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Pete Buttigieg: The Left's Identity Crisis, Wealth Tax, 2024 Mistakes, Plans for 2028 Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) Chamath and Jason welcome Pete Buttigieg
(1:31) Why the Democrats lost tech
(6:40) Taxes: Federal wealth tax, wealth disparity, billionaires, the role of government in the free market
(23:17) Government efficiency: Democratic DOGE, breaking ranks on debt, his plan to control spending
(33:01) Culture Wars: The costly role of democratic identity politics, navigating a primary with moderate views, the two Democratic Parties
(40:07) Immigration: Trump shutting the border, Biden’s failure
(47:38) Working in the Biden Admin: good and bad, gatekeepers, cognitive decline, anointing Kamala Harris vs running a short primary
(52:17) Thoughts on moving NASA under the Dept of Transportation
(54:07) AI: self-driving, automation, and job loss
(1:01:19) Running in 2028, Mamdani in NYC
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Pete Buttigieg: The Left's Identity Crisis, Wealth Tax, 2024 Mistakes, Plans for 2028 Podcast Episode Summary
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Pete Buttigieg: The Left's Identity Crisis, Wealth Tax, 2024 Mistakes, Plans for 2028 Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
There are certain trillion dollar ideas that the private sector just won’t do because it doesn’t pencil or because of whatever market failure is there. That’s where you need government. First of all, the the debt path we’re on is not sustainable, that I think identity has become too central to how my party thinks.
Speaker: 0
00:16
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My big worry is that if we’re already at a level of concentration of wealth and power that no republic has ever ai. Is this sana be a development that just makes wealth and power even more concentrated in even fewer hands.
Speaker: 1
00:31
Ai, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. Ai could hear and talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions a minute.
Speaker: 2
00:40
We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion.
Speaker: 1
00:43
What’d you guys say? That was fun, palace grad. I’m doing all in. Ai, everybody. Welcome back to the All In podcast interview series. Last week, we had Joe Manchin on this week. Pete Buttigieg is here. Everybody knows Mayor Speak, born in South Bend, Harvard, Rhodes Scholar, McKinsey, US Navy, and, of course, ran for president and was the transportation secretary under Biden.
Speaker: 1
01:10
Welcome to the program, Pete Buttigieg. How are you?
Speaker: 0
01:13
Good. Thanks for having me.
Speaker: 1
01:15
Pleasure. Meh Shamoff Palihapitiya, a former Democrat who re ai 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 ai to get into the details. And so I thought Ai wanted to start with your perception of entrepreneurs, technologists, etcetera. I was watching a clip of you on, Bill Maher.
Speaker: 1
01:39
And you said, hey, you know, these these libertarian ai 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.
Speaker: 1
02:00
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?
Speaker: 1
02:19
Or do you think there were other things at work with the loss in 2024? Well, I don’t think you
Speaker: 0
02:26
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 the people who drifted away from the Democratic Party, at least the ones who were 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.
Speaker: 0
03:01
And, you know, 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 kinda ai 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.
Speaker: 0
03:17
How could they back, a president or administration that’s been deleting references to science and kind of censoring ai, at least anytime that climate is concerned? A lot of these guys are libertarian. How could they be on board with the, you know, the administration that is, sending troops into streets and has, really meh a crackdown on freedom that’s kind of something out of the fever dreams of my conservative and libertarian friends back when we were arguing about politics over beers that I never thought I would see happen.
Speaker: 0
03:44
Some of these folks are gay and how can they be backing an administration that’s really assaulted LGBT rights? And 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.
Speaker: 0
04:07
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 I would counter, as I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are still Democrats would, that, look, a a healthy business environment you know, you don’t wanna be overregulated, but you also wanna make sure you’re in an environment with rule of law.
Speaker: 0
04:33
You wanna be in a place where it’s safe to say scientific truths out loud. You wanna be in a place where somebody can’t impose their interpretation of their religion on other people. 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 2024.
Speaker: 0
04:51
Do
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04:51
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?
Speaker: 0
05:07
Sai 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 it came really close to the stove some of the times when the administration was trying to make sure that bad information or misinformation wasn’t being pushed into the public health conversation and was engaging social media companies that were trying to be responsible and do the right thing.
Speaker: 0
05:31
And there might be moments that they got that wrong or went too far. But right now we’re in a moment ai 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.
Speaker: 0
05:55
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, Ai worried about the false equivalencies here.
Speaker: 0
06:09
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 in trying to direct the destruction, not only of journalists but of comedians that he doesn’t ai, 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.
Speaker: 1
06:40
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 Maandami,
Speaker: 2
07:03
ai
Speaker: 1
07:03
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 Mondami rally, they were chanting sai the rich and Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, who I think are far left of you, you can correct me if I’m wrong, or saying, hey, ban the billionaires.
Speaker: 1
07:30
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 tacks here. Would you support and obviously, you’re sana run for president again in 2028 and you’re you’re one of the lead candidates. Would you ever support a wealth tax?
Speaker: 0
07:47
In principle, maybe. Yeah. I mean, you ai said, you know, folks like Bernie, are to my left. I don’t know the details of the state and local proposals you just meh, 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.
Speaker: 0
08:08
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 have 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?
Speaker: 0
08:27
And this is why you have these stories of ai dollar corporations or multibillion dollar individuals somehow paying an effective tax rate that’s lower than a teacher or a ai. And I think most people get that that’s wrong. So I guess my overall take is everything has a balance, everything has limits.
Speaker: 0
08:46
But if you’re asking me the question, arya 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 something like wealth tax Sana there’s a lot of ways to do it.
Speaker: 0
09:03
I think what’s important is that it’s fair, that it makes sense, and that you do it in a way that can make sure that the people who are spectacularly rewarded by our system are contributing to it without being so extreme that you’re crushing wealth creation.
Speaker: 2
09:19
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 ai?
Speaker: 2
09:39
And give us some examples of how you would make sure that as tax receipts went up, accountability went up with it.
