Zohran Mamdani Plays Mario Kart On Twitch To Talk Fast Buses

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani once again took to Twitch for another session of his “Talk With The People” show to talk about policy in the big city, primarily with a focus on the mayor’s plans to improve bus travel in the Big Apple. This comes off his administration’s recent announcement of the bus action plan, and to talk about the initiative, the mayor was joined by Assistant Commissioner for Transit Development Diniece Mendes to play Mario Kart World live on stream. Maybe he should stick to winning mayoral races instead of getting on the track, though, because Mendes managed beat him while talking about the future of public transit in New York City.

Wildly enough, Mamdani says he’d never seen a Switch controller before today, and I mean, I guess coming from the same guy who doesn’t know what Minecraft is beyond the movie, that’s not impossible? The pair started racing on the Toad’s Turnstile track, which has buses, so it’s thematically appropriate.

In between the trash talk and discussing the city’s new bus action plan, Mamdani asked chat to weigh in with some stories of their bus experiences in New York City, but whoever runs the NYC Mayor’s Twitch account has become wise since Mamdani’s first stream in which the chat was spamming crude comments and NSFW ASCII images, so they’ve now put restrictions on the chat so it moves slower and isn’t getting spammed with such…uh, art. Now the chat is filled with people requesting the mayor play games like Marvel Rivals and Overwatch, and I’m half convinced he could turn a group of toxic players into a cohesive unit in one round.