All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All-In podcast interview series. Last week, we had Joe Mansion on. This week, Pete Buttigieg is here. Everybody knows Mayor Pete, born in Southbend, Harvard, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey, US Navy, and, of course, ran for president and was the transportation secretary under Biden. Welcome to the program, Pete Buttigieg. How are you?

Good. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure. Meet Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Democrat who rewrote his support of your party and now is a Republican and really the spirit of this program is to just have a candid discussion. We like to get into the details and so I thought I wanted to start with your perception of entrepreneurs, technologists, etc. I was watching a clip of you on Bill Maher and you said, "Hey, you know, these libertarian, science-based folks in Silicon Valley, they made a very practical decision. These are rich men who have decided to back the Republican party that tends to do good things for rich men." And these rich men include Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. These are people who have been part of the Democratic party for a very long time. huge donors to the Democratic party and they all made this sort of flip. Do you think it was just pragmatically based upon the desire to have less regulations, a better business environment to personally make more money or do you think there were other things at work with the loss in 2024?

Well, I don't think you can reduce it to any one thing, but I certainly think that's part of the story. Look, it's no secret that Republican policies tend to favor people who are wealthier. And a lot of people who drifted away from the Democratic party, at least the ones who are getting a lot of attention. Like how could these business figures, investors, billionaires have gotten away from Democrats and gone to Republicans might be kind of a you know dog bites man story. like not something that's wildly complicated. If you look at the fact that, you know, Democrats have been extremely concerned about wealth and income inequality and you got a lot of very very wealthy people. I don't think it was just that. I mean, I think there are a lot of things that that kind of combined at once.

But, you know, for a lot of my friends who are scratching their heads saying, "Wait a minute, these are folks who are from the tech and science world. How could they back a president or administration that's been deleting references to science and kind of censoring science at least anytime that climate is concerned?" A lot of these guys are libertarian. How could they be on board with the administration that is sending troops into streets and has really led a crackdown on freedom. That's kind of something out of the fever dreams of my conservative and libertarian friends back when we were, you know, arguing about politics over beers that I never thought I would see happen. These folks, some of these folks are gay and how can they be backing an administration that's, you know, really assaulted LGBT rights? And you know, if you just go down the list, there's a lot of things that are counterintuitive about some of these Silicon Valley leaders who flipped in many cases flipped from being very very active Democrats to backing Trump.

And you know, maybe there's an intuitive answer to that counterintuitive thing, which is that many of them feel their short-term business interests or personal financial interests are better served by Republicans. I get that. I would counter, as I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are still Democrats would, that look, a healthy business environment, you know, you don't want to be overregulated, but you also want to make sure you're an environment with rule of law. You want to be in a place where it's safe to say scientific truths out loud. you want to be in a place where somebody can't impose their interpretation of their religion on other people. I, you know, I have a whole counter to that. But, you know, I think that's the kind of swirl that we got into. Definitely just in those short years between 2020 and 24.

Do you think that there was censorship under the Biden administration for things like scientific truth? Let's just focus on COVID for a second and the back doors that it seemed that the Biden administration had to places like Facebook and places like Twitter to just suppress scientific thought and debate as you just talked about.

So, this is an amazing example of some of the false equivalencies that I've seen thrown around out there. So yeah, I would acknowledge I think a lot of folks would say that you know it came really close to the stove some of the times when the administration was trying to make sure that you know bad information or misinformation wasn't being pushed into the kind of public health conversation and was engaging social media companies that were trying to you know be responsible and do the right thing and and there might be moments that that you know they got that wrong or went too far. But right now, we're in a moment, right, where the president of the United States doesn't like being criticized by a comedian and has the head of the FCC, which regulates corporations that are trying to buy TV networks, go out and threaten them and say, you know, you're we can do this the easy way or the hard way. I mean, that is a whole different level of censorship. Not to mention just the way they've gone through like every government website, right, and deleted anything that could accidentally be a reference to climate change.

So, you know, I'm worried about the false equivalencies here. You could definitely say there were moments under the last administration or any administration where we could argue that that having fidelity to to free speech, you know, you should have done this way instead of that way or these edge cases should have been different. But but I am nervous that anybody would equate a president trying to direct the destruction not only of journalists but of comedians that he doesn't like with public health authorities in a public health emergency that killed a million Americans doing their best to try to make sure that people got good public health information.

