If you think you had a wild year, just imagine how New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani must feel.
In October 2025, weeks before his historic election win, WIRED sat down with Mamdani for an interview at his campaign office. I remember, vividly, the energy that he carried into the room. This was a man, after all, who’d just pulled off a stunning political feat, rising from being an unknown to becoming the mayoral front-runner in a matter of months. In part, that was because of his message, which focused squarely on affordability and the working class. But much of Mamdani’s campaign success can be attributed to how that message was delivered, namely through a mastery of social media that made every other politician in America look like they were still figuring out how to open Instagram.
Mamdani, then just about to turn 34, radiated in our first conversation with what I can best describe as a supernatural electricity. It lit up the room, and in a subsequent photo shoot on a bustling Manhattan street, drew passersby as if by magic. New Yorkers hooted and hollered at the candidate who, seemingly overnight, had made the mundanity of local politics feel like a cultural revolution.
Fast-forward one year, and the Mamdani electricity is still there—it just might be a little bit more tired. The daily grind of governing, after all, doesn’t offer quite the same excitement as a rocket-ship campaign. Not to mention that Mamdani, particularly given his massive reach online, has now become a lightning rod for polarizing conversations, from Israel to the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a beacon of political hope for millions across the country and even around the world.
Mamdani’s approval rating among Big Apple voters sits at a stunning 69 percent, and he’s become among the most influential figures on the American left; he’s also been described, by his harshest critics, as a dangerous radical whose politics threaten the very city he’s been elected to lead. No pressure.
During a sit-down interview at New York’s City Hall, the mayor and I spoke about what he’s learned during his 10 months on the job, how he uses social media as a tool for governance, and where he stands on some of the most pressing issues facing Americans in today’s midterm elections. Mamdani might be tired—he divulged, hoarsely, that it had been “a long day”—but the internet’s Mayor also seems newly liberated, and certainly empowered to speak his mind. Winning power and wielding it, after all, are two very different things. And right now, the power is squarely in Zohran Mamdani’s corner.
KATIE DRUMMOND: It was almost exactly this time last year that I interviewed you in your campaign office. I remember that for two reasons. One, it was just before the election, but two, you were just about to have a birthday. I was remembering that this weekend, because I was in Sunset Park on Saturday. Sunset Park, for those who don’t know, is the best park in Brooklyn, and actually all of New York. I’m sure you agree.
While I was there, I saw you being serenaded with “Happy Birthday.” I did not join. I kept walking. I was like, “I’m gonna see this guy.”
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I was wondering, like, “Who’s that woman who’s not singing along?”
Yes, the one with the really excited 9-year-old, and her mom was like, “No, we’re gonna keep going.” That was me.
Good to know.
Do you feel a year older? How has the last year of your life been?
It’s been a pretty incredible year. It has also been probably the most transformative year that I’ve lived in my life in terms of what my life was versus what it is now. Much of that year has been having the privilege of having the greatest job in the world. To lead this city and now to be 35.
35.
35.
35.
35.
How old do you feel?
I think 35. It’s a funny thing because in the world of my friends, this is an age that has a lot of existential questions that come with it. In the work that I do, most people are significantly older than me, and so the meaning of the age, it doesn’t really live in a professional setting.
Do you ever feel like your age is a barrier in politics?
No. When I met [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] during the UN General Assembly, he was very excited by the fact that I was young. [Laughs] He kept coming back, “So young!” I don’t think it’s a barrier. It’s been one that has also illuminated both the promises and the betrayals of politics.
To be 35 means you grew up through the housing crisis. You grew up through the Iraq War. You grew up through so much of what has shaped our country’s politics over the last few decades. These have been formative moments in my and so many other people’s lives. That too often politics is shaped by those for whom these are issues that just affect other people, not ones that have been all-consuming.
We spent quite a bit of time last year talking about social media and your campaign’s use of it. WIRED declared you the internet’s Mayor. That was before you even won the election. It was a gamble. We felt pretty good about your odds …
Not sponsored by Kalshi.