Speaker: 0
09:45
Yeah. I think that’s that’s super important. And and people’s willingness to pay taxes depends in 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 print more dollars if we wanted to as the city of South Bend.
Speaker: 0
10:02
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 sana 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.
Speaker: 0
10:21
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.
Speaker: 0
10:33
We should get good national defense and all of the other things that we, you know, as a country are
Speaker: 2
10:40
honestly shah 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 100 of these charging stations. It’s been pretty much an abject failure.
Speaker: 0
10:58
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 ai 2030 we think about half of the sales or we were hoping about half the sales of cars in the country would be EVs.
Speaker: 0
11:17
Now in order to have that work well, we’re sana need more chargers. The market does a good job of delivering chargers in a lot of places, but there arya other places where we found it was lower income or it was more rural or it was more spread out and it just wasn’t in a pencil for the private sector to do it, right?
Speaker: 0
11:32
So we had a fund called NEDI. I can’t even remember what the acronym was, but the point was it was, like you said, about $7,000,000,000 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.
Speaker: 0
11:53
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 sana the funding to the states, we let them set up their own program, and importantly, we let them set up their own programs differently.
Speaker: 0
12:05
So we were going to dictate what the optimal subsidy was in Wyoming compared to West Virginia or whether you even do it through subsidy or whether it’s owned and operated by the state. 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 ram, knowing that that meant most of the chargers will go in in 2026, 2027, but well ahead of 2030.
Speaker: 0
12:28
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 sana take longer. I’ll just admit that because just ai them off the shelf from China would be dramatically quicker.
Speaker: 0
12:43
We thought that was worth it because we thought it was important to have a US based industry with, you know, American workers, ai, 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.
Speaker: 0
13:02
But since we thought most of the chargers would be needed ai, 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 $7 or $8,000,000,000 ram, and then falsely ai to make it look like we spent the $7 or $8,000,000,000 already on the handful of chargers that they already managed to build first, even though we never thought most of the chargers would be built even during our first term.
Speaker: 0
13:25
And that’s where the Washington game comes in. Right? Take something that I mean, the jury’s still out. Right? The program’s not done.
Speaker: 0
13:31
We’ll see how the Trump administration does in completing the ram, 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 Ai not challenging you that ai waste, that there’s bad things that happen in and and and What’s your best guess ai what’s your
Speaker: 2
13:48
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¢ of every dollar, 10¢ of every dollar, a penny, 90¢? Like, what is your best guess?
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14:09
You’ve been in the bowels of these organizations.
Speaker: 0
14:12
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.
Speaker: 0
14:28
And when the general or the government accountability office or the inspector general by the way, institutions that Trump is demolishing right ai. But the organizations that do the auditing and really dig in on a bipartisan basis, often in terms of outright fraud, you know, they’re gonna come in a number that’s well below 1%.
Speaker: 0
14:46
But but but, you know, I’ve also seen
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14:49
ai% is effective?
Speaker: 0
14:52
No. This is this comes to the other part of what I was gonna 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, $30,000,000.
Speaker: 0
15:08
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.
Speaker: 0
15:22
I mean, that’s still, like, under 1%, but it’s still a huge waste if you have a project that costs 1% or 10% or ai a 100% more than it should, right? Sai 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.
Speaker: 0
15:42
I think government gets in its own way with procedure.
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15:45
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 were 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.
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16:06
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?
Speaker: 0
16:14
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. That’s what we did. And ai 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.
Speaker: 0
16:32
Now, this is one of the few audiences that might be nerdy enough that I can geek out a little bit and talk about the big upgrade to the communications backbone 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.
Speaker: 0
16:55
Sai that obviously had to be upgraded. We launched a contract. Ai was a contractor. Obviously, a multi ram, multibillion dollar IT contract when you have to have, you know, not even five nines, but, like, a billion to one, chance of anything going wrong, 24 by seven by three sixty ai, you know, it’s challenging and it takes a while.
Speaker: 0
17:16
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?
Speaker: 0
17:27
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 FAA has 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.
Speaker: 0
17:47
So it’s easy to grumble and I grumble sana 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 push airlines so hard on passenger protections. But just in the four years I was secretary, we had about 4,000,000,000 passenger emplacements, so 4,000,000,000 times somebody got on an airplane, ai, and zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of that four billion.
Speaker: 0
18:12
In other words, what this ai of clunky, imperfect federal government has achieved is a standard of safety on 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 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.
Speaker: 0
18:39
So Let’s
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18:39
hope it’s Jason.
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18:41
Well, I meh, ai I was saying, I mean, it is ai 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 forties, 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, obviously working in a cabinet position.
Speaker: 1
19:02
How has your view of free market ai 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.
Speaker: 1
19:22
We have superchargers and chargers everywhere, thanks to Tesla and a number of other folks putting them out there, ChargePoint, etcetera. When it comes to putting fiber into rural areas, which the FTC was trying to do, they were gonna spend ai to $25,000 per home. And now we have Starlink and their competitors, again, back to Elon, which your party ai, under Biden, you wouldn’t even invite the guy to the EV summit.
Speaker: 1
19:48
So Well,
Speaker: 0
19:49
let let me talk about that, but we’ll I wanna park that to the side because we we should probably talk about what
Speaker: 1
19:54
happened there.
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19:55
By the way forget that because I wanna I wanna mention that.
Speaker: 1
19:57
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 what they feel. But that’s how that’s how Silicon Valley feels. Alright.
Speaker: 0
20:14
We’ll we’ll talk about the vibes.
Speaker: 1
20:15
Whether you wanna deny it or not, but it feels like
Speaker: 0
20:18
this I hate entrepreneurs. Like, I 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 on the substance of the question you’re raising. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s really important to think of this as not ai 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?
Speaker: 0
20:40
So to me, like, the classic example is just the smartphone. Right? I cannot imagine that a smartphone designed by the federal government would be a pretty thing or that an app designed by matter of fact, having been in the military and dealt with, I guess you could call them apps, ai some of the kind of software 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 it was designed by the government and it’s not pretty.
