Mayor Mamdani: It means making the choice every day to fight for working people. It means that you believe that everyone in your city deserves to live a dignified life, no matter how much money is in their pocket. And what we've found is that this city is many things all at once. It's both the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. And it's also a city where one in four people are living in poverty. And so, that you'll often hear the phrase, "Don't sweat the small stuff." To me, being a democratic socialist is also sweating the small.
Because for a lot of New Yorkers, it's those things that are the measure of how difficult or easy their life is, whether they're able not only to pay for their rent or their childcare, but whether they are able to also rely on City government to get around their city, to breathe in their city, to experience life in their city. And I think that we've forgotten that at the heart of what we want to deliver is not just the existence of a public sector, it's also the excellence and efficiency of a public sector. I want New Yorkers to be choosing this City government every single day as opposed to feeling as if they're subjected to it.

Mayor Mamdani: You know – it is – when I've talked about wanting City government to be remade in the image of a struggling New Yorker, one aspect of it is that we be as careful with our money as working New Yorkers are with theirs. And one of the many reasons for that is that this is their money. And when we're looking at – when we looked at that fiscal deficit, what was hard – one of many things that was challenging about it, is that you couldn't blame it on an external reality. You couldn't say, "Oh, it's the fiscal crisis of 2008. Everyone can see what's going on across the country and the world."
This was, in many ways, purely of City Halls doing. It was mismanagement and under budgeting, and it had been building for years. And I think that one of my goals is how do we right the ship, not just in a 12-month interval, but frankly on a medium- and long-term. Because if you're just trying to survive on a calendar year basis, you're in many ways going to have to rob Peter to pay Paul. And eventually that bill is gonna come due. And the thing that I'm looking forward to next year is that we're not gonna have to inherit a $12 billion fiscal deficit, no matter how tough it is.

Mayor Mamdani: And the CSOs, they found about $1.7 billion in savings across City government, and they're actually going to continue that work. Because when you look at the size of our budget, and you also look at what the approach has been to the finances of our city, we know that there are more savings to be had. And sometimes these are the efficiencies that come from when you're actually pressure testing how we've been doing things. There's savings to had when you actually say that you know, could that contract that you're giving to a consultant actually be done in house? And it can be a lot of times.

Stewart: Were there stuff in the budget as you went through, you're like, "$100 million on mittens, what is this?" Did you find things that you couldn't believe?

Mayor Mamdani: No, but we do comb through. And there were a number of things where you can't provide a justification for it. And if you can't provide one, then why should the city be spending that money? And a lot of times, it comes from a vision of government where you want to hollow out its capacity and privatize as much of its responsibility. And oftentimes, it's done in the name of fiscal prudence. And yet what you find is you end up overpaying for that external capacity than what it would look like if you invested internally. I mean, you know, we've talked about in the past this – you know, the previous administration had an AI chatbot that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that was not even usable.

Mayor Mamdani: And you look at that, and it's not just the amount of money, it's also the number of vendors that we went through to get to that point. It just speaks to an approach to contracting that does not actually save you money, and it doesn't build any kind of long-term fluency. What it does is just lock you into commitments that will cost you money and oftentimes won't even perform those services.

Mayor Mamdani: It is easy, when there is this much noise, to tell yourself that all of it is exactly that. Tune it all out. But that's also what – It will leave you in an echo chamber. You cannot have it that you are only surrounded by people who agree with you. You might as well just stay home at that point. And I think that the job that I have, that my team has, that our administration has, is, how do you listen to all of it and then separate out what is actually worth engaging with and what is just driven by the algorithm and written in response to what the algorithm responds to and rewards. And I think that the other part of this is, no matter how good we may feel about whatever achievement we have or how this six months has gone, you always have to push yourself because every day is an opportunity to do better for New Yorkers. And I, and I think that's something that I love about this city is, you especially see it in, in kind of sports culture, but I would say even in, in the cultural aspect of the city, there is this sense of having to be the best, of driving yourself each and every day. And yet in our politics, that often feels as if it's missing. There is somehow in a city that is the best in the world at so many things, mediocrity has come to be accepted as the standard in our politics. And I think that it's something that we shouldn't accept any longer.

