2028 Presidential Frontrunner: 4 Soldiers Died And Their Names Were Erased

1. 0:00 – 2:27

   Intro

   1. PBPete Buttigieg0:00

      I'm really worried about where we're headed as a country right now. The American system is so out of whack that if you are a multi-billionaire, you probably pay a lower percentage in taxes than if you're a school teacher or a firefighter. You have levels of inequality that we've almost never seen. There's a rise in political violence, the collapse in trust, and the biggest thing of all that we're facing right now is this massive debt. But it's now escalated to a level that no one can ignore.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:25

      How, how do you think this plays out?

   3. PBPete Buttigieg0:26

      I mean, we're on the brink of losing our democracy, and we're running out of time to do something about it.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett0:32

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

   5. PBPete Buttigieg0:38

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

   6. SBSteven Bartlett0:58

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

   7. PBPete Buttigieg1:13

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

   8. SBSteven Bartlett1:36

      Secretary Pete Buttigieg, are you gonna run to be president in twenty twenty-eight?

   9. PBPete Buttigieg1:40

      Um-

   10. SBSteven Bartlett1:44

       This is super interesting to me. My team give me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe, and some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button, if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double-check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you wanna hear. I've

2. 2:27 – 4:10

   How Politics Is Reshaping Everyday American Life

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:27

      stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of The Diary of a CEO, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. [upbeat music] Secretary Pete Buttigieg, how are you feeling about the nature of politics at the moment, but I should probably say the nature of American life at the moment?

   2. PBPete Buttigieg2:47

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

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:04

      On the brink?

   4. PBPete Buttigieg3:05

      Yeah.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett3:05

      What do, what do you mean by that?

   6. PBPete Buttigieg3:06

      I mean, we're on the brink of losing our democracy. The whole idea of this country, the whole idea of overthrowing a king was that everyday life would get better if we set up a country where the people are in charge of the government instead of the other way around.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett3:21

      Mm-hmm.

   8. PBPete Buttigieg3:21

      And now in this moment where after all of the things we've gone through for decades, for two hundred and fifty years, it's not clear if that's gonna work out. I think it will. I believe it will if we do what we have to do. But that means reforming, tuning up, changing that political system because the, the problems in that political system help to explain all of the economic problems that I think so many Americans are living with, where you've had enormous economic growth and shockingly little of it making it into people's pockets, where you have levels of inequality that we've almost never seen-

   9. SBSteven Bartlett3:59

      Mm-hmm

   10. PBPete Buttigieg3:59

       ... in this country. And then the other thing is there, there's the American promise in terms of the system, the politics, the government, democracy, America's gift to the world, creating democracy. But there's the economic

3. 4:10 – 5:29

   Why Denmark Still Sells the American Dream Better

   1. PBPete Buttigieg4:10

      version of that, which is the American dream, right? The idea that no matter how you start, no matter who you are, you can come out ahead of where you started economically. That used to happen for nine out of ten Americans. Statistically, the place where you're most likely to live out the American dream right now is Denmark, and I want that to be America.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett4:31

      And systemically, if we just think from a high level, what is the, what is the essence of, of why Denmark is a better place for the American dream? What are the systemic problems? Is it with the current administration? Is it with a perspective on what a good life looks like in America, or is it greed, or is it something else?

   3. PBPete Buttigieg4:47

      Well, I wouldn't say it's just the current administration. I mean, I think the current administration isn't helping, but I, I think the problem is much deeper than that. Uh, a lot of it is the last thirty or forty years, we've had policies in this country that make it harder to get ahead if you're not already starting out well off. Even just the way our taxes work, they, they, they tax work more than they tax wealth. That's really catching up to us. I mean, it has created problems, I believe it's created problems for decades, but you feel it in a different way now. And when inequality reaches a certain level, and when the inequality of power follows the economic inequality to a certain level, that's when I think you start to have earthquakes

4. 5:29 – 7:12

   Why Trump Continues to Connect With Voters

   1. PBPete Buttigieg5:29

      in, in the society and what it feels like to live in this country, and I think we're going through those earthquakes. Uh, not just Trump and everything he represents, but the rise in political violence, the collapse in trust in our society. All of these things I think are related to that, and we're running out of time to do something about it.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett5:50

      Trump made a lot of promises when he came into power.

   3. PBPete Buttigieg5:52

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett5:53

      He won in a bigger than expected victory, I would say. Why does he resonate?

   5. PBPete Buttigieg5:59

      Well, first of all, I think he speaks to a lot of people who know that the system has let them down. And even though I think he's somebody who really benefits from the system as it is, it's made him rich and kept him rich, you know, his message was, "I'm gonna blow it all up." And I think he's blowing up all the wrong things.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett6:19

      Mm.

   7. PBPete Buttigieg6:19

      But look, if, if the system's let you down, you're no- you're only gonna vote so many times within that system before somebody comes along and says, "I'm gonna blow it all up." And you say, "Well, I, I might not even like the guy, but, uh, I'll give him a shot to see if that makes me better off." Now, I also think he lied to a lot of people. Um, you know, some people voted for him because they believed him when he said he's not going to start a new war. Many people voted for him because they believed him when he said on day one he was going to start lowering costs, and right now inflation's higher than it was the day he took over. So these promises weren't true, but they spoke to something that I think a lot of people had on their mind that that made a lot of people willing to burn things down, and there's a lesson for my party in that. I'm obviously passionately against many destructive things that he's doing.

5. 7:12 – 8:13

   How Democrats Helped Create the Demand for Outsiders

   1. PBPete Buttigieg7:12

      That doesn't mean the answer is to, quote-unquote, "reverse the damage," put everything back the way it was.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett7:17

      Mm-hmm. Because, uh, you're right that the, the Democrats have a lot of responsibility here, um, for a lot of reasons. I think the very fact that Trump was voted into power says something about how people felt with the previous administration, which was a Democratic administration. What responsibility does the Democratic Party have for getting the country to a place where they thought Democrats weren't the solution? Because that's kind of-- I think a lot of people thought that's just, like, more of the same.

   3. PBPete Buttigieg7:42

      Yeah.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett7:43

      Maybe people are getting increasingly, I think across the Western world by the looks of it, increasingly tired with, like, politicians-

   5. PBPete Buttigieg7:50

      Mm-hmm

   6. SBSteven Bartlett7:51

      ... saying these, like, cute words and, like-

   7. PBPete Buttigieg7:53

      Yeah

   8. SBSteven Bartlett7:53

      ... "We're gonna help the working people," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and being very polished.

   9. PBPete Buttigieg7:57

      Sure.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett7:57

       And then you see these, these other figures that have come in and said, "I'm not a politician."

   11. PBPete Buttigieg8:01

       Yeah.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett8:01

       And as you say, "I'm gonna burn it down."

   13. PBPete Buttigieg8:02

       Right.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett8:02

       And for some reason people are choosing that.

   15. PBPete Buttigieg8:04

       Yeah. Even though when they do, usually that person makes it worse, and so that's why the president's unpopular. But the president is unpopular, to your point, that doesn't mean people are automatically

6. 8:13 – 11:16

   Will You Ever Run for President?

   1. PBPete Buttigieg8:13

      gonna trust Democrats.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett8:15

      Yeah.

   3. PBPete Buttigieg8:15

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

   4. SBSteven Bartlett8:34

      Are you gonna run to be president in 2028?

   5. PBPete Buttigieg8:36

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

   6. SBSteven Bartlett9:12

      I'll use your own words here-

   7. PBPete Buttigieg9:13

      Uh-oh

   8. SBSteven Bartlett9:13

      ... Secretary. Um, you said politics often favors someone who is completely different to the current leader-

   9. PBPete Buttigieg9:20

      Mm

   10. SBSteven Bartlett9:20

       ... and that you could not be more different from Trump. I quote, "An intellectual, young, gay mayor from the Midwest." You know, Amazon have this really interesting thing when they hire people, um, which we've copied. They, every time you meet someone, you have to vote one of four things. You either vote strongly not inclined, not inclined, inclined, and strongly inclined.

   11. PBPete Buttigieg9:44

       Mm.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett9:44

       So you've got four options when you interview someone. We do the same in our company now. We took it from them. And the whole idea here is to prevent people from sitting on the fence-

   13. PBPete Buttigieg9:52

       Mm

   14. SBSteven Bartlett9:52

       ... which is, like, what is your inclination?

