I love technology. I really do. I’m all in, and have always been.

But let’s talk about everything we touch. Making coffee, starting a car, turning the lights on in your house, listening to music- it’s all tied to an app.

In the past, you used to hand someone a key. Your kid, your friend, the valet, whoever. They drove off. Simple. Now? My car opens with an app or a card. Which means if I want to lend my car to someone, I basically can’t. No key, no borrowing. You’re screwed.

We have a coffee machine that our daughter jokes about every morning, saying she needs to go get her phone to get a cup.

Even turning the TV on and off can be a challenge. The lighting in the house has long given up the on/off switch.

I don’t have a key to my own house anymore. We’ve got keypads. Codes. Electronic everything.

And look, I get the appeal. It’s slick. It’s modern. It is efficient (when it works); I like the concept.

But there’s something to be said for on, off, and dim. That’s it. A key you can hand off. A switch you can flip. No app, no battery dying at the worst moment, no code to remember or share.

I’m not saying go back. I’m saying — sometimes I long for those days. The simple, dumb, reliable version of things. Where a key was just a key, and anyone holding it could drive your car.

Technology’s amazing. But every now and then, give me the analog version, maybe just for the car.

The post Key Please? appeared first on Gotham Gal.

Last week, New York State launched “Cannabis Honestly” — a statewide campaign to help students, schools, and parents talk to young people about weed. It came out of a yearlong listening effort: 23 facilitated sessions with more than 450 young people, parents, educators, and community members. The goal is to dispel myths and give families real tools for the conversation.

This should have been launched before the first legal dispensary hit the street, but better late than never. Here’s the thing. It’s pretty simple. Talk about weed to your kids like you talk about alcohol and sex. Directly, honestly, early. Here’s what’s actually scary: roughly a third of teens surveyed couldn’t correctly guess the legal age for cannabis consumption in New York. And that confusion isn’t happening in a vacuum.

It’s happening while illegal stores are everywhere — bodegas, underground operations, unlicensed delivery services all selling product with zero oversight. So parents are scared. Of course they are because you have to be 21 to buy legal weed, and the reality is kids can buy weed underage anywhere but a legal dispensary. Just like alcohol and sex (although you don’t have to be of age to have sex), teenagers are partaking in all of it. If you don’t think so, you are kidding yourself.

Parents are not just worried their kid might try weed — they’re worried their kid will buy something laced with god-knows-what from an unlicensed shop down the block. A campaign teaching families how to talk about cannabis? Great. Necessary, even. But it’s treating the symptom, not the disease. The real problem isn’t the conversation — it’s that illegal weed is still everywhere, undermining the entire point of legalization and regulation in the first place. You can hand every parent in New York a conversation guide. It won’t matter if the corner bodega is still selling untested product to a sixteen-year-old. Fix the enforcement problem. Then the conversation gets a lot easier.

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We are hosting the world. Fans came from every corner of the globe for the World Cup, and a lot of them are still here, extending the trip, seeing the country. And the thing I keep hearing from them, over and over, is the same thing: how is everything so expensive here? Rent, dinner, a cab ride, all of it. They’re not wrong to ask.

And a huge, underdiscussed piece of the answer is healthcare. Our healthcare system was built for corporations, not for people. If you work for a big company, you’re fine, although they now make you pay for some of the costs, which makes zero sense to me. They negotiate bulk rates, they spread the risk across thousands of employees, and your premium looks almost reasonable. But that model assumes everyone works for a big company.

We don’t live in that economy anymore. We have a gig economy. Freelancers, artists, consultants, solo entrepreneurs, small business owners. We also have many people quasi-retire at 50 and need healthcare until they get Medicare. That’s a massive and growing share of how people actually work now, and none of them have access to the group-rate deal. They’re on their own, staring down a bill that can run twelve to twenty thousand dollars a year for a family, just to have coverage before you’ve spent a dollar on actual care. That is not a healthcare system. That’s a tax on not working for a Fortune 500 company. And it traces back further than people realize.

