Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays

YERRR – former U. S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg came on to talk about fixing America’s crumbling infrastructure, fixing the Democratic Party, & his political aspirations. He gets into policy, public perception, parenting, his coming out story, and what it takes to run for president. All that and more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 00:00 Intro 00:32 White Lotus recap 3:11 Commercial space travel + Air travel is unbelievably safe 5:37 Taxing the ultra wealthy + Corporate tax avoidance 11:17 Tariffs are a tax + Reducing incentives to hoard money 15:05 Urban decay, Corporate profiteering & Wealth tax 23:12 What would Pete do differently with tariffs? 28:26 Finger-wagging, Compassion + Dems’ direction 33:59 AOC + Bernie messaging & Policies 38:14 DOGE is about power not efficiency 44:56 Huge transportation projects in NYC 48:50 Power play + Limits on power 54:00 Where do our taxes go? 1:00:47 Best results aren’t seen + Slow progression = bureaucracy 1:08:11 Perception of Dems’ states + Facts are debated 1:15:20 Stocks & politicians + Misunderstanding data 1:19:14 Willing to correct mistakes 1:22:00 NBA playoffs time 1:23:55 Echo chambers + Courting some controversy 1:32:28 What do Americans really need? 1:38:57 Right to choose and tax cuts + Address our feelings 1:41:31 What would Pete do? 1:45:46 Coming out, “Just In Case” letter + Radical Empathy 1:59:42 Reaction to coming out + White boy fun 2:04:40 Telling parents was not easy + Challenges 2:11:30 Fatherhood 2:19:20 Raising Black children 2:22:39 If Pete runs for president, what are the costs? 2:26:58 What drew Pete into public service? 2:32:46 Is America ready for a gay president? 2:34:53 How do keep the US at no. 1? A1 not AI 2:41:14 Addressing the wage gap + Poverty 2:46:17 Tax Cuts being passed right now Follow Us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/flagrant/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:15Speaker 03

  What's up, guys? Today, we are joined by the Democrat's secret weapon. He's an Afghan War veteran and the former Secretary of Transportation. He's also one of the first gay men to run for president. And today, he's here to explain how he kept the planes in the sky, how billionaires legally dodged taxes, why Trump's tariffs could be hurt in America, what he ate in Afghanistan that made him gay, and most importantly, why every Republican National Convention grinder is on fire. Give it up for Pete Buttigieg. You started a conversation when you sat down on the couch, you said that Lachlan should have died. Which is not the first thing we often hear from a, you know, future president. He said Lachlan should have died and White Lotus

• 2:00Speaker 03

  talked to us, like, this is a big time, you know.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I hate to say it, I love him, he's a good kid, right? But just from a narrative perspective, right? And having like-

• 2:09Speaker 03

  From doing that to his brother.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  No, I mean, you know, I think the dad has to sit with Chasten, my husband and I have been talking about this a lot. The dad should have to sit with like what he did.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  The guilt, yes.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  And there were so many parallels to what happens with Tanya where he's like floating, right? When he seems like he's dying or maybe sort of dead.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 04

  I think just story wise that otherwise, you know, I don't have a lot of notes for for this year's White Lotus.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  I mean, it was incredible. I guess the one thing would be, does anything really happen to the ultra wealthy?

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Maybe that's maybe that's what he's trying to showcase.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  Which is kind of what always.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  They always get away with it.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah, even the kid.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Even the kid.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, because by the time they're on the boat, it's like none of that even happened, right? Yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 06

  And then the poor security guards that are guarding the guy, they die.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:07Speaker 06

  No one talks about them.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  No, I forgot about them.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  They were bullying assholes. They were mean to what's his name?

• 3:13Speaker 03

  God, fuck them.

• 3:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. I'm OK with that.

• 3:17Speaker 06

  That's a good point.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  They were bullies, dude.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  You really fell in love with that.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, dude. He had such a pure heart. Don't bully this guy.

• 3:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, that is true.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  And then the three women seem fine after witnessing a mass shooting like they're just laughing.

• 3:28Speaker 06

  Just on the boat, having a good time.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  But yeah, in season one, if you remember, the guy, the really rich kid like stabs the guy and then he's just in the airport 20 minutes later or whatever. No questioning, no nothing. And I think that's kind of Andrew's point is like, I think the point of that show is the ultra wealthy. One guy has his wife killed, nothing seems to happen, they just kind of get away with it.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  But there is social mobility because Belinda joins the club.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And the second she joins the club, what happens to her?

