Pete Buttigieg: I'm really worried about where we're headed as a country right now. America's system is so out of whack that if you are a multibillionaire, you probably pay a lower percentage in taxes than if you're a school teacher or a firefighter. You have levels of inequality that we've almost never seen. There's a rise in political violence, the collapse in trust, and the biggest thing of all that we're facing right now is this massive debt, but it's now escalated to a level that no one can ignore. How do you think this plays out? I mean, and we're on the brink of losing our democracy and we're running out of time to do something about it.

Host: Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Trump made a lot of promises when he came into power. Keen to get your perspective on the Iran war.

Pete Buttigieg: So, the president can't explain why we're there. There's a lot of reasons to suspect that we're just at war cuz he wanted us to. And now I can't figure out how to get us out of it. Troops have lost their lives. [music] Prices are higher. You're paying more for gas, for food, or for mortgages because of this war. And so that the next president will be doing this at a big disadvantage because so many relationships with our allies have been burned.

Host: So I am keen to get your perspective on AI good bad. Should we implement a wealth tax? Is there anything you respect about Trump but also greater Israel for example? But what does Netanyahu want in the region? And then were you the first person in a presidential candidate to be openly gay?

Pete Buttigieg: Uh definitely the first person who's considered to have a shot. And when I finally made peace with [music] this reality that I was gay, I was well into my 20s cuz I wanted so bad for it not to be true. I'd like to believe we'll get to a day when it's just not a thing. No one cares.

Host: Secretary Pete Buttigieg, are you going to run to be president in 2028?

Host: Um, this is super interesting to me. My team gave me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe and some of you have told us according to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular view of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the Diary of a CEO, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show.

Host: [singing] Secretary Pete Buttigieg, how are you feeling about the nature of politics at the moment, but I should probably say the nature of American life at the moment?

Pete Buttigieg: I'm really worried about where we're headed as a country. I think in many ways our entire existence has been about creating a different kind of political system and introducing it to the world. That's what we're about. And now that whole project is in question. That whole project is in my view, it's on the brink.

Host: On the brink?

Pete Buttigieg: Yeah.

Host: What? What do you mean by that?

Pete Buttigieg: I mean, we're on the brink of losing our democracy. The whole idea of this country, the whole idea of overthrowing a king was that everyday life would get better if we set up a country where the people are in charge of the government instead of the other way around. And now we're in this moment where after all of the things we've gone through for decades, for 250 years, it's not clear if that's going to work out. I think it will. I believe it will if we do what we have to do. But that means reforming, tuning up, changing that political system because the problems in that political system help to explain all of the economic problems that I think so many Americans are living with where you've had enormous economic growth and shockingly little of it making it into people's pockets where you have levels of inequality that we've almost never seen in this country. And then the other thing is there there's the American promise in terms of the system, the politics, the government, democracy, the America's gift to the world, creating democracy, but there's the economic version of that which is the American dream, right? The idea that no matter how you start, speaks to a lot of people who know that the system has let them down. And even though I think he's somebody who really benefits from the system as it is, it's made him rich and kept him rich, you know, his message was, I'm going to blow it all up. And I think he's blowing up all the wrong things. But look, if the systems let you down, you're only going to vote so many times within that system before somebody comes along and says, "I'm going to blow it all up." And you say, "Well, I may not even like the guy, but uh I'll give him a shot to see if that makes me better off." Now, I also think he lied to a lot of people. Um you know, some people voted for him because they believed him when he said he's not going to start a new war. Many people voted for him because they believed him when he said on day one he was going to start lowering costs. And right now inflation's higher than it was the day he took over. So these promises weren't true, but they spoke to something that I think a lot of people had on their mind that that made a lot of people willing to burn things down. And there's a lesson for my party in that. I'm obviously passionately against many destructive things that he's doing. That doesn't mean the answer is to quote unquote reverse the damage, put everything back the way it was.

Host: Mhm.

Pete Buttigieg: Because you're right there that the Democrats have a lot of responsibility here um for a lot of reasons. I think the very fact that Trump was voted into power says something about how people felt with the previous administration, which was a Democratic

Interviewer: administration. What responsibility does the Democratic Party have for getting the country to a place where they thought Democrats weren't the solution? Because that's kind of I think a lot of people thought that's just like more of the same.

Secretary: Yeah.

Interviewer: Maybe people are getting increasingly I think across the Western world by the looks of it increasingly tied with like politicians saying these like cute words and like we're going to help the working people and blah blah blah blah blah and being very polished. And then you see this these other figures that have come in and said I'm not a politician.

Secretary: Yeah. Yeah.

Interviewer: And as you say, I'm going to burn it down.

Secretary: For some reason, people are choosing that.

Interviewer: Yeah. Even though when they do, usually that person makes it worse. And so that's why the president's unpopular, but the president is unpopular. To your point, that doesn't mean people are automatically going to trust Democrats.

Secretary: Yeah. Right. Uh so I mean, the answer to your question is yes, Democrats have a responsibility to present something that is better, not just better than now, but it's got to be better than before. The fact remain is a lot of these results have unfolded on you know, kind of regardless of who's in power.

Interviewer: Are you going to run to be president in 2028?

Secretary: I don't know. Um, I would have to believe, and this is how I've approached every every time I've decided to run for office. It's looking at everything that the office seems like it needs, not just generally, but in that moment, and then looking at what I bring to the table and asking myself, okay, am I bringing something that's different enough from what others are bringing? And that fits like that moment. Like that's what led me to run for mayor, which is a pretty unlikely move in in Southbend, Indiana when I was in my 20s. It's what led me to run for president when I did almost 8 years ago. Now,

Interviewer: I'll use your own words here, Secretary. Um, you said politics often favors someone who is completely different to the current leader. And that you could not be more different from Trump. I quote, "An intellectual young gay mayor from the Midwest." You know, Amazon have this really interesting thing when they hire people, um, which we've copied. They every time you meet someone, you have to vote one of four things. You either vote strongly not inclined, not inclined, inclined, and strongly inclined. So, you've got four options when you interview someone. We do the same in our company now. We took it from them. And the whole idea here is to prevent people from sitting on the fence, which is like what is your inclination? So, if I presented you with those four options as it relates to you running for president in 2028 as things stand, and this is just a balance of probability, are you inclined?

Secretary: Not inclined, strongly not inclined.

Interviewer: Strongly inclined.

Interviewer: Um, on these podcasts, nobody ever tells the bloody truth. This is why it's difficult sometimes to interview politicians cuz we all have an inclination, right?

Secretary: Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons why you hesitate to to talk in those terms is because, you know, like people are going to run with it and it'll be this like news of the day thing and it'll, you know, it'll kind of dominate the next couple of days when you're trying to talk about something else.

Interviewer: But does the truth just not matter more though than the consequence of the truth in this regard?

Secretary: Yeah. Yeah, but the truth about like what you know what I'm maybe going to do like there's a there's a level of like not even being certain some of the things I'll have to weigh like before having made a decision like this before I can tell you that there's the read

Interviewer: I need the inclination

Secretary: like I'm I'm obviously not to one end or the other.

Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So you're not those two.

Secretary: Um I think I'm like more inclined than not.

Interviewer: Okay, then I appreciate that.

Secretary: Um, but there's so much we don't know. There's so much I don't even know about what's going to happen this year, let alone, you know, what we need to know later. Um, and this is not, you know, the weight of a decision like that. And I don't just mean like the national political weight, but just like the weight of a decision to run for office for you and your family, which frankly I did not fully understand, but until I had kids. Uh that's changed all of my equations. [clears throat] Um it it's just something that you really sit with and take seriously, which you should.

Interviewer: One of the big things that people are talking about at this moment in time is the Iran war. And this feeds into some of the points we were touching on around promises kept and not kept. What is going on in plain terms? Because Americans are getting lots of messages. We've destroyed everything. Iran, the military bases are all gone. and then we're back at war and American lives have been taken, right? Can you help us see through all of this?

Secretary: I think what's going on is the president has painted himself and the country into a corner. There was a a moment where it seemed to him that he was better off politically if we were at war. even though he promised that we wouldn't be, even though a lot of his supporters didn't want the war, and certainly the the American people as a whole don't want it, but he was under a lot of heat over cost of living, over the Epstein files, which was dominating the conversation every day, being proven to be as connected to an infamous pedophile as Jeffrey Epstein, and then doing everything he could to cover up disclosures about it. Right? This is something that obviously was something that was creating a ton of heat on the president. Meanwhile, there's a lot of people in his ear every day and some of them from American politicians to people around the world would really like to see him go to war. Why? Well, it's kind of the tradition of the Republican party is to generally be more pro-war, right? That's I mean, you know, my coming of age was at the time of the Iraq war. In fact, a big part of what kind of pulled me fully into politics was being opposed to the Iraq war.

Interviewer: One of the things that a lot of people won't know about you is that you did actually go and serve your country. I've got some photos of you here serving and I think you've got your uh parents I think post Afghanistan as well.

Secretary: Yeah, that's the day I got back.

Interviewer: I just think it's important for people to know that you can speak to this quite accurately having served your country.

Secretary: Yeah, I mean I know what it feels like to get on a gray tail airplane that's taking you into a war zone and and wondering what's waiting for you there. Where we are now is a lot of troops are in that situation. They're in harm's way and the president doesn't seem to have a plan. He can't explain why we're there. He said it's for regime change. He said it's for unconditional surrender. He said that it's to get deal with their nuclear program. But last year he said they obliterated the nuclear program. And so it there's a lot of reasons to suspect that we're just at war because he wanted us to be and now I can't figure out how to get us out of it. And it appears that any way forward leaves us worse off than we were before the war. Prices are higher. Troops have lost their lives. And it seems like the least bad options still involve Iran having more control over the Straight of Hormuz than they were asserting a year ago. Most Americans shouldn't have to be worrying about the straight of Hormuz. They got enough to worry about. And a year ago, we weren't. That was not a problem. Whatever was going on in the straight of Hormuz did not feel like it was a problem. You know, where I live in Michigan and now it is.

Interviewer: Why though? What what was the like domino effect that caused him to go, you know what?

Secretary: I think we can just go in there, decapitate the leader.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Secretary: And announce victory. Obviously, this is a question for the president, but honestly, I don't fully understand why they would do something like this, especially because we know like you didn't have to be like an expert in international affairs and security studies to know if we actually attacked Iran, they were going to shut down the straight and try to the

Speaker B: ...world economy. Like, it was literally the most obvious next thing that could happen. And yet it seems like he either didn't understand or didn't believe. Surely he was told this. We know in fact it's been reported that he was told this and he did it anyway. So how does that happen? I mean I've long given up trying to see into the mind of this president.