Speaker: 0
21:07
On the other hand, when you talk about capital allocation, the federal government literally invented the internet. Ai are certain trillion dollar ideas that the private sector just won’t do because it doesn’t pencil or because of whatever market failure is there. That’s where you need government.
Speaker: 0
21:24
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 federal involvement.
Speaker: 0
21:39
And that’s the attitude we ai to take on things like EVs. Ai never thought that we were going to 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 initial buy in costs, who we really wanted to help out, that’s where there’s a role for policy.
Speaker: 0
22:02
That’s where there’s a role for funding.
Speaker: 2
22:04
What I get confused though, Pete, is ai 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 sana go and take a bunch of that away from you.
Speaker: 2
22:22
How do you reconcile that? And how do you think it impacts 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’re rewarded, that they’ve earned those rewards.
Speaker: 0
22:37
Look, I love people being entrepreneurial, creating something and doing well ai, it. I mean, that’s basic idea. But to a certain ai, right?
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22:45
Only to a certain ai, beyond
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22:47
the human point of entrepreneurial success. 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 not American. But in general, if we’re talking about taxation, I just sana to make sure people who are really well off do their part to pay into a system that has helped them to ai, because you know, that’s what it takes for the next generation to do well.
Speaker: 0
23:14
And that’s what it took for all of us to do well. I mean
Speaker: 2
23:16
Let’s just assume you’re a president. You get trillions of dollars of receipts. Mhmm. I’m gonna guess the party line that you have to take is DOGE was bad. Okay. Fine. What is the version of DOGE that you would implement sai that
Speaker: 0
23:29
Great question. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
23:29
We could figure out what percentage of that dollar that we’re giving you is wasted and stop it?
Speaker: 0
23:36
Yeah. So I would love, in theory, a department of government efficiency that was actually about government efficiency. I think that would make tons of sense. It’s what I tried to do again when I was mayor. We took apart the small government that I was in charge of. It was about a $300,000,000 operation and put it back together and found that it could be radically more efficient in many ways.
Speaker: 0
23:54
And we need to do that at the federal level. We need to How
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23:57
much money did you take out from that 300?
Speaker: 0
23:59
We used it better, I would put it that way. Sai, you know, we didn’t I mean, there were areas where we were able to kind of have a certain budget line item shrink, but in a city where the average per capita income was $18,000 or $19,000 per person when I came in, we weren’t handing that over in tax breaks to wealthy residents.
Speaker: 0
24:18
We were putting it to other use on public safety and fundamentals like that. But look, again, I agree that the DOGE we could have could do a lot of really good work. It could find duplicative regulations. It could find cases where we could move from input based to output based evaluation of our programs.
Speaker: 0
24:38
In other words, instead of saying ai this is a meaningful program because how many billions went into it, figure out how much value came out of it. But the DOGE we got was one that couldn’t even count, that put information ai that was wrong by three orders of magnitude on its own ai, then erased its own information because they didn’t believe in the transparency.
Speaker: 0
24:58
The DOGE we got sent an email to every air traffic controller in the country during an air traffic controller shortage and suggested they quit being an air traffic controller and get something, quote, more productive to do in the private sector, only later on to be told, actually, that was a mistake.
Speaker: 0
25:15
The Doge we got apparently wasn’t supposed to send that information to all the air traffic controllers. Whoops. The Doge we got fired people in charge of making sure our nuclear weapons were safe and in charge of making sure that bird flu didn’t spread and then, whoops, tried to hire him back in a hurry.
Speaker: 0
25:31
So yeah, there’s a huge difference between the Doge we got and the Doge we could have had. But if you’re talking about in principle, should we unleash ai smart, talented people with an outside in perspective and a free hand to evaluate what is working and where we’re not getting value for our money in government.
Speaker: 0
25:49
Like, you and I would be in violent agreement that that’s a good idea and there’s no better place to find some of those opportunities than the things that the federal government does because it just does or because there was a good reason once upon a ai, but that reason has ai.
Speaker: 0
26:03
Or maybe meh reason was not good to begin with. Let me just Let me
Speaker: 1
26:06
go to debt maybe, as part of this. I don’t know where you were sana go, Ai. Sai think maybe
Speaker: 0
26:10
talk about I
Speaker: 2
26:11
wanted to go to the inner workings of the Democratic Party, but go ahead to debt and then we can
Speaker: 1
26:14
move. Yeah. And then maybe that’s a good segue. I was just gonna point out, you know, we’ve we’ve added about $2,000,000,000,000 in debt over the last, what, nine years now under Ram. One, ’45, ’46, Ai, and now, again, with Trump, we just hit 38,000,000,000,000. So it seems like we’re adding 2,000,000,000,000 a year. What’s your take on the sustainability of this?
Speaker: 0
26:35
First of all, the the debt path we’re on is not sustainable, and that’s one area where, you’re ai, 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 or there’s no such thing
Speaker: 1
26:55
And
Speaker: 0
26:55
there was a moment when this felt a little more credible. Some of the evidence vatsal of a few years ago, put a lot of wind in the sai of what was called modern monetary theory. I think a lot of that looks different now. It looks different. And then you have the Republicans ai say that debt matters but then act the exact opposite.
Speaker: 0
27:14
Now, look, 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 Ai mean, the Laffer curve has collapsed empirically and it just doesn’t work that way, right?
Speaker: 0
27:43
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 didn’t need them and in some cases weren’t really asking for it and were perfectly productive.
Speaker: 0
28:05
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 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.
Speaker: 0
28:21
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.
Speaker: 1
28:30
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 gotta tighten our belts, folks. We’re gonna have to cut unemployment. We have to cut these, and we’re gonna have to raise taxes here.
Speaker: 1
28:44
We’re gonna 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.