Stewart: Could this still be a middle-class city?

Mayor Mamdani: That is what it has to be. And I think if we allow it to continue on the path it's been on for many years, it will become a museum of where working-class people once lived. And we don't want this to be something that people can visit to pay tribute to what it once was. We want it to be a living, breathing testament to that energy. And I think what is one of the most concerning things that I hear is when I turn to someone who is working as hard as they can for the city and I asked them how long their commute home is, and they tell me it's hours because they're going to another state or another city. That's a reflection of a failure to ensure that those who build the city can live in the city, and the reason I think that affordability will be our greatest challenge and also our greatest opportunity is this is what is pushing people out of this city. You cannot disentangle the cost of housing, of childcare, of groceries from the exodus of working-class people from out of the city. Some of these things are New York City specific. Some of them are true across the entire country. And we have to finally change direction so that people can actually afford to live here.

Mayor Mamdani: I'm comfortable with disagreement. And I'm uncomfortable with disagreement that doesn't end the conversation entirely. Because I think what motivates a lot of people is, "How do you deliver public safety?" And the thing that I've said time and again is, we cannot have New Yorkers choose between safety and justice. And yes, I am doing the work with our police department, and we have been able to deliver the lowest number of murders and shootings in recorded history. And at the same time, I'm doing the work to close down Rikers Island and ensure that we are actually building the four smaller borough-based jails that brings an end to a horrible chapter in New York City history. And I think to your point, when we're thinking about safety, there cannot be a hierarchy of safety where you experience it more or less depending on where you live in our city or how much money's in your pocket. And there also can't be a definition of safety that is purely after the fact, meaning that how you respond to violence. We also have to do the work of investing so that we prevent violence and to that

Stewart: To that point, the Department of Community Safety, which was one of those things that you had ran on, which I think was sort of reprioritizing some of those assets so that not necessarily it was always police were the first responders to everything, there was also – how has that come? I know it, the money for it didn't exist, you had to do an executive order, I believe. What's the status of that? How has that grown?

Mayor Mamdani: So, we've created that Office of Community Safety. We have for the first time in New York City now, a deputy mayor for community safety, Renita Francois, who's doing great work in putting together what is right now a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar budge, in a lot of the very kinds of things that you're talking about. And I think one of the clearest examples to me is we have asked police officers to do almost everything we can think of when it comes to dealing with the failures of not just the social safety net but also violent crime and also and also, and also across the five boroughs. And what we found time and again is that these same officers who signed up to join the Department, to respond to violent crime, to prevent violent crime, are also being tasked with responding to a mental health call. And this is the kind of work that undermines both our ability to deliver on public safety as a whole and it shows that we need to develop a new model here.

And so, one of the focuses coming out of the Office of Community Safety is, how do we provide the investment and the support so that when a New Yorker calls for help with a mental health crisis, that they can also receive that help from mental health professionals as well? And that's something that continues alongside the incredible work that the office is doing with gun violence prevention, which is work that we always need to do more and more of, because we know it's an epidemic in this city and across this country. And a lot of that prevention work also comes with investing in gun violence interrupters, in the Crisis Management System. And I've had the privilege of meeting a number of young people who themselves have been victims of gun violence and they've told me how organizations like the ones that New York City invests in are the ones who will respond to them in the moment and make sure that retaliation isn't something they're thinking about, but rather recuperation is what they're focused on.

Stewart: We got it all. What's your outreach like to those communities? What have you learned from those communities. What have you learned from those people? How do you interact with them? And how do you take in their criticisms of you or their fears?

Mayor Mamdani: I think that the first thing you have to do is walk into those conversations without having already made a judgment. And when you walk into it with an open mind, then it means that you can actually have a conversation and make a decision as to how you feel after you have that conversation. And I think in a lot of our politics, we label people and then disregard them entirely. We treat them as if they're not even people worth engaging with. And look, I'll have conversations with more billionaires that oppose my fiscal policies than those that don't, but there's still more things to actually be discussed about with them. And similarly, what I've also found is, to our benefit, the caricature of me and what our administration would mean was so immense that when I walk into a room and I don't immediately strangle three people that are in front of me, people are taken aback that that might not actually be as bad.