No, absolutely not, and never. You told us that you wanted your campaign to not just do social media better than other candidates; you wanted to “own the medium.” You’re still at it. How are you thinking about social media as a tool now for governance versus a tool for campaigning?
I think the similarity is that you have to continue to recognize the fact that for many New Yorkers, this is how they engage with the world. It is yet another medium that has to be treated with the same legitimacy and respect as traditional mediums. I say that because if your goal is to reach as many New Yorkers as possible to tell them about a policy that you are unveiling that they could stand to benefit from, your responsibility is then to communicate through every conceivable measure.
Social media means that we can make a video that could reach, that will reach, more than a million people. That’s just on one specific medium. Also, it means that you have to continue to work your way backwards from How are New Yorkers consuming media? It’s not that we have the right answer, it’s just that we’re listening.
For example, we heard from a number of Spanish-speaking New Yorkers that if you really want to communicate with a specific constituency that you’re not reaching right now, you need to make a WhatsApp channel.
So we made a WhatsApp channel, El Chisme Oficial de NYC, and on that channel we will share directly with Spanish-speaking New Yorkers information that we’re putting out, and you will hear voice notes of me speaking in incredibly halting Spanish about what that policy is.
I think for too long there’s been a sense of “pat myself on the back” in government where it’s like, “I put out the paper press release. People should just know. I put this in one obscure place that people could find if they were looking for it.” We have to make politics and political decisions something that reach people wherever they already are, as opposed to the condescension that comes with, “If you’re not reading this, then it’s not meant for you.”
You also talked last year about your time campaigning and feeling like you needed to put yourself out there on social media in different ways, “Many of which are embarrassing.” What does it look like to be less embarrassing on social media now that you’re the mayor?
You’re asking the wrong guy.
Have you tried to clean up your act a little bit?
I feel like I’m equally embarrassing. I think there’s a part of social media which is all about the presentation of cool and mystery.
I don’t think that’s what you’re doing.
That’s not where I live.
We’re not living in mystery.
I live in a world where you will know everything about me, and I have to utilize that to try and share the message of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. I think in some ways that means abandoning any fear of embarrassment or what it means for perception. If the way that you can learn about the Rent Guidelines Board is me jumping into freezing cold water, then so be it.
That’s what it was when I was running for office, and I think today we’re still taking the same approach of: How can we communicate with as many people as possible? How can we not veer into a place of complacency? That “Oh, now that I’m the mayor, it means everything has to conform to a traditional outreach.”
Part of the reason why so many people feel so ambivalent, at best, about politics is that there’s a sense of irrelevance. And some of that irrelevance comes from the focus of politics, but some of it also comes from the methods of politics. If politics continues to present itself in a way that it did 20 years ago, that is ignoring the fact that we are living in a very different world today. That’s the world that we should be speaking to, and that’s the world whose concerns we should be reflecting.
I would just say that in the year since we sat down together, there’s been a lot of focus on our use of the medium, as if that is more important than the message. I think it’s important to focus on the use of medium, the respect for the medium, and also to understand that putting tired, old ideas into a short-form version in a vertical video does not answer the critical issue with politics today.
It’s not just the presentation, it’s also the substance.
The New York Times published a story in September about your office’s work with creators. Your administration works with lots of creators, some of whom receive talking points around initiatives. They’re invited to cover events, sometimes where traditional journalists, people like myself, would not be present. Among the concerns raised in that piece is the idea of this distinction between journalist and creator.
I understand wanting to leverage social media to reach people in new ways. I think that’s really laudable. But how do you think about that distinction between, quote unquote, “professional journalism” and content creation? Because I think for the average person, and people are very smart, that line has become incredibly blurry.
I would push you a little bit.
Push away.
Talking points are essentially the basis of a press release, right? When we announce a new policy, in the press release there’ll be quotes from myself and other relevant agency heads and other relevant politicians, and then there’ll also be a description as to what the policy is.
