Bill de Blasio on Zohran Mamdani, New York's Future, and Why He Had a Chip on His Shoulder

A transcript of The New York Editorial Board's interview with former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat who served two terms as mayor from 2014 through 2021 and was previously Public Advocate and a City Council member, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of September 18, 2025. (photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)

Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.

Full Transcript

Ben Smith
First I just want to state for the record that Mayor de Blasio ordered an omelet. It’s a novel – that’s the first time that’s happened at The New York Editorial Board.

Bill de Blasio
Say for the record that I was early.

Ben Smith
I should also state for the record that Mayor de Blasio was early—

Bill de Blasio
Before some of the journalists.

Ben Smith
Before some of the journalists, and we were perhaps slightly surprised and should not have been. But anyway, thank you for coming in. I’m reminded that the last time I sat down with you like this was at Buzzfeed in 2013, where we asked you about Anthony Weiner’s surging campaign the whole time, and you were so annoyed.

Bill de Blasio
I was right, by the way.

Ben Smith
And you were correct. Yeah. Just to begin with, we’re at a very particular moment in this mayoral campaign, which is why we wanted to have you in, and I wonder: How often do you talk to Zohran Mamdani?

Bill de Blasio
Pretty consistently. I don’t want to put an exact day amount on it, but I’d say we’ve had a good number of conversations in the course of the year. And, I think several people have recognized this, I don’t remember a lot of people who were so prominent in public life or became so prominent who had such genuine conversations. I remember when I attempted conversation with Michael Bloomberg as a Council member or public advocate, there was literally, like, Bloomberg would talk, you’d try and say something, and then he would say something else that had no reference to what you said. And Mamdani is an extremely engaged conversationalist. Really listens, responds very specifically to what you raise, takes it in, thinks about it. It’s been striking to me. It’s one of the reasons I have a lot of faith in him.

Josh Greenman
What do you talk about the most?

Bill de Blasio
I would say in the primary time he was often seeking insight on different policy matters and, obviously, how they play out politically as well. And a lot of it was understanding what happened in the 2013 campaign. And then since, without getting into any detail, substantive matters and where New York City is going and what it’s gonna take to deal with the current realities of New York City.

Ben Smith
What is your advice for him?

Bill de Blasio
It’s hard to give a lot of advice politically to someone who’s doing such a great job. I think he’s honestly tremendously gifted. So I don’t feel like I have any great political revelations except the only thing I’ve said is: If you feel something didn’t come across right or has been misunderstood, speak to it. I also have been candid previously, and I’ve said it to him, that I struggled with acknowledging mistake because I felt the ever-changing environment that I entered into — sort of the growth of social media, one thing or another — as my administration began, it felt like if you acknowledged mistake, it would be repeated a thousand times. And there’s truth in that. But I increasingly came to believe toward the end of my time as mayor, and certainly since then, there is a way to acknowledge you need to do something better or you didn’t understand something before or you’ve evolved that could be very healthy. And I think people see authenticity in that.

Juan Manuel Benítez
A couple weeks ago I got to interview Kathy Wylde from the Partnership for New York City for my podcast. And she told me that the way she is comforting the wealthy or the business community is by telling them: “Listen, you survived Bill de Blasio for eight years–”

Bill de Blasio
The republic still stands.

Juan Manuel Benítez
“Mamdani is not like Bill de Blasio, because Bill de Blasio was vindictive.”

Bill de Blasio
Was what?

Juan Manuel Benítez
Vindictive. And that you wanted to punish the wealthy with tax increases. You wanted to tax the wealthy. And she tells them, “Mamdani, at least he’s not like that. He listens and he’s open to other possibilities to raise the money that he needs to implement all those social services that, all those plans that he has.” So I want just your response to the vindictive claim and whether you think that’s an accurate difference between you and Mamdani.

Bill de Blasio
The first thing I’d say to Kathy is, bless her heart. I just think that’s unfair, and strange. Do I think I had a chip on my shoulder? Yes. Coming off the Bloomberg years, a long 12 years, and especially the way Bloomberg got his third term, I felt the city was increasingly being dominated by the wealthy and the powerful, and it bothered me deeply and I certainly wasn’t hiding that. So I clearly had a chip on my shoulder and I probably would’ve been well advised to push some of that down and try to offer an open hand a little more, even though I think my critique was fair. But substantively I can name a host of things where I think my administration worked well with the private sector and held them to account. I think the whole approach to affordable housing and rezonings, for example, was to say, “we’ll work with you and we’ll help you get done some of the things you’re trying to get done, but you have to give the public back their fair share,” which I think was a good balance and I actually think a lot of folks in the real estate community found that perfectly livable.

So I think this comes down to the interesting role of emotion, which obviously is politics. So many people in the world of capitalism freak out easily at the slightest criticism or whenever they’re held accountable. And I find it very interesting that people with so much money and power are so sensitive. But I had this conversation over the years — real estate folks, Wall Street folks — and they basically said, if you say nice things to them, they’ll be cool and they can even work with some of your policies they disagree with. I think Zohran has figured that out, that offer an open hand, you don’t need to be as overt with your critique as I was, but ‘vindictive’ makes no sense. Where’s the vindictive? Because I wanted higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for pre-K? That wasn’t vindictive. So I think she’s lost in her own thing.

Josh Greenman
You refer to capitalism. You don’t sound like a member of the DSA.

Bill de Blasio
No. I am not.

Josh Greenman
Would you be?

Bill de Blasio
No.

Josh Greenman
Why not?

Bill de Blasio
Notwithstanding what I deeply appreciate about Zohran, I think a lot of the DSA platform’s wrong and I think a lot of their approach is too rigid, and I don’t think they’ve been as good as they should be about connecting with working class communities. That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with them on some things, or I don’t see value in their movement, but no, I would not.

Myles Miller
What specifically, though, what specifically about their platform doesn’t help working—

Bill de Blasio
I don’t, especially partway through my first coffee, I am not gonna go point by point down the DSA platform. I’m trying, I think my answer is authentic. I have never had an impulse to join them. I respect, again, some of the worldview I respect. I’m sure there’s some things I agree with but Zohran to me has been such a breath of fresh air because it’s like democratic socialism with a human face. Whereas I think before a lot of what we saw from the DSA was extremely rigid, prone to internecine warfare in the left, which is not helpful. I’ve been in one form or another left my entire life and one of the things that bugs me the most is how easily people find a reason to be pissed off with each other.

I love this story, so I have to tell it, that when Dante [de Blasio] was at Yale, he said he noted with interest that some DSA members thought it would be righteous to go off campus and form affinity houses. You know, group houses for people of similar beliefs. And he said what inevitably happened was after a few months, the houses would break up because people managed to argue over extremely small ideological matters and they couldn’t live with each other. That is an example of what has been wrong with the DSA. It would be great for the world if people like Zohran would teach the left to chill and work together better, but also to do what he did in terms of really rooting in community and going out into working-class communities and making the work about working people, which is what the entire history of the left has been. But too much of the American left for generations has been highly-educated folks who want to talk to other highly-educated folks, and not actually engage working people.