• 3:55Speaker 04

  She seems fine.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  She becomes the woman that she's always hated.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  She leaves off.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Doesn't she use the same language?

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  I think she's like the same words.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  I have to do something for myself.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. But like the whole show, I was worried about her, like physically, not morally.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  And then it turns out I was.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  And I thought that was a genius choices. You're worried about her well being and then she gets to 5 million, you're so happy. But then she also just kind of becomes gross right after.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? I thought that was a really good way to do it.

• 4:21Speaker 06

  Money corrupts, baby.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Money corrupts. Speaking of. How do we corrupt you? No. What do we do? Like, I keep on hearing conversations about how we're gonna tax people and make a lot of money. You know, I've been very fortunate. I've made a lot of money and they're doing a really good job at it.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Who, how do we tax the people who really are making a lot of money? Like, the guys who, like, send their wives to space for fun? How do we make sure? What did you think about that?

• 4:47Speaker 04

  The spaceflight?

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  I'm glad they got back OK. I mean, yeah, I guess, I mean, it seems to me there's some, there's some other things we could probably be paying a little more attention to. But, but, you know, it's, it's exciting. Look, we're in this era of commercial spaceflight, which is exciting.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  I worked on this when I was Secretary of Transportation like that.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Oh, you were part of that?

• 5:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's transportation, right? Our, our main thing was just making sure on the way. It's actually a very Wild West right now, big picture wise. The main concerns are making sure you don't hit anything on the way up, because you gotta go through the national airspace. And that if anything blows up on the ground, you don't hurt anybody on the ground. Like, those are kind of the main, like, concerns. But eventually, we'll have to start regulating that like we do commercial air travel, right? In order to make it, like, now, I think there's a sense of fly at your own risk, right? You, you understand if you're being blasted into space.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Do you have to, like, ask permission when you're ready to go?

• 5:35Speaker 04

  I'm guessing there's all kinds of, I don't, I haven't seen it, but I'm guessing there's all kinds of releases and paperwork.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Hopefully, we could talk to the Transportation Secretary.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  But, but there's an understanding there's a different level of risk.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Whereas on, on commercial aviation, we have zero tolerance for risk. And, and actually, that, that's worked out pretty well, right? Like, I think one thing that we, we always talk about the things that are going poorly.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  We pay attention to, to the bad thing before we notice the good thing.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  It does feel like that a little bit recently, that the planes aren't making it as much.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, we, we can get into that. But, but we had 15 years with zero commercial.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Airline fatal crashes, 15 years. Think about that, like just in the time I was secretary. We had about 4 billion people get on airplanes. Look statistically, if you took your seat on an airplane and you were sitting there, buckle your seatbelt, eating your snack, you would be statistically more likely to randomly die of natural causes than to be involved in a fatal crash.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  And that didn't just randomly happen. That happened for years of technology, regulation, policy, like a lot of things go into that. And that's what it looks like kind of on the other side of that process where with commercial spaceflight, it's very new. It's understood that it's very risky and I guess that's okay. But I don't want to lose the first thing you asked about, which is taxation, because I think, you know, a big thing, I think most Americans, definitely my party, but I think most Americans believes that if you're making a billion dollars, good for you, but like you should at least be paying an effective tax rate that's comparable, or I would argue more than like a firefighter. And that's not true right now.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Like, because nobody really makes a billion dollars.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Right, because it's all equity.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And share their income is $5. Nobody makes income, like anybody that's generating that type of wealth is not making income. So it's almost like, and this is not like a woo-hoo, like we got it so tough, but it's almost like the people who are, I think Miles used the term like not middle rich, like middle class, like they're the ones that are actually paying what they should pay. If they're adhering to the tax code, they're not, you know, hiring these tax attorneys that are gonna, you know, attack it all willingly and try to reduce whatever they're paying in. But let's assume, let's take it for face value, right? Somebody, an athlete or somebody that's making 5 million bucks and let's say that they pay 2.5 million around, right?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  The concern I have really is potentially the corporations. And I'm not smart enough to even know about this stuff, but it seems to me, and I think tariffs plays into this, so I'd love to get your take on it, but like it seems to me on the surface, and again, I'm giving a very emotional argument, you can give me tons of data, call me an idiot for even thinking this, but it's possible. Okay, seems to me that there's been an effort that has been supported to, you know, send the manufacturing of some of these products overseas to increase profits, right?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Or maybe it's more effective to manufacture them overseas. Maybe it's not all nefarious, but the idea is to like to increase shareholder profits or increase the profits of the company.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Which I'm not necessarily against. What I'm against is when you also put these like shell companies overseas to decrease, like you create the headquarters and you put it in Dublin or something like that so you can avoid taxes.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  And it's a P O box, like nobody's even there.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Exactly, so you can't do both. You can send the manufacturing overseas. But at least if we're taxing the revenue of that company that's generating billions of dollars. You would like to believe that that money would come back to the American people and then we could reinvest in the American people and then maybe there's other industries that would pop up and those jobs could transfer from manufacturing to those new ones.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  Or vice versa.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  But you can't do, to me, it just feels like if you do both, you are using the marketplace that America is.