To me, that is so critical because we’re looking to demystify politics, and some policies are pretty self-explanatory, and other policies are ones that, frankly, if I didn’t have talking points, then I wouldn’t even be able to formulate what that is.
Earlier this week, we announced that we were going to deliver on an innovative solution to flooding in Central Park. We were going to be able to lower the water levels in three key water bodies to ensure that we would do so in advance of a storm, and then prevent the typical storm water runoff. You need to be able to explain that before you have a conversation about it. So that’s where I would push a little bit on the idea of what talking points are and what they serve.
To your question, you have to be able to treat all of these different mediums with respect and understand the differences between them. If we were an administration that exclusively engaged with digital-first creators, then that would be an issue. But what I see as important is we have to speak to journalists for whom their medium is television, newspaper, radio, digital, magazine, as well as those for whom their only medium might be TikTok or Instagram or Twitter or Bluesky, whatever it may be.
It cannot be a choice any longer, because I think, as you’ve said, for many New Yorkers, there is a sense that all of this is media.
I think we have to have respect for that, as opposed to what has long been a political condescension about which media is legitimate and which media is illegitimate.
How do you separate audiences in your mind when you think about what you would say on TikTok or Instagram, what you would say to a journalist, what you would say behind a podium? Do you think about those distinctions?
Not so much. I think if you try to calibrate yourself for every single constituency, you are losing sight of why people will want to listen. It starts to veer into an imitation as opposed to a presentation of the facts, and I think there’s a difference in that we’ll sit down for 48 minutes. But if I put out a video on Instagram that’s 48 minutes, is it gonna do well? No. But if I’m thinking that I should speak like this over there, and then I should speak like this over here, you’re gonna end up kind of twisting and turning yourself into knots.
I want to move to the midterms, but last year we spent some well-earned time talking about Eric Adams’ social media campaign. He did incredible things on those platforms. Remarkable.
Michael Bay. His life has been changed by that one video.
Phenomenal. Who is the Eric Adams of the midterms on social?
The social media that I am still confused by …
Sure.
… is that of the departing Congressman Shri Thanedar.
I don’t know about this one.
I just never fully understand what I’m looking at.
What are you looking at? What’s happening in the videos?
Sometimes it’s even just still images.
Are we in carousel mode? Is it just a single photo?
Typically solo style. I would invite others to take a look, and I would say that I’m very excited as well about the incoming congressman.
I will take a look. [Laughs] There is some remarkable AI-generated social media content from some candidates, some of which includes AI-generated versions of you talking about, I think it was a delusion pill.
I have not seen that one.
You and Governor Hochul, you’re talking about taking the delusion pill …
What?
… where you think that having higher taxes and less money is a good thing. You should check this out.
Was this from [Republican gubernatorial candidate] Bruce Blakeman?
Yes!
I’m sure it was.
It’s incredible stuff.
It looks just like you.
[Laughs] Yeah …
You are not on the ballot for the midterms this November, but this is a big one. In the last year, you have become one of the most influential people in politics. Whether you agree with me saying that or not, you’ve been described repeatedly as something of a power broker within the Democratic Party. An endorsement from you matters.
I’m curious about your decision to endorse and campaign for Governor Hochul. She’s seeking reelection. You were critical of her before taking office. Can you talk us through that calculus and what changed?
I think the key thing that my endorsement is a reflection of is just how productive our working relationship has been. And frankly, it is a stark contrast to that of the typical working relationship between the mayor of New York City and the governor of New York state. You look through the years, frankly, and you will find mayor and governor after mayor and governor who are seemingly forever at loggerheads.
What I’ve found in working with Governor Hochul is that we can deliver on material wins for working-class New Yorkers. And to me, the single most exciting one of those is Universal 2K. On the eighth day of our administration, she agreed to deliver $1.2 billion to make universal childcare a reality for 2-year-olds in this city.