Ben Max
That actually gets to a two-parter on the sort-of state of the race and Democratic coalitions in the city. First, a very brief one: Do you see this mayoral race as over? What percentage do you give a Mamdani victory?

Bill de Blasio
I think he’s gonna win, but it’s far from over. It’s far from over. Look, this is such a dynamic moment in history to begin with. Just things are changing all around us, literally daily. So I think a cardinal rule of politics is: You are deeply affected by the surrounding environment and even if you’re doing everything right, you cannot account for larger forces that might change the public’s focus or interest. I think he’s running a great campaign. I think he’s done a great job reaching out to people who weren’t with him originally, and a lot of them have come over to him, but this ball game is not over.

Ben Max
The second part relates to all the general election polling we’re seeing is he’s right at 45%, and you might say in a commanding position there as you just got at, but also stuck there. It’s obviously a unique field. Connected to what you were saying earlier, talk about your view a little bit of electoral coalitions in the city, because obviously unlike yourself, he hasn’t had such strong support from Black voters in the city. He’s got a different coalition. There’s different generational lines being drawn. It’s complicated. But he’s sort of stuck at 45% here. He’s got two other Democrats, obviously, in the election with him. What’s your view of his strength and his electoral coalition?

Bill de Blasio
I think his coalition’s evolving. We have to put in context that on January 1st, very few New Yorkers knew who he was. So it’s an imperfect comparison to my situation because even though in the beginning of the year in 2013, I was way back in the pack, at least I held the citywide office and had some amount of name recognition. So he had a really incredibly fast trajectory, in less than six months, going from essentially nowhere to victory. In coalition building, you need time. You need validators, you need emissaries, and I think he got about as far as a human being could get in that timeframe.

Since then, I think he’s done a great job of building a broader coalition. Now, the number one x-factor and the reason that polling has been shot to hell since 2016, the number one x-factor is turnout. There’s just no polling that can capture turnout dynamics. It’s just, in my strong, personal, narrow opinion, literally impossible. And so if turnout is taken into account, I would trust Zohran’s ability to turn out his vote and his operations ability to turn out his vote over any of the other candidates all day long, which is why I believe he will absolutely break 50%. Forty-five percent polling easily translates to 50 or more if you bring turnout elements into play, in my opinion.

But he’s also not done building his coalition. Meanwhile, I don’t think any other candidate is offering a compelling vision. As we all know, politics is, again, about emotion and emotion is motivated by the personality of the candidate, by message, by vision. And there’s basically one candidate doing that, and everyone else is doing something else. So I think there’s a certain inevitability that he will keep gaining support slowly but surely, but then the turnout operation does the rest. That said, I don’t think he should be resting on his laurels. I don’t think he is. I don’t think his team is. I think they are taking this very, very seriously and there’s no triumphalism, but I don’t think— I think your thesis on paper makes sense, that the polling keeps saying, look, mid-forties. But I think the reality is there’s a very simple pathway to break 50.

Ben Smith
You don’t think he’s sort-of dropped the ball politically by letting, I don’t know, what is he doing? He had a scavenger hunt. He hasn’t announced new policies. You don’t think that’s a mistake?

Bill de Blasio
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of what he’s doing.

Ben Smith
Someone is gonna read this transcript and get mad at me.

Bill de Blasio
That’s OK. It’s New York City.

Josh Greenman
Realistically, if he wins with 47%, or 49%, or whatever, and turnout is whatever it is, do you have any particular guidance about how to — the rest of the voters will probably be pretty anti-Mamdani—

Bill de Blasio
No. I don’t believe that.

Josh Greenman
You don’t believe that?

Bill de Blasio
I don’t believe that.

Josh Greenman
Well, how should that inform his post-election agenda, if he wins with right around 50% or under 50%?

Bill de Blasio
You’re describing most recent presidents of the United States of America, right? Remember, Bill Clinton never broke 50%. I just want to immediately say, first of all, I do think Zohran is running an energetic campaign, a campaign that continues to put out ideas, but really what he has been doing up to now is broadening his coalition effectively. Every few days it feels like more people are coming on board who used to not be with him, and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing in a general election campaign. So I think it’s perfectly vibrant. The final weeks will be different, in my opinion. I think the final weeks are where he gets to re-imprint the vision more deeply when people truly focus, because we all focus all day long, but most voters, we all know, it’s the last week, if you’re lucky, people pay attention. And that’s when you reiterate vision.

On the question of what do you do if you’re under 50%? The idea is you got elected for a reason, stick to your program, but have an open hand to people who don’t agree. And I think that’s been his impulse. So I don’t feel like it’s, you know, Paris is gonna be burning, that there’s gonna be this 49% or 50% of New Yorkers who are totally agitated all day long. I think there’s gonna be people who didn’t feel yet ready to support him and if he does a good job, if he can get some of his main initiatives started, chooses good people, handles some of the immediate challenges well, people will absolutely give him a chance.

Liena Zagare
You brought up the working class and I wanted to ask about Richard Florida’s creative class that drove a lot of New York’s revival, and at the same time also gentrification and displacement. Right now, many of these same creatives, having traded security for flexibility in terms of their jobs, are struggling with the same rising costs that they contributed to creating. And—

Bill de Blasio
That’s called irony.

Liena Zagare
Exactly. So how do you think, how do you reconcile that? How do you think the city reconciles that? It is the Mamdani voters and his affordability agenda.

Bill de Blasio
This is an ongoing phenomenon. I got elected on a platform that was in many ways about affordability, although we didn’t say the words the same way and there was more of a civil rights element because of stop-and-frisk. But really if you come down to the focus on affordable housing or paid sick days or pre-K for all, a lot of it was obviously about affordability.

So the notion that that creative class obviously helped fuel gentrification and now is feeling the negative effects of it, that’s been happening for a while. I would say the solutions that Zohran is putting forward are very pertinent to that class of people, especially. And I was totally shocked how much creative folks valued pre-K and 3-K. We did it for everyone, very explicitly. I assumed the greatest energy would come from working-class folks and lower income folks because it was much deeper relief financially. But the response I’ve gotten in the years since from classic, you know, brownstone Brooklyn folks who, it’s often phrased as, “I would’ve had to leave the city, go to Jersey,” whatever. So I think that community of people is looking for any and all relief they can get — on rent, on childcare, et cetera. So I think his platform is well-directed toward them. And there’s also, again, the emotional reality of feeling that your government sees your situation, is trying to do something about it. So I think it’s very helpful that he can connect deeply with that community of folks and also has policies that would help them. But that doesn’t mean you can arrest these dynamics overnight, right? We’re fighting a very long battle here to keep this place at all affordable and hopefully one day make it more affordable. It’s a long, long effort.

