I cannot believe what happened this past week and a half. I wanna dive a little more deeply into the article that I initially wrote, which was, New York City is dead forever, here's why. I didn't expect that Seinfeld would respond, Mark Cuban would respond, Mayor de Blasio would address it as someone born in New York. I've lived the past 26 years in New York. I was raised all around the New York City area. I wanna explore why I wrote the article, why I wrote the things I did, why it might have gone viral or struck such a chord with so many people from so many different backgrounds and places and then maybe focus on solutions. Why the title? Right before 911 happened, I had my apartment up for sale because I was going broke and I was scared to death. And if someone had written an article right then, right after 911, Hey buddy, New York City is is dead forever.

Here's why. I probably would have been really upset. I understand why people are upset when they saw the problems and they didn't see me address solutions. I do think that some dangerous things happened in the the reaction to the article and some of this was my fault. I think I could have had a little bit more empathy towards people going through a very difficult time. I didn't mean for this post to be, a poster child for, hey, New York City's dead. Let's dance on the grave. I want New York City to get better.

New York City right now has an 18% unemployment rate. For some people people, forever might just be 2 months. How are they gonna survive the next 2 months? You know, 1 in 4 New Yorkers have not paid their rent since March and they're gonna owe that rent or they're gonna get evicted. The other reactions I didn't expect was people like, you know, Jerry Seinfeld wrote an op ed. I kind of hit did wrote my article from a very logical like here are the facts sort of point and here's my story and I get it like Jerry Seinfeld and a lot of other people looked at it from a very emotional point of view, which I totally understand. And a lot of people mentioned and I believe I've seen it, I've been there, the the grit of growing up around New York City, living in New York City during 9/11, living there during 2,008, I can handle uncertainty. We all can. I did notice though that over 400,000 people left New York basically in March.

Restaurants closed, small businesses closed, people can't pay their rent. What are people going to do? How are these 1 in 4 people who haven't paid rent since March? How are they going to pay? Are the 400,000 people who left, are they going to come back? And Jerry Seinfeld brought up this problem. He said that everybody hates remote. The problem is I wish that were true but it's not true. The IBM did a study, they interviewed about 20,000 people and a little more than half actually loved being remote and not having to go into the office. The other thing that people have researched is our company is more productive or not. And the answer is yes. In general, most companies in most industries are more productive when people are working remote.

And not only that, they save on costs. So what happens if people don't come back to work? Well, they move to other places. And we don't know how many are coming back. Hopefully, a lot of them will come back, but some of them won't. Between 90 to 95% of the restaurants in New York City are gonna go out of business if they have to survive November December without any customers. That's disturbing to me. That that is a problem that needs to be addressed by words other than grit. It needs to be addressed directly to mayor de Blasio when he says he's gonna have to lay off 22,000 EMTs, teachers, police, garbage collectors, MTA workers.