   15. PBPete Buttigieg9:54

       Right.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett9:54

       So if I presented you with those four options as it relates to you running for president in 2028, as things stand, and this is just a balance of probability-

   17. PBPete Buttigieg10:01

       Yeah

   18. SBSteven Bartlett10:01

       ... are you inclined, not inclined, strongly not inclined, strongly inclined? Um, on these podcasts, nobody ever tells the bloody truth. This is why it's difficult sometimes to interview politicians, 'cause we all have an inclination, right?

   19. PBPete Buttigieg10:14

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

   20. SBSteven Bartlett10:27

       Does the truth just not matter more, though, than the consequence of the truth in this regard?

   21. PBPete Buttigieg10:31

       Yeah, but the truth about, like, what, you know, what I'm maybe gonna do, like, there's a qu- there's a level of, like, not even being certain some of the things I'll have to weigh, like, before. Having made a decision like this before, I can tell you that there's the read, uh, all right.

   22. SBSteven Bartlett10:50

       I need to, the inclination.

   23. PBPete Buttigieg10:51

       Look, I'm, I'm obviously not to one end or the other.

   24. SBSteven Bartlett10:54

       Yeah, okay. So you're not those two.

   25. PBPete Buttigieg10:55

       Um, I think I'm, like, more inclined than not.

   26. SBSteven Bartlett10:59

       Okay. Um, I appreciate that.

   27. PBPete Buttigieg11:02

       Um, but there's so much we don't know. There's so much I don't even know about what's gonna happen this year, let alone, you know, what we need to know later. Um, and this is not, you know, the weight of

7. 11:16 – 14:23

   What’s Really Happening in Iran?

   1. PBPete Buttigieg11:16

      a decision like that. I don't just mean, like, the national political weight, but just, like, the weight of a decision to run for office for you and your family, which frankly I did not fully understand b- until I had kids. Uh, that's changed all of my equations.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett11:31

      Mm-hmm.

   3. PBPete Buttigieg11:32

      Um, it, it's just something that you really sit with and take seriously, which y- you should.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett11:37

      One of the big things that people are talking about at this moment in time is the Iran war.

   5. PBPete Buttigieg11:41

      Yeah.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett11:41

      And this feeds into some of the points we were touching on around promises kept and not kept. What is going on, in plain terms? 'Cause Americans are getting lots of messages. We've destroyed everything in I- Iran. The military bases are all gone, and then we're back at war, and American lives have, have been taken.

   7. PBPete Buttigieg11:59

      Right.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett12:00

      H- Can you help us see through all of this?

   9. PBPete Buttigieg12:02

      I think what's going on is the president has painted himself and the country into a corner. There was a, a moment where it seemed to him that he was better off politically if we were at war. Even though he promised that we wouldn't be, even though a lot of his supporters didn't want the war, and certainly the American people as a whole don't want it. But he was under a lot of heat over cost of living, over the Epstein files, which was dominating the conversation every day, being proven to be as connected to an infamous pedophile as Jeffrey Epstein, and then doing everything he could to cover up disclosures about it, right? This is something that obviously was something that was creating a ton of heat on the president. Meanwhile, there's a lot of people in his ear every day, and some of them, from American politicians to people around the world, would really like to see him go to war.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett12:57

       Why?

   11. PBPete Buttigieg13:00

       Well, it's kind of the tradition of the Republican Party is to generally be more pro-war, right? That's, I mean, you know, my coming of age was at the time of the Iraq War. In fact, a big part of what kind of pulled me fully into politics was being opposed to the Iraq War.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett13:14

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

   13. PBPete Buttigieg13:25

       Yeah, that's the day I got back.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett13:27

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

   15. PBPete Buttigieg13:31

       Yeah, I mean, I know what it feels like to get on a gray tail airplane that's taking you into a war zone and wondering what's waiting for you there. Where we are now is a lot of troops are in that situation. They're in harm's way. And the president doesn't seem to have a plan. He can't explain why we're there. He said it's for regime change. He said it's for unconditional surrender. He said that it's to deal with their nuclear program. But last year, he said they obliterated the nuclear program. And so there's a lot of reasons to suspect that we're just at war because he wanted us to be. And now he can't figure out how to get us out of it. And it appears that any way forward leaves us worse off than we were before the war. Prices are higher. Troops have lost their lives. And it seems like

8. 14:23 – 17:16

   Why Trump Chose Military Action Against Iran

   1. PBPete Buttigieg14:23

      the least bad options still involve Iran having more control over the Strait of Hormuz than they were asserting a year ago. Most Americans shouldn't have to be worrying about the Strait of Hormuz. They've got enough to worry about. And a year ago, we weren't. That was not a problem. Whatever was going on in the Strait of Hormuz did not feel like it was a problem, you know, where I live in Michigan. And now it is.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett14:43

      Why, though? What was the, like, domino effect that caused him to go, do you know what? I think we can just go in there, decapitate the leader, and announce victory.

   3. PBPete Buttigieg14:54

      Obviously, this is a question for the president. But honestly, I don't fully understand why they would do something like this, especially because we know, like, you didn't have to be, like, an expert in international affairs and security studies to know that if we actually attacked Iran, they were going to shut down the Strait and try to cripple the world economy. Like, it was literally the most obvious next thing that could happen. And yet, it seems like he either didn't understand or didn't believe. Surely he was told this. We know, in fact, it's been reported that he was told this. And he did it anyway. So how does that happen? I mean, I've long given up trying to see into the mind of this president.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett15:37

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

   5. PBPete Buttigieg15:43

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

   6. SBSteven Bartlett16:00

      So what are you going to do if you are president?

   7. PBPete Buttigieg16:02

      Look, the next president will face a complicated, violent, and challenging Middle East and world map no matter what. And the next president's going to have to deal with that while dealing with a more assertive China and a dramatically, swiftly evolving security landscape, partly because of things like AI. Just as you and I are sitting here now, there's a lot of headlines about a big safety issue created by an AI model that was supposed to not even be able to access the internet, managing to get itself on the internet and hack into another company to get the answers to a test that it was told to solve, right? And that's as of today in 2026. The things that could be going on by 2029 are surely going to change both what we're up against and what's possible. Look, in the same way that there was a nuclear hotline between Washington and Moscow, because it turns out even while at each other's throats in a lot of ways, one thing that Americans and Soviets didn't want was to incinerate the planet. There's going to have to be some way for countries that do not trust each other today to coordinate on things like making sure

9. 17:16 – 19:02

   What Kind of President Can Handle Today’s Crises?

   1. PBPete Buttigieg17:16

      AI doesn't lead to bioweapons being made by rogue actors or even individual actors, making sure that it doesn't lead to nuclear proliferation or any number of other problems that could happen. So the security picture, I think, will be more challenging for the next president than it's been for any president since the Cold War.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett17:37

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

   3. PBPete Buttigieg17:43

      Well, you need somebody who's deliberate and decisive. Those two things sometimes are in tension because deliberation means you slow down, you look at what's going on and you think about it. But decisive doesn't mean you immediately make a call every time a question is put to you. It does mean that once you feel like you've got enough information, you make a decision, you own the consequences of that decision, you move on to the next decision. And I think in terms of kind of character and style, we're going to need both of those things. We're going to need wisdom, we're going to need judgment, and we're going to need judgment that is not twisted or changed or colored or biased based on corrupt reasons. And the reason I mention that is because right now we've got, for the first time ever, out of all of our presidents, uh, a president whose family is making billions of dollars from things that are sometimes directly connected to the decision of a foreign government, right? Uh, there was one government in the Middle East that put hundreds of millions of dollars into the family crypto fund of this president. You got Saudi Arabia investing in the First Family's business interests to the tune of, I believe, a couple of billion dollars for the president's son-in-law, right? And we just can't afford, with everything

10. 19:02 – 22:01

    How Do You End a War With Iran?

    1. PBPete Buttigieg19:02

       that's on the line right now, to have the next president be someone who could remotely be influenced by those kinds of considerations, given everything that's on the line for the American people and for American security.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett19:15

       When you look at that, the picture, um, in Iran, it's all well and good saying we have to, uh, we have to get out of there, but how?

    3. PBPete Buttigieg19:22

       No, the only good way to do it is to not be there in the first place.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett19:25

       Yeah.

    5. PBPete Buttigieg19:25

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

    6. SBSteven Bartlett20:20

       'Cause, you know, you're dealing with a lot of, um, dare I say, very large ego leaders around the world.

    7. PBPete Buttigieg20:25

       Mm-hmm.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett20:25

       You got your Putins.

    9. PBPete Buttigieg20:26

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett20:27

        I don't even know who's running Iran at the moment. Then you've got China.

    11. PBPete Buttigieg20:30

        Mm-hmm.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett20:30

        Um, does it need a leader with a ego of the same size?