Speaker A: Dare I say if you are president in 2028, this could be your responsibility to resolve.

Speaker B: I mean I really hope that the next president isn't facing this war dragging on into 2029. But I mean, yeah, one thing we have learned is that it is harder to stop a war than it is to start one. Which is why if you have any other reasonable choice, you don't start one.

Speaker A: So what are you going to do if you are president?

Speaker B: Look, the next president will face a complicated, violent, and challenging Middle East and world map no matter what. and the next president's gonna have to deal with that while dealing with uh a more assertive China and a dramatically swiftly evolving security landscape partly because of things like AI.

Speaker A: Just as you and I are sitting here now, there's a lot of headlines about a big safety issue created by an AI model that was supposed to not even be able to access the internet managing to get itself on the internet and hack into another company to get the answers to a test that it was told to solve. Right? And that's as of today in 2026. The things that could be going on by 2029 are surely going to change both what we're up against and what's possible. Look, in the same way that there was a nuclear hotline between Washington and Moscow, because it turns out, even while at each other's throats in a lot of ways, one thing that Americans and Soviets didn't want was to incinerate the planet. Mhm.

Speaker B: There's going to have to be some way for countries that do not trust each other today to coordinate on things like making sure AI doesn't lead to bioweapons being made by rogue actors or even individual actors. Making sure that it doesn't lead to uh nuclear proliferation or any number of other problems, right, that could happen. So the security picture, I think, will be more challenging for the next president than it's been for any president since the cold war.

Speaker A: So what kind of president in terms of mentality or character experience do you think can meet those challenges?

Speaker B: Well, you need somebody who's deliberate and decisive. Uh those two things sometimes are in tension because deliberation means you slow down, you look at what's going on and you think about it.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: But decisive doesn't mean you immediately make a call every time a question is put to you. It does mean that you once you feel like you've got enough information. You make a decision. You own the consequences of that decision, you move on to the next decision. And I think in terms of kind of character and style, we're going to need both of those things. We're going to need wisdom. We're going to need judgment. And we're going to need judgment that is not twisted or changed or colored or um biased based on corrupt reasons. And the reason I mentioned that is because right now we've got for the first time ever out of all of our presidents uh a president whose family is making billions of dollars from things that are sometimes directly connected to the decision of a foreign government, right? Uh there was one government in the Middle East that put hundreds of millions of dollars into the family crypto fund of this president. You got Saudi Arabia investing in the first family's business interests to the tune of, I believe, a couple of billion dollars for the president's son-in-law, right? And we just can't afford with everything that's on the line right now to have the next president be someone who could remotely be influenced by those kinds of considerations given everything that's on the line for the American people and for American security. When you look at that the picture um in Iran, it's all well and good saying we have to uh we have to get out of there. But how?

Speaker A: No, the only good way to do it is to not be there in the first place. It's too late for that.

Speaker B: And so, as is often the case in difficult decisions that executives face, it will be finding the least bad combination of options, which probably means engaging a lot of other countries, a lot of regional partners, uh a lot of allies. Now again, the next president will be doing this at a big disadvantage because so many relationships with our allies have been burned. And it turns out you you build relationships with allies not just out of friendliness or because it's neat. You do it because you're going to need each other someday. And the worse something is, the more difficult a problem. Just like life, you know, the times I'm quickest to call a friend are the times when I'm hurting the most or feel like I I I need help the most, right? Same is true for countries. The tougher your situation, the more you got to have friends you can count on. We are in a very tough situation in Iran. We will be for a long time. We need our friends because, you know, you're dealing with a lot of um dare I say very large ego leaders around the world.

Speaker A: You got your Putins.

Speaker B: I don't even know who's running around at the moment. Then you've got China.

Speaker A: Um does it need a leader with a ego of the same size? because I sometimes I think like I think crazy people kind of respect crazy people in a weird way.

Speaker B: I think I think a lot of different ways to deal with people like that. But I think the the most useful is to earn a level of credibility. And when we're talking with allies, a level of trust. When we're talking with adversaries, it's maybe not the same thing as trust, but it is credibility that when you say you're going to do something or you seem like you're going to do something, you're going to do it. It means less energy gets wasted on guesswork and it means you have just a little more stability. I think something all of us are looking for in the world right now is for it to just be a little more stable. And by the way, the way to do that is not to like rewind and imagine that we can make the world look the way it looked in the '90s or the '50s. It's not like that. We're going to have to find new ways to create a stable future. But look, there there are as many different kinds of personalities in world leaders and presidents as there are, you know, in humanity in general. But it'll need to be somebody who, like I said, is deliberate and decisive, tough and fair and credible.

Speaker A: Yeah. The the the Iran situation is particularly it's particularly uncertain for many reasons. In part because I don't know who the leadership there is anymore. In part because that it seems like they will now control the strait of Hummus or at least use it as leverage really irrespective of what outcome takes place and in part because you still have this nuclear threat. Yeah.

Speaker B: Um that they are probably now more motivated to de develop nuclear weapons than they probably were under Obama when he signed that

Speaker A: that agreement with them.

Speaker B: Yes, they may have less capacity, but they certainly have more motivation at this point.

Speaker A: Would you let them develop nuclear weapons if you were president?

Speaker B: No, they should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Uh a nuclear armed Iran, I mean, look at the malevolent activities that they already have pursued with conventional means, terrorist groups around the region and around the world. Like this is not a regime, certainly not in its current form or anything resembling its current form that could ever be trusted with nuclear weapons. No, different presidents, each of the last few presidents had a way of making sure that that never happened. The best way to do that was through diplomacy. That was the whole point of the Obama deal. The first Trump administration tore up the Obama deal, but couldn't get a better deal. And then when the Biden administration was trying to get a better deal, it was very hard to work across the table to get the Iranians to negotiate because they remembered that it was Trump who tore up the Obama deal. Right? It's part of what I mean when I talk about credibility. It doesn't mean that people across the

Interviewer: you mean they have to have some sense that it's at least worth dealing with you, right? And there's not a lot of that given that kind of instability, that pattern that we faced. You know, I followed American politics, I think, since I was about 10. One of the things I've never heard mentioned so much in politics is Israel. It appears to me as a objective observer that the subject of Israel is now so central to politics.

Secretary: Yeah.

Interviewer: Why? What's going on with the US's relationship with Israel and the public sentiment towards Israel?

Secretary: Well, it's getting a lot of attention because many very important things are at stake and they've been put into conflict with each other, right? And each of those things is a valid thing, at least in my opinion. And I'll name three. One which has become very challenging for many Jewish Americans, is the safety of Jews around the world and in America. Theoretically, that could be separated from what's happening in Israel and Palestine. But in the real world, there's been a relationship between what's going on there and an explosion in anti-semitism that has many American Jewish families afraid for their safety. Another thing is the safety and dignity of Palestinian people who in Gaza, but not only in Gaza, have been subjected to horrific violence and in my opinion war crimes. And alongside that, there is the safety and dignity of people in Israel who we have a security relationship with as a country and have since the Jewish state of Israel was founded, the future and survival of Israel as a Jewish state and a country that is still responding to the worst day of the most violence against Jews since the Holocaust. Those three things I believe in principle can be honored at the same time. In fact, I believe in principle they have to be honored at the same time.

Interviewer: Is that what Netanyahu wants?

Secretary: No, I don't think he is remotely interested in the safety and dignity and security of Palestinian people. I think he believes that he would be better off if they didn't exist or at the very least he doesn't want them around. Right. And so we see a policy which obviously has led to what it did in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, which gets less attention, maybe because there's been fewer deaths there, but pretty horrific behavior and conduct and violence from settlers that is part of a project of making it impossible for there to be a secure, viable Palestinian state. So, what does Netanyahu want in the region? Well, I don't know that I'm much more capable of seeing into the mind of Netanyahu than I am seeing into the mind of Trump. But looking into his choices, it seems that he wants to be able to assert domination of any other regional player and something that is beyond just security and safety for the people of Israel, which is something that I believe in and something I think is hard to argue with, but something else, which is a project of taking over what is called greater Israel in his ideology and his worldview.

Interviewer: Grace Israel.

Secretary: Yeah, that's Israel, which is a vision that does not have a lot of room for Palestinians anywhere between the river and the sea. He won't say it in those terms, but if you look at his actions, it is hard to believe that he is comfortable with anything less. What's your take on how Trump has treated Netanyahu and that relationship? Is that the relationship you would have had?

Interviewer: It's not the relationship I would add. Um, I think like all things with Trump, it's pretty transactional. It's instrumental. It's what's in it for me. And I think part of how that has developed into a friendmy relationship now is that, you know, the relationship that maybe served him well politically is not so good for him now. Because among other things, Netanyahu has an interest in a continued US presence in an Iran war that has gone from being something Trump would thought would be politically useful for Trump to something that is politically dangerous for Trump. How do you think this plays out, Secretary? What do you think happens? You know, I said there I sort of hypothesized that by 2028 this will still be dragging on because from my perspective, you're either going to kind of lie to the American public and say that and declare some kind of victory or you're going to stay in there. I can't actually see a third option personally. So, how how do you imagine this playing out?

Secretary: There's got to be a way to get out of Iran. Like, we just cannot. First of all, the president has already backpedled a lot, even though he would never admit it on what we're there to do because he said unconditional surrender. That's not happening. He said regime change. Regime hasn't changed. We went from Ayatollah Kame toy Kame Jr. at least on paper. Who knows if the guy's alive, but the regime is alive. But the regime's entire ideology is based on hating the United States, right? And now that the United States has done this, hard to believe that's going to change. There will have to be an exit that is very unlikely to be the unconditional surrender that Trump promised, but has to be something that is tolerable to this country, to our country, to Americans, which includes passage through the Straits of Hormos. And the only way to do that, I think, is with a lot of international partners who want the same thing to happen. Remember, anyone east of Iran is feeling more economic pain even than we are from what's happening in the straits. China and

Interviewer: yeah because East Asia relies on oil and and goods that go through there more.

Secretary: So I think what you're going to have to have is a regional and international partnership that ensures something at least resembling free passage of goods and security without the US sending troops in there or continuing to be at war. It's it's it's seems like the only way, but it's unquestionably worse than where we were a year ago before the war started. Did you hear recently that Trump mentioned I think it was at the G7 summit, we run out of reserves about 4 weeks. You know, there are reserves all over the world and we would really run out and there'll be time when we wouldn't be able to get it. It would be bedum. and he made these comments last month 2026 at the G7 summit in regards to the amount of oil the United States have left in the reserves. He was I think he was framing it around why he signed this memorandum of understanding this agreement with them. But you know in the last week we've gone back to war and the straight of Hermuse appears to be closed again.

