Plain English with Derek Thompson - NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani on Abundance, Socialism, and How to Change a Mind

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Before today’s show, a personal announcement. After almost 17 years at The Atlantic, I have just officially moved my writing full time to Substack, the newsletter platform. If you like this show, if you’re a fan of my work, I think you’ll love what I’m trying to build. Sign up here. 'Abundance,' the book I cowrote with Ezra Klein, has received sharp pushback from left-wing commentators. But the response among left-wing politicians has been strikingly different. While Bernie Sanders devotees have repeatedly bashed the book, Representative Ro Khanna (D-California), an outspoken advocate of Bernie’s signature policy proposal, Medicare for All, has announced his support for abundance on several occasions. While several people have accused the book of ignoring policies to increase welfare, Wes Moore, the progressive Maryland governor whose private-sector career was devoted to reducing poverty, said in a recent speech that Democrats have to change from being the party of “no” and “slow” to the party of “yes” and “now.” Then there is Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist candidate for mayor of New York City. Mamdani and I have very different politics on a range of issues: housing, affordability, education, levels of taxation, and spending. But Mamdani has in the last few weeks embraced what he calls an agenda of abundance. He’s told podcasts like Pod Save America that he thinks leftist critics of abundance have oversimplified the book and that our approach to making government work better is exactly what the left needs. I saw some people point to Mamdani’s name-checks of 'Abundance' and say, "This is great!" while others warned, "It’s a ruse! Stay away!" I wanted to talk to the man himself. So I was very gratified that Mamdani and I found 30 minutes to sit down Saturday and talk calmly about abundance and the left, how we agree, how we disagree, why government efficiency ought to be a virtue of all leaders (especially those on the left who want government to do much more), and, finally, how to change our minds. On this point, Mamdani and I are in full agreement: To see the errors in our own thinking requires that we have the courage to talk to people we do not agree with. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Zohran Mamdani Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Folks, it's Jay Kyle Mann from The Ringer, and as always, basketball is so freaking, freaking good. It's so good, in fact, that the Ringer's NBA draft show is finally back just in time for a ramp up to June. We've got you covered every week as we take an in-depth look at who's got next for the NBA's future. We'll talk the rising and falling stocks of the best and the brightest prospects in the 2025 NBA draft class. From Cooper Flag to Dylan Harper, the VJ Edgecom, and more. Tap in with me on the Ringer NBA draft show every Wednesday and make sure that you follow, subscribe, and hit us with those five-star ratings. a super-exit to Shopify. Empeza to period of

per year for a euro at a month in Shopify.es bar records. Before today's show, a personal announcement. After almost 17 years at the Atlantic magazine, I have just officially moved my writing full-time

to Substack, the newsletter platform. If you like this show, if you're a fan of plain English and my work across abundance, the anti-social century, happiness, loneliness, science, technology, I think you'll love what I'm building here. And on a personal note, it would

mean a lot to have you sign up. So check out derikthompson.substack.com or just search Derek Thompson substack on Google or wherever. Enter your email, and you are done. That's derikthompson. Dot substack.com. Today, abundance, the American left, and Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist candidate for or mayor of New York City. In the last few months, I've been surprised by the reaction to abundance, the book I co-wrote with Ezra Klein, on the political left. The online discourse has been quite negative.

On Twitter, Blue Sky, on Reddit, on YouTube podcast, on articles, and left wing and left populist sites and magazines, it has been a surprising wave, a large wave of negative feedback. In fact, the volume of conversation around this book has reached such a level that New York Magazine's backpage, a grid of the cultural zeitgeist called The Approval Matrix, recently plotted what they called, quote, the overabundance of abundance discourse in their highbrow despicable quadrant. But if you pull your mind away from social media and YouTube and this online discourse, if you listen to and watch what politicians and people running for political office

have been saying about this book and our project, I think what you'll see is that the response has been notably different. It's not just centrist and moderate mayors, governors, senators who have called out the book as a useful model for the future of liberalism and the Democratic Party. It's often politicians who represent the same leftist causes whose posters are constantly criticizing the book. For example, Bernie Sanders devotees have a very much. repeatedly bashed abundance. But Representative Roe-Kana, an outspoken advocate of Bernie's signature policy proposal, Medicare for All, announced his support for abundance on several occasions. And while several people have accused the book of ignoring policies to reduce welfare,