• 9:27Speaker 05

  Encourages entrepreneurship, all of that, but not really giving back.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  And then stealing from it.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's no question, especially because a lot of what that tax revenue goes into or is supposed to go into here in the US is what then turns around and makes it possible for businesses to thrive.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Can you give us an example of that?

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, my favorite example is probably the smartphone. So, have you ever noticed like in like talks or like whenever somebody mentions a smartphone, they like start to pull it out of their pocket or like touch it. But, so the federal government could not have invented the iPhone, right? Like I don't think anybody, any of us would want a phone that was like invented by the federal government.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  That thing would suck.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  That is like all of the design, the manufacturing, supply chains, that's the kind of thing that corporations can do very well. And Apple did it very well and their competitors. But what makes the iPhone work? Well, among other things, the internet. The internet was literally invented by a federal research project. And it would never have been possible to invent the internet with a private company because you wouldn't have got the kind of capital virtue, even though it's a trillion dollar idea or a multi-trillion dollar idea. You know, companies can do multi-billion dollar ideas, but a trillion dollar idea like inventing the internet. That requires basic research and that's the kind of thing the government's supposed to do, among many other things.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  It requires basic research? What is that?

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Basic research, I mean, I mean, things that are so fundamental that you actually don't know for 50 or 100 years if they're going to have a return. They might never work out.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, you can't look at it as this thing is going to be profitable.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  Right, right, so it's different.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Benevolent endeavor for a society.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's different from research on like, like a pharmaceutical company researches a new medication expecting that, you know, they're gonna.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  There's gonna be a return in the next, you know, 10, 20 years.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Right, right, at least kind of within the, the kind of profit, right?

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, public parks is another version of this and stuff like that.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  You can't privatize at a public park.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Right, this is the whole idea of public goods, right?

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Sure, sure.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  This is why we have governments, why we collect taxes.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  God, we're turning into such libs already, dude.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  But, but there's a handshake, right? There are the things that only the government can do, and then there are the things that, that the private sector can and should do. And, and they, they meet in the middle. But if you start shorting, and part of what really worries, worries me right now about this kind of war on academia. And there are some things about academia that need to change, but the war on academia, the cuts to cancer research, the cuts to science research. This kind of like general anti-science like atmosphere that I think is emanating from, from the administration. Like, that costs us in ways that don't show up on, you know, a corporate profit and loss statement six months from now or a year from now. But in terms of whether a country, a society, an economy is productive and is growing and is innovating. That starts to really cost you over time.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  And if we're shorting that, or if corporations and extremely wealthy people don't want to be paying into that.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Through taxes, that is, I think, a classic example of, of a kind of short-term gain that causes long-term pain.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  I'm really worried about that.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  And I think that's why there seems to be some, a lot of support for the administration right now, or one reason why. And even support for the administration when it comes to tariffs. You know, when the tariffs happen and you hear about like the stock market being deeply affected. Most Americans are not invested in the stock market. So they're like, I don't give a fuck. Oh, rich people are losing some money? Or 50%, we can go off the numbers. Meaning there's a large swath of Americans that don't feel directly.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  But here's the thing, right?

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Impacted.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  A tariff, so part, part of what's happening is the markets are responding to their belief that the tariffs will probably make the world economy less productive and, and make a. More likely, but a tariff is a tax that people pay on stuff they buy every day. And proportionally, if you're, what'd you call it, middle rich versus like people in the neighborhood I grew up in in South Bend, Indiana?