Let's talk a little bit about where the rubber meets the road, which is tax policy. And I think a lot of what we've seen in this back and forth to add to why the Democrats lost all of these amazing entrepreneurs and capitalists who build these amazing companies that create all the jobs in the tax base for this country. Two tax proposals recently, New York City with Mandami and I don't know if you've come out and publicly supported him yet, but he's proposing 54% tax for the top earners there. Here in California, we have the floating of a bill to charge a wealth tax of 5% on billionaires. At a recent Mandami rally, they were chanting tax the rich. And Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, who I think are far left of you, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, are saying, "Hey, ban the billionaires." And we have this sort of movement that being a billionaire is in some way immoral or unethical. So, let's start with some brass tax here. Would you support, and obviously you're going to run for president again in 2028, and you're one of the lead candidates. Would you ever support a wealth tax?

In principle, maybe. Yeah. I mean, you rightly said, you know, folks like Bernie are to my left. I don't know the details of the state and local proposals you just mentioned, but those sound on their face like they're further than I would go. But look, in reality, we tax across a variety of things, right? There's income tax, there's payroll tax, there's property tax. Wealth tax would be kind of along the lines of a property tax. And the thought, of course, is that you've got a lot of folks who become incredibly wealthy. And importantly, the way taxation works now, less and less of the way the wealthiest people accumulate their income is actually booked as income, right? And this is why you have these stories of, you know, multi-billion dollar corporations or multi-billion dollar individuals somehow paying an effective tax rate that's lower than a teacher or a firefighter. And I think most people get that that's wrong.

So I guess my overall take is, you know, everything has a balance, everything has limits, but if if you're asking me the question, are the wealthiest people in America right now paying too much tax or too little tax? I would say the wealthiest are paying too little tax. and whether you adjust that through income tax, whether you adjust that through, you know, something like a wealth tax. And there's a lot of ways to do it. I think what's important is that it's fair, that it makes sense, and and that you do it in a way that that can make sure that the people who are spectacularly rewarded by our system are contributing to it without being so extreme that that you know, you're you're you're crushing wealth creation.

What is the responsibility of the US government in your eyes with the tax receipts that they get? How do we understand that money is being spent appropriately and well versus pet projects or pork barrel spending or frankly just waste and grift. Where is that line? And give us some examples of how you would make sure that as tax receipts went up, accountability went up with it.

Yeah, I think that's that's super important and and people's willingness to pay taxes depends on some level on their, you know, sense that they're getting good value for their money. So, I I cut my teeth as a mayor. We didn't we couldn't, you know, print more dollars if we wanted to. As the city of South Bend, we had a cash budget, had to balance it every year. If we took on debt, we really had to think hard about how we were going to pay on that debt. We made sure that any time we're asking people to be paying revenue into the city, they know what they're getting for that. Whether it's police service or parks or trash pickup, I don't think that's the worst metaphor to think about how things should work at the national level, too, right? We we should believe that we're getting good services, good infrastructure. That was obviously what what I worked on when I was at the federal level as as Secretary of Transportation. We should get good national defense and all the other things that we, you know, as a country are

How do you how do you make sure that it's not wasted? Like I'll give you an example. You had billions and billions of dollars allocated to you from the infrastructure and jobs act to deploy charging infrastructure, right? And as of this year, there's only a few hundred of these charging stations. It's been pretty much an abject failure.

Uh that's not true. And and I'm really glad you raised that because it's actually one of the biggest red herrings we had to deal with. So this is a program to get EV chargers deployed by 2030. The thought was, you know, by 2030, we think about half of the sales or we were hoping about half the sales of cars in the country would be EVs. Now, in order to have that work well, we're going to need more chargers. The market does a good job of delivering chargers in a lot of places, but there were other places where we found it was lower income or it was more rural. It was more spread out and it just wasn't going to pencil for the private sector to do to do it, right? So, we had a fund called NEVI. I can't even remember what the acronym was, but the point was it was like you said about $7 billion to buy down the difference to subsidize or just outright build those chargers in places where they were needed.

And we made a couple of choices that we knew would mean that it would take longer, but we were okay with that. One of them was to have it led by the states. So instead of sitting there in Washington saying where all the chargers ought to be built, we send the funding to the states. We let them set up their own program. And importantly, we let them set up their own programs differently. So, you know, we were going to dictate what the optimal subsidy was in Wyoming compared to West Virginia or whether you even do it through a subsidy or whether it's owned and operated by the state. We took we took a step back on that, let the states innovate, even if that means it's going to take a while for them to polish the program, knowing that that meant most of the chargers would go in in 2026, 2027, but well ahead of 2030.

Now, the second thing, this is really important, too. We made a conscious decision to insist that the Chargers be made in America. Now, when you do that, you're deciding that it's going to take longer. I'll just admit that because just buy them off the shelf from China would be dramatically quicker. We thought that was worth it because we thought it was important to have a US-based industry with, you know, American workers, ideally union electrical workers, making and installing these chargers. Again, we knew that if if the goal was to get them all done by like 2023 or 2024, we wouldn't have had the luxury of doing that. But since we thought most of the charges would be needed by well, by 2030, we were okay with that.