And I have to say, and everyone in this room is pretty steeped in New York City history, such a fascinating conversation to have here in this beautiful room [at the Lafayette Grand Café & Bakery] because when I came to NYU, I got to NYU in September of 1979, and if you had told me you wouldn’t be able to afford the rent in New York City because it had gotten so expensive and popular, and at that point the place looked like it was falling apart entirely, I wouldn’t have believed you in a million years. So it’s this fascinating, really problematic phenomenon that we have to address for years. We’ll be addressing it for years and years, but we have to remember the alternative would’ve sucked, which is we would continue the sixties, seventies, eighties decline and be extremely affordable because people didn’t want to be here.

Josh Greenman
Can I ask a quick rent-freeze question, please? You, for a while, were saying about your rent freezes that the RGB, the Rent Guidelines Board, was independent and that they still used their math, whatever they used. I’m not sure if that shifted after a little bit of time, but that was your initial posture. Does Mamdani have unilateral authority to preemptively say four years of rent freezes [on rent-stabilized apartments]? And if he does, what if his posture was, we’re going to have four years of 3% increase? Would that be OK?

Bill de Blasio
Important thing to understand about any board, particularly one with stipulated membership, because RGB is not name-whoever-the-hell-you-want — you have to name by category. And then, New York City is not a police state. The people named have the power to make their own — they have a term, they have the power to make their own decisions. And I learned this with multiple boards in multiple situations, they’re independent. Once anyone has a term, they have a measure of independence. So a mayor can choose people that they think will philosophically follow a certain vision, and we’ll communicate, but you do not get to purely control, first of all. Second of all, our vision was that the RGB had not, in the past, looked beyond the needs of landlords, and needed to balance the equation, which I think was the right thing to do, and I think is resonant with what Zohran is saying. So sometimes there might be a call for a rent freeze, sometimes there might be a call for something else. But the vision was always to say it can’t just be about the needs of landlords.

Josh Greenman
OK, but he’s preemptively promising four years of rent freezes. How can you, given what you just said, how can he do that?

Bill de Blasio
I’m gonna be clear that I have not seen, I know he’s obviously called for a rent freeze. I haven’t seen his specific language around four years. But the point is he’s offering a vision that’s perfectly acceptable, perfectly fair. I’m emphasizing the fact that once you name people, you do not control them entirely. Just a fact.

Alyssa Katz
I want to ask whether you think the circumstances now are the same or similar enough to the ones that you faced when you called for a rent freeze? And I’ll just note two pieces of background here. One is that, we had a 2019 [state] law that severely limited landlord’s ability to raise the rent on vacant units and use other loopholes — that were widely abused, I don’t think there’s any question about that — but the picture is very different around getting revenue out of rent-regulated units. And I also wanna give a shout out to Josh’s journal Vital City, which has a great new issue on housing, including a piece that really drills in. You know, Mamdani’s picture of rent freezes, right? A voter would think it’s for everybody — regulated, not. Of course, it’s just for rent-regulated tenants, but even beyond that, you have some buildings that are a hundred percent rent-regulated where landlords basically can barely raise the rent. You have others, especially in Manhattan, that have a lot of high-income tenants that can help the landlord pay for the stabilized units with very limited rent increases. And as a Vital City article gets into, there’s a real problem out there, and it’s been documented by lenders to regulated housing. It’s shown in the sales prices, which are rock bottom right now for these buildings. There’s a real risk that they’ll go into foreclosure, that maintenance will get cut back, and so on.

So that’s a lot of background there, but just to say: Do you think that the circumstances now still call for the kind of across the board rent freeze that Mamdani is proposing?

Bill de Blasio
Two pieces. The 2019 law needs to be changed. It wasn’t done right in terms of the MCIs, the major capital improvements. I agree with your statement before. We had a law, previously, that was extremely prone to abuse and the whole legal structure supported landlords over tenants in a way that led to a lot of displacement. Classic scenarios where people who had been part of a neighborhood for a long time were pushed out, priced out, consistently.

So the impulse for the 2019 rent law in general was right, but the part about MCIs went too far the other way and took away, in my opinion, the ability of some landlords to appropriately maintain their buildings and improve their apartments and get some kind of appropriate return but one that did not encourage aggressive displacement efforts. So that needs to be fixed, still. And I would argue fixing that particularly would be a good balance to a rent freeze or other actions to address affordability.

The affordability situation is insane right now. So I think using measures like a rent freeze, as needed, to give some measure of relief to people is a perfectly legitimate strategy. But I would contextualize it. My argument would be you do it in concert with other actions. And one thing I think that really would help would be if Albany, with the city’s urging, would correct that mistake from 2019.

Nicole Gelinas
On taxes, your plan was a $800 million personal income tax increase, it would’ve brought the city’s income tax rate from a little under 3.9% to about 4.4%, 4.5%.

Bill de Blasio
For upper-income folks.

Nicole Gelinas
Yes. Above half a million. Mamdani’s plan is many magnitudes greater. He’s asking for a 50% increase in the city’s income tax rate. It would go from little under 4% to 6%.

Bill de Blasio
And he’s starting at, is it a million [dollars in income]?

Nicole Gelinas
Yes. Is he asking for too much? Is there some place in the city’s universe where we do have to worry that we will start to erode this tax base with the 50% increase? That’s the policy. Politically, what happens if the governor doesn't give it to him? Should he take something else and call it a victory as you did?

Bill de Blasio
OK. A lot of pieces there. When I was calling for that, which I thought was perfectly fair, and by the way, for those students of history, I borrowed from, because I worked for [Mayor] David Dinkins, I borrowed from the formulation of Safe Streets, Safe City, which is a highly targeted tax increase to achieve a specific goal. And Dinkins was working in a different environment. I came along post-Occupy Wall Street, post-recession. I targeted mine to upper-income folks, but again, specifically for pre-K and after-school.

And I will say, even in those days there was some angst around it from some wealthier folks, there were also a decent number of wealthy folks who said, “You know what, I could live with that because I agree with the specific cause, assuming it worked well.”

But that was before the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. So we now have an entirely different playing field where the notion that what Zohran is proposing will somehow discomfort wealthy people is ludicrous to me. Whether it’s pretty to look at or not, wealthy people did incredibly well during the pandemic. They’ve done incredibly well in the stock market and done incredibly well because of the tax cuts that Trump and the Congress have given them.

