YouSaid · the spoken record

Drew Warshaw

lines on the record: 56
first: 2026-02-11
most recent: 2026-02-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That we actually start getting that money back. And you have to go to some dopey website right now that is complicated and hard to use. And if you have money, they don't even tell you how much because they don't even really want you to get it back, right? It sounds like you're trying to, you know, issue a health insurance claim or something like that. We are going to get rid of this website. We are going to decommission it. We won't have a website because we won't need it because we're automatically going to send New Yorkers their money back because it's their money. It is not Tom Denapolis. It is not the state of New York's. It is New Yorkers. We have your name. We have how much you're owed. We have your last own address. We have access to all the data in the world. And we are in 2026. My phone knows more about my personality than I do. My phone knows where I live. Why can't we figure out how to get your money back automatically? We can and we will.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neutral, the cost of construction. And on the financing side, I think we could bend the cost curve of the cost structure, the capital structure. And the cost of capital for affordable housing by making available, and I propose the largest housing fund in the United States of America, a $10 billion housing fund to invest in homes that New Yorkers can afford. Definition of success that is deployed in what we estimate to be 100,000 homes that New Yorkers can actually afford. That is something that is absolutely concrete. And then this $20 billion fund of New Yorkers own money.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. So a few very concrete examples. One, hopefully property taxpayers and state income taxpayers aren't bleeding because they're paying a bunch of fees to a bunch of bankers who just are not doing their job. So one, we have pivoted the investment strategy away from that sort of beat the market idea that has failed utterly over the last 18 years. And we are moving away from that and we are taking pressure off of taxpayers that is part of the cost crisis that we are facing in New York and why New Yorkers cannot afford to live here. So that's one thing. The cost of housing. I think the state controller has an ability both on the capital side and on the audit side to address it. We talked about the audit side in terms of addressing this building code issue. And I hope that that can lower or at least keep”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, that is a layer of cost and a layer of friction that basically admits that the status quo makes no sense. And so we're going to have this off-ramp for people who can afford it and only those people who can afford it. And they will somehow get special treatment. And to me, that is like the exact wrong thing and the wrong direction. And we have to show that the regular throughway works, that you don't need the Lexus lane that only certain people can afford. And that's where we have to kind of pull government back in that mindset, that they should just be able to do their core job.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are the things that the state controller can do both by proposing those service level standards and making sure that they are adopted. And if they aren't adopted, that's okay. We can still measure them anyway. And we can come back every single year and see how they're doing. So the Department of Buildings is one of those places where, again, sort of projects go to die. And I think there just is a lack of discipline and focus around metrics to just make sure that they are doing their legally required job. You should not have to hire an expeditor to have an expedited project. That seems to be the same. That's a layer of cost.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the short answer is no, we are not getting the best bang for the taxpayer buck in these projects. And there are any number of reasons why I talked about the building code as one of those reasons. Another reason, and I think listeners will appreciate this, is you look at the Department of Buildings and where are their service level standards, right? Where are their turn times? Where are the things that they need to be doing to ensure that the people out in the world who are investing the capital and putting that capital to use and all the workers who are trying to build these projects and build these infrastructures, these pieces of infrastructure, where are those service level standards? In the world that I used to occupy, we would have service level agreements, right? Our counterparty would have to perform based on a number of different metrics. And this is, you know, goes back to that audit authority.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has ever heard of them? And if you were to ask, if you were to make up a name and you were to poll it, it is human behavior for at least one out of every three people to say, yeah, yeah, sure, I've heard of that person. And so the fact that 62% of New Yorkers and New York Democrats have never heard of this guy to me is an indictment of the performance of this job. And in terms of definitions of success, we need to address this cost crisis. But after four years, you better have heard of the New York State controller, right? Because that means we are actually using this power and this money for the people who don't have it.