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  Like proportionally, it's the people in Indiana who are spending a much bigger portion of their income at, let's say, Walmart. And everything at Walmart is about to get more expensive.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  You're 100% right. I'm talking about the knee jerk emotional reaction when you see like people who have money and have seemingly left you behind. As they've gotten richer, start to suffer a little bit, you go, yeah, I don't really care if you're suffering. In the same way that like when the Palisades fires happened, there was this sentiment of like, oh, a rich person's third home is on fire. They'll figure it out. Not this person's entire like life and belongings just went up in smoke. So I think that there is this like sentiment amongst a lot of Americans, you probably experienced it where you're from, just this kind of being like left behind. And I think this taxation of these corporations is a perfect example that really justifies that sentiment. It's like, why are you using the American marketplace and the support that we've given you and the lack of regulation?

• 14:05Speaker 03

  There's a reason why these companies don't sprout up in other countries, right? They sprout up here. And it's not just because they happen to be these unique smart individuals, it's because there is this marketplace that allows them to thrive here. You don't get to remove the headquarters so that you can not pay your fair share of taxes. That's going to then support the next generation of people who do the same thing. But how do you tax them? What do you do?

• 14:27Speaker 04

  But look at what's about to happen, right? Like as we speak, congressional Republicans are working on a budget framework that's going to cut corporate taxes. Like that's one of the biggest things it's going to do. And even this president, you know, the least popular he ever was last time around was when they passed his tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. So a lot of this is about, look.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  I have a question about that real quick. Is there a world where, and I doubt that this is possible, but is there a world where if they do that, it will influence companies that have gone abroad with their headquarters to come back here?

• 14:59Speaker 04

  I think it's less about that.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  I'm not just trying to defend the administration.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  No, no, I get that argument. But honestly, there are ways to structure taxes so that they capture where the value and the wealth is actually created.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  How do we do that?

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Like, you can have a P.O. box in the Bahamas or Ireland or whatever. But so one of the things, for example, that happened in the last administration was an international agreement on like a threshold, a minimum. So that, and now it only works if everybody agrees on it. This is part of why diplomacy matters so much, right? But no other country really wants to see too much of that happening either. So there's a way to create a floor that gets you a more level playing field.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  An international agreement for taxation of corporations.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  So even if your account is in Switzerland, if you have a trillion dollars in Switzerland or the Cayman or whatever, you're a trillionaire, you're going to get taxed as such.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  Exactly. So it reduces the incentive to offshore your books.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Now, it kind of seems like you're making the argument for a tariff on Lesotho. Right?

• 15:53Speaker 04

  Why? I don't know why they're beating up on Lesotho.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  No, no, I think the justification for that was so that someone can't go put a manufacturing factory on the plate.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, fine. And look, tariffs have their place, right?

• 16:06Speaker 03

  We're not going to make a lot of tariffs yet, but just on taxation.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  But again, what really worries me about tariffs is those don't amount to a tax on corporations. Those amount to a tax on consumers.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  I may have to push back, sorry. I'm on a pushback. And this is something Andrew brought up on a call that I completely agree with, and I'm an idiot. But I feel when people say these things, oh, the buck gets passed on to the consumer. That only happens because the corporations have exploited profits to the highest possible degree to keep their shareholder, share price as high as possible. Things have gotten more expensive over the past 50 years, every year. It's not just inflation. I think corporate greed is a big part of it. So why is it that now that there's a tariff, their profit has to stay the exact same and nobody's looking at them as perpetrators of any kind of greed? And it's just, oh, the United States government is deciding, here's a measure to help Middle America, and now we have to, we have to eat that.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  But how is making Middle America pay more a measure to help Middle America, right? I mean.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  Well, I would, and I don't, I do think, I get more frustrated with Democrats because I want very badly to be. That I definitely do not identify as conservative. But I find there's this, I, when I go to middle American, I'm sure you go there, we, we travel. Yeah, you live there. Yeah, that's what I meant to say. But it's like, oh, there's like decay in some of these places. And it doesn't feel like the party that I want to identify with has any empathy for them. And this to me was an idea that could help bring jobs back there. And I don't think the execution has been great from what I'm seeing. But this could help them. Why don't we look at any measure that could help them beyond? Let's keep things the way they are because the way status quo is not helping.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  Yes, I agree on that. Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think what my party has to do is respond to this in a way that doesn't make it sound like our whole argument is let's just go back to 2024, right? Like, if things like this, moments like this, movements like the one that's in charge of the White House right now, don't spring up in a country or an economy where everything's going along fine. And look, I lived this too. I grew up in South Bend, Indiana. People think South Bend, they know Notre Dame. The big employer that propelled South Bend wasn't Notre Dame, it was Studebaker. Studebaker made cars. Before the big three, it was the big four. And we were one of them. It dominated our city, grew our city. And then in 1963, they shut down.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  That's 20 years before I was born and we were still dealing with it 20 years later. We were still dealing with it 50 years later when I became the mayor there at the age of 29. And what had happened was, I mean, I, when we were going to school, I would go in between just acres of collapsing factories that literally looked like a war zone. I have been to war zones that look very similar to the way a lot of places in the industrial Midwest, like where I grew up, looked because of some of these things you're talking about. Which is why I think there's an appeal to saying, we're going to bring back manufacturing, right? And by the way, again, I, I don't want to like move away from what I was saying, that we shouldn't go back to where we were because I think a lot needs to change.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  But I would point out that in our entire lifetime, the year when there was the most investment in factories in the United States, the most factories being built was last year. Because there were a lot of policies, the chip stuff, the manufacturing stuff, trying to get more of the green economy stuff to be built on US soil, that led to a lot of these factories. And a lot of them are still in construction as we speak. Some of them actually opened, some of them still haven't. But right now, in Kokomo, Indiana, I just read a story today about 370 workers at Stellantis who just got laid off. Auto workers who got laid off because of the tariffs. So this is a tool that you can use, for sure. But it's absolutely critically important that you know what you're doing when you do.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  And if you're just making shit up as you go along, or if you're doing it for a reason that's actually less about helping Middle America and more about consolidating power, which is what I think is actually happening. We can get into that.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Then it's not going to work. But I don't want to completely disagree with what you're saying earlier. Like, yeah, part of what's happening is, like, part of why things cost more is that they actually cost more. But also, we've seen a lot of expansion of the corporate profits that people cash in on, right? Which helps to explain why a lot of things cost more. But to me, the answer to that is, okay, let's have a fairer tax system.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  How do we do that?