I don’t think it’s reductionist to say, can they afford what Mamdani is suggesting? Of course. And he’s doing it to try to preserve affordability in the city, which is necessary to the workforces that provide the wealth to wealthy people. So I think it’s absolutely fair, absolutely logical. I don’t think it’s too much of a burden. Where I think the interesting question comes in, about how will wealthy people react, gets back to the earlier question about the tone of things and the emotion of things. Ironically, if he were to pursue that policy while continuing to offer an open hand to the private sector and the wealthy and invite them in and show what they might regard as respect and appreciation for their contributions to New York City, which are very real, I suspect that medicine goes down pretty simply in the end.

Josh Greenman
But just to push back on the thing that the wealthy are doing just fine, there was a recent analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission that said New York City is losing its share of millionaires compared to other places. That Florida has seen them quadruple and other places have seen them triple, we’ve seen them grow at a slower rate so I think we now have 9% instead of 13% of the millionaires [in the country]. Are you worried about that continuing to erode and what would that do to the tax base if it happens?

Bill de Blasio
I think it is a responsible view to say we should look factually at what’s happening with our tax base and who constitutes it and how they’re responding. That said, the notion that somehow you will make policy decisions fundamentally based on the needs of a very, very narrow class of very wealthy people, that’s a slippery slope. And I wouldn’t encourage that way of thinking.

I think there is a way to show respect, to bring those folks into the discussion, to be responsive to some of the things they care about that are legitimate public policy concerns without turning over decision-making in government to the wealthy. I think you can balance the equation. I also think we should not ignore the fact that we continue to produce a lot of new millionaires because of all the strengths of New York City that continue unabated.

My argument is if we don’t take some of the actions that Mamdani is talking about, the city’s in tremendous danger in terms of being a place that can have the kind of values we’ve historically had, but also have the workplace, the workforce, the creativity, the entrepreneurial spirit. All the things that have historically made New York City great for literally centuries ride on addressing the affordability crisis. You can’t do that without money. So I think that, ironically, if wealthy people said, you cannot touch us at all, they would be killing their own golden goose in the end.

To the question of Albany, I think it’s going to be very hard, obviously, to get anything substantially done in terms of tax increase in Albany, maybe there’s a particularly narrow piece that could be done. If Hochul said, “I have an alternative to support what you want to do,” of course he should be open to it. And I think by his nature he would be, but I think his proposal starts in the right place.

Ben Smith
On the proposal to be nicer to rich people, or the advice: Do you think the fact that he is a child of a kind of Manhattan elite world in a certain way and you didn’t grow up in that world gives him an advantage in that kind of vibes-based approach to the rich? And then Juan Manuel had a question about education.

Bill de Blasio
I hadn’t thought of that, Ben. It’s an interesting thesis. I would just say that for reasons personal, familial, ideological, life experience, I did have a certain amount of angst. I did have a chip on my shoulder. And no, I didn’t— I think it’s fair to say, like that milieu — anytime I went into a private club, I always thought some authority figure would remove me because I didn’t belong there, right? So I don’t think I culturally connected particularly easily with wealthy folks. I think in some ways the public picked up on that and appreciated that. I think it’s perhaps one of those underlying things that somehow people appreciated that that was not my world.

That said, I think it’s a healthy thing to be able to communicate well with them and connect with them. I don’t know that I’d say his ability to do that is because of his familial background. It could be. I just don’t know enough about it. I do think he has a sharp, clear— I was struck, I was at Christian Cultural Center with him on Sunday and Pastor [Rev. A.R.] Bernard, who’s a perfectly moderate, pro-capitalist person, was doing a little interview session with him and pushed him on a few things. What I really liked was Zohran heard the questions, responded to them respectfully, acknowledged where he wanted to try and work with people who might have different views, but always stated his sort-of core philosophical belief. And I think there’s a comfort in his own skin that’s really striking and really positive. That probably helps him go into rooms where people disagree and still have his center and be at peace. So I don’t know if it’s so much community culture, it might be, but I do think whatever it is in his upbringing or his formation, he’s very comfortable talking with people who are different philosophically but not placating and losing his center, which I think is a great attribute.

Juan Manuel Benítez
As we speak, charter school parents and staff led by Success Academy are gathering today in Lower Manhattan. They’re gonna march over the Brooklyn Bridge advocating for charter schools. My Columbia journalism student Julie Lee reports in Labor New York today that Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of Success Academy, has been pressuring staff to attend this march and this rally. And most teachers my students spoke to believe that the main enemy, the person the rally is going to be targeting, is Zohran Mamdani, because they see him as having similar policies and ideas about charter schools that you had. What’s your advice to potential new mayor Zohran Mamdani when dealing with charter schools, and what’s your take on this kind of political advocacy that charter schools are putting forward?

Bill de Blasio
First of all, I don’t think it’s ever healthy to pressure teachers or staff or parents or students to go to rallies that they don’t want to go to. And I think it’s just a mistake. I think it’s a karmic mistake. It comes back to bite you. Second of all I would argue that what they’re doing is kind of anti-politics. At this moment, Zohran’s the most likely, by far, person to be the next mayor in New York City. So by affronting him at this sensitive moment, they are creating more distance and less ability to find common ground. I think it’s a dumb mistake.

That said, what I came to see about the charter school community is it’s extremely diverse, like shockingly diverse. And there are some charter schools that as I got to know them, I felt 100% comfortable with, that I felt were very community-oriented, were very inclusive, who were not corporate. And there were others that I thought were bringing the worst of corporate culture to education and were overtly exclusionary towards special-ed kids or kids who didn’t test well. So that to me, the first category should be supported a hundred percent. The second category doesn’t sound like public education to me. I don’t know why they get public support.

And I still think, as I’ve felt all along, the numbers say it, in New York City, overwhelmingly, we will live or die by traditional public education. The rest of the United States of America even more. Charter schools are very little, a very small part of the equation in most parts of the country. The idea of the charter movement originally was to create innovation that could come into traditional public schools. That concept got lost along the way. Maybe it could be re-found, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The thing we have to do better on, and the thing we have to fix, is traditional public schools, period.

Josh Greenman
School desegregation was a sizable push of yours. District 15 in Brooklyn did away with a lot of the screens in middle school. Should that go citywide? That’s one question. I think Mamdani is more supportive of continuing those efforts than you, but correct me if you think I’m wrong there. And second is, he’s less enthusiastic, I believe, about mayoral control [of schools] than you were when you were mayor. What would your advice to him be on that?

Bill de Blasio
My advice on mayoral control is it’s the only way to improve the schools. It’s my “Ebony and Ivory” moment with Michael Bloomberg, that we agreed entirely on mayoral control — quoting a great song there. There’s no way we would’ve gotten Pre-K for All without mayoral control of education. There’s no way we would’ve reopened schools — partially in September, 2020 and fully in September, 2021, and with no remote — if we had not had mayoral control. It’s the only way to move this gargantuan complex school system forward. So I do think there’s very legitimate concerns about increasing parental voicing and community participation in education. Those are real things. There’s improvements that can be made. But if the [State] Legislature took away mayoral control, it would set back the New York City school system for years. There’s no question in my mind.