The two of us spent a morning, maybe about a week or two ago, with a family whose child was enrolled in 2K, and they told us that before that, they had to send their child to a different state, that his grandmother had to drive him at 4:00 am for him to get to a childcare that they could afford, and they were still paying $2,300 a month.
That partnership delivered this family more than $20,000 of savings that they can now put towards a house. That, to me, is what politics has to be. It has to mean something for working people. You don’t have to translate to them what $2,300 a month means. They feel it, they know it.
That’s what I’m excited to build on. To me, it’s her track record. It’s her commitment to this city, one that continued in the budget that we had where we were facing a significant fiscal deficit, and she was a real partner in ensuring that we could deliver a balanced budget. There’s a stark contrast with her opponent, who is a little more busy with AI-generated videos of the two of us.
He’s been very busy making AI-generated videos, and defending ICE. I could go on.
Yes, which is a combination that I think most New Yorkers would not want to see in the governor’s office. I also think that his response to universal childcare was to say this was a delivery of a benefit to lazy parents. I have yet to meet a lazy parent in New York City.
I meet people who are exhausted by the fact that our city and our country has made parenthood something that is incredibly difficult to do and seen as if it’s purely an individual responsibility when it’s the benefit of our whole city if children can be raised here.
He said he would cut that program. He said he would cut Medicaid in half. I mean, times are tough as they are, and to have a gubernatorial candidate running on an agenda of, “I’m gonna make working people’s lives harder and more expensive,” I want to find the consultant who sold him that dream ’cause they must have had an incredible pitch. It makes no sense to me.
Perhaps it was AI. Who can say?
Honestly.
If Governor Hochul is reelected, where do you hope to take that partnership?
I would say continuing on childcare. What we have delivered funding for is enough to take a program for 2,000 2-year-olds to 12,000 2-year-olds next year. We want to deliver this for every single 2-year-old in New York City. And as of now, we’re scheduled to expand to all of the Bronx, all of Staten Island.
We want it to be every single borough, every single 2-year-old, and the governor has said she’s committed to the expansion of this program. To me, when we’re talking about a cost-of-living crisis, we’re talking about the most expensive city in America. Childcare is the second leading expense for working families in the city. If we can deliver that, what we are really delivering to New Yorkers is a more affordable life. That has to be the job.
Talk to me about the Democratic Socialists of America. Your name has become synonymous in many ways with that movement. It has been one of the dominant political stories of the last year, this rise of DSA candidates winning races across the country. Why do you think now is the time for that organization? Why not five years ago? Why not 10 years ago? Why not five years from now?
I think precisely because the movement is built around delivering dignity to working-class people. Today’s politics is an illustration of the betrayal of the working class. Never before has there been such an urgent demand for a new kind of politics. Here in New York City, the problems that working-class people are facing are in many ways the problems that working-class people are facing across the country: an inability to afford their rent, their childcare, their groceries, their electricity bills.
So that message of fighting for working-class Americans, it’s compelling wherever you are. That’s what drew me to DSA in the first place, was that this was an entire organization built around an understanding that this had to be the focus of our politics. That politics had to mean material wins for working-class people, and that we had to be willing to fight for it.
One of the things that I really love so much about what it means to be a DSA member is the D stands for “democratic.” The organization does what its members decide to do. I think in a lot of politics it feels like there’s the set of people who make the decisions, and there’s everybody else who has to go along with them.
The whole point of this is democracy, that people should be able to choose their own future. People should be able to not just choose their own leaders but also take that democracy and extend it from the ballot box to the rest of their lives.
On that note, we’ve been doing a lot of coverage at WIRED of data centers. I would be curious to hear your point of view on the data center movement, and why you think that specific issue has become such a flashpoint in this election. Where do you think that comes from?
I think the movement to oppose data centers is one that gives me a real sense of hope.
Why?