Healthcare in this country didn’t start as a for-profit, publicly traded industry. That shift happened under Reagan, when the door opened for hospital chains and insurers to become businesses that answer to shareholders instead of patients. Once you make health a business with quarterly earnings targets, you’ve guaranteed that costs will rise forever, because the incentive is never “keep people healthy as cheaply as possible.” The incentive is growth. We should be rolling that back. Healthcare should not be a publicly traded, profit-maximizing business. It should be run as a nonprofit, full stop.

Every other country in the world that’s gotten this right treats healthcare as a basic right, not a market opportunity, and it shows in their outcomes and their costs. This isn’t just a moral argument; it’s an economic one. Medical debt is the single biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in this country. Companies are drowning in healthcare costs they pass on to consumers in the price of everything else. When people are afraid to leave a job because they’ll lose their coverage, that’s not a free market; that’s indentured servitude with better branding.

A healthier population, freed from that fear, freed from that debt, is a more productive and more entrepreneurial one. If we want more people starting companies, making art, taking risks, we have to stop punishing them for not being on a corporate payroll. I hope the next generation of politicians actually understands this instead of tinkering at the edges. Universal, nonprofit healthcare isn’t radical. It’s just catching up to the rest of the world, and finally treating it like what it is: a right, not a revenue stream.

The post Why Everything Costs So Much appeared first on Gotham Gal.

Wyoming’s Attorney General Keith Kautz decided, on his own authority, that marijuana will stay a Schedule I substance under state law, full stop, to ensure that marijuana remains a Schedule I controlled drug no matter what the federal government does. One person, in one office, overriding the direction the rest of the country is heading, because the legislature hadn’t explicitly told him otherwise. Wyoming voters have tried and failed for years to get any kind of cannabis reform onto the ballot. The people keep asking. The power structure keeps saying no. That’s the pattern with cannabis policy in this country. It is not being run by data, by the people who actually use the product, or, half the time, by elected officials who answer to voters. It’s being run by whoever happens to hold an administrative pen that week. Why? Power and lobbyists’ money.

Look at the federal rescheduling hearing that’s supposed to wrap up July 15. This is potentially the biggest shift in marijuana policy in over fifty years, deciding whether cannabis moves from Schedule I, next to heroin, to Schedule III. And the DEA invited seven participants to testify. All seven oppose rescheduling. Not one pro-reform voice got a seat at the table, including NORML, who asked to be included and got rejected. That’s not a hearing. That’s theater dressed up as due process. And even if the judge recommends the move, nobody has to listen. The ruling isn’t binding. The DEA and DOJ can sit on it, ignore it, slow-walk it into oblivion. Meanwhile, more litigation is guaranteed no matter what happens. Litigation in an industry that isn’t making money.

This is the same federal government that already rescheduled FDA-approved and state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III back in April, and states like Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho, and Indiana are simply refusing to go along with even that. Let’s be clear about what rescheduling would and wouldn’t actually do. It would not federally legalize marijuana. It would not, by itself, get banks fully into the business or make credit cards standard at dispensaries — that still requires separate banking reform that Congress has stalled on for years. What it would mainly do is stop taxing cannabis businesses on gross revenue instead of profit, a punishing tax code provision that’s been bleeding this industry dry since day one. That’s meaningful, but it’s a fraction of what an actual functioning industry needs. And look at what happens even when states do legalize. New York is the case study in how not to do this, and it appears that NYS is spending more time listening to people outside the industry, such as unions.

Years after legalization, the legal market still hasn’t caught up to the illicit one. Licensing is a mess, the rollout was slow, and taxes and regulations made it hard for legal operators to compete with the unlicensed shops that never closed. Nobody’s running a healthy business, and the promise of legalization, tax revenue, safe, regulated products, and jobs has barely materialized. Meanwhile, everyone who wanted to use cannabis was already using it, legal or not. The only thing prohibition and half-measures ever actually accomplished was decades of arrests that fell overwhelmingly on Black and brown communities, for a product now sold in taxed dispensaries a few states over.

This whole system, federal and state, is a monument to politicians who’ve never touched the product, don’t understand the research, and don’t have to answer for the damage prohibition did. They are still leaning into a false narrative. Meanwhile, the people who voted for reform, the entrepreneurs trying to build legitimate businesses, the patients who need consistent access, the families of everyone who did time for something now legal ninety miles away- all of them are left waiting on a system built by people who are actively rooting against them.