On desegregation, I think we’ve seen some success. I think it should deepen. I think at the same time — in my painful experience on the specialized high schools, which was one of those situations where I look back and I’m like, what were we thinking? And our philosophical orientation was right, but our strategy was really off. There’s got to be a way to have a better dialogue with parents in the process of desegregation and opening up educational opportunity. I think District 15 did it pretty damn well. I think District 15 also had some real advantages going into it. In general, I think getting away from screens is smart, but I think there’s gotta be a framing dialogue and a level of parent engagement that has been missing in the past if it’s gonna be truly successful.

Harry Siegel
We convened this group because the New York Times stopped doing local endorsements. You’re shaking your head.

Bill de Blasio
I have no words. I think I expressed my opinion on their non-endorsement editorial quite clearly. I feel I did.

Myles Miller
Do you think it was just mean?

Bill de Blasio
Oh, yeah. Mean and inaccurate.

Harry Siegel
To open that up a little bit, the New York Post helped elect your successor. They endorsed in the Democratic primary. I’m stunned they have not done even a “Mam-dummy” headline yet, or maybe I missed it, but I’m just interested in your take on the maybe weakened media landscape, having been through it.

Bill de Blasio
Yeah. It’s sad and it’s worrisome. You know, I don’t want– there were no ‘good old days,’ so let’s start with that. Anytime— Something I always appreciated, Chirlane’s broad worldview was that the ‘good old days’ were not so good for a lot of us. That was something she would say frequently to me whenever I got a little nostalgic. So let’s put aside the notion of good old days, but I can also say in my personal formation, especially in the time around David Dinkins’ campaign in 1989, not only was it an extraordinary richness of media outlets and the talent that accrued to them because people actually got paid, right? I mean, it’s pre-social media and everything else, and different structures around journalism, but it was also like really powerful commentary that affected people’s lives. You know, the Jimmy Breslinses and everybody else, actually a lot of people took that in and it affected thinking. And there was certainly a theory in the 1989 campaign that if it weren’t for, you know, Jack Newfield and some other people’s voices, it would’ve been a lot harder for the city to elect its first Black mayor. So I think there’s a direct correlation between progress and a vibrant media.

Harry Siegel
Is it satisfying to watch the Post struggle a bit?

Bill de Blasio
Why would you say they’re struggling?

Harry Siegel
They’ve been gunning for the candidate who easily won the Democratic primary — and despite, by the way, an influx of the outside money, that’s something else coming in after Bloomberg — and struggling to find their target and swing zone, I would say.

Bill de Blasio
I would separate the pieces. I—

Harry Siegel
And they gunned for you, of course.

Ben Max
But you both supported Eric Adams.

Bill de Blasio
What’s that?

Ben Max
You both supported Eric Adams.

Bill de Blasio
The truth and nothing but the truth. There was never a formal endorsement. I was certainly helpful to him.

Ben Max
“Supported.”

Bill de Blasio
Absolutely. I think the money-in-politics reality is horrendous, but beautifully imperfect. Bloomberg, so many fascinating just Bloomberg examples of this. The 2009 mayoral [race] after the term limit change, where had [Bill] Thompson run a different, better campaign he actually could have beaten Bloomberg, the Bloomberg presidential, my all-time personal favorite, $1 billion, you know like three delegates or whatever. But also this recent effort for Cuomo in the primary, Bloomberg and many others. I mean, how do you spend that much money and get so little effect? So that says something good about the people.

And even though media has been buffeted, there’s still as of today enough freedom of expression and enough media discourse that people were offered an alternative in the primary and took it regardless of being bombarded with paid media telling them to do something else. So I think the jury keeps coming back and saying, the money-in-politics equation — as much as many of us fear the corrosive impact of money in politics — it is not a pure equation, thank God.

And then the question of the Post, look, this is an interesting scenario. ‘cause I would say in terms of a lot of what I experienced, they were extraordinarily influential and they led a lot of coverage in ways I found often very destructive. It is interesting, I think as Adams experienced his troubles, I think they didn’t quite know what to do. And in some way to their credit, they had spent a lot of time bashing Andrew Cuomo over the years so that was not an easy alternative. So I think they ran out of options. I think that’s some of the story here.

Josh Greenman
I want to ask about crime and disorder a little bit. You ran to reform stop-and-frisk, and you did, but you also made Bill Bratton your first police commissioner. Very important decision. And you held the line on broken windows policing even as criticism increased substantially about it, and quality-of-life policing in general. And you pushed back when I think the City Council attempted to decriminalize certain things that you did not want to decriminalize.

Bill de Blasio
Correct.

Josh Greenman
What would your guidance be to Mamdani, who seems more open to decriminalization than you were?

Bill de Blasio
I would argue he should look at what we did and see some lessons in that could be helpful. I think he has certainly shown openness— an unimpeachable commissioner and there’s numerous people that could fit that description. He’s done, I think, some very important things lately to reach out to officers and show he wants to work with them. And that’s, the officers are different than the unions, are different than the leadership. So I give him a lot of credit. He’s doing something very smart by sending a message directly to the officers and I think he should do a lot more of that.

On the decriminalization, look, we never got to a full set of policy changes around prostitution, and obviously that’s city and state, but I think something has been obviously historically wrong with the laws, and it tracks some of what we see with laws around drug usage. I think there’s a growing understanding that if someone is victimized or suffering, an addict in the case of drugs, someone who is in sex trade often not by choice or not their ideal, that’s not who we should be punishing.

Josh Greenman
What about things like fare-beating, other forms of disorder that I believe you held a line on enforcement for many of these things. What would your advice be there?

Bill de Blasio
With fare-beating, and I think Zohran and I would say some similar things on this, our central concern was to use police to address violent crime. And I was troubled, and even NYPD leadership saw this problem of if full-blown police officers are dealing with a fare-beater and that’s where their time and energy is going, that is not the highest and best use of those police officers. We tried to see if a summons approach rather than an arrest approach — because an arrest as I think you know is a big deal and an elaborate procedure. It takes up a lot of time and energy. We tried to see if summonses would be sufficient. I think the jury has come back and said, not exactly. That’s not working enough. There has to be something more aggressive around fare-beating. Whether it is going back to arrest, I’m not so sure because there was plenty of fare-beating even when we did arrest. So I think we’ve got to rethink the equation. Is it different physical barriers? Is it a placement of officers in different points at different times that kind of creates a blitz and convinces people that at any point they might get penalized? I don’t know the exact answer. I do know the fare-beating situation is unacceptable as it is. But I don’t want to romanticize that in the past, the situation was fully under control or arrest for fare-beating was such a great thing. I still think the fundamental question is: How do you first and foremost use police time and energy to address violence?