Interviewer: So when we think about oil reserves and how that impacts ordinary Americans and what might be around the corner there's a real pressure here to find a solution and to find a

Secretary: Yes. I mean, look, this is why he signed an MOU that was frankly more on Iranian terms than American terms. I mean, the ceasefire, so-called ceasefire, emerged from a deal that was really us responding to what Iran came up with, not vice versa. Again, he said he was out for regime change and unconditional surrender. We're not even talking about that anymore. We're nowhere near that. And now what we have is a set of conditions. It's us redlinining their text, not the other way around, right? And then he's trying to figure out how do I go out and sell that? And so he points out something that is true. Sometimes he tells the truth when it serves him. And when he was trying to explain why he backpedalled on his war goals, the way he explained it was by admitting that there was a level of economic vulnerability that was unleashed by closing the straight, which is what Iran did to respond to the US attacks. Right? But the problem is that ceasefire is not happening. At least not as you and I are sitting here right now. still a hard thing for them to admit. You know, in the same way that he took out a Sharpie to modify a hurricane map rather than acknowledge that he was mistaken about some detail uh during a national disaster once his administration deleted four names from the ranks of those killed in action in this conflict because they were afraid that listing their names would contradict him saying that we had a ceasefire.

Interviewer: Really? Yeah.

Secretary: At least that's the only explanation I can think of. The crazy

Interviewer: thing is all of us know there's a war. We've even had moments, remember, I think it was Secretary Rubio said in Congress where there's punishment for lying, you know, you're supposed to lie to Congress. He said, "The war's over. We all know the war's not over." Are they stuck? Because they seem a bit stuck to me. I was watching Hegseth in front of I think it was Congress. Yeah, it was Congress the other day. And they're just repeating his quotes back to him over and over and over and over again. Yeah, because how's he supposed to explain that we're in a war that supposedly we already won, that we're not getting any of the things that were supposedly worth going to war over, and that the bill for this keeps getting bigger in terms of tax dollars. I think his latest number was 37.5 billion. That's our money, all of us as American taxpayers. And of course, the cost in lives and the cost in terms of everything in America, starting with gas, being more exposed. They don't want to be explaining that, right? But they don't have a great way out either and they're not prepared to lead us to a better place because they don't even know what it looks like. Is there anything you respect about Trump?

Pete Buttigieg: Sure. Um I think he has been able to create the impression of a bias for action and I think he gets a lot of credit for that. I think in general and especially in government there's a lot of hand ringing like oh we got to have a 19-step process to get all these things exactly. I saw this during my four years trying to get stuff built in this country as Secretary of Transportation that there were so many hoops and so much red tape and he comes in and he says like, "Nope, not doing that. We're just going to do this." Now. Often what he's doing turns out to be illegal and it gets reversed. And obviously I think most of his policies are terribly destructive. But I I think you have to respect the effect that he has had with that kind of bias toward just doing something. And I think we could learn a bit from that.

Interviewer: Is that a case for less politicians in power and more entrepreneurs?

Pete Buttigieg: Look, I I think he's a politician through and through. I think that on some level every CEO is a politician. Every general is a politician. Every bishop is a politician. You just reach a certain level where part of what you're doing, if you're being honest with yourself, is is what is considered politics. Which, by the way, I don't mean in a pejorative way. I mean it's organizing people's choices, loyalties, and organizing power in order to get things done.

Interviewer: I think the difference I I I understand what you're saying. I think the difference especially with founders is um founders got from started at zero and got somewhere because

Pete Buttigieg: they had to be like highly have a high bias to action.

Interviewer: Yes. Believe that walls were made of paper and be disruptive and some I mean that the reason they are successful is because of disruption.

Pete Buttigieg: Yeah. The best thing about founders is they see something that could be

Interviewer: Yeah.

Pete Buttigieg: And the way things are just doesn't even bother them. They just see that vision and they just go after it and they blow through every wall between them and getting it done. That's the best thing about founders. The worst thing about founders from a political perspective is that sometimes because they were so good at one thing, like uniquely sometimes world historically good at one thing, they imagine that they're good at everything. Yeah.

Interviewer: Now, that's not just a problem with founders. That's probably lots of smart people.

Pete Buttigieg: Yeah. But politics requires you to be a little bit humble about how much you don't know and surround yourself by people who are smarter than you at whatever it is they're in charge of and not imagine that you've got all the answers.

Interviewer: Founders hate bureaucracy.

Pete Buttigieg: Yeah.

Interviewer: This is why they often

Pete Buttigieg: I mean look, I'm pretty impatient with bureaucracy, too. Like I I believe in the idea of a policy entrepreneur who can recognize here's a problem, here's a whole bunch of solutions and here's a window of opportunity and let's just like line it all up and make it happen. It's also laws exist in order to protect people. And when we're talking about bureaucracy, like we're really talking about laws. Now, sometimes those laws need to be changed, simplified, stripped down to the most important things. I learned this very early on in my time in office where sometimes I was trying to get something done as a policy entrepreneur and somebody tapped the brakes on me and used a bureaucracy to do it. Sometimes they were right. Sometimes they made me better. They made me sharpen what I was trying to do by fighting me. The other issue you mentioned a second ago that I think is going to be really pertinent over the next 24 months and is increasing in interest amongst Americans, I'd say especially young Americans that are thinking about getting a job and going into the workforce is the subject of artificial intelligence.

Interviewer: Talked to a lot of AI experts on my show over the last couple of years and I've also reflected a lot on the different types of comments that the CEOs of the big AI companies have made through time and how those quotes have changed. Um, if you go back a couple of years, it was doom and gloom. But now that they are running trillion dollar companies, the quotes seem to be a bit more optimistic all of a sudden. One thing that that I think they do agree on is that there's going to be significant job disruption, especially if you look at some of anthropics reports, which are the maker of Claude, they already show that entry level positions are at risk first, especially entry-level knowledge jobs. And people are scared. first time I saw that Eric Schmidt speech where the crowds, the college audience are booing every time he says the word AI, this is presumably going to accelerate this sentiment towards AI and in part because people are going to find it harder to get jobs and they're going to experience more more of AI sort of permeating through their life. Mhm. How do you feel about all of this? What is the what is the balance of of AI, good, bad, ugly risks?

Pete Buttigieg: I think it can be all of those things. And we've got some decisions to make about where AI goes. And the simplest way I put it is this. Either we're looking at a future where because of AI, we have a shorter work week and more money in our pocket, or we're looking at a future where there is even more extreme concentration of wealth and power in this country than we've already got. and which way it goes, which of those things happen. It's actually not something that's in the technology. It's not a tech question. It's a policy choice. It's about whether we make sure these technologies unfold in a way that is empowering for families and workers and college graduates and manage all of the harms that could come from it. Every technology brings good and bad things. And we've certainly seen that with digital technology. We've seen it with social media. We've seen it with the internet itself. Good and bad things always. AI has incredible capabilities. I think a lot about uh something that's not usually in the top 10 thing people talk about, but it's self-driving vehicles. Easy to be freaked out by them. They actually have enormous potential to save lives. That's just one example of how we could be better off if we responsibly develop these technologies. But if we don't, I'll tell you what I think could happen. And I come at this based on where I grew up, right? I'm from the industrial Midwest, northern Indiana, a place dominated by the auto industry. And starting in the 60s, but definitely in the 90s when I was growing up in the early 2000s, there was a huge amount of job loss because the economy was changing. What happened was there were a whole lot of people who didn't just lose their jobs. Often they would lose their jobs, maybe find another job, maybe be trained to find a new career even, but never recovered their sense of identity. You're an auto worker. You're in a tool and die shop. And it's your your whole sense of belonging revolves around your job. Not just your paycheck. It's how your spouses know each other from the union picnic. It's it's how you're sponsoring little league.

Speaker A: It's what you explain. You know, at least in the US, we don't even say like what's your job? We say what do you do? Right? What we mean is what do you do professionally, but we say what do you do basically as a way of saying who are you? And that's true for blue collar workers. That's even more true for white collar workers. And so I think that there is a generation of workers who are about to have their identity, not just their job, their identity disrupted. Whether we can come up with new sources or better sources of belonging, then what your job is could decide everything about what it feels like and is like to live in this country within the next few years. And I just think about what you said there about growing up in the Midwest. Um, people working in the auto industry making cars. And you also use the example of full self-driving vehicles being a net positive. But when I put those two things together, I thought, okay, so the people in the factories are at risk of being replaced by robotics now.

Speaker B: >> Huge acceleration in robotics, both humanoid, but just generally intelligent machines, which is right here. It's not theoretical. It's not sci-fi anymore. They're building them right now. And Sam Alman said, "On the current trajectory, we believe we may only be a couple of years away from early versions of true super intelligence. If we are right, by the end of 2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside in inside of a data center than outside of them." Daria, who's also the founder of Anthropic, said, "If the exponential continues, then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything." And the quotes go on and on and on. Dennis from Google said, "We're only a few years, maybe within a decade away from systems that have general human level intelligence across the board." And Elon Musk in an interview this week talked about how with robots being physical um disruption and AI being intellectual disruption, you have the perfect combination where work will become a choice. What does that mean for those people in the Midwest? Because Darra, the COVID, sat there in front of me and said the 9 million drivers he had would be replaced. Um, but also now you're if I think about the production line, the people making the cars as well theoretically could be at risk. There's always going to be something worth doing with our time. We need to arrange an economy that rewards things that are worth doing with our time, especially things that only people can do. Some of that is creative work. Some of that is very human work like caregiving. I'm thinking about this more and more because I belong to this sandwich generation that's taking care of kids and aging parents at the same time. But whether those kinds of things are rewarded or not is what I worry about. I mean, imagine a m a world where just for the sake of imagination, you've got a machine that can make more and more things. It's like the replicator from Star Trek. You know, I love Star Trek as a kid. Captain Peicard goes up to him. He just says like, "Give me a cup of tea. Earl Grey, hot." And like it happens, right? Imagine a some combination of artificial intelligence and robotics that leads to factories where you can kind of do that over time. You need fewer and fewer people in them. And that means that less and less in the economy depends on the wages that those workers can command because you need fewer of them. That means more and more is going to depend on well who actually owns the machine by which I mean both the intellectual property the AI and the the physical plant right and that's where we've got to make sure that the American people own enough of this or at least own enough of the value that's being created that people's needs can be met.