Wes Moore, the progressive Maryland governor, whose private sector career was devoted to reducing poverty, said in a recent speech that Democrats have to change from being the party of no and slow to being the party of yes and now. A direct call out to a theme of abundance that liberals given power often pass laws that are larded down with complicated procedure. And then there's Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist candidate from mayor of New York City.

Mamdani and I have very different politics on a range of issues, on housing, affordability, education, levels of taxation and spending. And yet, Mamdani has, in the last few weeks, embraced what he is called explicitly, an agenda of abundance. He's told podcasts like Pod Save America that he thinks leftist critics of abundance

have oversimplified the book and that our approach to making government work better is exactly what the left needs in this moment. Now, I saw some people point to Mamdani's name checks of the book and say, this is great. This is what persuasion looks like. But I also saw some people point to his comments and say, it's a ruse. Beware. Stay away. He's co-opting abundance to redirect it toward goals that have nothing to do with this book. I wanted to talk to the man himself. So I was very gratified when in a very busy

week for me as I've just switched jobs and now moving cities back to Washington, D.C. And in a very, very, very busy week for him, since he's running to become mayor of America's biggest and richest city, Mamdani and I nonetheless found 30 minutes to sit down and talk calmly last Saturday about abundance and the left, how we agree, where we disagree, why government deficiency ought to be a virtue of all leaders, but especially those on the left who want government to do much more. And finally, how to change our mind. This is the last subject of this. the interview, and it's the one that I honestly came away thinking about the most. The trick that ideology plays on the mind is that it convinces flawed thinkers of their

infallibility, but there's no ideology, not left or rights or centrist, that is guaranteed to have the perfect answer to every problem for all time. It is a delusion to believe that such a thing could even exist. The world is dynamic. Its problems are strange, and seeing reality clearly, continuing to see reality clearly, requires that we have the courage to talk to people we do not agree with, who see the world differently than we do, with the hope that we can learn from them. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Zoranamandani, great to talk to you. No, it's so lovely to be on. Thank you so much for having me. You recently delivered a speech in which you said this, quote, government must deliver an agenda of

abundance that puts the interests of the 99% over the 1%. End quote. Unsurprisingly, my ears pricked up at the language here. What does an agenda of abundance mean to Zoran Mamdani? As someone who is very passionate about public goods, about public service, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence. And one of the most compelling things that I think abundance has brought into the larger conversation is how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the

very ideas that we are so passionate about, and a recognition of the fact that any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector. And so to truly make the case time and time again that local government has a role in providing that, which is necessary to live a dignified life, you have to ensure that every example of government's attempt to do so is one that is actually successful. And I think that's what speaks to me about abundance. And I think that's the line in the speech that speaks of both who we're fighting for, but also the fact that we're delivering on that fight. And it's one that is actually experienced each and every day by New Yorkers across the five boroughs.

I think it's really important that if we're going to ask voters to give us the power to add new government functions, we have to prove that government can function in the first place. Exactly. And reporting out this book with Ezra was really interesting. And I'll be honest, it's sometimes almost blackpilling. Like it did not make me a libertarian. I'm still a proud liberal. I believe in an aggressive, muscular government. But it was astonishing sometimes to see that these examples of government failure, were not exceptions to a rule, but in some cases, something tragically close to the rule itself. And I wonder if you've had a similar experience of coming into government, coming closer to government functions,

and recognizing that some things just don't work the way they should. Can you put some meat on those bones of what you've seen that's made you so passionate about not just announcing new public functions, but proving public excellence? You know, I very much agree. And I think what's been frustrating is that even the very language of this conversation, language around bureaucracy, efficiency, waste, even quality of life, we've allowed this language