That said, and I think your rendition was accurate, most people in the public thank God do not experience violence but do experience quality-of-life offenses and they do want to see action on that. They want to see action on fare-beating. They want to see action on retail theft. And some of that is going to have to require the deployment of police officers creatively. Again, I’m not so sure it is about arrest. I think it might be about more penalty. So right now, the summons and the follow-through on a summons is insufficient. Is there a way to do something on that front where if you get one of these summonses, like with parking tickets, where people, many people take them very seriously because of the sheer cost, is that a direction that might be more productive?

Josh Greenman
That doesn’t sound like the Zohran Mamdani-voter answer.

Bill de Blasio
I don’t know what it sounds like. I’m just saying what I think.

Nicole Gelinas
What about the notion that’s been proven that disproportionately these fare-beating stops catch people with warrants, catch people with guns, catch people with knives. We still get hundreds of weapons out of the subway system before they are used in the subway system via fare-beating stops. Is this not a way to prevent violent crime rather than arrest people once they’ve committed the violent crime?

Bill de Blasio
Look, I believe in precision policing. I obviously believe in CompStat. I believe in all the powerful ideas that have emerged in the last quarter century in New York City policing. So if you do that as a precision strategy, of course. If you say, “we know at a certain subway stop that there’s been a particular issue around weaponry, and we’re going to have a regular presence there to catch weapons,” great. Bluntly, the level of fare-beating we’re experiencing now, the vast majority of those people are not carrying a weapon. So I would just put it in the bigger vein of, if it’s strategic, absolutely.

Alyssa Katz
So you talked about lessons learned on police, and I also wanted to ask you about lessons learned on mental health and particularly when it comes to serious mental illness. Looking back at ThriveNYC in hindsight and the interventions that you led, do you think at this point that serious mental illness is something that a mayor can meaningfully address? And, regardless of your answer, why do you think that the perception and the reality in many ways of serious mental illness, particularly for unhoused people, has persisted as an issue years after you’ve left office?

Bill de Blasio
We had a problem before, and it got exacerbated by COVID. I am by no means an expert on the nuances of mental health, but I think we can all say that the COVID crisis one, exacerbated the mental health challenges a lot of individuals were facing, and two, brought mental health even more squarely into the public understanding and debate. So I think there’s even more sensitivity than there was previously to the fact that many people are dealing with severe mental health problems.

I would say that often in the era when we were creating ThriveNYC, that the thing that would actually allow us to address mental health consistently, effectively would be if we had universal health insurance in America. And if it gave parity to mental and physical health. So it’s really important to say that we are never going to be able to solve this problem effectively if we can’t insure people and provide, really implement health services, and the only way that happens at the federal level — and that ain’t happening anytime soon. So it comes down to state and city, and I think it’s fair to say some of the best tools belong to the state but what the city can do, because we did develop new tools for health insurance, NYC Care, and more use of MetroPlus. The city has had real success getting more and more people into those programs, we have to go deeper on that. Some of the pieces of Thrive were effective, particularly the helpline, 888-NYC-WELL, the peer counseling, the mental health first aid, those pieces should be deepened. I don’t know who’s seen the recent video that Zohran did on Roosevelt Island about mental health, which I thought was very compelling, very powerful. It definitely picks up on some of the policies that we found were pretty effective with ThriveNYC.

I will take a note, just a second point of privilege: Less so today, but a year or two ago, quite frequently people who listen to right-wing radio and right-wing websites, etcetera, would aggressively scream out at me or Chirlane and me, that they alleged she stole $850 million. I just have to say, and again, I know right here around this table this is decent, well-intended people, but this is a really painful thing that our society has degenerated in such a manner that first of all, anyone could think a public servant — in her case an unpaid public servant — could somehow pocket 850 million. They literally think she took 850 million — that’s insane. It’s wrong. It’s inaccurate. It’s painful. It’s awful. And there’s been no effort out in the world to correct it despite our efforts. In the end, every dollar spent on Thrive, which is, as everyone here knows, is regulated wildly by the mayor’s office and OMB and the City Council and the comptroller, and everyone else, every dollar was spent on mental health. It is fair to say, was some of it really effective and other pieces more experimental that proved not to be so great? Absolutely. We explicitly said we are with mental health starting so much from scratch, we have to try different things to figure out what works.

Josh Greenman
Looking back, do you have any guidance on the use of spouses in public policy…

Bill de Blasio
Let’s finish this and I’ll come to you.

Alyssa Katz
So particularly around treatment, individuals who do not want treatment, that’s really the core of the issue, right? And we have a state law now that Eric Adams advocated for that allows for much easier involuntary commitment. Where do you stand on the use of involuntary commitment, and if you don’t support it, how do you approach treatment resistant people?

Bill de Blasio
Thank God I’m not a candidate for anything, so I can’t give you a perfect answer. I can only say that we all saw with our eyes that there were people who really should not be out on the street despite honest efforts by public agencies to address the problem. I think it’s fair to say the previous law, the previous judicial decisions really, although fantastic at protecting individual rights, which I value deeply, made it really hard to get someone in, even if they were evidently in deep distress.

We right before the pandemic were starting to do a better job of coordinating police and homeless services and Health and Hospitals to very coherently bring people in and give them a full medical evaluation, which in some cases yielded that in fact they were a threat to themselves or others and should be held in. So I think it’s fair to say I do not believe the city of New York nor the state of New York were utilizing the previous legal reality to the maximum extent possible. But I also don’t believe that was easy to do. So some law change makes sense to me. I don’t know the nuances of the new law. I do know that sometimes it’s just what you see with your eyes. There are too many people out there who should not be on the street, period. But, that is a really fine line as we’re seeing now the events of the last few days in terms of the potential of censorship in America and those dangers. The courts, you know it was frustrating as a public servant to feel that we were very limited in how we could approach certain homeless individuals, but it never escaped me that the courts were saying, if you can too easily commit someone that is a very slippery slope and could easily take us back to where we were in the seventies, eighties, where people were committed very lightly and had very little recourse, and there was very little transparency into what was happening to them. So I think the courts took a kind of a deeply Constitutional view that taking away someone’s individual liberty should be very difficult. Hopefully, a little bit more give in that situation is part of this new law. Again, I don’t know the nuances, but I would emphasize that I think the city and state have tools that I think we could use better but that are really labor-intensive if we want to get people in and keep them off the streets in a legal and appropriate way.

Ben Smith
We are a little short on time and I didn’t want spend most of this time looking backward but I thought Myles had a pretty interesting question.