Speaker A: >> How well there's a lot of ways you can do it. Uh I think some version of a dividend makes sense. What I mean by that is there's some public share. We can argue about whether it should come with like a vote like being on a board or whether it's kind of closer to a tax. By the way, I think this is also fair game. I mean, these things trained on data that all of us put in the world for free. These things are based on the internet, which was created by the American taxpayer basically free of charge in the 1960s when DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, created what became the internet. and and now it's time to return more of that to the American people. You do that, we really could have a shorter work week and more money in our pocket. But there's a big butt here, which is it hasn't always worked out that way with laborsaving technology. A 100 years ago, the economist John Maynard Kanes wrote wrote an essay called economic possibilities for our grandchildren. He wrote this in 1930 and it was all about what the world would be like a hundred years from then, so 2030. And he predicts that the productivity of our economy because of automation, technology, all these things will go up something like five to eightfold. And because of that, really, we're not going to have to work more than 10 or 15 hours a week. And so far, we are on track to almost perfectly match his prediction about productivity. But we're nowhere close to that. If anything, we're working more right now. So, how does that happen? Well, it turns out that has to do with policy choices about what is or isn't a good use of time and it has to do with social choices too, right? I mean, one question I think about a lot is if we go into the best possible scenario, we get the policy choices right, we make sure the companies act right. This is saying a lot, but imagine that we do and we do in fact have, you know, most of us have a shorter work week and more money in our pocket. How do we know we're going to use our time? Well, because in many ways I think many of us are aching to have more time to use. Well, I know just doing my thing, I I wish I had more time with my kids. This is always the lament of a politician, but like anybody in a intense job wishes they had more time with people they love. But, you know, also a lot of our time right now is being absorbed by right? Scrolling things where you spend an hour doing it and an hour later nothing sticks. It's exactly as if you hadn't

Speaker B: >> you regret put your hour yeah or you feel worse but the hour is gone.

Speaker A: >> So we need to figure out how to also be better stewards of our own time. These by the way are not just not this this sounds like a very 21st century problem and in one way it is but you know the stoic philosopher Senica the Roman philosophers writing about this kind of stuff more than 2,000 years ago talking about how we are so careful about who can get our money and and and are very up in arms if anybody looks like they're cheating us or taking our money but then our time which is the one thing where we have every reason to be uh even more stingy about it than money because you can get more money but you can't get more time in your life. We let it get wasted in all kinds of ways. Bernie has this proposal where he believes we should take and I know I was reading about you know you discovering Bernie I believe in college right wasn't it high school

Speaker B: actually in high school

Speaker A: he has a proposal where we should take 50% of the stock of these AI companies gives the general public 50% ownership and board voting seats to block jobk killing decisions and re redistribute AI profits directly to citizens for healthcare education and housing viable proposal part of that overlaps with what I'm talking about I do think a public share of the profits which could mean a public share of the ownership can make sense. And again, for reasons that I I shared earlier, I I think that would be fair. I do think we need to weigh whether the right way to make sure the public has a say in how these companies behave is to be on the board

Speaker B: >> versus just to have some rules to make sure that the rules are such that the companies can do what they do best, create value, innovate,

Speaker A: >> but they can't do it in a way that hurts people, which is generally how regulation is supposed to work. I mean, I say this having been in the

Guest: the Department of Transportation where our job was to regulate companies. So, what that meant was we have something like the FAA, right? The Federal Aviation Administration. You know, it doesn't create aircraft. It doesn't invent aviation technology. What it does is it sets a very elaborate set of rules to make sure that aviation is safe. And the consequence of that is actually an incredible unsung civilizational achievement. Just in the time I was Secretary of Transportation, we had 4 billion people get on an airplane. 4 billion passenger implants on commercial airplanes. The number of fatalities was zero. Zero out of four billion.

Stephen: Crazy.

Guest: There are very few things you can do in life. I mean, all the way down to like crossing the street or eating a cheeseburger that would have a zero to four billion fatality rate. So that's an amazing achievement that happened because there is the right framework with technology and rules where you have a lot of innovation. I mean the aerospace sector is known to be very innovative but also you make sure it's safe and it's worth considering that when we're saying okay how do we make sure that these AI technologies developed so that we can have safer vehicles or you can get a better screening of a radiology scan for cancer or any of these other things all the way down to like you know these amazing ideas about curing cancer figuring out nuclear fusion which are urgently important things to do without having the kind of AI equivalent of a plane crash.

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Stephen: There's also just a broader debate which I guess in some ways connected to this at the moment in America, but actually also across the western world, that's happening in the UK as well around capitalism, socialism and I think a lot of it's driven by the inequality that people are experiencing. And if my memory is true, the US has more extreme inequality. It has more growth, GDP growth, but it has more extreme inequality than a country like the United Kingdom. So socialism is often considered to be the solution to this inequality. Menani is now the mayor of New York and we're seeing in the UK socialist parties are becoming more and more popular. The idea of taxing the rich is becoming very popular. Big debate actually this week in the UK is should we implement a wealth tax on people who have wealth above 10 million. Keen to get your perspective on this. Yeah. Is socialism, is wealth taxes the right solution to some of these problems of inequality?

Guest: Well, I find socialism is a word that means less and less the more people use it. It gets thrown around as a label and it means different things to different people. And I'll take your example to illustrate this. You know, higher taxes for very wealthy people is an idea that is broadly popular. I think it's the right thing to do. And importantly, we have a tradition of doing that already in the United States. Some of the highest tax, there was a point where the income tax for the wealthiest tax bracket in the country was around 90%. In the United States, I'm not saying we need to go back to that. I'm just saying and that was happening in the 40s and 50s and 60s when the cold war was going on and the US represented capitalism against communism or some would put socialism would lump it in with that. Right? So there is a tradition of the US being a fully capitalist country and also doing a better job of heading off this inequality. And the point of dealing with the inequality wasn't to punish the wealthy. It was to make sure that that level of wealth didn't go off the rails and that it didn't turn into a level of political power that could bring down the whole system. Which by the way is the problem I think we're facing now. First of all, our tax system taxes wealth less than it taxes work. That's a problem. That's an even bigger problem now that AI is coming for jobs because there's basically a thumb on the scale, a subsidy in effect from the US government saying giving you a little more reason to automate a job than you otherwise would because things like capital gains taxes come in lower than things like income taxes. Now, wealth tax, which is a property tax by another name, can be part of the menu of taxes you have to get enough revenue and to make sure that outcomes are fair. You can argue about where to draw the line. I think some people have proposals that set it too high. You can also argue about whether you have to have a wealth tax or whether you can get the job done with capital gains and income and other tax. But what we know right now is that our system is so out of whack that if you are a multi-billionaire, you probably pay a lower percentage of what you make in taxes than if you're a school teacher or a firefighter. We even in percentage terms generally tax billionaires less than we tax millionaires because again of this system that kind of favors wealth. So the more you have, the more you make and the less it's taxed. Surely we can do better than that.

Stephen: So, are you supportive of wealth taxes? And I'm defining that as not taxing income, but looking at the net worth of somebody and taking a percentage of their net worth.

Guest: Yeah. Again, to me, that's just a variation on the idea of a property tax. I think it's legitimate. There are some problems with doing it. In practical terms, it can be hard.

Stephen: This is why it's hard, right?

Guest: Or like how do you tax like somebody's art collection or there are things that can make it tricky.

Stephen: One of the things that I learned when I had this company and it was a public company so I had public stock and someone came along and said Stephen you know with your public stock that you have so started this company when I was 21 does well by 27 the stock that I have is public stock which means it's on a stock market someone came to me at 27 and said Stephen do you know you can just take a loan against your public stock and I

Pete Buttigieg: went you can just get a tax-free loan so if your stock is worth $50 million right now

Interviewer: Yeah, they will give you a 50% loan without paying tax on that stock. So they will crazy low interest rate, right? Like almost nothing. They will just transfer you today $25 million in cash and you will have to pay no tax. And guess what? If the stock comes down, they'll just sell it. So you'll never really have like a real sort of tax liability there.

Pete Buttigieg: Mhm.

Interviewer: I couldn't believe this was possible. And so I was like, is this what all the rich people do?

Pete Buttigieg: And they told me, yes, this is what how it works. This is what Elon's doing. Elon is taking a taxree pretty much taxfree loan against his Tesla stock and they are transferring him a billion dollars in cash and he can live off that start new companies with that and never have to have a tax transaction. So I thought why don't politicians tax that there's always going to be a cat and mouse right whenever we figure out a way to make sure you can't hide all of your wealth from or all of your income from being fairly taxed. Very wealthy people will figure out some other place to hide it. Yeah.

Pete Buttigieg: And then we'll have to develop a new policy to deal with that. I guess my point is that's okay. Too often we have just hesitated to do anything, refused to do anything because it might be hard or because it might not last.

Interviewer: But if if the idea that somebody will figure out a way around this law meant that you shouldn't have the law, that would be an argument against having any law.

Pete Buttigieg: Mhm.

Pete Buttigieg: So it's messy. It's hard. But I am sure that if we had a more reasonable rate of taxation on capital gains and on corporate income, and if we made it harder to pass along wealth without uh especially inherited wealth without paying any taxes on it or some of these other maneuvers like this borrowing thing you're talking about.

Pete Buttigieg: We would have a fairer country because we'd still have capitalism. There'd still be lots of motivation and lots of reason to innovate and build a business and create jobs and do all the things that very wealthy people uh have done. And also we would be out of this doom loop we're in where they're saying, "Well, we can't possibly have as good health care as other countries. We couldn't possibly do something like, I don't know, fast trains here in the United States. We couldn't possibly have uh rural hospitals be properly funded or uh public education. Of course, we can. This is the wealthiest economy in the world. It just doesn't add up that we can't have nice things. But if we aren't collecting a fair level of taxes, then then of course we're going to come up short when we're trying to fund those things. And the biggest thing of all uh that numerically that we're facing right now is this massive debt. Now, it's not fashionable on the left to talk about deficits and the debt partly because, you know, I think Democrats are pretty sick of that being invoked as a reason not to do things like roads and bridges and schools and hospitals that we believe in. But it's now escalated to a level that no one can ignore it. It turns out, you know, some analysis has suggested or shown that if you just start the clock at the beginning of this century with the big Bush tax cuts in, I think 2001 and then you go through the Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest, you add all that up, if it weren't for all those tax cuts, the debt would actually be going down right now. So, they can fully account for what's happened to the increase in the debt. And we just don't don't have to accept that.

Interviewer: got this uh graph here of US national debt growth. I'll throw that up on the screen. Between 1970 and 2026, it looks like a rocket is taking off.

Pete Buttigieg: Yep.