to be seen as if it is of a right-wing concern, when in fact, this should be the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics. And, you know, one of my focuses in my time in the New York State Assembly has been on the MTA, in part because that is the form of government that most New Yorkers interact with most frequently on a daily basis. And when that train is late, when that bus is shown on your app to arrive in 10 minutes but never actually comes, when you are stuck in a tunnel, it diminishes your faith in local government at large. And I think this cannot be separated from the larger problem of

politics in our city and in our state, which is that it has become more about incumbency protection than it has been about innovation and competence. And to be in a mayor's race where my chief opponent is Andrew Cuomo, someone for whom his supposed strength is that of managerial competence, it is in stark contrast to his actual record in running so many parts of our state government that continued to be just as ineffective as they were when he became governor, if not more. And the MTA is a chief example of that were for years, he refused to even acknowledge that it was a state entity under his responsibility. And then it went to the point that he was so eager to chase the headlines of saving money on what was being spent on the MTA, that he implemented

a restructuring program within the authority that allowed for the elimination of position as soon as someone would retire without any actual comprehensive plan for ensuring that we were retaining the capacity within that authority to deliver on so much of what it was mandated to do, which then leaves us in a situation like the Second Avenue subway, where in the first phase we're spending more on consultants than we are in construction, because we've lost so much of that internal capacity, because we didn't replace the people who retired or were fired or for whatever reason, because we were working backwards from simply a headline of saying,

amount of positions have been eliminated, why amount of money has been saved? I want to get to housing, but let's hold on the subway for a second. I'm really curious to know what you would do to bring down costs for the most expensive subway construction project in the world, New York City subways. It sounds very good, I think, to say that in the early stages of the Second Avenue subway construction, we were paying a lot of money to consultants and outsiders. But I'm also convinced that public sector unions in New York have rules that raise costs far above what they are in other countries. Even countries, by the way, who are highly unionized.

I am certainly not against public sector unions in some big picture, but when I look to why New York City builds the most expensive subways in the world, one answer for me is that public sector unions have contracts and contract demands that are raising the cost of pro-mile construction in New York City, is talking to public sector unions about building transit cheaper, something that you plan to do as mayor? I think I will have to work with public sector unions. I think I come to a different conclusion than you. On the basis of however of the same point that you're making, which is that if, for example,

we name one of those counterparts, which is Paris, where they have arguably even stronger unions, and yet the cost per mile is so much less, to me it can't. The conclusion then can't be that it is the presence of those unions' work rules or labor rules in general. To me, the thing that has really stood out about how we drive down costs is the importance of something known as utility relocation. It's not the only answer to this, but I think it is one part of it. And I share it as an example. It's a piece of legislation that I introduced in the State Assembly that would – require public service corporations like Con Edison, National Grid, Verizon, other telecommunications

companies to perform the work that's required to support the MTA's infrastructure improvements on a reasonable schedule and in accordance with the actual needs. And what I mean by this is so often what happens is when the MTA does any kind of significant construction, these other entities, public service corporations, typically look at that as an opportunity to get gold standard work done for whatever it is that they require. And even the city sometimes does this. And what this all leads to is a ballooning of the actual cost of that infrastructure because it's being used as this one moment where the city gets a park and Verizon gets better underground cable networking. And it just continues on and on and on. and then the actual price tag is associated solely with the cost of what was supposed to just be

the MTA's infrastructure, as opposed to the truth of it where everyone is using this as this moment where they can finally spend as much money as possible to no cost to themselves. A top issue of your campaign, which I especially appreciate having lived in New York for seven years, is housing costs. And the top policy on your website is freezing the rent. You describe it this way on your campaign website. Quote, a majority of New Yorkers are tenants, and more than two million of them live in rent-stabilized departments. As mayor, I will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent, end quote.

There is a tension in those two sentences that jumps out at me. You want the city to cap prices for a good whose supply you're trying to increase. And I think that's a very hard thing to do. If, for example, you wanted more great grocery stores, but you declared that no grocery store could charge more than $50 per receipt, the stores would just stop stocking the shelves the same way they used to.