Myles Miller
I was wondering about COVID, and the daily briefings and all of that. I wonder what you think you may have mis-stepped on in the first 60 days of the pandemic response?

Bill de Blasio
I’ve taught about it a lot, I’ve been asked about it a lot. The bottom line is we just didn’t have enough information, and based on what I knew in the beginning, in the very beginning, I was trying to avoid panic in the city. I was trying to avoid a collapse of the economy and a collapse of the city’s ability to serve people. And once it became clear to me that we needed much more aggressive measures, then I felt like I had the facts I needed and I could support shelter-in-place, and then later things like vaccine mandates. But the first couple of weeks were extremely hard to make sense of. And I had many, many meetings where different health leaders in the team would have different views and the sum total was, but we don’t have, we don’t have the facts.

Ben Smith
It’s funny because I think you’re sort of saying that in retrospect you wish the city had locked down sooner and that feels like the 2022 retrospect. Do you feel like in 2025 retrospect— I think you, among Democrats, were probably among the most anti-lockdown, among the quickest to open schools nationally. Do you think maybe you shouldn’t have, in retrospect looking at just politics and culture that you actually locked down too hard?

Bill de Blasio
No, I don’t. Look, Ben, it’s very interesting. From the moment I left office, my flow of information decreased radically. So I follow the news intensely, but not anywhere near— I mean, I used to get briefed obsessively on everything all the time by real expert people. So I want to say, I don’t know if I have every bit of information that’s emerged since 2022. Looking back at the pandemic, I’m a hundred percent comfortable with what we did on schools — a hundred percent. And I’m appalled — it doesn’t matter what the jurisdiction was politically, I think that one of the biggest mistakes in a lot of parts of this country was not reopening schools. But in terms of lockdown, we had an immediate surge in March of 2020 that from everything I know, and I will lay it squarely at the governor’s feet here, when I called for shelter-in-place I think if he had just forgotten all his other politics and intrigue and emotion and just done it right then, I think it would’ve helped. I think it could have saved lives. I think the only way to break the pattern, that first intense surge of COVID, was to do lockdown. And then you’ll remember we were— by the way, we had projections around that time that were, things could get much, much, much worse. And I do think the lockdown arrested the surge of COVID and helped us reset. And by that summer, we had a very tough May and June in terms of protest and other things, but in COVID terms, by the summer, we were substantially better.

Juan Manuel Benítez
You were repeatedly humiliated by Governor Cuomo, not only during the pandemic but even before that. How are you experiencing right now, his campaign for mayor?

Bill de Blasio
It’s a horrible campaign. First, easy analytical point: he’s run a horrible primary campaign and a horrible general election campaign. And I think it’s about essence. Howard Glaser used to work for him, who I worked with very closely, and he had some great tweets about this. Like the guy’s running for an office he doesn’t want, he maligned, he thought was second class—not just an attack on me, just his general view of the mayoralty. And his only goal in life is to be president of the United States and be quote-unquote better than his father, which is insane and an insane way to look at life. But that’s how he lives his life. And I think the fact that he doesn’t even respect the job and in many ways doesn’t even respect New York City — and that’s how he comported himself as governor — the chickens are coming home to roost, right? This is just, this is very karmic. So that’s what I’m seeing. Look, it was painful dealing with him, but even when I was in office, I think more and more people were seeing through it. I’m glad it is being seen even more clearly now, but this is not the first time I think that people started to realize what was really going on with this guy.

Juan Manuel Benítez
And quickly, a follow up, because there seems to be a disconnect here, fairly or unfairly: New Yorkers don’t have a pretty loving opinion of you and your time as mayor. And every time we had a Democratic candidate for mayor here earlier this year, when we asked them to rank the top five mayors of their lifetime, most of them I think put Michael Bloomberg pretty high up. The only one who, from what I remember, put you at number one was Zohran Mamdani. After he said that, I thought, this guy’s losing it.

Bill de Blasio
Thank you for your honesty.

Juan Manuel Benítez
So where’s the disconnect when everybody else who’s having or still has Bloomberg in such a high regard, and then the guy who is leading and most likely winning this thing is someone who is trying to follow in your steps.

Bill de Blasio
I don’t know if I can give you a perfect answer to that. I think the view of Bloomberg, and again, I’ll give Bloomberg credit for some of the things I think he did well, particularly on public health. But the public came damn close to rejecting him in 2009 and then by electing me certainly was consciously choosing the clearest alternative to Bloomberg in 2013, and then reelected me squarely in 2017. So I think this notion of the public being in love with Bloomberg, I don’t buy., I think the political class, the media, whatever, different discussion. The elites, I agree.

I haven’t seen recent polling, but I’m sure I still have my share of challenges in polling but the policies were very popular. In other words, the things I stood for and the things I acted on were perfectly popular. I think sometimes the problem was me and my own missteps and communication problems, et cetera. And sometimes it was just dumb luck and circumstance. Governing during COVID was not a formula for popularity. But the policies, the direction, the ideals, I think were popular then, are popular now, and I think Zohran understands that. I think he gave an answer from the heart. I think it was an authentic answer. But I think he also understood that’s where New Yorkers are.

Harry Siegel
It’s been over an hour. Thank you for taking the time and going through all this. We barely touched on Trump and him looming over the city.

You were a steadfast supporter of Israel as mayor, beginning when Zohran Mamdani was a college student first getting involved in politics as a BDS supporter. In 2019, you said in a speech that the attempt to boycott, divest and sanction Israel as an apartheid regime was “unacceptable” and noted that the majority of hate crimes in New York targeted Jews, which I believe is again true this year and said, quote, “maybe some people don’t realize it, but when they support the BDS movement, they’re affronting the right of Israel to exist, and that is unacceptable.”

Is that still your position? And then more broadly, could you reflect on why the Democratic Party and its mayoral nominee seem to be in such a different place than it was during your two terms in office — which also overlapped with Netanyahu being the prime minister of Israel, and Mamdani said he’ll arrest him at the airport if he comes to New York — and those changes.

Bill de Blasio
Look I think there’s been extraordinary change in recent years and not for the better. And I’ll place all the original sin in the world at the feet of Hamas for the massacre that they perpetrated. But I also think Netanyahu’s actions have profoundly alienated a huge swath of the American people. And I think the attempt to say Democrat, Republican really misses a lot. I think there’s a lot of pain in this country over what’s happening in Gaza. So I believe what I believe, because I am blessed with a certain view of history. As I think many of you know, my parents were disproportionately older when they had me. They were both 44. So my dad was a captain in the U.S. Army during World War II and was wounded in action on Okinawa, and my mom worked for the Office of War Information on broadcast to Italy when it was fascist or later German occupied. So the memory of Nazism, the memory of the Holocaust, et cetera, it’s very present for me familially — let alone then on my journey, including the many years in the City Council where I represented Borough Park and would consistently come in contact with Holocaust survivors. I mean, it’s very, very personal.