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, look, the job cannot be keeping the job. That's not what this job is. And we are in a moment where if you are sitting on money and you were sitting on power and you were not using that really, really well, you have got to step aside. When one out of every seven New York City public school students do not go home at night because they don't have one. And you were sitting on the third largest pool of public capital in the United States of America, and none of that money is invested in homes that people can afford. By the way, while earning a reasonable risk-adjusted rate of return, which is what we did for a living, then that is a massive problem. And so for my part, the fact that no one has ever heard of this office is a problem. That is not an asset of the last 18 years. That is a massive liability. That is red blinking lights that the fiscal watchdog of the state of New York, no one.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. No, it's adopted by the city of New York and then the basically rest of state, the state adopts a building code. Different municipalities can add on, but that's one of the challenges, Barry, is we always add. We never subtract. These things, right? And no one has done a top to bottom audit of the thousands of pages of code that drives up the costs to build anything. And that's the type of creativity and energy and experience-driven audits that I think we need to bring.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get to that lighter, simpler, easier, and more cost effectively to build building code. We would do the work for them. And then we would go to the mayor and we would go to the city council and they have talked a lot about affordability. And we would say, if you were serious about this, go adopt this code. And we would go to the governor and the legislature and they talk a lot about affordability as they should. And we would give them a concrete way to be able to deliver that. And that is how I think we need to be thinking of leveraging the power of this audit.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is I would audit the New York City and New York State building code. And people say, well, wait a minute. You can audit agencies. You can't audit something like the building code. But my authority extends to anything that touches a state tax dollar. And if you had energy, imagination, and urgency, you would recognize that the silent killer of not just housing, but of anything in this town or all across New York State is the building code. This thing kills projects before they start. And it is gold-plated and it is outdated. And what I would do is propose a model building code that we estimate will strip 15% of the cost of construct anything, not just housing, which obviously I care a lot about. And New Yorkers need more of, but anything. And I would literally do the audit would be a track change version from the model building code to the existing two codes that govern construction in New York. And we would show precisely what would need to be changed to”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need to fundamentally change the utility business model. I think we can. I think there are a financial incentive structure that was built for 100 years ago, not for today and for the next hundred years. And I think that that would ultimately be good for ratepayers, good for consumers, and fundamentally good for the investors and the developers of these power infrastructures in the first place. And the third thing that I would audit.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And gas utility monopolies. This is the one thing that ensures that these monopolies actually serve the public interest. And I was in the electricity business for eight years building renewable energy, power infrastructure all across the country. And I had to deal with these utility monopolies. And these utility monopolies are broken. And their regulator is not doing anything about it. And what I would do is go in and we would audit the regulator. The one thing that's standing in between the public interest and these monopolies, why aren't we laser focused on that when electricity rates are going up by double digits? I was up in Rochester, New York, and Rochester, gas and electric, one of those utility monopolies, proposed a one-year 36% increase to your electricity rates. That is an admission of failure. That is literally an admission that the company in charge does not know what it is doing and is not up to the tax.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we have never done a top to bottom audit on the way in which they regulate this massive sector of our economy whose business model these days seems to be to take our money and make it really, really hard to get it back, whether it's on the health side and the health insurance gauntlet that you have to run or in my old world, in the housing world, with property insurance premium skyrocketing with deductibles going up to the point where you basically are self-insuring anyway. So you need to start asking questions like that. We are going to get to the bottom of this insurance industry and we can from this position of state controller, a second area. The New York State Public Service Commission and the Department of Public Service, another sort of mouthful of bureaucratic sounding things. Well, it turns out this bureaucratic sounding thing is the largest regulator of our electric.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial services is the largest regulator of insurance companies in the country. Insurance companies are not regulated by the federal government. They are regulated on a state-by-state basis, and the Department of Financial Services in the state of New York happens to be the largest among them. How are they doing? We have no idea.