At some point, the country has to decide whether policy gets made by the people who voted for it, or by whichever attorney general or unelected panel feels like overriding them that day. Right now, it’s very clearly the latter, and it is long past time for that to change.

The post Whose Weed Is It Anyway? appeared first on Gotham Gal.

Friday night in Harlem, a basketball tournament called the Kingdome was doing exactly what it was built to do. Kids and grown men were on the court at King Towers, playing ball, laughing, being a community. Kinu Rochford was one of the players. He was 35. He’d played college ball, gone pro overseas, come home to Brooklyn, and kept showing up to mentor young players in his neighborhood. He was warming up for his next game when someone walked up and shot him in the head. Twice. Two more people were hit. The shooter ran off. No arrests yet. This wasn’t some anonymous kid caught in crossfire. This was a guy who made it out and came back. And it happened blocks from a “Stop the Gun Violence” rally.

I keep asking myself: why are we back here? Why is it normal that a man can walk onto a public basketball court and execute someone in front of a crowd, and we all just brace for the next one? Why do we treat gun violence in public housing like weather — something that just happens, that we shrug at, instead of something we’re allowed to be furious about and demand an end to? Because that’s the real rot underneath this. If this happened on a court on the Upper East Side or in Brooklyn Heights, the city would not sleep until there were arrests, cameras, foot patrols, a task force. It would be front page for a month. Instead it’s a local news story, a vigil, a hashtag, and then quiet until the next one.

NYCHA residents are New Yorkers. Full stop. They pay taxes, they raise families, they build this city. But we’ve let public housing become a place where violence is expected, where the outdoor space looks like a forgotten lot instead of a park, where resources for kids and mentorship programs run on fumes and volunteers instead of real funding. One of the coaches at Friday’s rally said it plainly — they have almost no resources, and they do the work anyway because someone has to. That should embarrass all of us.

And where is the political will? Where are the NYCHA success stories — the executives, the artists, the athletes, the politicians who grew up in these buildings and made it — standing up and saying this is not acceptable, not one more time? Not a statement. Not a tweet. A plan. Because here’s what actually changes this: education that doesn’t stop at graduation. Real, funded youth programs, not the ones held together with duct tape by coaches with no budget. Outdoor spaces that look like something worth being proud of, not something to survive. Jobs. Mentorship that isn’t volunteer-only. And a serious, sustained conversation about how a young man can walk onto a public court with a gun in the first place.

If we actually believe that public housing residents are neighbors and not a separate class of citizens, we have to fund it as we mean it. If they rise, we rise. All of us. New York doesn’t get to call itself a great city while writing off entire neighborhoods as background noise for the evening news. Rest in peace, Kinu. This should not have happened to you, and it should not keep happening to anyone.

The post Violence Can’t Continue appeared first on Gotham Gal.

I’m a believer in privatization. Government shouldn’t be in the business of running things. It should set the rules, provide the incentives, and get out of the way. Nobody has yet to figure out how to fix, create, or change how NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) operates. It is so messy with so many people involved, yet we need more housing, and not necessarily the housing that is available.

There has been decades-long institutional failure on many levels. Many people in government had tried to do work arounds to make it better from RAD/PACT (Permanent Affordability Commitment Together) that congress created in 2012, and NYCHA launched in 2016 which was a “work around”. Section 9 is funded through the congressional capital fund, a pool of money that has been underfunded for decades. RAD was to convert those section 9 units to section 8 contracts that are long-term and federally guaranteed, aka bankable. Private lenders will extend financing against future rental income stream, just like any other deal in real estate. It is clever but it doesn’t fix the underlying $80B hole of capital improvements needed.

There is also the Multifamily Homeownership Program. The pitch: move into a nicer unit, keep your job, put down a small deposit, and, within 18 months, NYCHA will sell you the apartment. Real equity. Real ownership. The whole American dream wrapped up in a public housing unit. It fell apart. Years later, fewer than half of those apartments ever became co-ops. The buildings had leaky roofs, no heat, mice. . Here’s the thing. You can’t sell someone ownership of a building you haven’t maintained. Nobody wants equity in squalor. Ownership only works as a wealth-building tool if the underlying asset is actually worth something — and NYCHA’s chronic disinvestment ensured that much of it wasn’t. As I wrote, NYCHA needs somewhere around $78–80 billion to bring its buildings into good repair. Not to make them nice. Just functional. It’s why residents don’t trust “homeownership opportunities” offered on top of buildings falling apart.