Speaker: 1
29:04
It’s it’s there’s gonna be some austerity here, and it’s gonna be painful. And there’s gonna be more taxes, and that’s gonna be painful. And then you don’t get elected. Is that the issue?
Speaker: 0
29:12
Ai literally did put out a plan, which I balanced every single 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 explain what would have to happen tax wise in order to do it. And again, 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.
Speaker: 0
29:35
There are measures that we got to take to reduce things like the cost of providing health care, which is one of the biggest, sources of pressure on, Medicare ram 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.
Speaker: 0
29:52
I’m sorry, but ai can’t just slash a trillion bucks from what the wealthiest people are paying again and again, and then call this a sustainable budget.
Speaker: 2
30:01
The trillion dollars of cuts, what is that specifically that’s being cut?
Speaker: 0
30:04
Oh, you mean on the on the tax side? Yeah. We’ll start with, OBBA. Right? And then TCJA too. Like, we know that the vast majority of the benefits of those tax cuts went to the wealthiest. We could say the same about the broader pattern of cutting taxes going back to I mean, I guess if you look back over the fifty years.
Speaker: 0
30:22
Ai mean, why do you think that the American entrepreneurial class was more productive in terms of annual productivity growth back when taxes were higher.
Speaker: 2
30:30
How do you measure that?
Speaker: 0
30:31
Well, I don’t know. Productivity growth and income taxes. I mean, those are two pretty simple measures you could use.
Speaker: 1
30:36
And this
Speaker: 2
30:37
is This
Speaker: 0
30:37
is I’m sure you’ve
Speaker: 2
30:38
noticed, like Ai era?
Speaker: 0
30:40
Well, look at the seventies and eighties. Right? Sixties, seventies, eighties look at GDP growth, productivity growth, and tax rates. Ai sure you’re aware that those growth rates were higher and the tax rates were higher too. I’m not saying there’s no correlation where, like, if you overtax, you’ll eventually get less productivity.
Speaker: 0
30:54
But if you look at where we are in the spectrum between too far this way and too far that way, it’s not like we’re doing this in a vacuum. There’s historical data.
Speaker: 1
31:03
But I
Speaker: 2
31:03
just want to make sure. You think the BBB was a giveaway to rich folks, like no taxes on tips extending the Trump tax cuts that disproportionately affected middle income folks? Those are those are giveaways to rich people?
Speaker: 0
31:15
Do I think the majority of the OBBA tax cuts went to rich people? Yes.
Speaker: 2
31:21
And how do you define majority, like, dollar tonnage of depreciation or actual dollars in pockets of humans?
Speaker: 0
31:28
I mean, either way you look at it. Right? Well, there’s a lot of ways in that.
Speaker: 2
31:31
You look at it because it’s Especially if your
Speaker: 0
31:32
low income, dollars in your pockets is going down when you account for what they’ve done with the subsidies. Ai, this is I don’t care how many
Speaker: 2
31:41
Which subsidies? Which subsidies?
Speaker: 0
31:42
Can you name me a measure? Can you name a measure by which
Speaker: 2
31:46
I don’t I’m ai you. I’m asking the politician. I don’t know.
Speaker: 0
31:49
Yeah. I don’t have a line item breakdown in front of me. What I’m telling you is that it is not terribly contested. Like, if anybody listening to this podcast feels like opening up a window and looking it up for themselves, just to figure out which one of us is right, It’s not terribly contested that the majority of the benefit of TCGA and OBBA went to wealthy people, and it’s definitely not contested, or Ai say generally not contested, that OBBA represents one of the largest transfers of wealth from lower income people to upper income people in global history.
Speaker: 2
32:22
How do you measure that?
Speaker: 0
32:23
You can measure it in terms of wealth before and after, you can measure it in terms of the incidence of the different forms of taxation, you can measure it in the total package that accounts for subsidy as well as benefit. I mean, any number of ways. But again, if you measure it a different way, I’d love to hear it because I don’t regard this as something that’s deeply contested, but it sounds like you have a measurement in mind that’s different and I’d love to run with it and and look it up so I can see where you’re coming from.
Speaker: 1
32:47
We definitely cut corporate taxes and personal taxes because of TCJ. Yeah. Right? I mean, that was And and we
Speaker: 0
32:55
and to be clear, again, because the Laffer curve turns out to be bull we did not just grow our way out of the deficits that created. Right?
Speaker: 2
33:01
Let me ask you a question about the inner workings of the Democratic party. I’m sure you’ve been asked this a 100 times, so sorry for us being the hundred and first. But in Kamala Harris’s memoir, she points in part to your identity as a reason why you weren’t considered as her running mate.
Speaker: 2
33:16
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?
Speaker: 0
33:33
Let’s just say I I would love for identity to play a less central role, in the politics of our country and in 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 has really dominated so many people’s thinking in a way that makes it harder for us to build a message across identities. Sai mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it makes sense to pretend that identity doesn’t matter, Ai don’t think it makes sense pretend to be colorblind.
Speaker: 0
34:01
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 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, ai, and 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.
Speaker: 0
34:32
Like, here’s something for your group and here’s something for another group and here’s something for another group. It just 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 makes people feel like they arya encircled by the other, that immigrants are sort of an invasion.
Speaker: 0
34:51
Ai mean, we can go down that road and I often have, but 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.
Speaker: 2
35:01
How have they reacted? You know, you you took a pretty firm line on Israel Sana. You took a pretty firm line on transgender folks in sports. Tell us about the dynamics of taking those positions inside the Democratic party.
Speaker: 0
35:18
Famously, our party has a lot of different voices within it. And sai, you know, some folks, if you are not saying the leftmost thing, they’re just done with you. But I think a lot of others believe in the idea of politics as building a coalition and pulling people into a bigger picture.
Speaker: 0
35:35
And I’m going to say some things that won’t be in conformity with what every activist group in my party wants to hear. That’s okay. That’s part of it.
Speaker: 2
35:45
How do you navigate the necessary extremism maybe that’s required then to get out of a primary process?