The stores would just get worse for everyone. How do you plan to both freeze rents and build the high-quality housing that New Yorkers need? I see it from the perspective of landlords of those rent-stabilized units have seen an increase in 12% in their profits in the last year. These are profits with regards to tenants whose median household income is $60,000 a year. Now, what we have seen with the mayor, the current one, is that he's increased the rent by 9% and he's proposed increases on top of that by about 8%. the difficulty here is that you have an economic policy that the mayor effectively controls that determined whether or not New Yorkers, in large part, can continue to afford to live in this city.

And the rent, while it's often spoken about as if it is the only means by which these landlords are able to receive a profit, we know that there are actually other aspects of that. Some might call them loopholes, one of them being the individual apartment improvement. I bring this up because IAIs, as they're known, an abbreviated form, something that I was in opposition to, but still passed in the state legislature, were doubled whereby landlords could receive money from tenants for individual apartment improvements that were being made. And the reason I was in opposition to this was because this is a program that has been found to be, to have a number of instances of fraud. I say all this to say that you can freeze the rent. And what that ensures is that these tenants will not actually be priced out. when we know that there is this crisis of an exodus of working in middle class New Yorkers.

And there still continue to be so many other aspects in ways in which landlords can continue to extract profit from these very tenants. But beyond that, to your larger question of how do we both freeze the rent and ensure that we're building more, what I've heard from a lot of developers is one of the ways in which we are driving up costs in New York City is not even the dollar cost. but actually the time cost, which is then obviously translating into dollars. And that time and the delay of that time is in part because of the processes by which we approach land use. And this is also where abundance speaks to me in thinking about this both with regards to small businesses.

And if you look at an example in Pennsylvania where they took a, what was it, an eight-week permitting time and cut it down to just a few days. But also in terms of housing where we currently have a piecemeal approach where each city council member gets to determine whether or not land use project moves forward by virtue of something known as member deference. And what we need in order to actually build enough supply for the city that we have and to get past this staggeringly low vacancy rate is a comprehensive citywide approach, one that can fast track projects, especially those that are in line with the administration's goals. And I say that because there are a number of projects which you won't actually find that much disagreement on, for example, low-income housing for seniors that are still not been built many, many years later.

And ultimately, that's a failure of just how slow this process goes. But the other point is that when we're talking about a rent freeze, you still are seeing that, you know, this is on the backs of the findings that these landlords have a 12% profit in the last year. So that's where I believe that there is room for that relief and that there's still an incentive to construct more housing because we're talking about both an incredible, amount of demand and a limitation on profit as opposed to the elimination of profit. And that is all specific to rent-stabilized housing where, in fact, there's a lot of construction that is not rent-stabilized

in this moment. You mentioned that you're looking at Pennsylvania, what Governor Shapiro is doing there. And I like the fact that you're looking around the country and thinking about borrowing certain ideas from other governors and mayors. And I wonder if you looked across the Hudson River to see what they're doing in Jersey City, where Mayor Stephen Fullup has really succeeded in building a ton of housing. Last decade, rents in Jersey City were absolutely skyrocketing, but the city changed its permitting laws. It welcomed new development. Supply boomed. And literally just days ago, the mayor announced that rents are actually declining in Jersey City. I mean, for, you know, for renters themselves, for tenants, that's even better than frozen, right? Actually,

rents that are declining. And it's because of this boom in supply. Is this a story that you're following? Do you think there's a lesson to take from Jersey City? It is absolutely a story of interest to me, and I think I've thought of it often just even in the statistical analysis of the fact that in New York City we're building around four homes per thousand people while in Jersey City it's about seven and in Tokyo it's about 10. And this is, you know, I clearly have ideas and politics, but ultimately beyond all of those things, I care most about outcomes. And what I'm very passionate about is making this a more affordable city, also making it a more efficient city. And I think for too long in our politics, especially in the vein of what we were talking about earlier, this incumbency protection, we have allowed for this reverse exceptionalism to flourish in New York City, where we see examples of things that have been successful elsewhere in the country or elsewhere in the world,