Now, here comes Washington politics, right? And somebody gets a hold of the numbers. They see it's a seven or eight billion dollar program and then falsely try to make it look like we spent the seven or eight billion dollars already on the handful of chargers that that they already managed to build first even though we never thought most of the charges would be built even during our first term. And that's where the Washington game comes in, right? Take something that I mean the jury is still out, right? The program's not done. We'll see how the Trump administration does in completing the program. But, you know, you can't really say whether it was a success or a failure until the program's been run. But they move the goalpost. And I'm not challenging you that like there's waste that there's bad things that happen in and and and government spending that I don't like. But

what's your what's your best guess in general? For every dollar that gets given to the United States government by US taxpayers, what actually lands in productive programs that benefit Americans versus what gets leaked away? What's your best guess? Is it 50 cents of every dollar, 10 cents of every dollar, a penny, 90 cents? Like what is your best guess? you've been in the bowels of these organizations.

So my experience in transportation is that most of it goes to very good use. I mean if you just break it down it goes to things that keep the aviation sector operating safely. It goes to things like highways, roads and bridges. That was the biggest slug of funding that we had in the infrastructure package. and when you know the general or the government accountability office or or the inspector general by the way institutions that Trump is demolishing right now but the organizations that do the auditing and really dig in on a bipartisan basis um often in terms of outright fraud you know they're going to come in a number that's well below 1%.

but but but you know I've also seen my own sense as effective... no effectively this is this comes to the other part I was going to say I mean I think about my time in the military for example. you know there was a building. I think it was Leatherneck. Maybe it was Kandahar, but I think it was Leatherneck. When I traveled out there, there was a building that had taken years to go up. I think it was like $30 million. And just before they were about to activate it, they tore it back down. I mean, it's just a complete boondoggle. And and we see stuff like that happening for sure. We see cost escalations on a lot of projects. So, it's not, you know, it's not the same as fraud. I mean that's the like under 1% but it's still a huge waste if you have a project cost 1% or 10% or sometimes 100% more than it should right I mean by definition every penny it takes to build something more than what it was actually required is wasted and I do think there's a lot of that I think government gets in its own way with procedure

just explain to us as a secretary how much control do you have in stopping that waste So if you see it, so I'll give you a specific example. In 2023, there was some pretty incredible outages in the FAA. We've all now learned that we have an incredibly brittle air safety infrastructure that needs to be upgraded. You saw that in 23 there was outages all the time. What do you do to stop that? And when you see the waste, how do you stop it?

You know, that was an example where we needed to invest, right? So, it's that tough situation and needing to swallow hard and go before Congress and the taxpayer and say, "Look, we need more funding for this." But that's what we did. And by the way, this is one of the rare areas where I agree with my successor who's done pretty much the same thing to make sure we got the funding to upgrade the technology.

Now, this is one of the few audiences might be nerdy enough that that I can geek out a little bit and talk about the big upgrade to the communications backbone that that we were doing. It was to go from TDM to IP from from copper to fiber and to I think a lot of people would be astonished to know that you know something as important and theoretically modern as our aviation system is working on TDM. So that obviously had to be upgraded. We launched a contract. Verizon is the contractor. You know, obviously a multi-year multi-billion dollar IT contract when you have to have, you know, not even 59s but like billion to one chance of anything going wrong 24 by7 by 365. You know, it's challenging and it takes a while. But, you know, that's one of the reasons why we felt a lot of urgency on that particular issue.

But again, there's two ways of looking at this, right? Both of which are true. One thing is to look at the system and say how can the system not be more modern like we need to make better use of the dollars that go into the system to have more up-to-date communications infrastructure to have more controllers who are both well equipped and well-rested and FA's got to do better on that. The other way to look at it is consider the civilizational achievement that is aviation safety in this country. So it's easy to grumble and I grumble and more than grumble. I mean, I got pretty upset with a lot of things about how aviation works as a passenger, which is why we pushed airlines so hard on on passenger protections.

But, you know, just in the four years I was secretary, we had about 4 billion passenger implants. So, 4 billion times somebody got on an airplane, right? Um, and zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of that 4 billion. In other words, what this kind of clunky, imperfect federal government has achieved is a standard of safety on afford a form of transportation that involves being propelled through the air almost at the speed of sound by flammable liquids miles above the ground. And you know, frankly, you and I are one of us is more likely, not to be flip about it, but one of us is more likely to randomly die of natural causes during this taping than to be involved in a commercial airline fatality.

