess last year this kid came, actually got through the states and got to the nationals and was pretty excited. So he's. You know, just the fact that they're running these. These competitions in high schools is great and kind of fostering that kind of thinking and, like, getting. Getting kids thinking about starting companies really early is. Is fantastic. So I. I applaud what you're. What you're doing in. In New York City. All right, so for you, where do you think you're going to be in three to five years? Hopefully, I guess, mayor. Well, how long is the term for.

Mayor in New York City? It's four years, and very few mayors don't make it to the second term. So that would be my goal, but the voters would decide at that point, so I can't look too far ahead. I'm just looking ahead to June and how I can prevail in this race.

Okay, that's awesome. As we wrap up here, any resources that you found in your journey that you think would be helpful for our audience, which is kind of people 45 to 60 and transitioning out of their main career and kind of looking around for how do they use their human capital and how they stay involved, find purpose.

I'll make a recommendation of a book that's been around for a long time called In Transition by the Harvard Business School Alumni association of New York. It's a book that I've referred to frequently over the course of my career, and it's especially good for people who want to connect their value system together with doing something positive. And it could be a nonprofit thing, it could be a personal activity, it could be a business activity, but it is a phenomenally useful tool. So I would highly, highly recommend that for anyone who's thinking about how they take their time and experience and intellectual assets and be able to put those to use, hopefully for making the world a better place.

Okay, awesome. I'll look that up and we'll put a link to it, you know, in the show notes here. Okay. Anything else you want to share with our audience before I wrap it up?

Sure. Well, the final thing is I think, you know, I believe that a, the government is going to have to figure out a different way to communicate with people. Everyone now has their own favorite channel, whether it's in social media or in print. And so the government has to do this in a much better way and flattening the hierarchy so that that people can be more in touch with their elected representation. And so one of the ways that I'm doing that is by holding Zoom open office hours that anybody can book via my website, Chang nyc. And so anybody who's watching this or listening to this, who may want to actually connect with me, you know, please go to Chang NYC and find a time and attend One way open office hours. You can ask me anything.

That's awesome. Yeah, we're running those for our, for our business and it's been pretty interesting to get, you know, open it up and hear what our users want and have to say. And so I could see. I love the fact that you're doing it as you go to win the mayor's race. All right, so with that, Art Chang, thank you for joining us and giving us kind of the inside scoop on how to run for mayor of New York City and taking on this big challenge and trying to bring positive change to a city that I love and I think many people love and is definitely the city in the US and good luck with that. Thanks for being on our show. Thanks, Dotto Robison, for being our sound engineer. If you made it this far, I definitely encourage you to check out art's campaign at www.chang.new yorkcity. You can also see, you know, engage in the discussion around this in our Facebook group at just look for new retirement inside of Facebook. And then finally, you know, we're trying to build an audience for this podcast. So any reviews are welcome. We definitely read them and try to adjust based on what we're learning and that's it. So thanks and have a great day. Great.

Thank you, Steve.