Because it shows the ways in which this fight is cutting across the typical lines that separate Americans. It’s a bipartisan fight. Me and Ron DeSantis don’t have much in common, and yet there is a similar opposition to the development of these kinds of data centers.
It speaks to a few things. Think about the incredible amount of energy that we are talking about when we’re talking about AI. You think about the version of ChatGPT; just the training of that model took the same amount of energy it would take to power all of San Francisco for three days.
That’s the scale. So what you’re seeing in opposition from Americans across the country is an opposition for what these data centers would mean in their day-to-day lives, what it would mean in their electricity rates, what it would mean in terms of the impact on their environment. It’s also a repudiation of what has been a governing politics for the last few years when it comes to AI, which is: our risk, their reward.
You’re seeing it whether you’re in Florida, whether you’re in New York, across the entire country. Even in California we’ve seen municipalities that have started to ban the construction of data centers entirely.
You’ve supported New York state setting a one-year pause on data center construction. What next?
One of the solves is a recognition of the costs that come with AI. So much of what we are talking about is based on a very limited amount of information that we have. That is by design, because when we’re talking about these incredibly powerful companies, we also are talking about a level of opacity that renders it almost impossible for us to make an informed conclusion as to how much this query is actually costing us as a society.
Do you mean an absence of data about energy use? Or do you mean the idea that this technology is talked about as mythical rather than infrastructure?
I mean the former. I think that, frankly, there’s an attempt to make this technology seem as if it is mythical or as if it is divine.
Unknowable.
There is a real investment in the idea that this is so complicated that the only rational response should be that we trust those who created it.
In many ways, it’s what Facebook was arguing in 2008, that they should be able to regulate themselves. Yet what we need to see is a response that grasps the scale of the adoption of this technology and the incentives that are driving a lot of this technology at this time, and the fact that we are now at a point where there are far too many similarities between the housing bubble and the state of AI in our economy today.
You worry that we’re in a bubble?
Yes.
You worry that bubble’s gonna pop?
Yes.
Do you trust the Sam Altmans of the world?
No. Do you trust the Sam Altmans of the world?
I’m not the one being interviewed.
No.
But no, I don’t. In the context of AI, you focus obviously on New York. What is your role in shaping how AI affects New Yorkers?
It’s a role on a practical level. I also think it’s a role that reckons with the enormity of AI’s impact. Now, on the practical level, it means formulating one of the most comprehensive AI moratoriums in any American school system, which we put forward, that would ban the use of generative AI for students from 2K through eighth grade.
Ban it because we need students to be given the room to be students. Students to be able to try and fail and learn, and also to bring an end to the use of our students as guinea pigs for the profit motives of technology companies. There’s been this strange thing over the last few years, maybe last few decades: While we would not be willing to have a pharmaceutical company help write the curriculum of a science class, we have been all too willing to partner with technology companies to not just inform the products that are used in the classroom, but also how they are taught.
Then, to the second point, the fact that the impact of AI is not purely an economic impact or an ecological impact, it is also an emotional impact. For all of the focus on job numbers and what jobs will be replaced by AI, there also has to be a reckoning with job satisfaction. There are a lot of jobs where the very purpose of the job is starting to be stripped away by artificial intelligence. There was recently an interview that The Daily conducted with a mathematics professor.
In tears.
In tears, speaking about AI’s newfound ability to solve this age-old problem that inspired a crisis for him and for other mathematicians as to what they were doing now. What purpose did they have?
I think that is a question that should be at the forefront of how we respond to AI, because for too long, we’ve treated it, in your language, as a mythical thing, as an unknowable thing. In fact, it is a thing very much within human control. That means that we have to answer these questions, thinking about humanity as the primary responsibility.
You’ve said that citywide AI policy has been guided by the question of what we can do in the face of a complete abdication of federal law. How does that affect your ability to rein in the technology on a municipal level? How would you like to see the federal government handling this technology right now?