Well, I was about to say, I mean, it is like in some places in our some places in our infrastructure, we're incredibly blessed. And I'm wondering as, you know, now you're in your 40s, you've seen a lot of the world, whether it's your military service or or, you know, just being a mayor of a small town and then, uh, obviously working in a cabinet position. How has your view of free market dynamic solving problems versus the government solving problems evolved if at all? Because when we talk about these problems, you look at what's happening with space. We now can get to space for, you know, 5% of the cost than we used to. Thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX, we have superchargers and chargers everywhere thanks to Tesla and a number of other folks putting them out there, Charge Point, etc. when it comes to putting fiber into rural areas, which the FTC was trying to do, they were going to spend5 to $25,000 per home. And now we have Starlink and their competitors. Again, back to Elon, which your party decided under Biden, you wouldn't even invite the guy to the EV summit. So,

well, let me talk about that, but we'll I want to park that to the side because we should probably talk about what happened there. But let's forget that cuz I want to I want to mention that

because when you when you know I I'm a I'm a moderate but voted Democrat about 65% of the time and Republican a third of the time. When I look at it, I just can't understand how the Democratic party hates us so much. Hates entrepreneurs and that's how they feel. But that's how that's how Silicon Valley feels. We'll talk about whether you want to deny it or not. But it feels like

hate entre like I don't think most Democrats do. I I but I I know what you mean about the vibes and we should get to the piece about about Elon particularly but but but on the piece you're on the substance of the question you're raising. Yeah. I think it's really important to think of this as not like should it be government or should it be the private sector but like which parts should government do and which parts should the private sector do. So to me like the classic example is just the smartphone right. Um, I cannot imagine that a smartphone designed by the federal government would be a pretty thing or that an app designed by a matter of fact having been in the military and and dealt with I guess you could call them apps like some of the kind of uh software that that that you have to deal with even if it's done by contractors. It's kind of done in a way that you can tell was designed by the government and and and it's not pretty.

Um, on the other hand, you know, when you talk about capital allocation, the federal government literally invented the internet, right? So, there's things there's certain trillion dollar ideas that the private sector just won't do cuz it doesn't pencil or because of whatever market failure is there. That's where you need government. That's things like basic research. That's things like filling in gaps that especially on network effects like you know broadband, EV charging networks, that sort of thing where the bulk of it can be done quite well by the private sector, but there are pieces that just don't click unless you have unless you have federal involvement. And that's the attitude we tried to take on things like EVs. Like I never thought that we were going to, you know, create a government EV or that you even needed the government to make sure that a transition to electric happened. But we did believe that for it to be made in America, for it to happen as quickly as we wanted, and for it to reach people who maybe couldn't afford those those initial buyin costs who we really wanted to help out, you know, that's where there's a role for policy. That's where there's a role for funding.

What I get confused though, Pete, is like on the one hand, you're saying the government should set up these clear moonshot objectives that advance America for itself and relative to other countries. But then the other side is that if you do too well achieving those objectives, we want to go and take a bunch of that away from you. How do you reconcile that? And how do you think it impacts the the motivations of young men and women who want to learn and excel and put themselves at risk but also want to believe that if they put themselves at risk and then they are rewarded that they've earned those rewards.

Look, I love people being entrepreneurial, creating something and doing well by it. I mean that's but to a certain basic idea only to a certain level like beyond a certain point of entrepreneurship if you create a monopoly. Yeah. If you create a monopoly I might not like it. If you hurt other people I might not like it. If you concentrate power into your hands to an extreme extent I might not like it because that's just that's just not American. But in general if we're talking about taxation I just want to make sure people who are really well off do their part to pay into a system that has helped them to thrive. because you know that's what it takes for the next generation to do well and that's what it took for all of us to do well. I mean

Can we go to debt maybe um as part of this? I don't know where you were going to go chas but I think maybe

yeah and then that's a good segue. I was just going to point out, you know, we've we've added about $2 trillion in debt over the last uh well, nine years now under Trump, one 45 46 Biden and now again with Trump, we just hit 38 trillion. So, it seems like we're adding 2 trillion a year. What's your take on the sustainability of this?

First of all, the the debt path we're on is not sustainable. And that's one area where you're right, neither party has covered themselves in glory. And it's an area where I would part with some in my own party. I think for too long you've heard the message from Democrats is basically debt doesn't matter like or there's no such thing.

And there was a moment when this felt a little more credible. Some of the evidence at as of a few years ago put a lot of wind in the sales of what was called modern monetary theory. I think a lot of that looks different now.