Interviewer: And I sat here with Ray Dalio just a couple of days ago. He talks about the sort of big economic boom in bus cycles. He talks about how every 80 years or so you kind of see a great power falter and struggle. And we are 80 years into the American power. And he says that the writing is on the wall as it relates to what happens next. when you let debt go like this and you start getting sort of internal conflict and you start trying to please the world and

Pete Buttigieg: yeah and what's going on with the debt is both evidence of it and part of the problem. I think it's a symptom but in some ways it's a cause. It could be a cause of a currency crisis or force us to uh redo our whole tax code within the next few years. One thing I learned about recently uh there's a principle called Stein's law. It's named after a Reagan era economist, actually the father of Ben Stein from if you remember Ferris Beller. The principle is very simple. If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. It's one of these blindingly obvious things that we don't think about enough at a moment like this where everybody agrees the debt can't keep going up like this. It's just almost definitely definitionally impossible. Pretty much everyone agrees our politics can't go on like this. And if something can't go on forever, it won't. So the question is, okay, then what's going to happen? I believe one of two things can happen. Reform or catastrophe. And the whole reason I'm involved in public life is to try to make make sure that it's reform and not catastrophe.

Interviewer: Can I ask a question on this? So on this Steinlaw thing and and why irrespective of what you've just said, which makes perfect sense to me, this line keeps going up of national debt, is it in part kind of like musical chess with politicians where you come in for 4 years and the music is playing and you're kind of hoping that the music doesn't stop during your term because you want to spend money because that's politically positive. If you're helping people's healthare, if you're building infrastructure, positive, people are going to like you more. They're going to vote you in. But the nature of politics means that you really do play for four years and then maybe you play for eight, right?

Interviewer: But this might be a two decade catastrophe. The music might stop in two decades. So actually when you think about people's incentive structures, you're incentivized to actually not think about the future.

Interviewer: You're incentivized to like be remembered and pass the bat to the next Democrat in four years time in a way that's positive. So that's why we're seeing this cuz clearly if someone was in power for a hundred years or maybe if the time horizon was even longer maybe they would have thought about this debt rapidly increasing.

Pete Buttigieg: Yeah. But I think it also comes down to like why why do you think you're here if you're in office? Like are you in office just in order to hold it?

Interviewer: It seems like that sometimes

Pete Buttigieg: it's not worth it being in a position to make a difference and hold public office. Like it's an exciting thing. It's a compelling thing. It's a meaningful thing and it comes with with a lot of things that are you know good for your ego. I get all of that. But also, it's just not worth it unless you understand that you hold an office in order to do things with policy and power to make people better off, not the other way around.

Interviewer: I guess the American people and everybody listening now will be thinking, "Fool me once, Secretary Pete Buddha Judge." Because I've sat there and I've watched the elections and all of them talk about bringing down the public debt and and then you I look at this graph and I go, "Oh, it goes up again." And Trump says the same about spending and nope, it's gone up again.

Pete Buttigieg: It almost feels like in a way that

Interviewer: feel like you're trying to be nice.

Pete Buttigieg: No, no, no. I just I don't know. I can understand why people are sort of disenfranchised with politics.

Interviewer: Yeah, me too.

Interviewer: And I wonder if this is why they're picking the radical, you know, this is why

Pete Buttigieg: So [clears throat] this is why

Interviewer: Oh god. [laughter]

Pete Buttigieg: Because this is disruption. This is kind of burn it down to some degree. Right. So, this is why everywhere I go, I'm trying to talk to my own party about making sure that we understand that dealing with this is not the beall and endall. That our mission can't be to just take power and then go back to what we had before. That what we had before is actually what led

Speaker A: to this. In other words, guys like Trump don't get very far unless you're already in an environment where the political and social and economic systems are letting people down, which is I think how we wound up here. And I worry there's a big temptation, there will be a big temptation in my party to say, "Okay, our job is to take power, turn back the clock, reverse the damage, fix what was broken, and get us back to where we were. Get us back on track." I hear the word back a lot. I hear the prefix re a lot. Reverse, rebuild. And I'm very worried about that distracting from what our actual mission has to be, which is to change and fix things so that we'll be set up well for the next 80 years. So that that's a harder project for sure. But also sometimes the incentives change because the public is ready for something different. And I think the public tried one flavor of something different with Trumpism and is ready to spit it out. And so the question then is, okay, what are we offering in its place? And to me, that's where some very day-to-day things like setting up a better healthare system

Speaker A: or reducing what we're paying in tariffs or better infrastructure or any any of the other policy, you know, paid family leave. All these policy things that I'd like to see happen really depend on fixing a political system that's just not as sexy. But it can be powerfully motivating because our country was started by people who fought a revolution to change the political system. And I just can't imagine that it was just like Jefferson and Hamilton, these guys sitting in their studies reading, you know, John Lock and Russo and thinking, "Oh, it would be neat to try that somewhere." I I think they believe that like their lives and everybody's lives be better, different if we actually had a different system. And then they risked violent death in order to challenge the existing political system that was the monarchy and replace it with the republic, the democratic country that they set up. that is the United States of America. Right? So, it's not like this can't stir passion. Should we not be a country where everybody's vote counts the same? That would mean a popular vote for the presidents. We ought to do that. I just think everybody's vote ought to count the same and the person who gets the most votes ought to win. This is not a hard thing for us to buy into in literally any other election we run in our political system. We need to do things like make it just ban gerrymandering where districts are being drawn. So consider this. We have 435 seats in the House. Nine out of 10 are so red or so blue that you basically know who's going to win before the first vote is cast. Nine out of 10 in a 50-50 country. That makes no sense. And of course what it leads to is the people in those seats are either very comfortable and not really worried about being responsive to the people or if they are in danger, they're in danger from their own side. What's amazing to me when I look at how Americans feel about certain big issues like making sure there's health care for everybody or raising the minimum wage or having higher rates of taxes on the wealthy and on corporations or background checks on guns or marriage equality for same-sex couples, all kinds of things. There's like 60 or 70% agreement on most of the issues that most people tell pollsters they care about the most. So, how can we be a country that's got 60 or 70% agreement on issue after issue after issue and we fail to get those policies done and we keep proceeding like it's normal to be a 50/50 country where everybody's at each other's throats. That to me is evidence of a broken system. If we don't fix the system, I don't think we're going to get very far.

Speaker B: It's interesting because when I think about the last sort of 20 years of politics, we had, you know, the Bush era, then we had Democrats and and so on that were very polished. Bush was kind of very polished as well. Then we had Biden who was um very polished, kind of like career politicians, says the right things, reads off the teleprompter. And then it seems globally like people wanted some disruption. We had Brexit going on over there. We've got Nigel Farage increasing in popularity over the last 10 years or so as it relates to his political probabilities. And then over in the United States, we have Trump arrive. Again, not a career politician, not clean, not teleprompter kind of guy. If Democrats are to win, as you say, it's certainly not going to go back to the polished Joe Biden teleprompter. I almost think that there's going to need to be some disruptive character on the left side of politics to get to win over those independents, but also some of those Republicans. Is that Do you agree with that broadly?

Speaker A: I think that's right. I mean, I think it depends what we mean by polished, right? That can mean a lot of different things. I I think uh but I think you're talking about a sort of authenticity that people expect. And the paradox of Trump is he's authentic even when he's lying cuz it just seems like he's, you know, whatever he is, he's not reading talking points. At least that's how it seems. I think also part of this is just the it's actually a technology thing. So the technology that dominated politics for as long as I've been alive was television. And I think it produced a generation of people, you know, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump were all born within a few weeks of each other.

Speaker B: Really?

Speaker A: Yeah. They were they were all products of the summer of I think it was 1946 coming out of that generation, Joe Biden near to them in age, right, into whatever is next. I think you're going to have leaders, and I this can be potentially a very good thing, who are just a little bit better able to just kind of show their humanity being a long podcast like this one, right? Like I I remember when long form meant like maybe a 30 minute NPR interview. Now you're sitting for sometimes two or three hours. I don't think it's possible as a matter of physical stamina to stay on talking points for two or three hours because you wanted to like it just you know and so you know somebody once said that the running for office is like an MRI of the soul anyway but that's even more true now than it used to be because you just there's so many different kind of ways of having to kind kind of show who you are. We used to imagine that the people in charge are just like next level like on a different plane of existence and I think it's become harder and harder to believe that it just we know too much. Right. And so I think we're trading that for just wanting people that we have a reason to trust.

Speaker B: We see the same across um across business. We talked a lot about over the last 10 years how we've shifted from this blackbox world where the PR department would pay would paint the image of the company on the outside of this black box and then we moved because of phones and everyone has a mobile phone now and a camera in their pocket and a social media platform so they can give their own opinion to this glass box world where actually the job is to let everybody see inside because if you don't someone else will paint the the box for you. So actually defense became the big CEOs in the world now coming on podcast and having a personal brand and having a social media account. I think the same for politicians that actually the winning strategy now is being a glass box which is build your own reference points through transparency.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Which is why the podcasts like this are I think probably going to dominate the uh next election cycle to some degree.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think it's true not just for politics for like running and being a candidate. I think it's increasingly true for government too. I mean I started to feel this at the Department of Transportation. running this huge enterprise, 55,000 people, $145 billion is bigger than most GDPs in most countries. And what I found was that there were so many situations where people who just are generally mistrustful of government or media would assume the worst. And the only antidote to that was to be way more transparent than a federal agency or department was

Guest: used to being. But what I found was kind of the machinery of the department was not set up for that. It was designed to be you know, accountable, but accountable in the sense that if there's something going on and a member of Congress is worried about it, they can write a letter and six months later they'll get a report. And I'm trying to figure out how do I because, you know, I'd carry a phone in my pocket, too. Like, how do I take it out sometimes and like shoot a video and like tell people what's going on? Sometimes they're going to think that we're that we don't care about them, that we're putting a highway through their neighborhood and we don't care how it's going to hurt them or that we're not responding to a disaster in a Republican area because it's a Republican area or any other number of things that people might believe if we don't show them what we're actually doing and why.

Interviewer: Got this cap here 2028. when you when you think about running for president or being president of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, do you not have imposter syndrome? And what is it about the job that you think because, you know, it's pretty crazy for anyone to think they could run the most powerful nation on earth and not think, god, there's a couple of things that I'm not going to be great at.