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so expensive But one of the things that I want to get to some of the other things because the state controller actually does audit the MTA. And one of the things that I would want to do is because there have been so many audits of the MTA, I would first initially just do an audit of the audits. I would want to truly understand what have been the findings, make sure that those findings make sense, and then just simply cross reference to what have they implemented and what are still outstanding and like literally just simplify it from that point. And then we can get into the weeds once you've gotten smarter on that. But for my part, before we launch into some new MTA audit, there have been so many MTA audits. Let's just understand what of the findings have actually been addressed and what remain outstanding. But I want to talk about three audits, three things that I think we should concentrate this authority on. One is I think we should audit the Department of Financial Services. What is the Department of Financial Services? It turns out the State Department of Financial Services.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So their remit, their job jar is they are allowed to audit anything that touches a state tax dollar, which if anyone understands public finance is basically everything because our taxes go up to Albany and then they get redistributed.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Middle of an affordability crisis. And what we've seen, Barry, and what this basically amounts to is our state control over the last 18 years has overseen one of the largest wealth transfers that no one knows anything about, from ordinary taxpayers fifty nine point one billion dollars to hundreds of Wall Street bankers who didn't do their job. And if they were to do their job, if they were to beat the market net of fees, great. Then it's a win-win. Then everyone wins. Then we are living in a world in which we can have our cake and we can eat it too. But I live in the real world. 19 million New Yorkers live in the real world. It hasn't happened over the last 18 years. And that's why I think we need a fundamental change.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to use radical, it is radical common sense. It is the first day of business school. You know, they gather you around and they say, come close. We're going to tell you a secret. It turns out it's really, really hard to beat the market net of fees. It's really hard to do that over a long period of time. It's especially hard to do that with a fund size as big as $300 billion that just wants to regress to the mean. And so focus on asset allocation. Think about diversification. Think about that job description. But once you do, don't worry about the last 6% or whatever it is, which a lot of people argue may not be skilled, could be luck, could be a lot of other factors. I don't need to have that debate right now. For purposes of the third largest public pension fund in the United States of America, we should not be trying to beat the market and doing something that we can't possibly do because it turns out over the last 18 years, it has crushed taxpayers in the process.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“we know can perform or we know can pay out and we know are highly liquid and fortunately in the capital markets there are plenty of asset classes that can provide that liquidity while some of our assets may be tied up and you know can either get whether it's some you know illiquidity premium or some other cash flow characteristic that is useful again for that broader job description of the fund that has to pay out now but also to your point is the ultimate long-term investor the state of New York is not going away anytime soon they are a forever open fund and we need to have that focus of and that balance of what are our liquidity needs today and over the foreseeable future but how are we investing to ensure the public employees and the public school teachers who just entered the workforce who are teaching my two sons are are going to have the”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it just needs to be balanced and it needs to align and reflect to the job description of the fund. And I was talking to a chief investment officer, a former chief investment officer of one of the largest public pension funds in the United States. And he was the one who reminded me, Drew, what is the job description of the New York State Public Pension Fund? What does it need to do? What is the benefit stream that it needs to pay out? What is the income stream that is coming in, whether it's from the investment income or public taxpayers and employers, the 3,000 municipalities that are paying into the public pension fund that are funded by those property taxes? So to me, that is first principles. And for my part, I think we absolutely can be an areas that are less liquid. We just need to have balanced liquidity. We just need to ensure that, on the other hand, we have pockets of the portfolio that”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bad reason And again, in the context of a pension fund, we could deal with volatility. I appreciate and am sensitive to the liquidity needs to ensure benefit payouts, but we can do those things outside the context of our investment choices. We could do that in the context of the mechanics of how the pension fund is funded and smoothing mechanisms and averaging and so on and so forth. We don't have to do it in the actual job of investments.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look back periods and smoothing mechanisms and things like that. But let's not have that be the reason we put our money in private asset classes. If there are idiosyncratic opportunities, if there are ways to diversify within the context of a private market, I am open to that. But what I am not open to is the idea that just because it's somehow in private equity, the laws of physics and gravity of the economy are not impacting the underlying assets simply because the ownership model looks different, right? I mean, to me, that doesn't mean that we've diversified. It just means we've changed the ownership structure. If we can, if we can diversify, I would love to have that conversation and we could get the benefits of those idiosyncrasies, then great. I truly am open to that conversation. But to me, it can't simply be because we're going to wash away the volatility.