    13. PBPete Buttigieg20:35

        [laughs]

    14. SBSteven Bartlett20:35

        Do, 'cause I sometimes I think like cr- like, I think crazy people kind of respect crazy people [laughs] in a weird way.

    15. PBPete Buttigieg20:41

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

    16. SBSteven Bartlett21:48

        Yeah, the, the, the Iran situation is particularly, it's particularly uncertain for many reasons, in part because y- I don't know who the leadership there is anymore, in part because they, it seems like they will now control the Strait of Hormuz or at least use it as leverage,

11. 22:01 – 23:05

    What Happens If Iran Gets Nuclear Weapons?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett22:01

       really irrespective of what outcome takes place, and in part because you still have this nuclear threat.

    2. PBPete Buttigieg22:05

       Yep.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett22:06

       Um, but they are probably now more motivated to dev- develop nuclear weapons than they probably were under Obama when he signed that-

    4. PBPete Buttigieg22:14

       Yes

    5. SBSteven Bartlett22:14

       ... that agreement with them.

    6. PBPete Buttigieg22:16

       Yes. They may have less capacity, but they certainly have more motivation at this point.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett22:20

       Would you let them develop nuclear weapons if you were president?

    8. PBPete Buttigieg22:22

       No, they should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Uh, a, a nuclear-armed Iran, I mean, look at the malevolent activities that they already have pursued with conventional means, terrorist groups around the region and around the world. Like, this is not a regime, certainly not in its current form or anything resembling its current form, that could ever be trusted with nuclear weapons. Now, different presidents, each of the last few presidents, had a way of making sure that that never happened. The best way to do that was through diplomacy. That was the whole point of the Obama deal. The first Trump administration tore up the Obama deal but couldn't get a better deal, and then when the Biden administration was trying to get a better deal, it was very hard to

12. 23:05 – 25:45

    Why Israel Is Always at the Center of U.S. Politics

    1. PBPete Buttigieg23:05

       work across the table to get the Iranians to negotiate because they remembered that it was Trump who tore up the Obama deal, right? It's part of what I mean when I talk about credibility. It doesn't mean that people across the table have to like you. It means they have to have some sense that it's at least worth dealing with you, right? And there's not a lot of that given that kind of instability, that pattern that we faced.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett23:25

       You know, I've followed American politics I think since I was about 10. One of the things I've never heard mentioned so much in politics is Israel.

    3. PBPete Buttigieg23:33

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett23:33

       It appears to me as a objective observer that the subject of Israel is now so central to politics.

    5. PBPete Buttigieg23:39

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett23:40

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

    7. PBPete Buttigieg23:46

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

    8. SBSteven Bartlett25:19

       Is that what Netanyahu wants?

    9. PBPete Buttigieg25:20

       No, I don't think he is remotely interested in the safety and dignity and security of Palestinian people. I think he believes that, uh, he would be better off if they didn't exist. Or at the very least, he doesn't want them around.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett25:36

        Right.

    11. PBPete Buttigieg25:37

        And so we see a policy which obviously has led to what it did in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, which gets

13. 25:45 – 27:27

    What Netanyahu Really Wants in the Middle East

    1. PBPete Buttigieg25:45

       less attention maybe because there's been fewer deaths there, but, uh, pretty horrific behavior and conduct and violence from settlers that is part of a project of making it impossible for there to be a secure, viable Palestinian state.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett26:06

       So what does Netanyahu want in the region?

    3. PBPete Buttigieg26:08

       Well, I don't know that I'm much more capable of seeing into the mind of Netanyahu than I am seeing into the mind of Trump, but looking into his choices, it seems that he wants to be able to assert domination of, uh, any other regional player and something that is beyond just security and safety for the people of Israel, which is something that I believe in and something I think is hard to argue with. But something else, which is a project of taking over w-what is called Greater Israel, uh, in his ideology and his worldview.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett26:44

       Greater Israel?

    5. PBPete Buttigieg26:45

       Um, yeah, Eretz Israel, which is a vision that does not have a lot of room for Palestinians anywhere between the river and the sea. He won't say it in those terms, but if you look at his actions, it is hard to believe that he is comfortable with anything less.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett27:03

       What's your take on how Trump has treated Netanyahu in that relationship? Is that the relationship you would have had?

    7. PBPete Buttigieg27:09

       It's not the relationship I would have had. Um, I think like all things with Trump, it's pretty transactional. It's instrumental. It's what's in it for me. And I think part of how that has developed into a frenemy relationship now is that, you know, the relationship that maybe

14. 27:27 – 32:40

    What Happens Next in the Middle East?

    1. PBPete Buttigieg27:27

       served him well politically is not so good for him now because, among other things, Netanyahu has an interest in a continued US presence in an Iran war that has gone from being something Trump would-- thought would be politically useful for Trump to something that is politically dangerous for Trump.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett27:48

       How, how do you think this plays out, Secretary? What, what do you think happens? You know, I said there, I sort of hypothesized that by twenty twenty-eight this will still be dragging on because from my perspective, you're either gonna kinda lie to the American public and say that and declare some kind of victory-

    3. PBPete Buttigieg28:02

       Hmm

    4. SBSteven Bartlett28:02

       ... or you're gonna stay in there. There-- I can't actually see a third option personally. So how, how do you imagine this playing out?

    5. PBPete Buttigieg28:07

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

    6. SBSteven Bartlett29:06

       China and, and-

    7. PBPete Buttigieg29:07

       Yeah, bec-because East Asia relies on oil and, and goods that go through there more.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett29:13

       Mm-hmm.

    9. PBPete Buttigieg29:13

       So I think what you're gonna have to have is a regional and international partnership that ensures something at least resembling free passage of goods and security without the US sending troops in there or continuing to be at war. It's, it's, it's seems like the only way, but it's unquestionably worse than where we were a year ago before the war started.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett29:36

        Did you hear recently that Trump mentioned, I think it was at the G7 summit, "We've run out of reserves about four weeks. You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there'll be time when we wouldn't be able to get it. It would be bedlam." And he made these comments last month, twenty twenty-six, at the G7 summit in regards to the amount of oil the United States have left in the reserves. He was, I think he was framing it around why he signed this memorandum of understanding, this agreement with them. But, you know, in the last week we've gone back to war and the Strait of Hormuz appears to be closed again.

    11. PBPete Buttigieg30:10

        Right.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett30:10

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

    13. PBPete Buttigieg30:19

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

    14. SBSteven Bartlett31:49

        Really?

    15. PBPete Buttigieg31:49

        Yeah. At least that's the only explanation I can think of. The crazy thing is, uh, all of us know there's a war. We've even had moments, remember, I, I think it was Secretary Rubio said in Congress, where there's punishment for lying. [chuckles] You know, you're not supposed to lie to Congress. He said the war's over. We all know the war's not over.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett32:08

        Are they stuck? 'Cause they seem a bit stuck to me. I was watching Hegseth in, in front of, I think, think it was Congress. Yeah, it was Congress the other day.

    17. PBPete Buttigieg32:15

        Yeah.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett32:15

        And they're just repeating his quotes back to him over and over and over and over again.

    19. PBPete Buttigieg32:18

        Yeah. Yeah, 'cause how is he supposed to explain that we're in a war that supposedly we already won, that we're not getting any of the things that were supposedly worth going to war over, and that the bill for this keeps getting bigger in terms of tax dollars. I think his latest number was $37.5 billion. That's our money, all of us as American taxpayers,

15. 32:40 – 36:01

    Is There Anything to Respect About Trump?

    1. PBPete Buttigieg32:40

       and of course the cost in lives, and the cost in terms of everything in America, starting with gas being more expensive. They don't wanna be explaining that, right? But they don't have a great way out either, and they're not prepared to lead us to a better place 'cause they don't even know what it looks like.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett33:00

       Is there anything you respect about Trump?

    3. PBPete Buttigieg33:03

       Sure. Um, I think he has been able to create the impression of a bias for action, and I think he gets a lot of credit for that. I think in general, and especially in government, there's a lot of hand-wringing, like, "Oh, we gotta have a 19-step process to get all of these things exactly." I saw this during my four years trying to get stuff built in this country as Secretary of Transportation, that there were so many hoops and so much red tape. And he comes in and he says like, "Nope, not doing that. We're just gonna do this. No." Often what he's doing turns out to be illegal and it gets reversed, and obviously I think most of his policies are terribly destructive. But I, I think you have to respect the effect that he has had with that kind of bias toward just doing something, and I think we could learn a bit from that.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett34:00

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

    5. PBPete Buttigieg34:04

       Look, I, I think he's a politician through and through. I think that on some level, every CEO is a politician.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett34:13

       Hmm.