It looks different. And then you had the And then you had the Republicans, right, who say that debt matters but then act the exact opposite. Now, look, as as a good Democrat, I could point out that I would argue there's a difference in terms of what history empirically has shown us in terms of the return on investment you get when you raise debt to fix roads and bridges and other productive infrastructure versus if you blow up the debt in order to give massive tax breaks to the wealthiest people in the country. because that has just never generated the growth that you know I mean the laugher curve has collapsed empirically and it just doesn't work that way right

so I could quibble over if you're going to do debt what's the best thing to do with it and I would argue the best thing to do with it is education healthcare investing it make sure kids don't get lead poisoned investing it in ports and roads and not investing it in tax cuts for extremely wealthy people who who didn't need them and in some cases weren't really asking for it and were perfectly productive in fact history would say more productive at times in history when they were paying more taxes in the US. But leaving that partisan fight aside, I do want to come back and agree with you again that that where we are right now is not sustainable. That contrary to what some on the left would say, there is such a thing as the debt. It does matter and we need to make sure that what we're doing going forward is more consistent with with some basic fiscal responsibility.

What is the fiscal responsibility? I mean, I hear all these, you know, political speak over and over again from you guys, but I never hear anybody say, "You know what? We got to tighten our belts, folks. We're going to have to cut unemployment. We have to cut these and we're going to have to raise taxes here. We have to make cuts here." I don't ever hear any of you come up with like a plan that actually would pass mustard with any of us in the business community who have to run companies and make sure they're solvent. This does not seem like you have a plan or anybody else has a plan. And it's is it because it's so unpopular that you can't just say, "Hey, it's there's going to be some austerity here and it's going to be painful and there's going to be more taxes and that's going to be painful and then you don't get elected." Is that the issue?

I literally did put out a plan which I balanced every single spending back when I was running for president in 2020, which feels like another lifetime. Every single thing that I proposed spending on, I also proposed to pay for and explained what would have to happen tax-wise in order to do it. And again, that's just those are the habits that I built as a mayor who had to do my budget in cash. So, look, it's not like it's a completely unsolvable problem. There are measures that we got to take to reduce things like the cost of providing healthcare, which is one of the biggest sources of pressure on Medicare, Medicaid, you name it. Not just getting people insured, but the actual underlying cost. Same with pharmaceuticals. And then there are things you got to do on the revenue side. Like I'm I'm sorry, but like we can't just slash a trillion bucks from from what the wealthiest people are paying again and again and then call this a sustainable budget.

Let me ask you a question about the inner workings of the Democratic party. I'm sure you've been asked this a hundred times, so sorry for us being the 101st, but in Kla Harris's memoir, she points in part to your identity as a reason why you weren't considered as her running mate. Can you explain to us the role of identity in Democratic politics? Both perhaps you on the way in when you were nominated for secretary and then maybe on the way out when you were not considered as a credible VP candidate.

Let's just say I would love for identity to play a less central role in the politics of our country and and the politics of my party and and not just because I might have been passed over for for an opportunity, but just because I think it is it has really dominated so many people's thinking in a way that makes it harder for us to build a message across identities. I mean, don't get me wrong, I I don't think it I don't think it makes sense to pretend that identity doesn't matter. I don't think it makes sense to pretend to be colorblind. I also don't think it makes sense to allow that to explain everything, which is one of the habits that's formed, I think definitely on my party's far left, that that made it harder for us to get through,

especially when you have a lot of people whose interests are shared. I'm thinking about the economic interest of poor people and low-wealth people in this country, for example, who are black, white, and of of every ethnicity and identity and gender, of course, who maybe didn't hear a unifying message that was speaking to them as a group because it felt like my party was it was like a salad bar, like here's something for your group and here's something for another group and here's something for another group and it didn't add up into a story.

Now, I would argue that Trump practices a kind of identity politics, too. a sort of a white identity politics that uh makes people feel like they are encircled by the other that that that immigrants are sort of an invasion. I mean, we can go down that road and I often have, but uh the more straightforward way to answer your question about my party is that I think identity has become too central to how my party thinks.

How have they reacted? You know, you you took a pretty firm line on Israel Gaza. You took a pretty firm line on transgender folks in sports. tell us about the dynamics of taking those positions inside the Democratic party.

Famously, our party has a lot of different voices within it. And so, you know, some folks uh if you are not saying the leftmost thing, uh they're just done with you. But I think a lot of others believe in the idea of politics as as building a coalition and and pulling people into a bigger picture. and and I'm going to say some things that uh you know won't be in conformity with what every activist group in my party wants to hear. That's okay. That's that's part of it.

How do you navigate the the necessary extremism maybe that's required then to get out of a primary process?