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. So I guess a couple things on that. One, I think diversification matters. So, you know, that's back to asset allocation. Absolutely, we need to be thoughtful about diversifying. We need to be thoughtful about, you know, idiosyncrasies and trying to find those non-correlated asset classes. But to me, the idea that we should put our money in a bunch of private asset classes to basically perform an exercise in volatility washing just because they may not have to mark to market their valuations the way every split second in the public markets we know exactly what an asset is worth in terms of that value discovery and price discovery to me that is not that that can't be the reason we are putting our money in private asset classes we can deal with volatility in the mechanics of the contribution rates”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think would be arrogant enough to think that they know how to choose these folks. And they have 664 of them. So I don't know how selective you could be by basically hiring everyone anyway.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the thing. So, the response that I've gotten from people who understand finance and investments, no one could possibly understand how someone could hire 664 different investment managers. Effectively, he's bought the most expensive index fund in the world with the worst tracking error. And that's basically what he has done, right? And with a lower sharp ratio than the market. So you're getting a worse risk adjusted rate of return and you were underperforming the market by 39%. So it's like on every possible level, this thing is not performing. And I'm not here to say we can debate active management versus passive management. What I am here to say is for purposes of a 291 billion dollar fund that is managed by a bunch of folks in Albany, I do not believe that fund should or needs to try to pick the pickers and to somehow be the ones who frankly”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's focus on that once we do that the picking and choosing of the underlying securities and so on and so forth. To me, I think that's a loser's game, as one person famously said it. And I think we should save taxpayers their money in the form of these fees and we'd earn a better rate of return for the pension and we'd be able to lower property taxes in the process. Right.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the state controller right now pays $664 different investment managers to actively invest the fund, and their promise is we will beat the market net of our fees. And as we've established, they have not even come close. And what I would do is I would replace those 664 investment managers with a diversified set of low-cost index funds. To your point, let's not pay all these fees for something that they have been unable to do over the last 18 years, and let's take the market return. Let's focus on asset allocation. To be very clear, that matters, you know, whether it's between 89 or 93.4% of a portfolio's return will be driven by your asset allocation. So let's spend our time and resources on getting that right and making sure that asset allocation matches the job description of the fund, right? Asset allocation can look very different depending on what that fund needs to do, the liquidity needs, and so on and so forth.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is exactly the case. You understand this perfectly. And that is the direct connection between this job and people, and that's just one of the direct connection between this job and everyday New Yorkers' lives. On Long Island last year, 10 of the 13 towns on Long Island blew through their property tax cap. The reason they blew through it is because Tom Denapy did not do his job. It's because he underperformed the market and we are sending billions of dollars of property taxes, $1.1 billion last year alone, or $20 million every single week, every single payday alone in fees to a bunch of bankers who fundamentally did not do their job. And if you and I didn't do our job for 18th straight years, what would happen to us? We'd be fired.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funded because 11 million New York taxpayers over the last 18 years paid $59.1 billion in extra property taxes and extra state income taxes to make certain it was fully funded. It was the taxpayers that insured that, not the stewardship and the investment fund because it is New York State law for the public pension fund to be fully funded. Mickey Mouse could be the state controller and the question is how is it funded? Is it through the investment income and the returns if you're doing your job? Or is it through taxpayers subsidizing the underperformance? And that's what we found, Barry. We found that $59.1 billion of additional taxes, what we call the Dinapoli tax, has had to subsidize that 39% underperformance over the last 18 years.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The underperformance would have had to be made up by taxpayers. Now, the state controller walks around and he goes, you know, I've done a really good job. Why? Because the public pension fund of New York is one of the best funded in the nation. And he's right. It is. But he doesn't tell you why.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I call On the fact that our New York State controller for the last 18 years has given $11.3 billion in fees to hundreds of Wall Street bankers who fundamentally didn't do their job, who did not beat the market net of their fees, they did not even come close. In fact, they underperformed his own market benchmarks by 39% and got 11.3 billion dollars in fees. And we got this all off of the controllers Android. Is that how you get?”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So if you go to true friend Y on Instagram or X or whatever social channel you will see what Barry is talking about but every single Friday which is payday which is when New Yorkers get paid. I go down to the Wall Street bull and I call I don't know what we can say on this podcast. You can say whatever?”