    7. PBPete Buttigieg34:14

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

    8. SBSteven Bartlett34:35

       I think the difference, I, I, I understand what you're saying. I think the difference, especially with founders, is, um, founders got from z- started at zero and got somewhere because they had to be like highly, have a high bias to action.

    9. PBPete Buttigieg34:51

       Yes.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett34:51

        Believe that walls were made of paper and be disruptive in some-

    11. PBPete Buttigieg34:55

        Yes

    12. SBSteven Bartlett34:55

        ... I mean, that, the, the reason they are successful-

    13. PBPete Buttigieg34:56

        Right

    14. SBSteven Bartlett34:56

        ... is 'cause of disruption.

    15. PBPete Buttigieg34:57

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

    16. SBSteven Bartlett35:02

        Yeah.

    17. PBPete Buttigieg35:02

        And the way things are just doesn't even bother them. They just see that vision, and they just go after it, and they blow through every wall between them-

    18. SBSteven Bartlett35:08

        Yeah

    19. PBPete Buttigieg35:08

        ... and getting it done. That's the best thing about founders. The worst thing about founders, it, from a political perspective, is that sometimes because they were so good at one thing, like uniquely, sometimes world historically good at one thing, they imagine that they're good at everything.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett35:23

        [chuckles] Yeah.

    21. PBPete Buttigieg35:23

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

    22. SBSteven Bartlett35:26

        Yeah.

    23. PBPete Buttigieg35:27

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

    24. SBSteven Bartlett35:37

        Founders hate bureaucracy.

    25. PBPete Buttigieg35:39

        Yeah.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett35:40

        This is why they often-

    27. PBPete Buttigieg35:41

        But look, I'm pretty impatient with bureaucracy too. Like I, I believe in the idea of a policy entrepreneur who can recognize here's a problem, here's a whole bunch of solutions, and here's a window of opportunity, and let's just like line it all up and make it happen. There's also, laws exist in order to protect people, and when we're talking about bureaucracy, like we're really talking about laws. Now, sometimes those laws need to be changed,

16. 36:01 – 41:21

    How AI Will Change Society Faster Than Expected

    1. PBPete Buttigieg36:01

       simplified, stripped down to m- the most important things. I learned this very early on in my time in office, where sometimes I was trying to get something done as a policy entrepreneur and somebody tapped the brakes on me and used a bureaucracy to do it. You know, sometimes they were right. Sometimes they made me better. They made me sharpen what I was trying to do by fighting me.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett36:21

       The other issue you mentioned a second ago that I think is gonna be really pertinent over the next 24 months and is increasing in interest amongst Americans, I'd say especially young Americans that are thinking about getting a job and going into the workforce, is the subject of artificial intelligence.

    3. PBPete Buttigieg36:35

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett36:36

       Talked to a lot of AI experts on my show over the last couple of years, and I've also reflected a lot on the different types of comments that the CEOs of the big AI companies have made through time and how those quotes have changed.

    5. PBPete Buttigieg36:48

       Mm.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett36:48

       Um, if you go back a couple of years, it was doom and gloom.

    7. PBPete Buttigieg36:52

       Uh-huh.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett36:52

       Um, but now that they are running trillion dollar companies, the quotes seem to be a bit more optimistic all of a sudden.

    9. PBPete Buttigieg36:57

       Wow.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett36:58

        One thing that I, that I think they do agree on is that there's gonna be significant job disruption, especially if you look at some of A- Anthropic's reports-

    11. PBPete Buttigieg37:05

        Yeah

    12. SBSteven Bartlett37:05

        ... which are the maker of Claude. They already show that entry level positions are at risk first, especially entry level knowledge jobs.

    13. PBPete Buttigieg37:12

        Uh-huh.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett37:13

        And people are scared.

    15. PBPete Buttigieg37:14

        Yeah.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett37:14

        First time I, I saw that, um, Eric Schmidt speech where the, the crowd-

    17. PBPete Buttigieg37:17

        Yeah

    18. SBSteven Bartlett37:17

        ... the college audience are booing every time he says the word AI.

    19. PBPete Buttigieg37:21

        Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett37:21

        This is presumably gonna accelerate the sentiment towards AI, and in part because people are gonna find it harder to get jobs, and they're gonna experience more, more of AI sort of permeating through their life.

    21. PBPete Buttigieg37:34

        Mm-hmm.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett37:35

        How do you feel about all of this? What is the, what is the balance of, of AI, good, bad, ugly risks?

    23. PBPete Buttigieg37:41

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

    24. SBSteven Bartlett40:28

        And I just think about what you said there about growing up in the Midwest, um, people working in the auto industry making cars.

    25. PBPete Buttigieg40:35

        Mm-hmm.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett40:35

        And you also used the example of full self-driving vehicles being a net positive. But when I put those two things together, I thought, "Okay, so the people in the factories are at risk of being replaced by robotics now."

    27. PBPete Buttigieg40:45

        Mm-hmm.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett40:46

        Huge acceleration in robotics, both humanoid, but just generally intelligent machines, which is right here. It's not theoretical. It's not sci-fi anymore. They're building them right now. And Sam Altman said, "On the current trajectory, we believe we may only be a couple of years away from early versions of true super intelligence. If we are right, by the end of 2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside in, inside of a data center than outside of them." Dario, who's also the founder of Anthropic, said, "If the exponential continues, then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything." And the quotes go on and

17. 41:21 – 46:37

    What Happens to Workers in an AI-Driven Economy?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett41:21

       on and on. Demis from Google said, "We're only a few years, maybe within a decade, away from systems that have general human-level intelligence across the board." And Elon Musk, in an interview this week, talked about how with robots being physical, um, disruption and I- AI being intellectual disruption, you now have the perfect combination where work will become a choice. What does that mean for those people in the Midwest? Because Dara, the CEO of Uber, sat there in front of me and said the nine million drivers he had would be replaced. Um, but also now you're-- if I think about the production line, the people making the cars as well theoretically could be at risk.

    2. PBPete Buttigieg41:52

       There's always gonna be something worth doing with our time. We need to arrange an economy that rewards things that are worth doing with our time, especially things that only people can do. Some of that is creative work. Some of that is very human work like caregiving. I'm thinking about this more and more because I belong to this sandwich generation that's taking care of kids and aging parents at the same time. But whether those kinds of things are rewarded or not is what I worry about. I mean, imagine a mach- a, a world where, just for the sake of imagination, you've got a machine that can make more and more things. It's like the replicator from Star Trek. You know, I loved Star Trek as a kid. Captain Picard goes up to it and he just says like, "Give me a cup of tea, Earl Gray, hot," and like vroom, it happens, right? Imagine a mach- some, some combination of artificial intelligence and robotics that leads to factories where you can kinda do that. Over time, you need fewer and fewer people in them, and that means that less and less in the economy depends on the wages that those workers can command because you need fewer of them. That means more and more is gonna depend on, well, who actually owns the machine? By which I mean both the intellectual property, the AI, and the, the physical plant, right? And that's where we've gotta make sure that the American people own enough of this, or at least, uh, own enough of the value that's being created that- people's needs can be met.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett43:24

       How?

    4. PBPete Buttigieg43:25

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

    5. SBSteven Bartlett45:54

       Mm-hmm. You regret.

    6. PBPete Buttigieg45:55

       But your hour... Yeah, or you feel worse, but the hour is gone. So we need to figure out how to also be better stewards of our own time. These, by the way, are not just... Now, this, this sounds like a very twenty-first century problem, and in one way it is. But you know, the stoic philosopher Seneca, the Roman philosopher, is writing about this kind of stuff more than 2,000 years ago, talking about how we are so careful about who can get our money and, and, and, and are very up in arms if anybody looks like they're cheating us or taking our money. But then our time, which is the one thing where [chuckles] we have every reason to be, uh, even more stingy about it than money, 'cause you can get more money, but you can't get more time in your life. We let it get wasted in all kinds of ways.

18. 46:37 – 50:48

    Could Public Ownership of AI Actually Work?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett46:37

       Bernie has this proposal where he believes we should te- And I know I was reading about, you know, you discovering Bernie, I believe, in college, right? Wasn't it you?

    2. PBPete Buttigieg46:44

       High school, actually.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett46:45

       In high school.

    4. PBPete Buttigieg46:45

       Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett46:46

       He has a proposal where we should take 50% of the stock of these AI companies. It gives the general public 50% ownership and board voting seats to block job-killing decisions and re- redistribute AI profits directly to citizens for healthcare, education, and housing. Viable proposal?