I do believe that private capital can fix what the government starved for decades. And to be fair, PACT(Permanent Affordability Commitment Together- NYCHA’s brand of the RAD program) has now generated close to $9 billion in actual renovations. That’s not nothing. But you can’t out-privatize eight decades of federal disinvestment overnight, and residents who’ve been burned before are right to be skeptical of yet another plan that asks them to trust an institution that let their homes rot.

Here’s the part that should make everyone furious regardless of politics: it currently takes NYCHA over a year — in some cases pushing 18 months — to turn around a single vacant apartment. Lead testing, asbestos abatement, internal turf wars between departments. Meanwhile thousands of units sit empty while 200,000+ families wait on a list. This isn’t a hard problem. This is a software and workflow problem. An intake agent, automated document verification, parallel-tracked inspections instead of sequential ones — this is solvable with off-the-shelf technology, not another ten-figure capital plan. This tells you everything about why people don’t trust government to run anything, even when the money is there.

This brings me to the rent freeze supported by Mandami for stabilized units. I understand the instinct — protect people from getting priced out. But it raises the same question from the other direction. What percentage of landlords stuck under a freeze are actual slumlords who never gave a damn, versus someone who inherited a building, rents it out, and genuinely can’t afford the repairs without raising rent? Because those are two very different problems, and one blanket policy treats them the same.

I don’t think government should own or operate housing. I think it should own the rules. Tax incentives for landlords who maintain their buildings. Real penalties for the ones who don’t. Rent increases tied to actual economic indicators on a predictable cycle — not political whim, not indefinite freezes — so tenants get stability and owners can plan. Privatization isn’t the villain. Privatization without oversight, and public ownership without accountability, are both the villain. I want to believe that many people understand this but it seems insanely difficult for NYCHA to solve the decay.

We’re going to keep watching well-intentioned plans — homeownership programs, RAD conversions, rent freezes — solve one problem while quietly creating another. Many of the NYCHA buildings should be torn down, but how do we move all those residents somewhere else before that happens while giving them clean functioning apartments of the same size?

Roughly one in 17 residents live in NYCHA buildings. In Europe, non-profit housing associations run large swaths of social housing, meaning the government outsourced the management to these organizations, and it works. These non-profit organizations sit between the government and the tenant. Perhaps NYCHA needs an equivalent to that.

I truly wonder if this cycle will ever change.

The post Public Housing Privatization Paradox appeared first on Gotham Gal.

I entered the working world in the 1980s, well, actually, when I was 16, but the adult working world when I graduated college. I remember exactly how sharp women’s elbows had to be, because there were so few seats, if any, for women at the top. I also remember how many men held those seats and were, frankly, unimpressive at the job. It wasn’t about merit. It was about which gender was allowed in. I have been championing women through my investments for years, so I often ask the question about women’s equality: are we there yet?

Are women being embraced as equals, or are we just better at pretending? My guess is we are better, not equal. The numbers back that up. Women now hold 29 percent of C-suite roles, essentially flat from the year before, and remain underrepresented at every single level of the pipeline for the eleventh year running. For every 100 men who get promoted into their first manager role, only 81 women make that same jump — the “broken rung,” and it’s been stuck there for years. In many companies, the ladder becomes rungless for women at some point.

Women hold about a quarter of C-suite roles globally but under a fifth of CEO seats, and hiring of women into the C-suite has basically stalled since 2022. So it’s not that the door is closed. It’s that the door is open a foot and everyone’s fighting over who gets to squeeze through. Not that different from the early 80’s. And I think part of what’s stalling this out is something nobody wants to say out loud: plenty of men are still intimidated by women who are smarter than they are, and instead of embracing that as an asset, they put a foot down. It isn’t about chauvinism; it is about fear of smarter women.

Sometimes it’s just a slow withdrawal of being pulled into the room where decisions get made. You can build all the policy you want, but you can’t legislate away insecurity. Then there’s the piece nobody designed the system around at all: children. If you’re a woman with real ambition, your thirties and forties — the exact years you’re supposed to be putting your foot on the gas professionally — are also the years biology hands you the narrowest window to have kids. Try being present and running two competing priorities that both demand everything, at the same time, with a partner who’s also trying to run flat-out on his or her own career. Something gives. Historically, it’s been her.