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Diluting his staff over thousands and thousands of audits. And if you audited 2,000 things every single year, it is very difficult to get to the root cause of any one of them. And so I think just even the level of focus, and we could talk about some of the ideas and some of the areas that I would audit just need to be fundamentally more focused. And when you run large organizations or large businesses or even large government agencies, resources are finite at the end of the day. And you need to understand that and you need to concentrate those finite resources on the things that matter most.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that could be the definition of success in a position of this consequence. And unfortunately, that is what we have heard. So look, I think he is not corrupt. I don't know if any sex scandal, but we have to be doing more. And you asked some of the things that he could be doing more of. I think the way he has managed the $300 billion public pension fund has amounted to malpractice. I think it has cost New Yorkers. And, you know, we'll talk about this nearly $60 billion of extra taxes that have come out of our pocket and literally just been vaporized. So I think whether it's the public pension fund, the fact that he hasn't been able to get $20 billion of New Yorkers back into their pockets in the middle of an affordability crisis, or the way he focuses the audit authority, not going after the things that matter most to New Yorkers. And instead spreading his staff and”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Well, look, I think, and this is not nothing. And he leads with this. Now, my problem is this is a problem if this is your reason for running. And what he says is he has never been indicted and he's never been in a sex scandal.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turns out it is. It should be zero because it's New Yorker's money and it is the State Controller's job to give it back to New Yorkers, but it is $20 billion. There's $20 billion in the New York State Unclaim Fund when the controller was appointed 18 years ago. That number was only $7 billion. And by the way, that's still too high. And so that is a rare thing to be able to quantify the performance of an elected official, sort of how do you do that, especially with like a senator or an assemblyman? Is it how many bills that they sponsor? But what if the bills are bad bills? Or what if they're in the minority and they don't get passed? This is something in the job remit, in the description, that a fund that is supposed to go down has nearly tripled in size and it's New Yorkers money in the middle of an affordability crisis. This guy is sitting on $20 billion of our money.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think what is extraordinary and unfortunate is we have a position in government that is sitting on all this power and all this money. And it is not being used for people without it. And what do I mean? New Yorkers cannot afford to live in New York right now. We have a massive affordability problem, not just housing, anything, electricity bills, insurance, and so on and so forth. And there is a person up in Albany whose job it is to address things like that. Although unfortunately I don't think he understands that or knows that. And so I want to take this position and I want to use the massive levers of power and massive levers of money and help address the raging cost crisis.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unknown board that sort of operates wherever they operate and are politically appointed. So I think moving to a board structure to me on its face makes perfect sense. There is way too much concentrated power in one human. But if it becomes a politicized board, I think we have a problem. So I think we have to move in that direction, but we have to do that thoughtfully and carefully.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so, just to be clear, only one other controller nationally has that level of sole trusteeship, that authority. That's Connecticut, which is a much smaller fund. And I think corporate governance is so critical here. I think a board structure makes so much sense, but we have to get that board structure right. And one of the challenges, and this is, you know, I've looked at sort of best practices across the country, one of the challenges of these public pension funds is their boards are political appointees. And so you get into a situation where, you know, the governor gets an appointment and the state senate majority leader and the assembly and so on and so forth. And so now you have this board that you hope is accountable, but in many ways you've actually defused accountability away from a person who's publicly elected. At least they have a job interview every four years and have to come up to a sort of anonymous.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's currently there's the teachers, there's the firefighters and cops, there's the public employees, and so on and so forth. The state controller reports to himself. He is the board. He is literally the chief investment officer. He is the fiduciary. He runs this money.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He does not report to a board of trustees, the New York City comptroller, reports to five different fiduciary boards, right? Who are those funds?”