I say that to say I believe in the state of Israel. Even with the problems that have existed recently, I believe in the state of Israel. I believe it’s necessary in the world. I don’t think anything that has happened has changed that. But I also understand why more and more people can’t feel what they used to feel about Israel. And I said, I think it was on MSNBC the other day, that I want people to remember that it was not that long ago that Israel was profoundly admired in the world as this response to oppression and a place that was in many ways enlightened. I think Israel once upon a time was seen through a profoundly humanistic lens, and it’s very hard to feel and see that in some ways now. And I hope and pray that subsequent Israeli governments will go back to that, to help protect Israel in the future.

So I still believe in the state of Israel. I still oppose BDS because I still think BDS is an affront to the concept of the state of Israel. But I, like so many Americans, believe Netanyahu should not be the leader, believe people have been killed in Gaza, children have been killed in Gaza, who should never have died, that famine is being perpetrated that should never have happened, et cetera. And I don’t know why that wouldn’t change American politics. It is not Vietnam because we don’t have boots on the ground, because we’re not seeing our brothers and cousins come back, wounded or dead. But like Vietnam — I think this is being missed a bit in the discourse — something’s being done in our name, with our weapons, with our money, and I think people are deeply pained, especially if they happen to be younger and don’t have access to some of that history very personally.

[Crosstalk]

Just real quick, just to finish, I don’t think someone who’s 20, 30, 40 and doesn’t have as much vantage point on what happened in the 1930s and ‘40s, and also doesn’t even have vantage point on some of the better impact that Israel had in the world and as an example in the fifties, sixties, seventies, whatever you wanna say. I think if all they’re seeing is recent events, not notwithstanding again the absolute and total guilt of Hamas, I understand why it’s just deeply painful.

Juan Manuel Benítez
So do you think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza?

Bill de Blasio
Sadly, yes. I didn’t used to, I didn’t used to…

Josh Greenman
Should Netanyahu be arrested by the NYPD?

Bill de Blasio
I don’t think, I don’t know how to answer that because I don’t see a precedent given that this country doesn’t subscribe to the ICC [International Criminal Court]. I just don’t know how to answer that.

Juan Manuel Benítez
But you do believe [Israel is committing genocide]?

Bill de Blasio
Yeah. I did not. Honestly, a year ago or even less, I thought the word genocide was too much. I thought it was an unfair characterization. But the famine dynamics, I mean the fact that there is a famine and it is being explicitly ignored by the Israeli government, unfortunately, we’ve entered into a new territory, and that’s a word that– and again, that is not the people of Israel. That is not the broader concept of the state of Israel. That is the Netanyahu government.

Nicole Gelinas
So let me just, to somewhat incongruously switch topics abruptly: Vision Zero was a big success of your mayoralty, saved hundreds of lives through cutting traffic deaths.

Bill de Blasio
Thank you.

Nicole Gelinas
But the issue of Uber: Do you think that you were wrong to not do the cap on the number of for-hire vehicles earlier on in your mayoralty? And what would your advice be to the next mayor with the driverless cars, which have the potential to just flood the streets with cheap cars even more than Uber did?

Bill de Blasio
The driverless cars are a public safety danger, period. We’ve seen it around the country, and we are so much more complex a setting than San Francisco or Arizona, the places where we’ve already seen people die. No: driverless cars make no sense in New York City, and they would be horrific in terms of employment, which I think is a much bigger question about AI in general. I think we’re going to a dangerous place in employment terms. So I would strongly urge any new mayor to not allow driverless cars in New York City.

On the issue of the [for-hire vehicle] cap, yeah, there’s several things I wish we had in retrospect and we tried, remember, in the City Council to act on Uber and Uber fought back very effectively. So what I’d say is what we tried to do, I wish we had succeeded at, and I think I fundamentally misunderstood Uber’s ability to organize people. So yes, more early aggressive action. But the even truer thing is I wish we had said to the taxi industry, like really aggressively, that you can do what they’re now doing here and around the world where they could create their own Uber-like alternative or blend with Uber in some ways. I think there was a couple years in there where if that had been done, it would’ve strengthened the taxi industry and created more accountability and balance for Uber. And we did not perceive that we could get them to move as an industry. They were quite resistant, but it’s kind of a time and energy thing. If we had been smart enough to say no, let’s try and get them there, we might have saved everyone an immense amount of trouble.

Nicole Gelinas
How do you fight back when they created a base of activist-consumers. Maybe you could see the same thing with people saying, “I love my driverless car. It’s $5 to get from here to here.” How do you fight that?

Bill de Blasio
Educating people and building broader coalitions. I think later, as we were able to do some aggressive things on Uber because people saw many more of the problems with Uber. And they understood that the drivers were being treated unfairly, and also people were pissed off at surge pricing and different things. So I think what I learned in that and many other situations, I could give you a list of things where we didn’t lay the framework properly. Had we done that, we could have succeeded much more. And with driverless cars, yes, I agree with you. Some people might be tempted, it’s low cost, but the public safety danger I think is gonna be abundantly clear.

Ben Smith
Have you ever taken a Waymo?

Bill de Blasio
No.

Ben Smith
OK. As a Waymo activist, who’s gonna be working you on this, you should check it out. I think they’re very nice, and safe.

Bill de Blasio
Wait a minute: You’re calling yourself a Waymo activist?

Ben Smith
I think I might be. I’ve taken them four or five times, it’s a really nice experience.

Bill de Blasio
Wait a minute, I thought you were, you were an objective journalist?

Ben Smith
I know. I’m falling off the objective horse for driverless cars.

Bill de Blasio
Scandal! Scandal here at the New York Editorial Board!

Ben Smith
Just one final question, which I’m stealing from Akash Mehta, who’s not here. Big picture, what are the biggest substantive differences between you and Zohran Mamdani, and do you think of him as to your left?

Bill de Blasio
I haven’t analyzed that question, where he stands, becauseI know what I have seen reported about his views. I have not asked him about every topic or researched everything he’s ever said, so I don’t know where he and I fit specifically on the spectrum. I think there’s a perception that he is more left, but I just don’t have a perfect scale for that. What was your first part? I’m sorry,

Ben Smith
That’s the question. The biggest difference? Are there substantive differences?

Bill de Blasio
Look, I would say on most of what I’ve seen on affordability, no there’s not. I think the one, I’d say mayoral control of education, which again, he said what he said and he’s not mayor yet, and there’s time to see where that goes. But I think the concern I would have for him, and the ability to have the impact he wants to have for kids, is that there needs to be a real effort to protect mayoral control.

Ben Smith
Well, thank you for doing this.

Bill de Blasio
Thank you everyone.