    6. PBPete Buttigieg47:01

       Part of that overlaps with what I'm talking about. I do think a public share of the profits, which could mean a public share of the ownership, can make sense. And again, for reasons that I shared earlier, I, I think that would be fair. I do think we need to weigh whether the right way to make sure the public has a say in how these companies behave is to be on the board-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett47:19

       Mm-hmm

    8. PBPete Buttigieg47:19

       ... versus just to have some rules, to make sure that the rules are such that the companies can do what they do best, create value, innovate, but they can't do it in a way that hurts people, which is generally how regulation's supposed to work. I mean, I say this having been in the Cabinet of the Department of Transportation, where our job was to regulate companies. So what that meant was we have something like the FAA, right? The Federal Aviation Administration. You know, it doesn't create aircraft. It doesn't invent, uh, aviation technology. Uh, what it does is it sets a very elaborate set of rules to make sure that aviation is safe. And the consequence of that is actually an incredible unsung civilizational achievement. Just in the time I was Secretary of Transportation, we had 4 billion people get on an airplane, 4 billion passenger employments on, on commercial airplanes. The number of fatalities was zero. Zero out of 4 billion.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett48:11

       Crazy.

    10. PBPete Buttigieg48:12

        There are very few things you can do in life, I mean, all the way down to, like, crossing the street or eating a cheeseburger-

    11. SBSteven Bartlett48:19

        Mm

    12. PBPete Buttigieg48:19

        ... that would have a zero to 4 billion fatality rate. So that's an amazing achievement that happened because there w- is the right framework with technology and rules where you have a lot of innovation. I mean, the aviat- the aerospace sector is known to be very innovative, but also you make sure it's safe. And it's worth considering that when we're saying, "Okay, how do we make sure that these AI technologies develop so that we can have safer vehicles, or we can get a better, uh, uh, screening of a, a, of a radiology scan for, for cancer?" Or any of these other things, all the way down to, like, you know, these amazing ideas about curing cancer or figuring out nuclear fusion, which are urgently important things to do-

    13. SBSteven Bartlett49:01

        Mm-hmm

    14. PBPete Buttigieg49:02

        ... without having the kind of AI equivalent of a plane crash.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett49:06

        [page flips] I've got 60 seconds, and I'm gonna show you how much I can get done because of our sponsor called Wispr Flow. And for those of you that don't know what it is, it's a business I invested in that turns your speech into text in any app or device. I'm gonna post into our Slack channel, which rewards whichever team member conducted the most experiments this week. Hi, everyone. Here is this week's experimenter of the week. Congratulations to The Diary of a CEO trailer team, which is Ant, Liv, Dom, and Cam. You guys have won. Okay, now I'm gonna open Gmail. So here is one of our founders on an email chain that I wanna connect my team with. All I have to say is, "Add my team's emails," and Wispr will do exactly that. Now a quick message to Juan, who does my schedule every single week. Hey, Juan, can I record on Wednesday at 2:00 PM... Actually, no. Do you know what? Let's record at 3:00 PM on Wednesday. Wispr Flow is four times faster than typing, and it is incredibly easy to use. So if you wanna give it a go, all you have to do is head to wisprflow.ai/stephen to download it today. [page flips] I wanna speak to the business owners listening and watching right now. I know what it's like to be personally responsible for every decision. I founded my first company at 21 years old, and honestly, the pressure can be immense. It's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface. I recently did some tests through our sponsor, Function, which got me thinking about that invisible impact. I found that I had low levels of omega-3s. I had deficient levels of vitamin D, probably because I sit inside this dark room all day, and that has totally changed how I construct my day going forward. I get up in the morning, and the first thing I now do is I go for a walk outside in the sunshine, in part to help my vitamin D levels increase, but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm.

19. 50:48 – 54:20

    Is Socialism the Answer to Rising Inequality?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett50:48

       With Function, you can check your brain health, your aging, your stress, and so much more. They provide over 160 lab tests for what is equal to a dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Head to functionhealth.com/DOAC to join and use code DOAC25 for a $25 credit. [page flips] Th- there's, there's also just a broader debate, which I guess in some ways connected to this at the moment in America, but actually also across the Western world, it's happening in the UK as well, around capitalism, socialism, and, um, I think a lot of it's driven by the inequality-

    2. PBPete Buttigieg51:23

       Yeah

    3. SBSteven Bartlett51:23

       ... that people are experiencing. And if my, if my m- memory is true, the US has more extreme inequality.

    4. PBPete Buttigieg51:31

       Mm.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett51:31

       It has more growth-

    6. PBPete Buttigieg51:32

       Mm

    7. SBSteven Bartlett51:33

       ... GDP growth, but it has more extreme inequality than a country like the United Kingdom.

    8. PBPete Buttigieg51:38

       Yeah.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett51:38

       Um, so socialism is often considered to be the solution to this inequality. Memdani's now the mayor of, um, New York, and we're seeing, you know, in the UK, socialist parties are, are becoming more and more popular. The idea of taxing the rich is becoming very popular. A big debate actually this week in the UK is should we implement a wealth tax on people who have wealth above 10 million?

    10. PBPete Buttigieg52:02

        Hmm.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett52:03

        Keen to get your perspective on this.

    12. PBPete Buttigieg52:04

        Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett52:05

        Is socialism, is wealth taxes the right solution to some of these problems of in- inequality?

    14. PBPete Buttigieg52:08

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

20. 54:20 – 1:00:18

    Would Wealth Taxes Solve the Problem?

    1. PBPete Buttigieg54:20

       percentage of what you make in taxes than if you're a school teacher or a firefighter. We even, in percentage terms, generally, tax billionaires less than we tax millionaires because, again, of this system that kind of favors wealth. So the more you have, uh, the more you make, and the less it's taxed. Surely we can do better than that.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett54:41

       So you're supportive of wealth taxes, and I, I'm defining that as, um, not taxing income-

    3. PBPete Buttigieg54:46

       Yeah

    4. SBSteven Bartlett54:46

       ... but looking at the net worth of somebody-

    5. PBPete Buttigieg54:49

       Yeah

    6. SBSteven Bartlett54:49

       ... and taking a percentage of their net worth.

    7. PBPete Buttigieg54:51

       Yeah. Again, to me, that's just a variation on the idea of a property tax. I think it's legitimate. There are some problems with doing it. Uh, i- in, in practical terms-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett55:00

       Yeah

    9. PBPete Buttigieg55:00

       ... it can be hard to do.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett55:00

        This is why it's hard, right?

    11. PBPete Buttigieg55:01

        Or, like, how do you tax-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett55:02

        If you try this

    13. PBPete Buttigieg55:02

        ... like, somebody's art collection? Or there are things that can make it tricky.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett55:05

        One of the things that I learned when, um, I had this company, and it was a public company, so I had public stock.

    15. PBPete Buttigieg55:12

        Mm.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett55:12

        And someone came along and said, "Steven, you know with your, your public stock that, that you have..." So started this company when I was 21. Does well. By 27, the stock that I have is public stock, which means it's on a stock market. Someone came to me and, and at 27 and said, "Steven, do you know you can just take a loan against your public stock?"

    17. PBPete Buttigieg55:27

        Oh, yeah.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett55:28

        And I went, "What?"

    19. PBPete Buttigieg55:28

        [laughs] Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett55:28

        They're like, "You can just get-"

    21. PBPete Buttigieg55:30

        Yeah

    22. SBSteven Bartlett55:30

        ... "a tax-free loan."

    23. PBPete Buttigieg55:32

        Yeah.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett55:32

        "So if your stock is worth $50 million right now-"

    25. PBPete Buttigieg55:34

        Yeah

    26. SBSteven Bartlett55:35

        ... "they will give you a 50% loan-"

    27. PBPete Buttigieg55:37

        Mm-hmm

    28. SBSteven Bartlett55:37

        ... "without paying tax-"

    29. PBPete Buttigieg55:39

        Mm-hmm

    30. SBSteven Bartlett55:39

        ... "on that-" On that stock. So they will just-
21. 1:00:18 – 1:01:35

    Why America’s Debt Problem Keeps Getting Worse

    1. PBPete Buttigieg1:00:18

       make sure that it's reform and not catastrophe.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:21

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

    3. PBPete Buttigieg1:00:56

       Right.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:56

       But this might be a two-decade, uh, c- catastrophe. The music might stop in two decades.

    5. PBPete Buttigieg1:01:01

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:01

       So actually when you think about people's incentive structures, you're incentivized to actually not think about the future.