and we simply tell ourselves it could never happen here in New York because we're different. And in fact, we should be proud of the fact that those things are not present here. And I think we've seen this for talking about bike infrastructure or outdoor dining, but also especially around housing. And I think that we have to bring that kind of politics to an end. We have to have both a pride in our city, which I do have and which so many New Yorkers have, and a humility that we can still learn from other places. And I think that there is much to learn with regards to Jersey City and also much to learn with regards to other global cities across the world in understanding what regulation. do we have that truly still stand up to the question and which of them have actually lost their justification? You know, I think when we're talking about the need to build more housing, I also think we need to build different types of housing. And I think it is a shame that we've made

it functionally illegal to build SROs in New York City, for example. I think that we have to have conversations around even the minutia of, you know, single stairwell versus dual stairwell. These are examples that have stuck with me because there are examples that show that when it's when it's not innovation and competence that is driving the creation of these regulations, then you start to have more and more that actually things that actually drive up the cost for a justification that you can't even remember by the end of it. I've seen some folks associate your campaign with Brandon Johnson, the left-wing mayor of Chicago, which, of course, is not a comparison that I think a typical person would welcome,

even if Mayor Johnson's a nice guy. He's currently polling around 10 or 12 percent. I want to ask you about one aspect of Johnson's tenure, which is the bureaucracy of building affordable housing. In Chicago's affordable housing qualified allocation plans, 10% of points are rewarded for developers who show that they have extra accessibility features in their plans. And 15% of points are awarded based on the makeup of the development team. So extra points, the developers are BIPAC or women. only 3% of scorecard points are rewarded based on project cost.

And what that basically means is that affordable housing in Chicago essentially treats accessibility and workforce diversity as nine times more important than cost savings. And it seems to me like in Chicago you get exactly what you plan for. The city recently built affordable housing, each additional affordable housing unit at a reported $1.1 million a pop according to the mayor's Twitter feed. What do you think Chicago did wrong? I think one of the most important things is that we actually set a goal for

what each unit should cost and work backwards from that, as opposed to ending up with a figure after having made all of the different criteria that we would like to fulfill. Because if we cannot construct it at cost that is scalable, then that is the greatest failure of the idea itself. Because these ideas, they're only worth as much as their implementation. And it's interesting because I know that the critique you're laying out here is specific to Chicago, but one of the critiques that I've had, for example, of the previous tax subsidy scheme in New York called 421A was that the cost per... unit for quote-unquote affordable housing was similarly above a million dollars. And I think there is

just a lack of efficacy in the manner in which we've approached this construction. And what makes our campaign distinct is that we, yes, like many other campaigns, we want the private market to play a significant role in the creation of new housing supply. And we think the public sector should play the role of constructing that which is immediately affordable, as opposed to just the construction of more supply and the hopes that it then eventually drives down the cost of housing overall to have something that is from the first day meeting the median household income of $70,000 for a family of four. But for all of this, it still comes back to that central point that what is the cost that we can actually do this at scale and how do we ensure that we hit that cost? And I think,

yes, we're talking about housing right now, but it's the same issue that speaks to the MTA. It's the same issue that speaks to public bathrooms. We need to ensure that we are working backwards from scalability and outcomes as opposed to having that simply be a byproduct of all the other decisions we make. On rent, you have this plan to mandate a price freeze. With groceries, you also have a plan to use government power to control costs. You have a plan to build a small fleet of public grocery stores. What is the problem here that you think city-run grocery stores specifically can solve? There are two problems. The first is a problem of affordability. There is a sticker shock that New Yorkers tell me about all the time, whether they're making