Well, this is the classic issue with going from primaries to generals, right? you you are pressured to say one thing to appeal to the base in your party and then you wind up if if you're not careful saying things that make it hard for you to have credibility in a general election when you're trying to uh paint a picture that the broadest number of people possible can can see themselves in. That's nothing new.

But one thing that has happened more and more and more is that that's happening in more and more races. So the presidency is always a little bit like this, but the presidency is also the one that gets painted in the broadest strokes because it's it's a campaign for the whole country and it's all the different jostling around all the issues and all the groups all boiled down into two people running for one office. But where I think this actually hurts us the most is in Congress. So we got 435 seats in the House. Last time I checked, less than one out of 10 of them is considered to be seriously competitive at best. like less than 40 are actually competitive, which means in nine out of 10 races, the primary is pretty much it. So, you never even have to bother thinking about whether some stance you took in the primary is going to make it harder for you to work across the aisle or or harder to win people over or bring them together in the general because these districts are so gerrymandered, right, that that all you have to worry about is your right flank if you're a Republican or your left flank if you're a Democrat. That's where I think it hurts us the most.

Pete, do you think that Donald Trump made the right decision to close the border? And if not, why not?

I think that he is right to draw attention to the problem of the border and that it is it is important to have a secure border. I don't believe it was true that it was exactly open before. I think it is functionally closed now, but I I would agree that the last administration didn't do enough and didn't do enough early enough.

And why do you think Biden looked the other way? What was the strategy? Was there a strategy?

Yeah, I think what happened was he was really looking to Congress to do it. He came out of Congress. He was a creature of Congress and thought, you know, Congress can forge a bipartisan since, you know, there's actually a bipartisan agreement among the American people on what to do, right? Which is what most people believe, what I believe, which is let's make it harder to come in illegally and easier to come in legally and and to get legal if you're not. I mean, that's where most people are most country.

Yeah. And that's where most of the space for compromise has been on the hill. And yet, you know, I think it was the '8s last time we had an actual bill to fix it. So, I think he, and this is speculating, I I never really, you know, was in the middle of the immigration side of things, but I think he felt like the way to do this was to get things done in Congress, he he felt that, you know, he'd managed to get the infrastructure bill done, IRA. Um but what's interesting is when he finally gave up on Congress uh when it was clear that we just weren't going to get very far and meanwhile you had had that that exe set of executive orders that came late in the term that had a major effect on the number of illegal crossings. So you got to ask yourself if that executive order that happened toward the end if that had been done in year 1, year two, would we be in a different place?

Now of course we're on the other extreme. I mean, we got we got citizens who just have an accent or look brown getting picked up sometimes getting detained without access to a lawyer for a frighteningly long amount of time. And that's citizens, let alone other people who, you know, maybe they shouldn't be here, but they also shouldn't be brutalized, right? And I think one reason you see the pendulum swinging on on this is is we're seeing just how extreme it's gotten at a time when again I think the only way forward really is a kind of a grand bargain where we bring together the the the the people who believe in these simple realities that we've got an economy and a a society that exerts a pull that actually needs more people like for our demographics and our economy to work then there is room in the kind of legal pipeline to come in.

Just to clean this up, Pete, like if you if it were up to you, would you reopen the border or would you maintain the Donald Trump position right now of okay, now it's closed, now let's figure out this grand bargain, as you say, keep

more precise by what we mean. I mean, if you mean like having it be difficult, at least as difficult as it is now, to cross illegally. I think that's it's a good thing for it to be difficult to cross illegally. Um, but again, I think calling it open then or closed now, you're talking about a lot of different overlapping things. Obviously, there are a lot of things about Trump's immigration policy I think are wrong, destructive, possibly illegal, too.

Can I just say as the only immigrant right now on this podcast who immigrated here legally, I feel much safer and better under a Donald Trump presidency than I ever did under a Biden presidency. Just want you to hear from my mouth for what that's worth.

Let me ask you a different question which is I really want to get some insight into what it was like for you to work in the Biden administration. We've had the sea of tell alls coming out, Kla Harris's book, KJP's book. We had Joe Mansion on last week and one of the things that he said is that it was not that Joe Biden changed, but that the staff were nuts and that Ron Clay was effectively a gatekeeper and if you had reasonable proposals, they would go into some black hole and die. Can you give us a sense of what it was like to work under Biden and the the positives but also the negatives? Give us a fair representation.