If we’re going to live to a hundred, does that change the game? Perhaps we should be designing careers like there’s only one shot, one sprint, one decade that counts? Why can’t one partner lead for a stretch while the other builds a family runway, and then trade? Why isn’t staggering the sprint just… normal? We treat the traditional linear climb as the only legitimate one, and that assumption punishes women more than it punishes men, every time. It also gets more interesting — and more honest — when you take gender out of the couple entirely.

Two women, two men, one of each: the “roles” we assume in a heterosexual marriage — who leans in, who leans back, who carries the emotional load — don’t map cleanly onto every relationship. Does that happen in homosexual relationships? Are there default settings? Defaults can be changed. Will the next generation be more forgiving — more willing to let each person build a life around what they actually want, instead of a script? I want to believe yes; after all, I am an eternal optimist.

I see more men flexing, more couples negotiating rather than assuming, and more openness to nonlinear paths. But the data on speaking up is not encouraging: the share of people willing to speak out against discrimination when they see it actually declined this past year, down to 15 percent — the only behavior tracked that moved in the wrong direction. That’s not a small thing. Silence is how norms stay put. Maybe my success comes from never being silent.

I don’t think men and women are the same, and I don’t want them to be. I think we should embrace the difference. But different does not mean unequal, and it definitely doesn’t mean anyone gets to decide, on your behalf, what you’re capable of or what timeline your life has to run on. Anybody should be able to do anything they want to do — on whatever schedule actually fits their life, with a partner who’s genuinely building it alongside them, not one who expects them to bend.

We might be closer than 1985. But we are nowhere near done.

The post Are We There Yet? appeared first on Gotham Gal.

I believe in the law. I always have. It’s the foundation you build a company on; it’s the foundation our country was built on — it’s supposed to be the thing that protects you when you play by the rules. I’ve learned a lot about the law by building companies, and I believe that nothing is standard as long as you have legal documents to back it up. But somewhere along the way, using the law became a luxury product.

The first time I needed legal representation, I had to sue someone over owed commissions. My lawyer said to me, “Congratulations, you are an adult now,” because when you need legal representation, it doesn’t matter if you did nothing wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to win. You still have to pay — often hundreds of thousands of dollars — just to get to the moment where you’re proven right. A disgruntled employee. A union fight. A lawsuit that’s obviously frivolous. Doesn’t matter. You need representation, because the alternative is worse. And real representation, from lawyers who actually know how to fight, costs a fortune.

We were recently in an eight-year lawsuit, one in which, from the start, we were happy to pay the amount we believed was owed to the company on the other side. When the suit finally came to a close, the amount we were required to pay was exactly what we had suggested in the first place. The biggest losers were both us and the people who sued us because nothing changed except the amount we all paid for representation.

What are the options? Pay the amount you are sued for. Go out of business. Or find a nonprofit lawyer doing the work out of the goodness of their heart because they can’t charge what it’s actually worth. That’s not a functioning system. That’s a system that filters out anyone without deep pockets — regardless of who’s right.

Gotham, our business is in cannabis, one of the most regulated, most litigated industries there is. If anyone else in this industry had spent what we’ve spent on lawyers just to stay in business while doing the right thing, they’d be gone. And we’ve done nothing wrong. That’s the part that gets me. I can’t write this without pointing at the obvious. We just watched a president spend his entire life treating the legal system as a delay tactic — burying people in motions not to win on the merits, but to outlast them financially. That’s not justice; that’s leverage. If the law can be weaponized that well by someone with unlimited resources, what chance does an honest small business have against even a modest frivolous claim?

To be clear — I’m not anti-lawyer. I get what goes into it: years of training, memorizing, and learning how to read and apply the law, which continues to evolve through rulings. That expertise has real value. But there’s a difference between paying for expertise and paying a toll just to stay in business while doing nothing wrong. Right now, small businesses are paying that toll constantly. And the only guaranteed winner, years later, is the lawyers on both sides.