• 20:33Speaker 04

  That says, well, I mean, at risk of sounding simplistic, like, you pass a law, like, we can do this, right? It's not profoundly mysterious.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  But what law? For example, it's like, it's not going to be income tax, right? Because they'll find a way to not have income.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  So you can adjust capital gains, right? It doesn't have to be, like, all the way at the level that it used to be.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  But even with capital gains, you're only taxing them when they cash out. And a lot of these guys won't cash out. They just take loans against their investments, and then loans aren't taxable, so they live for free.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  So that's where the idea of wealth taxes come in, right?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  And what is that?

• 20:57Speaker 04

  If you're just sitting on it, at a certain point, especially if you're past a certain point in how much you're sitting on.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  You've got to contribute a little bit. I mean, this is not a novel kind of property taxes are that way, right? Like, you don't wait, depends where you live. But usually, you don't wait until you sell a home to have to pay property tax on every year. Like, you contribute a little bit of the value of the real estate you're sitting on.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  And that goes to... You know, the county roads and the school and the sheriff's department, whatever else you count on, right? So there is a way to do that nationally.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  But property taxes is gonna close that gap? I don't think it's gonna close that gap.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  I mean, if you had all these, well, you have pieces of that.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  A lot of pieces. No, I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. I just, I think that there is this feeling, this sentiment, I think that Akash was tapping into as well. And there's two things, like you seem like somebody who's very knowledgeable, very aware of all these things. You know these people that were fired in this random factory in, what'd you say it was?

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Kokomo, Indiana.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  In Indiana, right? It's like, the average person might not know about that. They don't know about these factories being built, but you have to meet the average person where they feel emotionally.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  And like, I think you do a really good job, and I've seen a lot of your interviews, is like acknowledging the emotions of the people that you're talking to before giving them evidence that might be contrary to them.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Instead of this like finger wagging approach, which is like, oh, you're stupid if you don't agree with me.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Really important, but just quickly, I think it'd be, I think the average like American isn't even aware that like what Jeff, what Amazon makes a year and what they pay in taxes. Like, I think they paid zero dollars last year.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, a whole bunch of these corporations.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  And I get what they're doing, and it's like they're writing off losses from other parts of the business, or they're reinvesting that money and growing the business. And, and I don't want to, I don't want the pendulum to swing so far that you can't start a business and you can't

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  grow and thrive, and I think that's like one of the great things about America. But there has to be this middle ground, and if we don't do something about it, the American people should at least be aware of the, I don't want to say the CEOs, but the people, the people that own these companies that are essentially stealing from the American people and using the system. Like, we should be aware of who they are. And I'm not saying we should do anything to them, but they should be shamed.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  Or taxed.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  If they're not gonna pay the taxes, you're gonna pay it emotionally.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  Because that like I I don't really care about their emotions. I just want to tax them.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  I do think there's a sociopathy to these people that you might underestimate.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Yes, true, but like maybe their partners like there will be no more chick flights of space. I promise you after the reaction to this, there'll be no more chick flights of space. I promise you he's it will not happen again. And the next one that happens, it will have like a real purpose.

