Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist Who Could Be NYC's New Mayor

Zohran Mamdani (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, we might get a socialist mayor here in New York City.

Tracy Alloway (0:27)

Can I tell you something?

Joe Weisenthal (0:28)

Please.

Tracy Alloway (0:29)

It's slightly weird. Last night, the night before we're recording this episode, I had a dream that I was in a shared Uber with Adrienne Adams, and she was the driver. Really? So she's another mayoral candidate. She was driving, and I told her we were going to interview this particular candidate.

Joe Weisenthal (0:48)

This is amazing.

Tracy Alloway (0:48)

I was asking her for good questions.

Joe Weisenthal (0:51)

This is an amazing dream. You're not making this up.

Tracy Alloway (0:53)

No. My dreams are very literal. And everyone in the Uber was giving me ideas for questions and had opinions and stuff like that, but now I can't remember any of them.

Joe Weisenthal (1:03)

That's really disappointing. Anyway, we don't really cover a lot of New York City politics. We don't cover a lot of politics in general. We hardly ever talk about New York City politics. Who really cares about New York and the broad audience? We don't like to be too navel gazing, but this is a city with a lot of people who needless to say work in finance. Potentially, if there were major changes to tax rates here, etc., then that could have an impact on the industry that we cover a lot. There are a lot of economic stories that are sort of New York-centric, particularly relating to housing that are very universal, etc. So it's not a crime to ever once in a while do a New York City focused episode.

Tracy Alloway (1:45)

No, and this also relates directly to a previous Odd Lots episode we did, all about how New York gets its groceries.

Joe Weisenthal (1:52)

That's right. That's the connection. Let's jump right into it. I'm very excited to say we have a state assemblyman and candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor Zohran Mamdani coming on the show. Zohran, thank you so much for coming on.

Zohran Mamdani (2:06)

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Joe Weisenthal (2:08)

I mentioned you're a socialist. What specific strand of socialism are you and are the other socialists revisionists and deviationists of various flavors? We need to know the exact category here.

Zohran Mamdani (2:21)

I will leave that to the Internet. I will tell you that I am a Democratic Socialist, yes, and I started to call myself that after Bernie Sanders' 2016 run for president, when I finally had a language described the way that I saw the world and the way that I believe the world should be, which is one where every person has the dignity they need to live a decent life.

Joe Weisenthal (2:42)

By the way, now that I am a journalist at a mainstream news organization, I do not personally have political opinions, but I can say that I wasn't always the case, and I went to high school in Vermont, and I was a volunteer on Bernie's 1996 house campaign, and there's a picture of me with Bernie. So I was a very early...

Zohran Mamdani (3:01)

You too.

Joe Weisenthal (3:01)

I was a Bernard brother before it became cool.

Zohran Mamdani (3:05)

Yes, you got in early.

Joe Weisenthal (3:06)

Yeah.

Tracy Alloway (3:07)

All right. So how would you describe your platform? Is it the New York version of Sanders?

Zohran Mamdani (3:13)

It's heavily inspired by that same focus on income inequality and a recognition of the fact that one in four New Yorkers are currently living in poverty in what has now been described as the most expensive city in the country, and it is a platform at its core to make this city affordable and to use every tool at city government's disposal to do so, because for too long we've had politicians pretend that we were just bystanders to a suffocating cost of living crisis when in fact we have two choices, whether to exacerbate it or put an end to it. And we've seen Eric Adams do the former, we're running to do the latter.

Joe Weisenthal (3:45)

What did Eric Adams do when you said he did the former? What did he do in your view to exacerbate it?

Zohran Mamdani (3:50)

The first issue that you hear from most New Yorkers when it comes to cost of living is housing and the mayor sets the rent increases for more than two million New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized housing, and he came in as a self-described real estate. That's how he described himself coming into the office, and he's raised rents accordingly. He's raised them more than 9 percent. And this year, when the Rent Guidelines Board, which is entirely composed of his appointees, found that the landlords of those million or so units that have close to two and a half million tenants had seen a increase in their revenues by 12 percent, he wanted to raise the rent once again to close to eight percent.