Speaker: 0
35:52
Well, this is the classic issue of going from primaries to generals. You are pressured to say one thing to appeal to the base in your party, and then you wind up, 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 paint a picture that the broadest number of people possible can see themselves in.
Speaker: 0
36:12
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 ai, but the presidency is also the one that gets painted in the broadest strokes because 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.
Speaker: 0
36:34
But where I think this actually hurts us the most is in Congress. So we’ve got four thirty five seats in the House. Last time I checked, less than one out of 10 of them is considered to be seriously competitive at best. Ai than 40 are actually competitive, which means in nine out of 10 races, the primary is pretty much it.
Speaker: 0
36:53
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 harder to win people over or bring them together in the general because these districts are so gerrymandered, ai, 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.
Speaker: 0
37:14
That’s where I think it hurts us the most.
Speaker: 1
37:15
Is the Democratic party really two parties right now? The classic Democratic party, I’ll call it the Clinton Obama party. You know? Hey. We’re socially liberal, but we’re not, like, absolutely crazy and insane. We we don’t necessarily, need to advocate to have trans kids get surgeries and, when they’re 12 years old or 14 years old and all the stuff that’s now become, you know, illegal in most modern countries.
Speaker: 1
37:41
Is it two parties now? Because I’m watching Maumdani and, like, that group go, hey, ban the billionaires, more taxes and socialism, and here’s all the handouts. We’re going for it. And then there’s guys like you and, you know, the I would say the the more Clinton era, Obama era, ai of moderate Democrats now, Ai is is kind of how I’d frame it.
Speaker: 1
38:04
And then can those two ever coexist in the same party?
Speaker: 0
38:07
Ai think both parties have their contradictions, and that’s definitely true for my party. The way I view it is one of the biggest problems we have as a society is this level of inequality we’ve hit. Historically, there’s no evidence that any republic can reach this level of equality to hold on to it and continue to be a republic.
Speaker: 0
38:26
And so the question is what do you do about it? And you’ve got obviously a socialist left that says the answer is socialism. You’ve got Republicans who tend to say this is not a problem at all. And then you’ve got where I think of as the center, or at least what I would like to be the center of my party, which is saying, Yeah, we’ve got to do things.
Speaker: 0
38:43
We’ve got to lean in. We’ve got to use the tools of the state, not in a socialist way, but in a way to try to have things be more balanced in this country. Is there a contest between ai of the center left and the far left or however you want to characterize it? Sure. But then ai Republican Party is a coalition of normal Chamber of Commerce business Republicans, more ai tech Republicans who to me are more libertarian even though it puzzles me that they’re for such dramatic government control over society right now and Ram.
Speaker: 0
39:14
But whatever. My point is you have normal business Republicans, you have techno libertarians, you’ve got economic populists ai are in many ways to the left of even left of center in some weird ways on trade and some issues like vatsal, And then you’ve got white nationalists, right?
Speaker: 0
39:32
And I don’t know that they can coexist for long if they’re not held together by the awe of or fear of the personality of Donald Trump. And people keep imagining maybe what if we had a third party? Ai I look at other countries that have it’s not unusual in a lot of other modern countries to have four, five, six, seven parties.
Speaker: 0
39:54
In some ways, it feels on its face like that would make more sense in The US, but I think the reality in practice is ai somebody tries to go off and start a third party, it just ai up screwing it up for one or the other two, and we’re right back where it started.
Speaker: 2
40:07
Pete, do you think that Donald Trump made the right decision to close the bryden? And if not, why not?
Speaker: 0
40:13
I think that it 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 Sai would agree that the last administration, didn’t do enough and didn’t do enough early enough
Speaker: 2
40:32
on the board. Percent. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
40:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
40:33
And why do you think Biden looked the other way?
Speaker: 1
40:35
And what was the strategy? Was there a strategy?
Speaker: 0
40:38
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 Congress can forge a bipartisan since it was actually a bipartisan agreement among the American people on what to do, ai, 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 to get legal if you’re not.
Speaker: 0
40:59
I mean, that’s where most people are
Speaker: 1
41:00
That’s not
Speaker: 0
41:00
the most sana the country. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
41:02
Yeah. And
Speaker: 0
41:02
that’s where most of the space for compromise has been on the Hill and yet I think it was the ’80s the last time we had an actual bill to fix it. So I think he and this is speculating. I ai really 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.
Speaker: 0
41:19
He felt that he’d managed to get the infrastructure bill done, Ai. But what’s interesting is when he finally gave up on Congress, when it was clear that we just weren’t going to get very far arya meanwhile you would have had that set of executive orders that came late in the term, that had a major effect on the number of illegal crossings.
Speaker: 0
41:38
So you’ve got to ask yourself if that executive order that happened toward the end, if that had been done in year one, year two, would we be in a different place? Now of course we’re on the other extreme. I mean, 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 ai, and that’s citizens, let alone other people who, you know, maybe they shouldn’t be here, but they also shouldn’t be brutalized.
Speaker: 0
42:04
Right? And I think one reason you see the pendulum swinging on this is we’re seeing just how extreme it’s gotten at a time when, again, I think the only way forward really is a ai of a grand bargain where we bring together the people who believe in these simple realities that we’ve got an economy and a society that exerts a poll that actually needs more people, like for our demographics and our economy to work, then there is room in the legal pipeline to come in.
Speaker: 2
42:32
Just to clean this up, Ai, 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 ram arya, as you say.
Speaker: 0
42:42
Keep it closed. Ai by what we mean. I mean, if you mean ai 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. But again, I think calling it open then or close now you’re talking about a lot of different overlapping things.
Speaker: 0
42:57
Obviously, there are a lot of things about Trump’s immigration policy Sai think are wrong, destructive,
Speaker: 1
43:02
possibly legal. Ai mean, if everybody has consensus that the border should be closed and it should be orderly and legal, you know, great. It’s 80% of the country. And then the majority of the country doesn’t like what we’re seeing with ICE agents without badges wearing masks. That’s the majority of the country is uncomfortable.