    7. PBPete Buttigieg1:01:07

       Yeah.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:07

       You're incentivized to, like, be remembered and pass the baton to the next Democrat in four years' time in a way that's positive. So that's why we're seeing this. 'Cause clearly if someone was in power for 100 years or maybe if the time horizon was even longer, maybe they would have thought about this debt rapidly increasing.

    9. PBPete Buttigieg1:01:22

       Yeah, but I think it also comes down to, like, why, why do you think you're here if you're in office? Like, are you in office just in order to hold it?

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:29

        It seems like that sometimes.

    11. PBPete Buttigieg1:01:30

        [chuckles] It's not worth it. Being in a position to make a difference and hold public office, like, it, it's an exciting

22. 1:01:35 – 1:06:27

    Could Political Frustration Lead to Trump in 2028?

    1. PBPete Buttigieg1:01:35

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

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:56

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

    3. PBPete Buttigieg1:02:12

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:13

       It almost feels like i-in a way that-

    5. PBPete Buttigieg1:02:17

       I feel like you're trying to be nice. [chuckles]

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:19

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

    7. PBPete Buttigieg1:02:23

       Yeah, me too.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:24

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

    9. PBPete Buttigieg1:02:27

       Right

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:27

        So this is why-- Oh, God.

    11. PBPete Buttigieg1:02:29

        [laughs] Uh-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:32

        Because this is disruption. This is kind of burn it down to some degree and-

    13. PBPete Buttigieg1:02:35

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

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:03

        Mm-hmm

    15. PBPete Buttigieg1:04:03

        ... or, uh, reducing what we're paying in tariffs or better infrastructure or any, any of the other policy, you know, paid family leave, all these policy things that I'd like to see happen really depend on fixing a political system that's just not as sexy. But it can be powerfully motivating because our country was started by people who fought a revolution to change the political system. And I just can't imagine that it was just like Jefferson and Hamilton and these guys sitting in their studies reading, you know, John Locke and Rousseau and thinking, "Oh, it would be neat to try that somewhere." I, I, I think they, they believed that, like, their lives and everybody's lives would be better, different if we actually had a different system, and then they risked violent death in order to challenge the existing political system that was the monarchy and replace it with the republic, the democratic country that they set up that is the United States of America, right? So it's not like this can't stir passion. Should we not be a country where everybody's vote counts the same? That would mean a popular vote for the presidents. We ought to do that. I just think everybody's vote ought to count the same, and the person who gets the most votes ought to win. [chuckles] This isn't a hard thing for us to buy into in literally any other election we run in our political system. We need to do things like make it just ban gerrymandering, where districts are being drawn. So, uh, consider this. We have 435 seats in the House.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:33

        Mm-hmm.

    17. PBPete Buttigieg1:05:34

        Nine out of 10 are so red or so blue that you basically know who's gonna win before the first vote is cast. Nine out of 10 in a 50/50 country. That makes no sense. And of course, what it leads to is the people in those seats are either very comfortable and not really worried about being responsive to the people, or if they are in danger, they're in danger from their own side. What's amazing to me when I look at how Americans feel about certain big issues, like making sure there's healthcare for everybody, or raising the minimum wage, or having higher rates of taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, or background checks on guns, or marriage equality for same-sex couples, all kinds of things, there's like 60 or 70% agreement on most of the issues that most

23. 1:06:27 – 1:11:08

    Does the Left Need Its Own Political Disruptor?

    1. PBPete Buttigieg1:06:27

       people tell pollsters they care about the most. So how can we be a country that's got 60 or 70% agreement on issue after issue after issue, and we fail to get those policies done, and we keep proceeding like it's normal to be a 50/50 country where everybody's at each other's throats? That to me is evidence of a broken system. If we don't fix the system, I don't think we're g- gonna get very far.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:48

       It's interesting 'cause when I think about the last sort of 20 years of politics, we had, you know, the, the, the Bush era, then we had Democrats and, and so on that were very polished. Bush was kind of very polished as well. Then we had Biden-

    3. PBPete Buttigieg1:06:59

       Mm

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:59

       ... who was, um, very polished, kind of like career politician, says the right things, reads off the teleprompter. And then it seems globally like people wanted some disruption. We had Brexit going on over there. We've got Nigel Farage, uh, increasing in popularity over the last 10 years or so as relates to his political probabilities. And then over in the United States, we have Trump arrive. Again, not a career politician, not clean, not a teleprompter kind of guy. If Democrats are to win, as you say, it's certainly not gonna go back to the polished Joe Biden teleprompter. I, I almost think that there's gonna need to be some disruptive character on the left side of politics to get, to win over those independents, but also some of those Republicans.

    5. PBPete Buttigieg1:07:37

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:37

       Is that, do you agree with that broadly?

    7. PBPete Buttigieg1:07:39

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

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:20

       Really?

    9. PBPete Buttigieg1:08:20

       Yeah. They were, they were all products of the summer of, I think it was 1946.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:24

        Mm-hmm.

    11. PBPete Buttigieg1:08:25

        Coming out of that generation, Joe Biden n- near to them in age, right, into whatever's next, I think you're gonna have leaders, and I hope this can be potentially a very good thing, who are just a little bit better able to just kind of show their humanity. Being in long podcasts like this one, right? Like, I, I remember when long form meant, like, maybe a 30-minute NPR interview.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:49

        [chuckles]

    13. PBPete Buttigieg1:08:50

        Now you're sitting for sometimes two or three hours. I don't think it's possible as a matter of physical stamina to stay on talking points for two, two or three hours if you want to.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:56

        [laughs] Yeah.

    15. PBPete Buttigieg1:08:57

        Like it just, you know. And so, you know, somebody once said that, that running for office is like an MRI of the soul anyway. But that's even more true now than it used to be because you just, there's so many different kind of ways of having to kind of show who you are. We used to imagine that the people in charge are just, like, next level, like, on a different plane of existence, and I think it's become harder and harder to believe that-

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:24

        [laughs]

    17. PBPete Buttigieg1:09:24

        ... 'cause it just, we know too much, right?

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:26

        Sure.

    19. PBPete Buttigieg1:09:26

        And so I think we're trading that for just wanting people that we have a reason to trust.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:33

        We see the same across, um, across business. We talk, talked a lot about over the last 10 years how we've shifted from this black box world where the PR department would pa- would paint the image of the company on the outside of this black box.

    21. PBPete Buttigieg1:09:43

        Mm-hmm.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:44

        And then we moved, because of phones and everyone has a, a mobile phone now and a camera in their pocket-

    23. PBPete Buttigieg1:09:48

        Yeah

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:48

        ... and a, a social media platform so they can give their own opinion-

    25. PBPete Buttigieg1:09:50

        Yeah

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:50

        ... this glass box world where actually the job is to let everybody see inside, because if you don't, someone else will paint the bla- the box for you.

    27. PBPete Buttigieg1:09:59

        Uh-huh.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:59

        So actually d- defense became for big CEOs in the world now-

    29. PBPete Buttigieg1:10:02

        Yeah

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:02

        ... coming on podcasts and having a personal brand and-
24. 1:11:08 – 1:17:34

    The Hidden Doubts Behind a Presidential Run

    1. PBPete Buttigieg1:11:08

       and, like, shoot a video and, like, tell people what's going on? Sometimes they're gonna think that we're, that we don't care about them, that we're putting a highway through their neighborhood, and we don't care how it's gonna hurt them, or that we're not responding to a disaster in a Republican area because it's a Republican area, or any o- other number of things that people might believe if we don't show them what we're actually doing and why.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:29

       Got this cap here.

    3. PBPete Buttigieg1:11:30

       Okay.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:30

       Pete, Pete Buttigieg, 2028.

    5. PBPete Buttigieg1:11:32

       Hmm.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:33

       When you, when you think about running for president or being president of the United States, the most powerful nation on Earth, do you not have imposter syndrome? And what is it about the job that you think-- 'cause, you know, [laughs] it's pretty crazy for anyone to think they could run the most powerful nation on Earth and not think, "God, there's a couple of things that I'm not gonna be great at."

    7. PBPete Buttigieg1:11:51

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

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:26

       That's the, uh-

    9. PBPete Buttigieg1:13:26

       Oh, there we go.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:27

        There we go.

    11. PBPete Buttigieg1:13:27

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

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:50

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

    13. PBPete Buttigieg1:13:53

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

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:12

        And there's really four frontrunners, um, according to the data that I saw, which is yourself, Gavin Newsom, AOC, and Kamala Harris. I've now interviewed three of them.

    15. PBPete Buttigieg1:14:24

        Which one haven't you got to yet?

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:25

        [laughs] AOC. I think, I think it's in the works. Very different candidates, I'd say-

    17. PBPete Buttigieg1:14:31

        Yeah

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:31

        ... as individuals.