40K a year or 200k a year, that when they go into the supermarket and they look at the same items that were easy for them to purchase a few years ago, they now seem more and more out of reach. And the most obvious examples here are eggs and milk and bread that have been cited again and again. There is a second crisis, which is that of food deserts, where black and brown New Yorkers disproportionately deal with a situation where there simply isn't affordable produce and sometimes even produce at all within close proximity to where they live. And I represent Queensbridge houses the largest public housing development in North America. And I've heard from constituents time and again that there simply isn't high quality produce within a five block, 10 block radius,

but I can find five, six different fast food restaurants in that same space. And that's where my proposal is one, you know, this is a proposal of reasonable policy experimentation where we're talking about five stores, one store in each borough across the five boroughs in New York City. And it is something that would cost $60 million in total, which is less than half of what the city is currently set to spend on subsidizing corporate supermarkets through a program called CityFresh. The reason I bring this up is that too often we don't interrogate the ways in which city government is already intervening in this, but doing so in a manner that tries to absolve itself of responsibility and instead further invest in a model that is leaving us with the same results. This city fresh program, which is set to cost about $1.40 million, is one that doesn't require the supermarkets receiving the subsidy to accept SNAP or WIC. It doesn't require them to engage in collective bargaining. It doesn't even require them to have lower prices. It's just about. trying to assist in their continued operation. And it's funny even, you know, to hear some of the critique,

especially from John Katz and Matidis, the owner of Gristides, is to completely miss the fact that for many New Yorkers, they can't even afford going into those kinds of stores today. And I think that the scale of this pilot program is one where we could meet these tween crises at the same moment by ensuring that where we're selecting this location is meeting both of these needs, and also to showcase the ability to prove out that argument that I'm having with you, not an argument with you, but the conversation with you around how do we prove the effectiveness? Because if it is not effective at a pilot

level, it does not deserve to be scaled up. But I believe it can be effective in two ways. One, because I think that there's far more efficiency to be had in our public sector, and I think there have been glimpses of that efficiency, most especially at the height of COVID, the speed with which city government set up testing side vaccine sites and the ability to go through that vaccine site in about 15 minutes is in stark contrast to how so many experience the public sector and because food is a non-negotiable. It's not a luxury item. And I'm talking to you as a state legislator who watched our state spend hundreds of millions of dollars in cutting the state's gas tax to subsidize the cost of gas at a time when those prices were going high,

but considers it a bridge too far to do anything with regards to the price of groceries. It's interesting hearing you talk about wanting to offer more government services while also being fixated on this North Star of efficiency. Do you know about the sewer socialists of Milwaukee? Is this something you're familiar with? So, I mean, just for listeners who might not be. I assume that maybe you could, you might as well have a tattoo of sewer socialism on your back. In the early 20th century, there was a group of Milwaukee left-wing city leaders who embraced what was originally, I think, a slur, of sewer socialism.

And it was this sort of self-aware reference, the idea that they often bragged about how great their public sewer system was. And it was a form of socialism that was laser-focused on making the city work better. It wasn't focused on necessarily, like, ushering in, you know, the global defeat of capitalism. It was focused on local, tangible, concrete, measurable issues, like, is the sewer safe and working? And it's funny because more than a few people on Book Tour asked if abundance was meant to revitalize sewer socialism in the 21st century. And my answer was always, well, look, I am not a socialist, but if I were a socialist, I would definitely be a sewer socialist. Because to me, the idea of you gave us power and look at the good that we did strikes me as so. much more attractive than you gave us power. We struggled to do good. Things are still horrible.

Add government functions. Tell me a little bit about how, you know, I wanted to make sure that that listeners were on the same page as us, but how you sort of define your own democratic socialism in this light, in the spirit of the Milwaukee sewer socialists. Claiming the language of quality of life as a left-wing concern, because it is often described as if it is somehow conservative, but in fact, if we want to fight for the dignity of each and every person, and especially ensuring that that applies to the very working class New Yorkers that are often forgotten, at the core of it is also the quality of their life, that it is an excellent life that they are living. And so much of that comes back to the efficacy of the public