Speaker: 1
43:18
There’s a large percentage of the moderates who voted for Ram. At least this is what the surveys are saying, people are not comfortable with this. So I’m curious about what you think the motivation is, and you can go into conspiracy corner if you want. It’s allowed here on this program. We can speculate.
Speaker: 1
43:33
But the conspiracy corner for Biden was he wanted to let a lot more people in in order to build the Democratic base in order to get voters. Okay. That’s one theory. Now the theory here is Trump is doing these violent deportations, tackling people, spending a lot of money while doing it. Why?
Speaker: 1
43:55
Why is Trump doing it this way? Why does Pete think he’s doing it this way?
Speaker: 2
44:00
I
Speaker: 0
44:00
I think he thrives on a politics of fear. I think chaos is good for him. I think he thrives on chaos. I think when you see images of, people getting beaten up or, you know, what what he used to call American carnage, like, anything that validates that. Basically, the worse it it’s a weird thing, but the worse it feels to be in this country, the better off Donald Trump is, whether he’s running for president or whether he is president.
Speaker: 0
44:26
And sending troops marching into the streets Sai
Speaker: 2
44:29
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 it from my mouth for what that’s worth.
Speaker: 0
44:43
Do you feel safer about the fact that a Latino doctor crossing the street in Washington, DC, is getting hassled or harassed because they’re brown?
Speaker: 2
44:52
I don’t think that I’ve heard that. Now
Speaker: 0
44:53
Okay. So you’re not aware of any case in which a US citizen
Speaker: 2
44:57
who
Speaker: 0
44:57
is Meh ai. But you’re
Speaker: 2
44:59
Me know. Ai I will tell you, for example, after 09:11
Speaker: 0
45:01
Wait, wait. You’re on a podcast commenting about immigration. Surely you have some level of awareness.
Speaker: 2
45:05
Let me tell ai. After 09:11, for example, for years Ai had SSS on my boarding passes. Ai sai pulled over constantly and people probably thought that I was a Muslim hijacker. Sai I know what it feels like to be harassed. And what I’m telling you categorically is I feel safer in this presidency than I have ever felt. And I’m just letting you know that.
Speaker: 2
45:24
This is just my lived experience.
Speaker: 1
45:26
Yeah. Yeah. I meh, I think we’re all aware.
Speaker: 0
45:28
Safer. I’m worried about how most Americans feel.
Speaker: 1
45:30
Well, I mean, I think we’re all aware that people are being picked up and they’re being racially profiled and their Fourth Amendment rights are being suspended here and
Speaker: 0
45:40
Well, let me put it a different way. Has it crossed your mind that if right now they started by going for people who were illegal and then they arya roughing up people who are citizens but who are speaking up against the administration, that even if you feel safe now in a country where that sort of thing can be done, where people can you know, where even comedians could lose their jobs for criticizing the government, does any part of me wonder if that might ever come for you?
Speaker: 2
46:05
Pete, it did come for me. Here’s what I’m trying to tell you. After the Patriot Act passed after nineeleven, I had to come to terms with the fact that even as a legal immigrant into The United States, that I was going to get extra searches, I was going to get stopped, and it happened for six years.
Speaker: 2
46:23
I came to terms with it. I put my head down and I kept working.
Speaker: 0
46:28
But that didn’t mean it was okay. Right?
Speaker: 2
46:31
It was a law that was passed and people felt for whatever reason that there was an amount of racial profiling that could happen then. And what I’m telling you is every immigrant class at some point has felt this. My point is it made things safer in the aggregate. And what I’m telling you now is what is happening now makes cities safer. It makes places safer.
Speaker: 2
46:53
If you go to Washington, DC, it is the safest it’s ever been. And you hear this consistently from many, many brown and black people.
Speaker: 0
47:01
Ai guess what I’m telling you is if you take the amount of money that it costs to do a full scale military deployment in American city and you just used it on, improving funding for the police and mental health and a whole lot of other things, you probably get a pretty good result that way too. But I know there are a lot of people, and I have heard sana direct examples of people who are, in some cases, U. S.
Speaker: 0
47:24
Citizens or in other cases, here legally, who no longer think it’s even okay to go outside, who ask people to run errands for them because of the atmosphere that has been created in Washington, DC. So it’s definitely not safer for them.
Speaker: 2
47:38
Let me ask you a different question, which is Ai really wanna get some insight into what it was like for you to work in the Biden administration. We’ve had the sea of tell all coming out, Kamala Harris’s book, KJP’s book. We had Joe Manchin 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 Klain was effectively a gatekeeper.
Speaker: 2
48:03
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 positives, but also the negatives? Give us a fair representation.
Speaker: 0
48:17
Shah. And in the spirit of fairness, I should sai, 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 to compare one White House to another or one president to another. But I’ll tell you what my experience was like.
Speaker: 0
48:31
There’s a high level of ambition ai to get big things done quickly, especially in the first two years when there was, it felt like there was that opportunity to, 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 Manchin, trying to make sure that we held together that coalition to do things like the infrastructure law.
Speaker: 0
48:54
There were calls I agreed with, there were calls I disagreed with. 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 do think it helped to have a president who spent as much time as he did in the Senate because it really felt like the infrastructure bill was dead.
Speaker: 0
49:12
We forget this now because it happened and it’s kind of hard to imagine it was any other way, but it was proclaimed dead many, many times in that 2021 before it got done. So these moments of snatching, 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.
Speaker: 0
49:33
I would also sai, though, that I ai say that’s new. You know, the the gatekeeper is often the the kind of other word you use for a chief of staff.
Speaker: 1
49:41
Was he into cognitive ai, or when did you first realize he was in cognitive ai, I guess, would be the better question, or suspect that he wasn’t, you know, up for the job?