Guest: Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of the system was that no one person should have too much power, right? That's why we got rid of monarchy. But we've wound up with this presidency that uniquely in our country, not just the country, the world, right, has this incredible amount of power. That the lives of billions of people go differently and could be much better or could be much worse based on decisions that get made in that office. And the idea that we would have just one human being doing that is on some level terrifying. But, you know, part of what we did as a country is we set up a whole bunch of things around that human being. And that's everything from like advisers to laws to Congress, you know, and the courts like to make sure that there's some balance to try to make sure that that whoever's in that seat can make the best decisions they possibly could and and has to act within certain boundaries. But yeah, I mean, look, all the way down to when I was elected mayor and I was in my 20s, like obviously I believed I could do the job or I wouldn't have run for it. But, you know, even just walking into the office of the mayor of the fourth largest city in Indiana on the 14th floor of the county city building and the snow's coming down the first day I it was New Year's Day, first day I was officially in office and I'm thinking, I'm now responsible for making sure the snow gets plowed and and and if we don't do it right, not only will I get in trouble politically, somebody could be harmed, right? But I think any office, any job, like you have to let that weight sit on your shoulders and then have it push you to be better at the job.

Interviewer: That's the Oh, there we go. There we go.

Guest: Yeah. Yeah. That was election day. That was a great feeling. But I I remember also immediately feeling this thrill of of having won. And if you're a competitive person, it's also the excitement of having beaten your competitors. But having to balance that with, okay, I said that if you elected me, I'd be able to get these things done, and now I actually got to produce.

Interviewer: Are you scared of the consequences of being president one day?

Guest: Any president should be. Anybody who's even being seriously talked about or considered for it should be. Puts you in a position where you have a responsibility to say things that make sense and think about what you have to say. know that your words, even if you have no official power, but that still things that you do or say could help or hurt people just by just by talking, just by going on a podcast that millions of people listen to.

Interviewer: And there's really four front runners um according to the data that I saw, which is yourself, Gavin Newsome, AOC, and Kla Harris. I've now interviewed three of them.

Guest: Which one haven't you got to yet?

Interviewer: AOC. I think this thing is in the works. Very different candidates, I'd say.

Guest: Yeah.

Interviewer: As individuals.

Guest: Yeah.

Interviewer: If not you, then which one of them?

Guest: It's just a bad idea to answer that question. I'm sorry. Like, I want to be transparent, but like

Interviewer: you must have an answer, though.

Guest: I don't know. Let the truth set you free. Secretary, she was lovely. Gavin's nice.

Interviewer: Which one are you closest friends with?

Guest: I mean, the one I've spent the most time with is uh is her because, you know, she was vice president uh and I was working transportation. There were times we uh traveled together. She was very involved in trying to get the infrastructure bill done which is kind of the biggest thing that I worked on the the legislation to to get roads and bridges and airports.

Interviewer: Is she misunderstood?

Guest: I think anybody in at that level is misunderstood. There's just uh I don't know that I can I don't know if I'm qualified to evaluate kind of more than more or less than other people in that job. I think anybody the vice presidency or any job with that visibility puts you in a position where it's hard for people to see your humanity when you're bearing the responsibility that you have. And even at other levels of government, I think this is this is true. I think high office does that. I think office that high especially does it.

Interviewer: Do you think she could be a good president?

Guest: Sure. I mean, I campaigned for her very energetically when she was running for president. I went all over the country uh trying to convince America to elect her and um I did that because I thought she'd be a very good president.

Interviewer: What about Gavin Newsome?

Guest: Yeah, he's he's been he's not someone I know as well as uh as her, but he's somebody I've worked with a lot. Obviously, California is a place where we're doing a lot of our dust infrastructure work and he's somebody who I think he understands how to break through in this kind of attention world that we're in um where you know the old formats and the old norms um just don't cut it anymore in terms of getting your message across. Access spoken to so many people who understand that the system is letting them down. I might not agree with her on every policy. For example, on the infrastructure law that I worked with the vice president on and worked with with Gavin on, she didn't see that the way we did. You know, I respect that she has activated a lot of young people, not just young people. She's activated a lot of people who were looking around saying the way things work doesn't serve me. And there's the generational thing. And when I ran for president, I was running on largely on a message of generational change. I didn't win. Obviously,

Interviewer: Joe Biden won. You got behind him.

Guest: Mhm.

Interviewer: Near the end of his uh his time as president, he I mean, we all saw it. We saw him go out and do those debates against Trump. And I think it was obvious to anyone who was being intellectually honest with themselves and objective that Joe Biden wasn't the same Joe Biden that we've seen over the last 20, 30 years and that something had changed quite considerably with his cognitive performance.

Guest: Mhm.

Interviewer: Um did you were you aware of that cuz you were in his you part of his team at that time. Were you aware that something was different?

Guest: I saw the same thing that America saw, right? Um it's not like I was in a room with him every day, but you know whether it was in front of cameras or whether it was I was invited to be in a meeting at the White House, uh I saw what America saw which is that he was getting older.

Interviewer: I mean cognitive performance is pretty important for the most powerful job on earth.

Guest: Yeah.

Interviewer: Were you concerned?

Guest: I was definitely concerned when I saw the debate. I mean,

Interviewer: you weren't concerned at any point before the debate.

Guest: Up until that moment, I I saw that he was visibly growing older, but there was never some moment where I saw him like make a different decision or at least in terms of anything that I was involved with, transportation, that I thought it was going different or worse or I couldn't get

Speaker A: ...what I needed from him or from the White House because of his age. But of course, the job is not just policy guidance. That the job is also to convey and communicate to the American people like what your administration is doing and why. That's the job of a president. It's in some ways 100% the job of a candidate.

Speaker B: And there was no watching the debate and not realizing how much of a burden that was.

Speaker B: You just said then that you're even conscious of like even in this medium, every sentence counts.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah. You say one sentence, that's the wrong sentence. Theoretically, it could have consequences, but that and you just said this is someone that doesn't currently have a job. That President of the United States, Joe Biden muddling up his sentences in front of the nation like he did in that debate

Speaker B: is probably not good enough to be in that position.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that was the beginning of course of the process that led him to reach the same conclusion.

Speaker B: Do you have a private conversation with him?

Speaker A: No, I wasn't. I was in the cabinet, but that doesn't mean I was invited to rooms when they were talking about things like whether he was going to run for president again.

Speaker B: Did the Democrats make the right decision there 100 days until the election to swap in Kamala Harris at that point? Like in hindsight, if you're honest with yourself,

Speaker A: Yeah, I thought about that a lot because I think in the moment it felt like, oh, we have very little time. We've all got to pull together. We got to put ego aside. We got to put kind of internal politics aside and we got to quickly speak with one voice. Partly because I knew and we all knew what could happen to this country if Donald Trump was elected again. And I believe all of those harms and then some have come to pass. But the other side of the coin is if there had been some way to have a competition, even with that very short timeline, I think that even if the candidate had still been Kamala Harris, I think she likely would have been a better candidate. I think in 2020, Joe Biden was a better candidate because he had to compete with Kamala Harris and me and like 18 other Democrats before winning that process. And I think that in general, we know the competition sharpens you. We know the competition gets more information out. And I'm not saying I have it all solved in my head how that could have been done on the timeline that we faced or what it would have been like, but I think with the hindsight that we have now, I think it's pretty clear that we would have been better off if we had that.

Speaker B: You know, we talked about maybe people are looking for something a little bit more radical this time around. What are your most radical ideas as it relates to policies you would be in favor of? So, I know you would you're keen to remove the electoral college.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And do it based on numbers, the quantity of votes for either presidential candidate.

Speaker A: And I still can't believe that anybody considers this radical. Like to me, there's nothing radical about thinking the person who gets the most votes ought to be the winner. But I think people haven't thought through how much benefit would come from that. If we did that, there are so many votes in red and blue states that you couldn't ignore anymore. Like if you were running for president as a Democrat, you'd have to go to Texas.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And even if Texas is still going to vote mostly for Republicans, you'd have to turn out every Democratic vote you could in Texas. And I just think we'd be so much better off if a Republican and Democratic candidate were competing over Texas. And by the way, New York, even if New York is definitely going to vote more for Democrats, a Republican candidate would have to come to New York and states from Alaska to Rhode Island. So, it's small states too that get ignored now would finally be part of this competition. So, yeah, electoral college for sure. Supreme Court needs to change.

Speaker B: What would you do to the Supreme Court?

Speaker A: I would have term limits, more justices, and some process that makes it less partisan who the justices are. Some different ways to do that. The one I think is most interesting is called the balanced bench proposal. We have a mix. But anyway, the point is that it needs to change. House of Representatives, like I said earlier, should be proportional.

Speaker B: What does that mean?

Speaker A: It means that I was saying earlier how to work for like school board or city council where sometimes you get more than one vote and more than one person wins. We could do that for Congress. The people get the top three votes, not just one, get to go to Congress. So you'd have bigger districts, fewer districts, harder to gerrymander. By the way, an easier change that I think we should do right away is ban gerrymandering.

Speaker B: I've got four things there.

Speaker A: Uh, let me give you one more constitutional amendment to deal with money in politics. If the Supreme Court said in the Citizens United decision that a corporation is the same thing as a person for these purposes and that spending money to manipulate an election is the same constitutionally protected behavior as writing an op-ed or carrying a sign at a protest, we need to clarify that corporate spending is not speech and corporations are not citizens people in the same way that a human being is. And we can do that with a constitutional amendment.

Speaker B: And so what would that mean? It would mean that a company couldn't just pump money into a political country, right?

Speaker A: Right? Congress could then actually have laws which we used to have like the McCain Feingold law which was struck down in Citizens United. But we could get to where Congress can once more have laws saying that you can't put unlimited unaccountable corporate dark money into a super PAC to manipulate how an election is going to go. And it's one more of these things that like two-thirds of the people think we ought to do.

Speaker B: Why doesn't it happen then?

Speaker A: because so many people who are already in office like the system just the way it is and because of the Supreme Court. I actually think you could get it through Congress, but the Supreme Court won't let you because their interpretation of the Constitution is that you can have these kinds of rules. So what do you do? If necessary, amend the Constitution. People forget the best thing about the Constitution is its capability to be amended. When we talk about the most cherished part of the constitution, many people will say the first amendment, right? That's the one that gives us free speech. And we miss that the word amendment being in there signals to us that it wasn't part of the original text of the constitution. It's an amendment. It's something they had to add on after. So is the second amendment. I mean, all of them by definition, right? So we shouldn't be afraid of that kind of things. things only by an amendment we get to pick who our senators are. Before that, it was the legislature. Same thing for making sure that black voters and the women could be voters. We shouldn't be afraid to use maybe the most elegant feature of the entire constitution, which is that it has a process to change it. We should use it. All of the things I've mentioned are these kind of system reforms. They're about the engine. So that then the policies, what comes out of the engine like do we get paid family leave in this country? Do we have fair taxes? Is there a healthcare system that gives everybody healthcare? All that stuff is decided by a government that works better.