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so let's be clear. Every New Yorker is impacted by this pension fund. So one, to your point, there are nearly 1.25 million beneficiaries. These are public school teachers. These are firefighters. These are cops. These are frontline government workers. So they are directly impacted. But who funds the public pension fund? Taxpayers. They do kick in a portion, but taxpayers pay the overwhelming amount of the contributions into the pension fund. So your property taxes and your state income taxes, they are taxed and all 11 million New York tax filers pay into our public pension funds. So everyone is impacted. And what's so extraordinary is this is not only the third largest public pension fund in the United States, but it's run by one person. He is the sole trustee of this fund, meaning”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, everyone's heard of the governor. Everyone's heard of the Attorney General. There's a third statewide position in New York, and it's the New York State Comptroller. And, you know, put simply, the state controller is the state's chief financial officer, chief auditor, and chief investment officer of the third largest fund in the United States of America, all rolled up into one job. One person has all three of those responsibilities. So it's an extraordinarily powerful position. Unfortunately, too few New Yorkers have ever heard of it. And the ones who have can barely pronounce the title. So we need to do a lot more to educate the public on the awesome responsibility and authority of this one office. And part of the challenge has been it's been occupied by the same person in the same seat for 18 years who has stayed well below the radar and unfortunately I think is sort of treating the position like”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big problem. And unfortunately, what we've seen is if you actually study this and you look at what happens when you introduce new supply of homes, what you don't see is home values plunging. You don't see wild traffic jams or the schools getting filled up. You see a balance because these things can't come online all at once anyway. They are phased in over time. And a place will naturally adjust to the inflow of new homes and new people. And I think much too much is made from a very small but very loud group of people who, to your point, say not in my backyard.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you have this incredible dynamic in this country where the incumbents of home ownership are actually economically incented in theory to not allow greater supply. Because just if we're in a supply-demand world, if the supply goes up and demand stays constant, the value of their underlying property either will sort of rest in a neutral position or potentially go down. And so there is just this literal economic self-interest to not want to allow more homes into your neighborhood. And then there's cultural things and there's all sorts of other cross currents. It is a”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is also an issue. But what gets talked about much less is even if a piece of land is perfectly zoned, it is still hard to get the math work because the minute you hit dirt, particularly in New York, with the complexities of the building code and the gold-plated nature and the outdated and so on and so forth, it is a fortune to build. So whether it's the cost of construction or the cost of capital and the cost of land, you have so many different things working against you. And those are some of the roadblocks that we need to start clearing.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we have a massive undersupply problem, a supply demand imbalance. And whether it's 2 million, whether it's 7 million, it's too many million home short. And people feel that every day, whether it's in their rent or in home prices. What we saw at enterprise community partners, which is the Affordable Housing Nonprofit that I worked for, as to your point at every single level, it is virtually impossible to build a home that people can afford. And I thought citing a solar farm was difficult and you get pushback. Try sighting an affordable property. And there's so many layers of bureaucracy, and whether it's from the financing side, the capital structures of these affordable properties, you needed to code a ring to figure them out. They're so complex. The building code that I think is the silent killer of affordable housing in this country, we talk a lot about zoning.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are homeless. And when I'm sitting there, co-CEO of the most extraordinary affordable housing nonprofit in the country, 1,100 dedicated professionals who are there to address the affordable housing crisis. And it occurs to me, Barry, that we were losing. We were getting smoked. It wasn't even close. And I look over to a government that we are trying to make faster, better, cheaper, and more efficient. And they have all this power and they have all this money. And we could use those things to address this raging affordability crisis. And that's sort of what turned me on to doing what we'll talk about, I'm sure, because I was not someone who grew up, you know, wanting to run for office. I was sort of the operator, the heads down person behind the person. But I got to the point where I realized that the cavalry is not coming.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's as bad as it gets, but I think importantly, and your last point is spot on, this is not just a New York City problem. It is not just a city problem. It is an everywhere problem. When I left the renewable energy industry, and just to give you a sense, this was late 2019. I was at my umpteenth ribbon cutting for however many solar farms that we had built. And it's an extraordinary thing to be at a solar farm, to see the sun shining on basically three pieces of equipment, clean electrons going into the grid, and you're sort of like, this is a miracle. We figured this out. We just need a battery. We need an extension cord, and we've got this. But what you don't have in that farm and a field somewhere is people. And I'm a New Yorker and I'm a state and local guy at heart. And the affordability crisis was mushrooming around me. And I just felt like I needed to.”
2026-02-11 · Masters in Business · BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source