I would like to see them reckon with the questions of the similarities between the housing bubble and the nature of AI in the economy today. I would like to see them reckon with the wildly varying estimates of actual profitability of these companies, and the ways in which so much of their business dealings are attempts at continuing to prop up a completely artificial valuation of themselves that justifies the amount of money that they’re spending on a daily basis.
I would like to see them reckon with the fact that the application of AI has already been seen to have fatal consequences. When we’re talking about AI hallucinations, this is not just of intellectual interest. It’s also something that almost led us to war with China. When we’re talking about AI’s use of outdated information, that’s what led to our government bombing an Iranian children’s school.
This is right now. This is not a hypothetical future. What we’re doing here in New York City is we’re looking to utilize every tool we have in the face of that abdication. Some of those tools are very practical. It’s the implementation of a new rule by our Department of Consumer and Worker Protection that realtors cannot use AI-generated images of apartments.
Those images did look incredible.
They looked incredible, but they were not real.
No, they were not.
The housing market is tough enough. You don’t need to wonder if your dream apartment is actually a dream. You should know that it is something that exists.
Similarly, a lot of New Yorkers have been trapped in these doom loops with chatbots, so we’ve put together another rule that puts a limitation on that.
These are the kinds of day-to-day actions we can take. What we are talking about is something of international importance, and yet all too often when it is raised at that level, it is caricatured as: Everything that we’re doing is critically important because we are in a race with China. That kind of arms race terminology is used to justify every abdication of duty in this country.
You have a bafflingly good relationship with President Trump. Have you talked to him about AI?
We’ve had conversations about a lot of different topics that affect the city.
Do you feel confident in his administration’s ability to get a handle on that technology?
I think that federal policy has been lacking thus far on this, and I think that the critiques that I’ve just leveled, that is how I honestly feel about what federal policy has been thus far.
WIRED has reported extensively this year on the surveillance tech at Madison Square Garden. We’ve described it as a panopticon, among other things. We’ve published several stories about this. We’re actually being sued by James Dolan over that reporting.
I want to know what you think about what is happening there, and I’m curious about your view on whether a private citizen, someone like James Dolan, should be able to wield that kind of surveillance power over everyday New Yorkers.
No. I don’t think that should be allowed. I think that it is indicative of much that is wrong in our country today in terms of the use of technology.
How does one, say the mayor of New York City, address something like that?
I think first they would do it in a WIRED interview, and then there is also legislation that City Council member Shahana Hanif has introduced, and I think that that’s an important response to this kind of an issue.
It’s an issue that has frankly been true not just at Madison Square Garden. I think also at Radio City Music Hall, where I think there was at one time reporting of a mother who is a lawyer taking her child to see a show and then being barred from entering because of her professional work.
Last year I asked you if technology was making democracy stronger or weaker. You told me weaker. What about today?
Still weaker.
Why?
I have family members sending AI videos of me, to me, thinking that it’s real. I have a family member who complimented me on a 45-minute debate that I had with a European member of parliament. And I watched the video, I was like, “This is not me.”
How’d you do?
I could not last through that video. Apparently, I did well. Defeated my European AI counterpart. But it wasn’t real. And I think that there is a real crisis of faith as to what is real right now, and some of the application of it is lighthearted, it’s funny, but it is quite terrifying to think that in an age of such little faith in traditional institutions, how even that could be diminished further by the application of this technology in that way.
We need to close by talking about the future. The Democratic Party is going through a lot of change right now. Let’s fast-forward, say, a decade. It’s 2036. What do you hope the party looks like, and who’s running it?
I hope that party looks like one that realizes the only majority in this country is the working class, and that it fights for it, and that it understands that no longer can an ambitious version of the party only be one that we find in history books. There’s too many monuments in this city to incredible figures who showcase what it could look like to fight for working-class people. We need that to be a living, breathing politic. I think the people who run it have to be the American people.
And what are you doing in 10 years?
I don’t know. Hopefully I will have finished a second term, but I can never take that for granted.
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