How do we fix this? I don’t have the answer. I hope that AI will help, as writing a motion will more than likely be done better and more quickly by technology. Regardless, something is seriously wrong with a system where being right isn’t enough — where you either pay, fold, or get lucky enough to find someone willing to help you for less than they’re worth. If we actually want small businesses and people without deep pockets to do the right thing and survive doing so, this has to be part of the conversation.

The post The Cost Of Law appeared first on Gotham Gal.

Something happened in this city when the Knicks entered the championship and won. Every block comes alive. A myriad of faces — every kind of person you can imagine — spilling out, acknowledging each other, strangers becoming neighbors for a moment. Even the homeless guys on the corner are yelling, “Knicks in five.” It’s civilized in the most beautiful, chaotic New York way.

And then I look around at everything else.

The anger being fed to us daily. What’s happening in the Middle East. The Jewish community — and I’m Jewish — watching a conflict where it feels less about peace and more about power. Like the church. Always the church. Power over people.

I just finished the Stanford book by Theo Baker, How to Rule the World, a seventeen-year-old kid who dug into the data and uncovered that the president of one of the most powerful universities in the world had faked his research. For years. The disconnection between people and money, between institutions and truth, between those at the top and the rest of us — it’s everywhere.

Which is why we’re watching progressive candidates like Ocasio-Cortez win. People are done. They want something different.

I call myself a progressive capitalist. I believe in making money and I believe in change. I want money out of politics. I want institutions that serve people, not the other way around.

Years ago, I got into a cab in Israel. The driver found out I was from New York. He wanted to know if I was from the Bronx; he saw a Clint Eastwood film. He asked if I was Jewish. Yes. He asked where I sent my kids to school. I told him downtown, a school with all kinds of kids, not just Jewish kids. He seemed almost incredulous. And I said: I live in a city of eight and a half million people. We all get along. You could learn something from that. He roared, laughing.

I think about that cab driver every time I watch this city come alive. The whole world is watching New York right now. And what they’re seeing — this mosaic of people united around something joyful and shared — is so different from what’s coming out of Washington.

We need the world to see us as we actually are. Not them. Us.

The post New York, New York appeared first on Gotham Gal.

The DEA hearing on cannabis rescheduling starts this week. Seven voices will be heard. All seven oppose rescheduling. Not one supporter of reform was invited. The government itself has to argue its own case in an empty room.

How did we get here?

We got here because the beginning was a lie.

Nixon’s War on Drugs was never about drugs. His own aide John Ehrlichman said it plainly years later — they couldn’t make it illegal to be Black or anti-war, so they associated those communities with heroin and marijuana and criminalized both. Aggressively. The science didn’t matter. The public health didn’t matter. It was about power and control. It was always about power and control.

Every institution built from that moment forward carries that lie in its foundation. Cultures are hard to break. The DEA. The Controlled Substances Act. The scheduling system that put cannabis in Schedule I alongside heroin — more dangerous, they said, than cocaine. A lie, compounding a lie, building an entire apparatus of enforcement and incarceration on top of it.

Decades of lives destroyed. Communities gutted. And now we’re supposed to trust that same apparatus to get it right? What was I thinking? Obviously, I wanted to believe. I definitely did not realize the challenge ahead.

New York tried to do something different. We built a licensing system designed specifically for the people and communities most harmed by the drug war. Restorative justice, on paper. A chance to rewrite at least part of the ending. Unfortunately, that has yet to work out, and it is very questionable if it will. The mistakes are countless.

But the federal framework underneath it all hasn’t changed. The DEA is still the DEA. And this hearing — stacked entirely with prohibitionists, with not a single reform advocate in the room — is proof that the beginning keeps poisoning the end.

I’m a progressive capitalist. I believe in markets and I believe in change. I’ve watched this industry get built from the ground up, slowly, painfully, against enormous resistance. And I believe cannabis rescheduling is right — morally, scientifically, economically.

But I also know that you cannot build something clean on a foundation of lies. The end depends on the beginning. And until we reckon honestly with where this all started — with Nixon, with racism, with deliberate political manipulation dressed up as public health policy — we are going to keep arriving at crooked endings.

Call me crazy, but this case might be one of them.

The post The End Depends on the Beginning appeared first on Gotham Gal.