Speaker B: Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time-consuming and we're all very very busy. And if you've never posted something before, there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post. What people will think of you. Am I doing this right? Is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid? All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post and your feed goes bare. I'm an investor in a company called Stanto, which you've probably heard me talk about. And what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses

Host: AI looks at your feed, looks at your tone of voice, looks at your history, looks at your best performing posts, and tells you what you should post, makes those posts for you. You can also just use it for inspiration. And sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for our social media channels is inspiration. Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life and I think it could change yours too. So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think. All you have to do is search coach.stand.sto now to get started. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much.

Host: What do you think of Elon Musk?

Guest: The richest man on earth, the arguably most famous entrepreneur on planet Earth, building companies here in America, very intelligent, has had an extremely important impact on a whole bunch of things. um is right about a lot of things and is very wrong about a lot of things and lacked the humility to understand some things that would have saved him from doing a lot of damage based on how wrong he was. So you look for example at the tragedy of the failure of Doge. And the thing that most upsets me about the failure of Doge is that we actually needed an effort around government efficiency. But what we got was unbelievably sloppy making math errors. And the one thing they're supposed to be really good at ought to be math. Maybe I don't mean like little rounding errors like saying billion when they meant million on the quote unquote wall of receipts. The whole purpose of which was to show that they knew what they were doing and they were transparently documenting their choices. firing people they didn't know what they did and then having to scramble and hire them back on things like nuclear weapons safety or managing biohazards and communicable diseases and leaving a federal government that actually spent more after Doge than before.

Host: Elon used to be a Democrat.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: He would say, and I've heard him say this, that the Biden administration basically snubbed him. They were sort of adversarial towards him. There's always the story people talk about about the electric vehicle summit in 2021 where everybody was invited GM, Ford, Chrysler, but Elon wasn't invited and that was a mistake.

Guest: I was there for that. I can tell you how the mistake happened. There was a difficult and complex set of negotiations happening between the big three automakers to try to get to a new framework moving forward on tailpipe standards. this event was built to kind of celebrate the agreement that had been reached around tailpipe standards. Um, and Tesla, because all they make are EVs, doesn't even have tailpipes. And so, people weren't really thinking about inviting Tesla. But what Elon saw was there's an event at the White House about EVs. He is, if not single-handedly responsible, certainly is the person most responsible for EV excellence on American soil. and he's saying, "What the fuck?" And I I don't blame him for that.

Host: And he publicly broke ranks with the Democrat party. He bought Twitter and ultimately became Donald Trump's largest donor. And uh Keith surrogate. It's It's I think I asked this question because I think uh any president is going to need to contend with both solving the probably problem of inequality, this national debt, while also keeping entrepreneurs happy and highly productive at the same time. And the the of the two parties, Republican and Democrat, the party that is typically, according to the data, more associated with being entrepreneur friendly is the Republican party. It's not often you hear billionaires are evil coming from the Republican from the Republican side, but that that's a prevailing narrative on the Democratic side is that billionaires are evil.

Guest: I don't know if that's the prevailing narrative, but I get what you mean.

Host: So, it's more dominant on the left than it is on the right.

Guest: Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. But look, I mean, you have to engage everybody if you want to be in a high position of leadership. Like the last time I had a specific problem with Elon when I was Department of Transportation. Uh, I called him, we talked it out and we figured it out and we actually solved a problem together. It is amazing in my experience how many problems can be, if not solved, at least better faced if you just pick up the phone. And you know, we have this style of politics now where everything's combat. You're not just disagreeing with somebody, you got to destroy them, right? And that's really bad for America. It does not lead to good political outcomes. And so, especially when I disagree with somebody or I have a problem with what they're doing, we should be talking.

Host: On the left, you've got AOC saying you can't make a billion dollars, you take a billion dollars. Is that true in your view?

Guest: I don't know. That doesn't make a ton of sense to me. I I will say there's a lot of different ways you can get a billion dollars. And right now the easiest way to get a billion dollars is to have $10 billion and do nothing. You know the thing we most admire about the entrepreneurs is that they work hard and they do things and they make things right and they generate value and and I think most Americans don't spite you the value that you get from having created even more value. I think at the same time we see a lot of outcomes in the market that seem to be about just like money just sort of happening to whoever already has money. Many of them have seen their wealth go up like tenfold in the last few years. Way more than how much their wealth went up in the few years before that. So I guess like the thing you did between zero and a billion in my experience is usually much more impressive than whatever you did between 1 billion and 10 or 10 and 100 or 100 and 500. And I think we are in a political system where it would just be so naive to think that the amount that the market gives you is just purely equal to the amount of benefit that you create or the amount of hard work that you put in.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: Some people work hard and they earn a lot. And some people don't do and they wind up with a lot. And some people are a mix of those two things.

Host: It's definitely not correlated to hard work. That is for sure. I've never met anyone that worked harder than my mom and working, you know, coming from Nigeria, can't read or write, comes to the UK, works every waking hour that she can, never complains, and still financially struggling as a result of that all the time growing up. So, you know, I know that very intimately, that hard work doesn't equal wealth at all.

Guest: And I don't think people would be as angry about billionaires as they are if there weren't millions of people whose story is closer to that of your mom.

Host: Mhm.

Guest: And I it brings me back to this idea of the American dream where, you know, it's supposed to be the case that generally you come out ahead if you, as the saying goes, you work hard and you play by the rules. And that definitely happens sometimes, but it doesn't happen enough now. And most importantly, it happens less in America than in certain other countries. And it happens less in America than it used to in America. And those two things are the big blinking alarm lights to me.

Host: AOC also said a system that allows billionaires to exist is immoral.

Guest: Yeah, I don't think I agree with that. It's not whether they exist. It's having too much power. It's it's being able to turn economic power into political power and then using that power to get even more wealth. That's why people are so furious because they see that happening and are not wrong. And the role of money in our politics is just one example, probably the biggest example of how that can happen. I think Americans wouldn't mind people being as wealthy as they are nearly as much if we didn't have the inequality that we have. And if we didn't have some of those people using their wealth...

Pete: ...to assert political power in a country whose whole founding principle is that the millionaire or I guess billionaire stands in line next to the dishwasher and the taxi driver in the voting booth and they all have the same political power.

Interviewer: Yeah. I think it's interesting because I can weirdly relate to both sides of the spectrum. If you go back, I don't know, 13 years, I am broke, um, because I've decided to drop out of university and I can't feed myself, to put it in a nice way, for a long period of time, living many hundreds of miles away from home in terms of a round trip. And then you jump 13 years forward and I'm running these businesses and the businesses are going well. So I kind of oscillate between these two worlds of entrepreneurship and being very pro-entrepreneurship, but then falling back into that 18, 19, 20-year-old me who really needed society to catch him, to be quite honest. Thankfully I lived in the United Kingdom where we have healthcare.

Pete: Yeah.

Interviewer: But when I moved here at 25 years old to launch the business here in New York City and run the office here, I discovered that you guys don't offer health healthcare and that I had to, as the employer, pay for all of my team members' healthcare. It was this really "what the hell is going on". I thought this was the land of the free and all those kinds of things. So I kind of understand both ends of the spectrum and it makes me realize that actually it's the inequality. It's the people at the sort of bottom of the ladder per se being so far from the top of the ladder.

Pete: Yeah.

Interviewer: That is the central issue. So what is the radical idea that you bring forward to end inequality? I mean presumably it's not just tax wealth.

Pete: Well here's the lift. I actually think the ideas for fixing those economic problems aren't that radical. The weird thing is in order to get what I think of as very reasonable economic ideas through, you have to have radical change on the political side. Economically, we can do this mostly with tools that are very familiar to us. Make sure that there are higher tax rates, not to punish the wealthy, but to get enough revenue so government can do its job. Make sure there are higher tax rates not on all Americans compared to today, but on corporate profits and on the wealthiest individuals. Make sure that it is harder to hide and move around money so that you never have to pay taxes on it at all. And then what do you do with that money? You make sure there's a healthcare system where, for example, somebody in the situation you are in still gets to be an entrepreneur because they don't actually have to worry that they won't have healthcare if they don't just take the next low-wage job available to them. Invest in education enough that we are preparing people who know not just how to work, but how to think so that when work changes, they're ready. Make sure that we make it easier to have a family. Things like paid family leave and using tax credits to compensate people who give care to their parents and or children can have a huge freeing effect on people and I think it's the right thing to do and it's a way to respect that that's work too. Yeah, I've had roles and jobs where I have worked very, very hard, but the hardest I've ever worked in my life was when I was on parental leave when we adopted our newborn son and daughter, our twins. That was the only time...

Interviewer: There they are.

Pete: Yeah. I mean, that was the only time that I was routinely getting up at 3:00 in the morning. If I was lucky, I could get a nap at 5:30 in the morning and was just working until I physically couldn't work anymore and then tapping out, and then Chasten trying to, my husband trying to, you know, we'd alternate and help each other. And that work, which is a beautiful work but very hard work, is work I think we also need to invest in. Things like national service so everybody has an experience. Military is not for everybody, but everybody should know what it's like to be part of something bigger than yourself and to work on something that is hard with people you don't already know. So, I think if we have that, we'll have more trust.

Interviewer: Where do you find this one? So, these are some photos.

Pete: Wow.

Interviewer: Of a much younger Pete. I'm really curious. You know, when I sat with Kamala, I learned a lot about her by just understanding where she'd come from.

Pete: Yeah.

Interviewer: And her parents and her early context. What is it about your early context that shapes your world view as Mayor Pete, but also Secretary Pete and potentially someday President Pete?