    19. PBPete Buttigieg1:14:32

        Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:34

        If not you, then which one of them?

    21. PBPete Buttigieg1:14:35

        Hmm. It's just a bad idea to answer that question.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:37

        [laughs]

    23. PBPete Buttigieg1:14:37

        I'm sorry. Like, I wanna be transparent, but, like-

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:40

        You must have an answer, though.

    25. PBPete Buttigieg1:14:42

        I don't know.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:43

        Let the truth set you f-free, Secretary.

    27. PBPete Buttigieg1:14:46

        Hmm. Uh, let's think about it.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:46

        Kamala, like, man, she was lovely. Gavin's nice. Which one are you closest friends with?

    29. PBPete Buttigieg1:14:51

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

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:07

        Is she misunderstood?
25. 1:17:34 – 1:20:33

    What Biden’s Health Meant for the Election

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:34

       were you aware of that? 'Cause you were in his-- You were part of his team at that time.

    2. PBPete Buttigieg1:17:38

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:38

       Were you aware that something was different?

    4. PBPete Buttigieg1:17:40

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

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:54

       I mean, cognitive performance is pretty important for the-

    6. PBPete Buttigieg1:17:57

       Sure

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:57

       ... the most powerful job on Earth.

    8. PBPete Buttigieg1:17:58

       Yeah.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:00

       Were you concerned?

    10. PBPete Buttigieg1:18:01

        I was definitely concerned when I saw the debate. I mean-

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:04

        You weren't concerned at any point before the debate?

    12. PBPete Buttigieg1:18:06

        Up until that moment, I, I saw that he was visibly growing older, but there was never some moment where I saw him, like, make a different decision, or at least in terms of anything that I was involved with, transportation, that I thought it was going different or worse, or I couldn't get what I needed from him or from the White House because of his age. But of course, the job is not just policy guidance. The, the job is also to convey and communicate to the American people of what your administration is doing and why. That's the job of a president. It's in, in some ways 100% the job of a candidate.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:42

        Mm.

    14. PBPete Buttigieg1:18:42

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

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:47

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

    16. PBPete Buttigieg1:18:52

        Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:53

        You say one sentence that's the wrong sentence, theoretically it could have consequences.

    18. PBPete Buttigieg1:18:57

        Totally.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:57

        But, and that, and you just said it. This is someone that doesn't currently have a job.

    20. PBPete Buttigieg1:19:00

        Mm.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:00

        The President of the United States, Joe Biden, muddling up his sentences in front of the nation like he did in that debate-

    22. PBPete Buttigieg1:19:06

        Yeah

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:07

        ... is, um, is probably not good enough-

    24. PBPete Buttigieg1:19:10

        Yeah

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:10

        ... to be in that, in that position.

    26. PBPete Buttigieg1:19:11

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

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:17

        Do you have a private conversation with him?

    28. PBPete Buttigieg1:19:18

        No, I wasn't-- I was in the Cabinet, but that doesn't mean I was invited to rooms when they were talking about things like whether he was gonna run for president again.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:26

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

    30. PBPete Buttigieg1:19:35

        Yeah. I, I thought about the lot because I think in the moment it felt like, oh, we have very little time. We've all gotta pull together. We gotta put ego aside. We gotta put, uh, kind of internal politics aside, and we gotta quickly speak with one voice, partly because I knew, uh- And we all knew what could happen to this country if Donald Trump was elected again. And I believe all of those harms and then some have come to pass. But the other side of the coin is if there had been some way to have a competition, even with that very short timeline, I think that even if the candidate had still been Kamala Harris, I think she likely would have been a better candidate. I think in 2020, Joe Biden was a better candidate because he had to compete with Kamala Harris and me and like 18 other Democrats before winning that process. And I think that in general,

26. 1:20:33 – 1:21:49

    The Most Radical Ideas He Thinks America Needs

    1. PBPete Buttigieg1:20:33

       we know that competition sharpens you. We know that competition gets more information out. And I'm not saying I have it all solved in my head how that could have been done on the timeline that we faced or what it would have been like. But I think with the hindsight that we have now, I think it's pretty clear that we would have been better off if we had that.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:53

       You know, we talked about maybe people are looking for something a little bit more radical this time around. What are your most radical ideas as it relates to policies you would be in favor of? I know you're keen to remove the Electoral College and do it based on numbers, the quantity of votes for either presidential candidate.

    3. PBPete Buttigieg1:21:11

       And I still can't believe that anybody considers this radical. Like to me, there's nothing radical about thinking the person who gets the most votes ought to be the winner. But I think people haven't thought through how much benefit would come from that. If we did that, there are so many votes in red and blue states that you couldn't ignore anymore. Like if you were running for president as a Democrat, you'd have to go to Texas. And even if Texas is still going to vote mostly for Republicans, you'd have to turn out every Democratic vote you could in Texas. And I just think we'd be so much better off if a Republican and Democratic candidate were competing over Texas. And by the way, New York, even if New York is definitely

27. 1:21:49 – 1:26:26

    How He Would Change the Supreme Court

    1. PBPete Buttigieg1:21:49

       going to vote more for Democrats, a Republican candidate would have to come to New York and states from Alaska to Rhode Island. So it's small states too that get ignored now would finally be part of this competition. So yeah, Electoral College for sure. Supreme Court needs to change.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:09

       Supreme Court. What would you do to the Supreme Court?

    3. PBPete Buttigieg1:22:10

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

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:33

       What does that mean?

    5. PBPete Buttigieg1:22:34

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

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:58

       I've got four things there.

    7. PBPete Buttigieg1:22:59

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

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:30

       And so what would that mean? It would mean that you couldn't just, if a company couldn't just pump money into a political candidate.

    9. PBPete Buttigieg1:23:35

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

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:57

        Why doesn't it happen then?

    11. PBPete Buttigieg1:23:58

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

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:28

        Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time consuming and we're all very, very busy. And if you've never posted something before, there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post what people will think of you. Am I doing this right? Is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid? All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post and your feed goes bare. I'm an investor in a company called Stan Store, which you've probably heard me talk about. And what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses AI, looks at your feed, looks at your tone of voice, looks at your history, looks at your best performing posts, and tells you what you should post, makes those posts for you. You can also just use it for inspiration, and sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for our social media channels is inspiration. Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life, and I think it could change yours too. So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think. All you have to do is search

28. 1:26:26 – 1:35:01

    What He Really Thinks About Elon Musk

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:26

       coach.stan.store now to get started. There should be a button just down below here, and if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know, and according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. What do you think of Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, the arguably most famous entrepreneur on planet Earth, building companies here in America?

    2. PBPete Buttigieg1:26:55

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

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:11

       Elon used to be a Democrat.

    4. PBPete Buttigieg1:28:13

       Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:14

       He would say, and I've heard him say this, that the Biden administration basically snubbed him. They were sort of adversarial towards him. There's always the, the story people talk about, about the Electric Vehicle Summit in two thousand twenty-one-

    6. PBPete Buttigieg1:28:25

       Yeah

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:25

       ... where everybody was invited, GM, Ford, Chrysler, but Elon wasn't invited.

    8. PBPete Buttigieg1:28:30

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

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:16

       And he publicly broke ranks with the Democrat Party. He bought Twitter-

    10. PBPete Buttigieg1:29:20

        Hmm

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:20

        ... and ultimately became Donald Trump's largest donor and, uh, key surrogate. It's, it's interesting. I think I ask this question because I think, uh, th- any president is gonna need to contend with both solving the probably problem in- of inequality, this national debt, while also keeping entrepreneurs happy and highly productive-

    12. PBPete Buttigieg1:29:40

        Yeah

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:40

        ... at the same time. And the, the, of the two parties, Republican and Democrat, the party that is typically, according to the data, more associated with being entrepreneur-friendly is the Republican Party. It's not often you hear billionaires are evil coming from the Republican si- from the Republican side.

    14. PBPete Buttigieg1:29:59

        Right. Yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:59

        But that, that's a-

    16. PBPete Buttigieg1:30:00

        Yeah

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:00

        ... prevailing narrative-

    18. PBPete Buttigieg1:30:01

        Yeah

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:01

        ... on the Democratic side is that billionaires are evil.

    20. PBPete Buttigieg1:30:04

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

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:06

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

    22. PBPete Buttigieg1:30:09

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

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:52

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

    24. PBPete Buttigieg1:30:58

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

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:02

        Yeah

    26. PBPete Buttigieg1:32:03

        ... to the amount of benefit that you create or the amount of hard work that you put in.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:07

        Yeah.

    28. PBPete Buttigieg1:32:07

        Some people work hard and they earn a lot.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:09

        Yeah.