Speaker: 0
49:50
You could feel that he was growing older. I mean, I think we all saw that. I think my experience and, obviously, you know, I wasn’t at the White House every day most of the time I was out in the field doing transportation work, but, you know, what I would see if I was at an event was the same as what you’d see watching TV.
Speaker: 0
50:07
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
Speaker: 1
50:18
handling something like that happen. 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 gonna end well. How did they get to that point? How insular were they? And then I wanna talk about the, selection of Kamala without having a primary. So yeah.
Speaker: 0
50:40
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.
Speaker: 0
50:52
Sai you know, I think I Ai can’t imagine what exactly was going on in the inner circle. I wasn’t, I wasn’t part of those conversations. But, yeah, I I I do think that, you know, by the time it got to that debate, it was just very clear that it wasn’t serving him well, wasn’t serving the party well.
Speaker: 1
51:09
Okay. So now you get on a good point. But but just as a last thing about the speed run, there was no primary.
Speaker: 0
51:14
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
51:15
And, you know, we were speculating on a podcast, like, why not run a speed run? Just have the six or seven candidates, including yourself, just do three weeks. This should be ai blockbuster television. Were you in favor of the speed run or not? Was there discussion of that?
Speaker: 1
51:29
We’re hearing that Obama and maybe some other people wanted to have a quick ai. And what do you think the outcome would have been? Would you have had a shot at, winning?
Speaker: 0
51:38
Yeah. There’s there’s a lot of chatter of that. And I think in hindsight, we we’ve obviously got to ask since the outcome of what did happen was not ai. I think anyone serious in our party has to say, okay, what if we’d done that? And you could argue that it would would have led to I don’t know, but you could argue it would have led to a different nominee.
Speaker: 0
51:54
You could also argue it would have led to the same nominee, but that she would have been stronger. Right? Ai mean, if she had become the nominee by prevailing over another half dozen people who wanted a shot, presumably that kind of sharpening that happens, would have served her well in the general.
Speaker: 0
52:08
And and let’s meh, that that’s actually more normal. Right? Like, most countries don’t drag out their their presidential process for more than a few weeks.
Speaker: 2
52:17
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.
Speaker: 0
52:30
Let me think of it. To be honest, I haven’t, like, deeply reflected on this. At a selfish and nerdy level, it would have been amazing as secretary of transportation to be working NASA too. I think generally, ai you can have ai box on an org chart where there’s two, you know, as long as it’s ai, I think there are some benefits to that.
Speaker: 0
52:54
Sai mean, definitely ai now the way that meh me put it this sai. If we think the future of space is going to be more and more about commercial space, which is clearly just as a matter of numbers what’s happening, the mishmash we have now where you’ve got NASA obviously leading government driven space missions, you got the Department of Transportation which actually already had responsibility over some things.
Speaker: 0
53:14
And we did commercial space ai, we wound up having to radically accelerate how that worked because that actually comes under the FAA largely because you have to go through the national airspace to get to ai. 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 a DOT or whether you configure it a new way.
Speaker: 0
53:35
I mean, I do think that Washington in general ai too attached to all of the structures that we have right now and the existing org charts and existing habits. And 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.
Speaker: 0
53:55
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 just because it came from this administration.
Speaker: 2
54:07
This is my last question. There was a report that came out today. I think the amount of miles driven per day by Waymo is about to pass 250,000. We have Tesla with ai cab and robotaxi. These things have a material ability to prevent drunk driving and prevent vehicular deaths. What do you think should be done?
Speaker: 2
54:30
Should we let this play out at this exact pace? Is Is there a responsibility from the federal government? Do you wish you had done more to accelerate this? Tell us about autonomous driving and its role in society.
Speaker: 0
54:41
So I think that there’s a 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. And we had a plug door blow out of an airplane and we reconsidered our whole oversight framework because somebody could have gotten hurt that day.
Speaker: 0
55:01
Meanwhile, every day, one hundred to one hundred and fifty people die on our roadways to car crashes in vehicles driven by humans. I mean, it’s enough to fill a seven thirty seven every day. It’s on par with gun violence thirty, forty thousand people a year. So human drivers have a murderous track record.
Speaker: 0
55:21
This is a little bit different when we talk about professional drivers who have incredible I mean, I met truck drivers who’d have, you know, 2,000,000 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.
Speaker: 0
55:40
So Ai 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 irony of it is even if a handful of highly publicized negative incidents will really change public acceptance.
Speaker: 0
56:00
Sai my approach was And
Speaker: 1
56:01
they have. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
56:02
Yeah. So my approach was we do need to be conservative as a safety regular to make sure it’s sai, not because I don’t believe in the technology, but because I do. Because I think if people see it unfolding safely, there’s sana be more acceptance. But are there things we could or should do or could or should have done to accelerate AV adoption? Ai think the answer is yes.
Speaker: 0
56:22
Like, the the simple reality is we we can’t tyler, like, it’s no big deal, human drivers killing more than a 100 people a day on our roads.
Speaker: 1
56:30
This is a perfect segue ram my final question. We’ve had a grand debate occurring in our industry about job displacement. 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 reqs for the future and not hiring them because they’re so convinced that robotics will do that.
Speaker: 1
56:59
We all know AI is going to be the biggest change of our lifetime. Sai don’t think that’s the debate. The question is, what will job displacement and new job creation look like this time? What does Pete Buttigieg 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?
Speaker: 1
57:18
When you’re president, what will it look like if you inherit this chaotic AI job displacement potential?
Speaker: 0
57:27
Ai. I’m seriously concerned about it. And part of that’s from growing up in the Industrial Midwest. Ai grew up in Northern Indiana, a lot of auto industry supply chain companies there. And in the ai and February, a lot of trade and automation, but the truth is mostly automation, came in and, everybody was told, don’t worry too much about what you’re doing today.
Speaker: 0
57:51
The pie ai 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 through. And people were pissed. People were pissed because they lost their income. But also, even after they got their income, 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 sense of identity or belonging, then you continue to have a displacement that’s not just economic but really deeper than that.