Pete: Well, my dad came to this country because he thought he could have a better life here. Not exactly in a rags to riches sense. He came from a middle-class family in the tiny country of Malta. And the way he tells the story is that he knew that he wanted to come to the US and go to grad school here. And he had a mentor who said, "Look, if you stay here, I can promise you that you will be a big fish in a small pond." And he said, "I'd rather be a medium-sized fish in a very big pond." Which is a great way to think about coming to America. And that's exactly what he did. He came, he went to grad school in Binghamton, New York, and then he got a job in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He met my mother who was teaching there too. She was a young linguist. They got married and then the first good job he got was at University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. They moved there and pretty soon after that I was born. And so I grew up with parents who cared a lot about literature and learning and they cared a lot about politics. We weren't like politically connected. I don't think I ever met an elected official while I was a child. But I grew up with this sense that it was very important to know what was happening in the world. My dad was always reading the newspaper. The TV was always tuned to the news. It was just a sense like that's the most important thing. Whatever's happening in the world is the most important thing that you ought to be paying attention to out there. It was a great upbringing with great parents and a good neighborhood and good friends. You know, I felt both a sense of belonging and a sense of being an outsider kind of at the same time. And I had this name that nobody could pronounce. And we're in this great neighborhood. People did all kinds of different things. Our neighbor to one side laid carpet. A family across from us were retired public school teachers. Lady on the corner was a nurse. And I'd see her walk down to the night shift at the hospital a couple blocks away every day. And I felt like the texture of that neighborhood like really belonged to me. But at the same time, like I also felt and knew that I was different. Like this was before it was trendy to drink espresso, for example. That was like a weird immigrant thing that my dad did, you know? Like he had this little thing you would put on the stove and make espresso. And I remember them being kind of bewildered when like Starbucks became a thing, you know? And then the surroundings of it all, the city of South Bend, which people know that the University of Notre Dame is there, but the other thing that was there was Studebaker. This was as big a car company as like GM or Ford in its day, but it stopped making cars in 1963. They just couldn't quite innovate and keep up and the company collapsed. That was a catastrophic thing for the city. The city lost a big chunk of its population and never really recovered it. And when I was a kid, I didn't really know any different. I didn't realize it was unusual to have factories that hadn't been operating for decades in some cases that looked like they'd been hit in a war. It's like collapsing. Big giant structures falling apart all over this city. I'd see him, you know, at the window of my dad's Chevy when he was driving me to school. And gradually as I grew up, I kind of put the pieces together of what it meant to live in a place whose best...

Speaker A: economic days had been behind it. And and the message that I got, the kind of lesson that I was given was I don't know anybody said this to me in a sentence, but what the world kind of said to me was if you want to be something, you want to be someone, you have to get out. You have to move out.

Speaker B: Did your dad say that?

Speaker A: Not that I remember. I mean, that's the irony. You know, he's this world very worldly man, you know, been all over the world, but he chose to live in Southbend. He died in South Bend, Indiana. That was where he lived his life. But I I don't know. You You just get this sense that that was what you were supposed to do. And then I did. I got into Harvard, got to the east coast to go to college, and then immediately began to understand that I was I was a somewhere in a way that I didn't understand when I was growing up and started to feel this kind of loyalty, this kind of like almost militant attachment partly because I heard the ways people talked about where I was from.

Speaker B: He passed away while you were running for president.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was just right about the moment that I was announcing the the beginning of the campaign. Yeah. like literally the same week

Speaker B: unexpectedly.

Speaker A: He had been diagnosed with cancer in September and we knew that it it was pretty rough and he passed away in January. So yeah, I mean there was you know not overnight but three or four months the stabilizing in the leadup to the most consequential decision and period of your life.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, this really big important part of your world. And we were close.

Speaker A: I, you know, I moved into a house that was on the same block as where my parents lived in South Bend. Home for dinner every Sunday night. I mean, to have him become ill and then to have him pass away just at the moment that we were starting to launch. Sometimes I look back on it. I don't actually don't know how it worked. I was trying to remember something and I looked back at my like emails and I saw some email I sent at like 3:30 in the morning to my someone on my staff like it was normal I think on the city staff because the other thing is I was still mayor right so I was running the city facing my father's death during that period my mother had a heart attack and heart surgery and then launching this campaign like all within a few really few weeks with each

Speaker B: It's a lot. It's a lot at once. It's a lot for one person to take. How How do you deal with all of that? The noise, the the family stuff at home, the loss of your father all at once. What's the strategy for

Speaker A: I don't know. Strategy is a word. Um, but my way of dealing with it, first of all, had a lot to do with Chaston. So, uh, all this happened, yeah, we got married in 2018 and all of this happened toward the end of 2019. So, we hadn't been married for long and he never guessed when neither one of us guessed on our first date or even when we got married that that this was happening.

Speaker B: What is the, you know, I've got lots of friends who have been on the journey of um sort of disco discovering their sexual orientation at a young age and then going through the process of being comfortable enough in their in their environment to announce it to the world. Yeah. How does that what's the sort of the journey of of you knowing who you were and then feeling comfortable enough to announce it? And what was the how do I put together the picture of like how your parents understood that, how the world understood that, how you understood that? And also, I guess the other question that I have is like American politics. Yeah. How does that understand it? You know, you got the right, the left. How do you think about all of that at the moment?

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I'd like to believe we'll get to a day when it's just not a thing. No one cares and it doesn't affect your career. It doesn't affect your opportunities in life. It just is what it is. That's how I feel it should be. But, you know, that's not how it was or how it is. I mean, when I was commissioned into the Navy Reserve, it was still the law of the land that if I was known to be gay, I'd be fired, right? In fact, when I when I finally made peace with this reality that I was gay,

Speaker B: what age?

Speaker A: I was well into my 20s cuz I wanted so bad for it not to be true that even though obviously I was the whole time, I just needed it not to be true. And working through that took most of my 20s. And then when I finally kind of came to terms with it, it was also around the time that I was I was running for mayor. And maybe because not being able to come terms with it meant that I didn't have really a dating life. Maybe in some ways that helped professionally because I had nothing else to do with my energy, you know. Um, but I remember when I realized I was going to win. I I realized it was important that I kind of finished the process of coming out to myself, which meant I had to come out to somebody else. That was what kind of marked it, you know. And so I had a conversation with a close and trusted friend. And I remember part of his reaction was to say, you know, to joke that like you didn't exactly make it easy on yourself because what you know, my whole professional life had two parts. One was being a Navy officer when that could be career ending. And the other was being an elected official in Indiana, which had was well on its way to getting a reputation as maybe the most anti-gay state in the country. Mike Pence hadn't yet become governor, but he soon would. On one level, I was at peace with this fact, but I also knew it could be a career limiting fact. So, I kept it to myself for a long time. And then I just hit a point where I couldn't do that anymore. And then it was time to come out because, well, the thing that really put me over the edge was when I was getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan. I was already in there, but like a lot of people in the reserve, you leave your day job to go when you get called up. So when you deploy into a war zone, they tell you to write a letter just in case you don't come back, which I did. And in that I in that process, you're kind of taking stock of your life. You're thinking about what you want to say to the people you love most if you don't come back. And that was kind of the the moment that really is the final moment where I just thought if I Here I am. I'm taking stock of my life. I have a great life, but I'm a grown man in a position of responsibility. I'm a homeowner. I'm going to be a veteran. I don't know what it's like to be in love. And I just thought that's not that's untenable. And so I promised myself that if I came home safe, I would deal with this. And I came home physically safe. And the problem was there was a re-election coming up, but I didn't want to have to wait until I'd been reelected. Um, so I figured out a way to come out. And I I was kind of resentful of the idea that I even had to. Like straight people don't have to come out. But I knew that if I just tried to just like show up at some Chamber of Commerce dinner and my date was a dude that night. Like that was just not I couldn't do it that way. Um, and I didn't want to be like quote unquote found out. like I definitely didn't want to be hiding it, but I wanted to start dating.

Speaker B: What about your your parents?

Speaker A: I remember it was weird because again I I knew that they were forward thinking. I knew they were accepting. I knew how much they loved me. Uh but I had a it took me a while to be ready to come out to them. And I did, you know, like I said, I used to go home for Sunday dinner every night. And uh and so I was home for Sunday dinner one night and kind of pushing my ice cream around with a spoon in the bowl and just thinking about and then I just took a deep breath and it's just like I got to tell you something. And um you know as I expected like they you know responded with love and acceptance and I know not everybody gets to expect that. So I'm I'm thankful for that. My dad was immediately worried about what it might mean for

Guest: ...my future. Not in a way that he was trying to like talk me out of anything. He just thought about that and talked about it. My mom wanted to know if I was dating somebody. I think she had had her eyes on, you know, maybe becoming a grandma for a long time. Um, I wasn't dating anybody, but you know, I don't know. It was probably within a year of that that I brought Chaston home for Sunday dinner for the first time and watched him hit it off with my parents, which is just like everything about that everything about that scene at dinner was just not a thing that I could have thought would have been possible just just a few years before it was happening.

Host: By the way, I just want to say that's really beautiful. Uh it's I think you probably don't realize the um the net impact that decision had on many many people who are contending with their own sexuality um by being both a politician. I think you were the you also the um were you the first person in a presidential candidate to be openly gay as well?

Guest: Uh definitely the first person who was considered to have a shot. Yeah.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: I mean not that I was considered to have a shot when I started.

Host: Yeah. But I think in the same way that Obama paved the way for lots of other people to expand their minds as to what was possible for them because of their identity, I think you've certainly done that. And I think it's um it's a weird word to say courageous or brave um as it relates to just being yourself.

Guest: Yeah. I mean it was a personal decision but...

Host: but I think that when there's consequence and there's obvious consequence and you do something irrespective of that, I do consider it to be very admirable in that regard. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is what is the thing that the world needs to hear right now that it maybe doesn't want to hear that is uncomfortable but necessary?

Guest: I think it's that it doesn't have to be the way it is, but we have to do the hard things to change it. Like people can feel that things can't go on like this. And I go around all around the country reminding people that it doesn't have to be like this, but is not going to change on its own. Like you can't just sit back and let some pattern or some wave of history or some technology just like come save the day. It doesn't work that way. Everybody's got to be part of it. Everybody's going to have to give a little something up. And if we do it, it'll be great. But hard things are hard.

Host: One of the things that's quite different between you and other politicians as well is I think you are most willing to go and talk to the other side.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: But just before you arrived here, you were actually over at Fox News.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: And I think that's also something that gosh, both political sides haven't always wanted to do if we're talking about the things that are not nice to hear is you actually have to go talk to your quote unquote enemies or adversaries or those that are totally against you. And I applaud you for really leading the way there and you do a remarkable job of it because you're so bloody articulate and smart. Um, but I think there's a that's that's something important as well in this moment in time.

Guest: I think it's like pol good politics is about encounter. Like it's about encountering people. What's the point of doing this if you're only if you're only talking to people who already agree with you? So yeah, to me it's it's it's a very natural part of the job. I get why it's hard. I get why not everybody does it. Um, but to me it's one of the most important ways to earn my my keep.

Host: Thank you for doing that because it's so wonderful to see the I'd say conflict of ideas in in in public. It's wonderful to see you going to the other side and I know you've been on a bit of a tour of red states recently doing exactly that. I I wish more politicians would do that because that's we get to see those ideas that often exist on extreme polls um collide and we get to make our own mind up and please keep doing what you're doing. I think it's really really remarkable and the values that you have I also respect a huge amount. So thank you for being here and I appreciate your generosity and coming.

Guest: Thanks for having me.

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