Yeah. And and in the spirit of fairness, I should say this is the only time I've outside of military, it's the only time I've ever worked in the federal government. So I can't benchmark, you know, to compare one white house to another or one president to another. But I'll tell you what my experience was like. There's a high level of ambition trying to get big things done quickly, especially in the first two years when there was uh felt like there was that opportunity to uh work with both houses of Congress to make it happen, including just a ton of energy going into well among other things spending time with folks like Joe Mansion trying to make sure that that we held together that that coalition to do things like the infrastructure law.

Um there were calls I agree with, there were calls I disagreed with. Um, there were also a lot of times when it looked like something wasn't going to happen and then somehow it happened. And that was where I I do think it helped to have a president who spent as much time as he did in the Senate because, you know, it really felt like the infrastructure bill was dead. We forget this now cuz cuz it happened and it's kind of hard to imagine it was any other way, but you know, it was proclaimed dead many, many times in that summer of 2021 before it got done. So these moments of snatching uh uh victory from the jaws of defeat, you know, the word gatekeeper gets used a lot for White House staff. I don't think that's unfair. I would also say though that I don't say that's new. Um you know, the gatekeeper is often the the kind of other word you use for a chief of staff.

Was he into cognitive decline or when did you first realize he was in cognitive decline, I guess, would be the better question, or suspect that he wasn't, you know, up for the job.

You could feel that he was growing older. I mean, I think we all saw that. Uh, I think my experience and obviously, you know, I wasn't at the White House every day. Most of the time I was I was out in the field doing transportation work. But, uh, you know, what I would see if I was at an event was the same as what you'd see, you know, watching TV. Um, I think the debate was a real turning point.

Yeah. I mean, the debate was a turning point, right, where you just saw I think everybody saw what everybody saw. On the other hand, you know, when we were

something like that happen, h how does somebody who is so in cognitive decline get put up into that situation because it's clear that they knew many months before that this was not going to end well. How did they get to that point? How insular were they? And then I want to talk about the uh selection of Kamla without having a primary. So yeah.

Yeah. I think the short answer is there there's not really a they that makes that decision, right? people give advice, but there's a he like one person decides if he's running again. One person decides at the end of the day on the campaign strategy and is accountable for that. Uh so, you know, I think I I can't imagine what exactly was going on in the inner circle. I wasn't I wasn't part of those conversations, but um yeah, I I do think that, you know, by the time it got to that debate, uh it was just very clear that it wasn't serving him well, wasn't serving the party well.

Let's move to a different more tactical question. This is my last question for you, Pete, which is there's some discussion about moving NASA under the Department of Transportation. Good idea, bad idea. Give us your reasoning.

Well, let me think of it. To be honest, I haven't like deeply reflected on this. Um, at a selfish and nerdy level, it would have been amazing as Secretary of Transportation to be working NASA, too. Um, I think generally anytime you can have like one uh box or on an org chart where you where there's two, you know, as long as it's justified, I think there are some benefits to that.

I mean, definitely right now the way that it let me put it this way. If we think the future of space is going to be more and more about commercial space, which is is clearly just as a matter of numbers what's happening. The mishmash we have now where you got NASA obviously leading government-driven space missions. You got the Department of Transportation which actually already had responsibility over some things and we did commercial space licensing. We wound up having to radically accelerate how that worked. Uh because that actually comes under the FAA um largely because you have to go through the national airspace to get to space, right? And there's actually parts of it that sit with commerce. So it would make sense to disentangle that one way or the other, whether it's inside of DOT or whether you configure it a new way.

I mean, I do think that Washington in general, my part is definitely guilty of this, is too attached to all of the like structures that we have right now and the existing or charts and existing habits. And you know, one message I'm trying to get my party to accept is, you know, if and when we get another chance, a lot of the things that he has burned down just aren't coming back the way they were, why would we put them back the way they used to be if it was full of problems anyway? So, I don't have a really deeply considered answer for you, but I wouldn't be hostile to a change just because it's a change or or just because it came from this administration.

This is my last question. There was a report that came out today. I think the amount of miles driven per day by Whimo is about to pass 250,000. We have Tesla with cyber cab and robo taxi. These things have a material ability to prevent drunk driving and prevent vehicular deaths. What do you think should be done? Should we let this play out at this exact pace? Is there a responsibility in from the federal government? Do you wish you had done more to accelerate this? Tell us about autonomous driving and its role in society.

So, I I think that there's the potential to save a huge number of lives. You know, we talked earlier about the incredible standard of aviation safety, right? Zero fatalities per billion better. It's the opposite on roadway safety. Nobody talks about it. I we had a plug door blow out of an airplane and we we reconsidered our whole oversight framework because somebody could have gotten hurt that day. Meanwhile, every day 100 to 150 people die on our roadways to car crashes and vehicles driven by humans. I mean, it's enough to fill a 737 every day. It's on par with gun violence. 30 40,000 people a year.