Speaker: 0
58:20
And I actually think a lot of that ai of leads directly to the populism and the nationalism that you see in this administration in this political moment. And the thing that really haunts me is as much as any auto worker or electrical worker Ai know, like their sense of belonging and identity, you know, very much depends in many ways on being an auto worker or an electrical worker.
Speaker: 0
58:44
That’s even more true for most white collar workers Ai know people who work in law or or software or, you know, you see what’s happening in radiology. Just take one example of what’s happening in medicine that’s really changing because of AI. And the displacement that could come with that Ai think is enormous and I don’t think we’re prepared.
Speaker: 0
59:05
Ai don’t know, Ai 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 ai, is this going to be a development that just makes wealth and power even more concentrated in even fewer hands?
Speaker: 0
59:32
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 destabilized.
Speaker: 2
59:41
That’s the thing that you just said is the key. It doesn’t have to be. It requires very smart, thoughtful legislation. I think that we had some really idiotic legislation under Biden that president Trump and David Sacks have largely unwound, these diffusion rules, the gatekeeping, all of those things, Pete, would have seen us lose to Ai.
Speaker: 2
59:59
Just to be very clear, as a technologist who’s in the middle of it, who is in In
Speaker: 0
01:00:04
the arena.
Speaker: 2
01:00:04
Investing and building. What I’m telling you is those historic rules were terrible and dumb and they had one or two companies who would have basically had all the spoils and the rest of us would have been standing on the outside looking in. That’s no longer the case. We can run the race now. But I think what you said there is very critical.
Speaker: 2
01:00:22
It doesn’t have to be a winner take all or winner take most outcome.
Speaker: 0
01:00:26
Well, and to me that’s, you know, that’s not just a question of tech policy. Like that’s a question of
Speaker: 2
01:00:31
ai kind of context. And this is, by the way, I just sana be clear. The reason why it was likely under Biden is because it was so difficult to actually talk to him. He wouldn’t talk to anybody. The difference with Trump, just so it’s clear, is that he’ll talk to everybody. He’ll make his own decision, but he gets the broad tapestry of everybody’s feedback.
Speaker: 2
01:00:48
The danger of that Biden approach is that when one or two people are allowed in and everybody else are shah out and you can’t even find a way of just proposing ideas or explaining how it’s gonna be, you get things like the Biden diffusion rule. So just vatsal something to think about, I think being open and being available to people is a really good way of running the country.
Speaker: 0
01:01:08
That’s one thing I definitely believe in.
Speaker: 1
01:01:09
If you win, Pete, are you gonna forget us and not come back on the pod and you won’t invite us to the White House? Or if you win, can we still can I get an invite to the White House?
Speaker: 0
01:01:16
I would love for this not to be our last conversation.
Speaker: 1
01:01:19
Our friends at Polymarket. I’m sure you know, all about these, 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 looks like you’re in a pretty good position here.
Speaker: 1
01:01:40
What are your thoughts here on the early, indicators of who’s connecting with the shah over at Poly Arya?
Speaker: 0
01:01:48
Well, you guys don’t strike me as, folks who’d be content with a 6% return, but you gotta Maybe maybe you gotta
Speaker: 1
01:01:55
get those numbers up, Pete.
Speaker: 2
01:01:57
Maybe a day, Pete. Maybe a day.
Speaker: 1
01:02:00
Well, I mean, what do you think about Gavin coming out just strongly and saying, hey. I’m running. Obviously, I’m running. He’s he’s been pretty clear about it. Do you think that’s a smart savvy move or is that a crazy move three years ai?
Speaker: 0
01:02:11
I don’t know. I mean, you know, one interesting thing about what the current president did is ai I remember right, he didn’t even wait for the midterms, in order to announce. Sai, you know, it feels like the timelines keep shifting. I’ll tell you, I’m in no hurry to be in the middle of presidential politics.
Speaker: 0
01:02:26
Obviously, it’s something I care about. It’s something I have done, already once before in 2020. But this year, this is the first year in about ‘fifteen that I haven’t been in office or running for office and I’m kind of enjoying it. I mean, I’m working hard supporting candidates I believe in.
Speaker: 0
01:02:42
We have a speak, and Ai travel a lot and speak a lot, but, you know, there will be a time for those kinds of things and I’m not, I’m not gonna try rushing that out.
Speaker: 1
01:02:51
Did you abort Bombadami? Did you did you support him? Did you come out publicly for him, or you have concerns?
Speaker: 0
01:02:56
I’m not getting directly involved in that race, or endorsing or anything like that. So you’re gonna you’re gonna duck the
Speaker: 2
01:03:02
ai the intifada bullet? I mean, that is the craziest ai out of
Speaker: 0
01:03:06
the world. That’s that’s that’s a problem. You know, he’s got a lot of he’s got a lot of views that I mean, it’s no surprise or secret that he is further left than I am in the Democratic coalition. That sai, you know, I was a 29 year old mayor that a lot of people wrote off and and, didn’t take seriously, and was able to get big things done.
Speaker: 0
01:03:25
So We’re gonna write sana socialist
Speaker: 2
01:03:28
experiment in the what was at least before the greatest city in America and one of the greatest cities in the world.
Speaker: 0
01:03:34
Well, you know, the thing about winning is you get a chance to, find out very quickly, how good your ideas are and whether they’ll have the results you have in mind. And, you know, that’s something that stupid. I speak that he’ll win and then we’ll all get to see.
Speaker: 1
01:03:48
Yeah. I mean, it’s it’s gonna be interesting to see when that 54 tax hits, like, if people are like, you know what? Miami and Texas look pretty great, and maybe I’m gonna bounce. Alright. Listen. Speak Buttigieg, thanks so much for taking the time. We’ll have you on again.
Speaker: 1
01:04:00
Great to talk with you and, we appreciate you coming on the program. Ram you all next time. Bye bye.
Speaker: 0
01:04:05
Sai here. Good to hear you. Great job.