    30. PBPete Buttigieg1:32:09

        And some people don't do shit and they wind up with a lot.
29. 1:35:01 – 1:44:27

    The Boldest Idea to Reduce Inequality

    1. PBPete Buttigieg1:35:01

       Yep

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:01

       ... pay for all of my team members' healthcare. It was just really, what the, like what the hell is going on? I thought this was the land of the free and the, all those kinds of things.

    3. PBPete Buttigieg1:35:07

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:08

       So I kind of, I kind of understand both ends of the spectrum and I... It makes me realize that actually it's the inequality, it's the people at the, the sort of bottom of the ladder-

    5. PBPete Buttigieg1:35:16

       Yeah

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:17

       ... per se, being so far from the top of the ladder-

    7. PBPete Buttigieg1:35:20

       Yeah

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:20

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

    9. PBPete Buttigieg1:35:29

       Well, here, yeah, here's the thing.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:30

        How do you lift people that-

    11. PBPete Buttigieg1:35:32

        I actually think the ideas for fixing those economic problems aren't that radical. The weird thing is, in order to get what I think of as very reasonable economic ideas through, you have to have radical change on the political side. Economically, we can do this mostly with tools that are very familiar to us. Make sure that there are higher tax rates, not to punish the wealthy, but to get enough revenue to do so government can do its job. Make sure there are higher tax rates on the, uh, not on all Americans compared to today, but on the corporate profits and on the, the wealthiest individuals. Make sure that it is harder to hide and move around money so that you never have to pay taxes on it at all. And then what do you do with that money? You make sure there's a healthcare system where, for example, somebody in the situation you are in still gets to be an entrepreneur 'cause they don't actually have to worry that they won't have healthcare if they don't just take the next low-wage job available to them. Invest in education enough that we are preparing for people who know not just how to work, but how to think, so that when work changes, they're ready. Make sure that we make it easier to have a family. Things like paid family leave and using tax credits to compensate people who give care to their parents and/or children can have a huge freeing effect on people, and I think it's the right thing to do, and it's a way to respect that that's work, too. Yeah, I, I've had roles and jobs where I have worked very, very hard, but the hardest I've ever worked in my life was when I was on parental leave when we adopted our newborn son and daughter, our twins. That was the only time... There they are. Yeah, I mean, that was the only time that I was routinely getting up at 3:00 in the morning. If I was lucky, I could get a nap at 5:30 in the morning, uh, and was just working until I physically couldn't work anymore, and then tapping out and then Chasten trying to, my husband trying to, you know, we'd alternate and, and, and help each other. And that work, which was beautiful work, very hard work, is work. I think we also need to invest in things like national service so everybody has an experie- Military's not for everybody, but everybody should know what it's like to be part of something bigger than yourself and to work on something that is hard with people you don't already know. I think if we have that, we'll have more trust. Where did you find this one?

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:01

        So this, these are some, uh, some photos-

    13. PBPete Buttigieg1:38:04

        Wow

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:04

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

    15. PBPete Buttigieg1:38:11

        Yeah

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:11

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

    17. PBPete Buttigieg1:38:24

        Huh. Well, my dad came to this country because he thought he could have a better life here. Um, not exactly in a rags to riches sense. He came from a middle-class family, uh, in the tiny country of Malta.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:38

        Mm-hmm.

    19. PBPete Buttigieg1:38:39

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

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:57

        Did your dad say that?

    21. PBPete Buttigieg1:41:59

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

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:35

        He passed away while you were running for president?

    23. PBPete Buttigieg1:42:37

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

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:46

        Unexpectedly?

    25. PBPete Buttigieg1:42:47

        He had been diagnosed with cancer in September, and we knew that it, it was pretty rough, and he passed away in January. So yeah, I mean, there was, you know, not overnight, but three or four months.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:03

        Destabilizing in the lead up to the most consequential decision and period of your life?

    27. PBPete Buttigieg1:43:08

        Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, this really big, important part of your world. And we were close. I, you know, I moved into a house that was on the same block as where my parents lived in South Bend. Home for dinner every Sunday night. I mean, to have him become ill and then to have him pass away just at the moment that we were starting to launch... Sometimes I look back on it, I ac- actually don't know how it worked. I was trying to remember something, and I looked back at my, like, emails, and I saw some email I sent at, like, three thirty in the morning to my, someone on my staff like it was normal. I think on the city staff, 'cause the other thing is I was still mayor, right? So I was running the city, facing my father's death. During that period, my mother had a heart attack and heart surgery, and then launching this campaign, like, all within a few, really few weeks with each other.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:07

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

    29. PBPete Buttigieg1:44:17

        I don't know if strategy is the word. Um, but my way of dealing with it, first of all, had a lot to do with Chasten, so, uh, all this happened--

30. 1:44:27 – 1:51:41

    Coming Out While Building a Political Career

    1. PBPete Buttigieg1:44:27

       Yeah, we got married in 2018, and all of this happened toward the end of 2019. So we hadn't been married for long, and he never guessed when-- Neither one of us guessed on our first date or even when we got married that, that this was happening.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:47

       What is the-- You know, I've got lots of friends who have been on the journey of, um, sort of disc-discovering their sexual orientation at, at a young age and then going through the process of being comfortable enough in their, in their environment to announce it to the world.

    3. PBPete Buttigieg1:45:03

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:04

       How does that-- What's the sort of the journey of, of you knowing who you are and then feeling comfortable enough to announce it? And what was the-- How do I put together the picture of, like, how your parents understood that, how the world understood that, how you understood that? And also, I guess the other question that I have is like, American politics-

    5. PBPete Buttigieg1:45:21

       Yeah

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:23

       ...how does that understand it? You know, you've got the right, the left.

    7. PBPete Buttigieg1:45:25

       Yeah.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:26

       How do you think about all of that at the moment?

    9. PBPete Buttigieg1:45:28

       Yeah. I mean, I'd like to believe we'll get to a day when it's just not a thing.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:34

        [chuckles]

    11. PBPete Buttigieg1:45:35

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

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:08

        At what age?

    13. PBPete Buttigieg1:46:09

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

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:44

        What about your, your parents?

    15. PBPete Buttigieg1:49:47

        I remember it was weird because, again, I, I knew that they were forward-thinking. I knew they were accepting. I knew how much they loved me. Uh, but I had a-- It took me a while to be ready to come out to them. And I do-- You know, like I said, I used to go home for Sunday dinner every night. And, uh, and so I was home for Sunday dinner one night, and Kind of pushing my ice cream around with a spoon in the bowl and just thinking about, and then I just took a deep breath and it's just like, I got to tell you something. And, um, you know, as I expected, like they, you know, responded with love and acceptance. And I know not everybody gets to expect that. So I'm, I'm thankful for that. My dad was immediately worried about what it might mean for my future. Not in a way that he was trying to like talk me out of anything. He just thought about that and talked about it. My mom wanted to know if I was dating somebody. I think she had had her eyes on, you know, maybe becoming a grandma for a long time. Um, I wasn't dating anybody, but you know, I don't know. It was probably within a year of that, that I brought Chaston home for Sunday dinner for the first time and watched him hit it off with my parents, which is just like everything about that. Everything about that scene at dinner was just not a thing that I could have thought would have been possible just, just a few years before it was happening.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:12

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

    17. PBPete Buttigieg1:51:33

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

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:35

        Yeah.

    19. PBPete Buttigieg1:51:36

        I mean, not that I was considered to have a shot when I started. Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:39

        But I think in the same way that Obama paved the

31. 1:51:41 – 1:54:53

    The Truth the World Needs to Hear

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:41

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

    2. PBPete Buttigieg1:51:53

       Yeah. I mean, it was a personal decision, but-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:55

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

    4. PBPete Buttigieg1:52:18

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

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:13

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

    6. PBPete Buttigieg1:53:19

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:20

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

    8. PBPete Buttigieg1:53:22

       Yeah.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:23

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

    10. PBPete Buttigieg1:53:47

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

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:06

        Thank you for doing that because it's so wonderful to see the, I'd say conflict of ideas in, in, in public. Well, it's wonderful to see you going to the other side. And I know you've been on a bit of a tour of red states recently doing exactly that. I wish more politicians would do that because as we get to see those ideas that often exist on extreme poles, um, collide and we get to make our own mind up and please keep doing what you're doing.

    12. PBPete Buttigieg1:54:29

        Thank you.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:29

        I think it's really, really remarkable. And the values that you have, I also respect a huge amount. So thank you for being here and I appreciate your generosity and coming.

    14. PBPete Buttigieg1:54:35

        Thanks for having me.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:36

        Thank you. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out. I bet you, you might love it.

Episode duration: 1:54:53