services that they engage with. And too often we've refused to even admit to inefficiencies or critiques or waste within the public sector, thinking that by doing so, we open the critique from the right. But in actuality, our refusal to admit it is even more ammunition for the right because it showcases that ultimately, you know, their argument would be that we don't believe in the efficacy of these things, simply in the existence of them. But for myself and I know for many, the existence is important because of the efficacy that it opens the door to. And I think which sewer socialism and the example of Milwaukee is that we want to showcase these ideals, not by lecturing people about how correct they are, but rather by delivering on them

and letting that delivery be the argument itself. And there are just far too few examples in New York City politics of any large-scale interventions of city government and anyone that have been successful. And I think that the few that come to mind right now are congestion pricing and universal pre-K. And they are examples of interventions that fundamentally transformed life in our city and should be used as a model for what more we can do. And yet both of them require a level of political courage and a willingness to have the kind of battles that so often are the very obstacles that stop us from imagining a better future than the one that we have. I mean, to have universal pre-K, you have to have a mayor who is willing to say that they're going to go

to Albany. They're going to fight to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers to fund an expansion of the social safety net to apply to universal pre-K. To have congestion pricing, you have to be willing to take on the political culture of this city that for so long has been the exact impediment we've seen at community board after community board about the way in which we can reimagine a streetscape from the one that we've had to the one that we actually need. And I think that those are some of the ideas that animate a lot of what I'm running on. And my vision for this city is how do we refuse to be content with what we have and actually deliver on the things that we deserve and use the examples of elsewhere across the country and the world as what

drives us. And for me, one of those examples is also what's happened in Paris with Hidalgo and the ability to plant more than 100,000 trees and have a significant impact on the air quality of that city in tandem with the transformation of that streetscape. This could be a model for what we do in New York City as well. Last question. And I've really enjoyed talking to you. I feel like there are a lot of things we agree about congestion pricing, trees, government efficiency, this idea that the liberals should not be afraid of pointing the finger at their own side just because they think Republicans might say, oh, look, liberals are criticizing each other, therefore there are critiques to be made.

It's really important for us to understand how to wield power effectively if we're going to ask voters to give us more of it. We disagree about some things. We disagree, I think, about rent freezes. I like that you're into policy experimentation that you seem to think about the world through a lens of tradeoffs. And finally, it seems to me that you change your mind on some things. You told the New York Times that you would change your mind a bit on the value of private

development. And also, there's this case of defund the police. In 2020, you and a couple other mayoral candidates embrace the rhetoric of defund the police. But on a debate stage this year, you said, and this is a quote, I will not defund the police. I believe the police have a critical role to play. We need to ensure that police can focus on crimes, end quote. And several interviews. You've talked about wanting to hire more social workers to do social work so that we can

have police officers doing police work, stopping crime and solving murders. This is not a gotcha question at all. I don't think you're a hypocrite. I think you change your mind. And I want to know how you change your mind. Who do you talk to? What do you read? What do you see that has shifted your position on police or housing for?

from one year to the next? No, I think there's, you have to continue to fight the instinct in politics to surround yourself with people who are quickest to get to a yes or who are quickest to replicate the very idea that you've proposed to them. And I've been lucky that in my time in the State Assembly,

there are a number of my colleagues with whom I have significant disagreements, but whom I've also developed relationships with such that I can continue to have this conversation and always approach it with some level of humility that I could have been wrong at some time. And I think that that's a part of politics that we're also missing is the idea that leadership can also be someone who recognizes what they know and what they don't know and surrounds themselves with people who challenge them and whose commitment is not of a shared ideological approach to the world, but rather a shared track record of excellence and fluency.

And the reason that I've come to different conclusions today than I've had in the past, whether we're speaking about policing or housing, is not just a function of the changing way in which I see the world, but also a result of the conversations with colleagues, with a number of friends who have always been generous with their time, in interrogating the concepts that are animating our politics at any different year. And I think that's also the way that I would approach running the city is to be wedded to outcomes,

not wedded to the means by which we get to those outcomes. And I think that allows you the ability to learn, to grow. And I think that leadership can look a lot more like that than someone who pretends they know all the answers all the times and regrets is something that is beyond them. Zoran Mamdani, thank you very, very much. Thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much, Karen.