So, human drivers have a murderous track record. It's a little bit different when we talk about professional drivers who have incredible I mean I met truck drivers who'd have, you know, two million miles with no crashes or accidents. But just as a general rule, most of us the average driver thinks they're safer than the average driver. And the average driver stands a shockingly high percentage chance of getting somebody killed. So, you know, I think we're at the point where at least some of these technologies right now already are safer than human beings and that's only going to increase and improve. And the the irony of it is, you know, even if a handful of highly publicized uh negative incidents will will really change public acceptance. So my approach was

and they have. Yeah. Yeah. So my approach was we we do need to be conservative as a safety regular to make sure it's safe. Not because I don't believe in the technology, but because I do because I think if people see it unfolding safely, uh there's going to be more acceptance. But are there things we could or should do or could or should have done to accelerate AV adoption? Um, I think the answer is yes. Like the the simple reality is we we can't tolerate like it's no big deal human drivers killing more than 100 people a day on our roads.

This is a perfect segue for my final question. We've had a grand debate occurring in our industry about job displacement. Uh Amazon announced yesterday, I'm sure you saw 30,000 white collar jobs to be eliminated. UPS today something around 40,000 people and there was a leak in the New York Times that Amazon was planning on eliminating 600,000 job wrecks for the future and not hiring them because they're so convinced that robotics will do that. We all know AI is going to be the biggest change of our lifetime. I don't think that's the debate. The question is um what will job displacement and new job creation look like this time? What does Pete Buddhajed think? Do you think that we have a serious issue on our hands or do you think we'll be able to navigate it? And then what's the government's role in it when you're president? What will it look like if you inherit this chaotic AI job displacement potential?

Yeah, I'm I'm seriously concerned about it and and part of that's from growing up in the industrial Midwest. Like, you know, we were told I grew up in Northern Indiana, uh, a lot of auto industry supply chain companies there. And in the 90s and 2000s, a lot of trade and automation, but the truth is mostly automation came in. And uh everybody was told, you know, don't worry too much about what you're doing today. The pie is going to get so much bigger that everybody will be better off. And the thing is, the pie did get bigger, but the rest of that promise didn't come true. And people were pissed. People were pissed because they lost their income, but also even after they got their income, if if they went through a training program and got another job in a field that was growing, but it wasn't who they thought they were, it wasn't connected to their their sense of identity or belonging, then you continue to have a displacement that's not just economic, but but but really deeper than that.

And I actually think a lot of that kind of leads directly to the populism and the nationalism that you see in this administration and this in this political moment. So uh and the thing that really haunts me is you know as much as any auto worker or electrical worker I know like their sense of belonging and identity you know very much depends in many ways on being an autoworker or an electrical worker. That's even more true for most white collar workers. I know people who work in law or or software or you know um uh you know you see what's happening in radiology just to take one example what's happening in medicine that's really changing because of AI and the the displacement that could come with that I think is enormous and I don't think we're prepared.

Yeah. I don't know you know I don't want to get into prediction games about which things will happen in which order but I think it's clear that it's big. It's clear that it's fast. It's coming. It's accelerating. And my big worry is that if we're already at a level of concentration of wealth and power that no republic has ever survived, is this going to be a development that just makes wealth and power even more concentrated in even fewer hands? I don't think it has to be. I think that's where, you know, good policy can make a difference. But I think if we just sleepwalk into it, that could happen. It could be even more dabiliz.

Our friends at Poly Market, I'm sure you know uh all about these uh prediction markets and how good they are. Looks like Gavin AOC oddly in second place and then yourself in third place right now. Gavin obviously is running up the hill. Who knows if he takes the arrows first, but it looks like you're in a pretty good position here. What are your thoughts here on the a early um indicators of who's connecting with the sharps over at Poly Market?

Well, you guys don't strike me as folks who'd be content with a 6% return, but

got to get those numbers up, Pete.

So, you know, it feels like the timelines keep shifting. I'll tell you like I'm in no hurry to be in the middle of presidential politics. Obviously, it's something I care about. It's something I have done uh already once before in 2020, but you know, this year, this is the first year in in about 15 that I haven't been uh in office or running for office, and I'm kind of enjoying it. I mean, I'm I'm working hard supporting candidates I believe in. We have a a pack uh and and I travel a lot and speak a lot, but uh you know, there there will be a time for those kinds of things, and I'm not uh uh I'm not going to try to rush.

All right, listen. Pea Judge, uh, thanks so much for taking the time. We'll have you on again. Uh, great to talk with you and, uh, we appreciate you coming on the program. We'll see you all next time. Byebye.

Same here. Good day.