• 23:39Speaker 05

  That's a fight when they get home. When she gets home, he's gonna be like, you see how much shit I had to deal with? Stupid fucking.

• 23:45Speaker 06

  To have a girl trip to the moon.

• 23:47Speaker 05

  Also, guys, tour dates, May 9th and 10th, Virginia Beach, June 19th and through 21st, we'll be in Salt Lake City at Wise Guys. All those dates and plenty more at akashsing.com. Now let's get back to the show.

• 23:58Speaker 06

  Hold on a second. Don't skip forward, guys, because it's the world's fastest ad read. My name's Mark. I'm coming to America. All right? We're going to Bangor, Maine, Portland, Maine, Charleston, Atlanta, Strasburg, Hoboken, Indianapolis.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  Several cities to suck his dick.

• 24:11Speaker 06

  Let's get a fuck Miles in the chat, by the way, to prove you didn't skip. We got Raleigh, North Carolina, Poughkeepsie, Portland, Fort Worth, Austin, Stanford, Philly, Leventown, Chandler, and San Diego. More dates to come. You can get it at my website, markgagnonlive.com. And I can't wait to see you guys there for consensual time where no one's gonna have, no one's gonna suck my dick.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  Somebody suck his dick.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  I could be assuming wrong, but it seems like you're against the current administration's tariff plan. And what would you do different? Because no one's giving actual solutions. Yeah, so I think what you do is you peg it very, basically you do what they're pretending to do. So what they said they were doing is they're kind of scanning all of the different countries. And they're saying, okay, here's some countries that are really not trading with us on fair terms. Like they're restricting our trade with them. Or they're artificially manipulating their currency. China does this for sure.

• 24:59Speaker 06

  What does that mean? So artificially manipulate your currency.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  So in a nutshell, the the cheaper the exchange rate, the the more you're gonna export because the cheaper your goods are, right? So the the strong dollar, right? Basically, the weaker the dollar is actually, the cheaper our stuff looks to the rest of the world and the more they're gonna purchase our things. So if you're China, one thing you're gonna do is you're gonna, it it sounds counterintuitive. Like usually you think like a nationalistic country, we want our currency to be super strong, right?

• 25:24Speaker 06

  You make your currency cheap, so you have a competitive advantage.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Manage.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Now, how does that?

• 25:27Speaker 04

  But think about if you ever traveled in like Southeast Asia and the dollar's doing really strong, you're like, wow, I'm gonna buy like everything here in Thailand.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  It's the first thing.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Like when you go to Europe and you find out the euros like there are moments where it's like under the dollar and you're like, oh, my God, let's go. I'm getting this hotel.

• 25:40Speaker 06

  If I go to India, I want a five star hotel. It's 200, 300.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Right, right. So that applies on everything from, you know, your experience as a tourist to like major industrial production, right?

• 25:50Speaker 03

  And how does one do that? Do they print more money?

• 25:53Speaker 04

  So you can print more money. You can buy and sell bonds. You can, uh, some countries just officially set an exchange rate and then use their central bank to do. There's all kinds of ways to do it. But the point is, part of trading deals is you're supposed to promise not to do it. And so what I'm saying is, what you do is you look for a place where there's an unfair trading practice. And then you respond and you say, okay, you either drop this trading practice, or we're gonna impose these restrictions on how you trade with us, which again, is exactly what they say they're doing. But it is not what they're doing.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  What are they doing?

• 26:24Speaker 04

  And you can tell. They came up with this weird formula. Um, it's actually the same thing that ChatGPT would suggest. If you just ask ChatGPT like, hey, hey, like make up a table of how I should turn to terrorists. Um, they used a totally different measure called the trade deficit, which, which we could get into. Um, and said, okay, if whatever the trade deficit is, we're gonna do this formula off of that. And by the way, there was a math mistake that a conservative think tank discovered in the way they did it. Um, and they, they just randomly applied. There were, there were islands that don't even have people. There are islands that are actually like US, UK.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  I heard that this is a little bit of a misnomer, though. I heard that, that there was a language. There's a little confusion with language where they said reciprocal, but it was supposed to be proportional.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  Either way, it showed the sloppiness of the process.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Sure, in terms of the communication, but if the actual process, and I don't want to seem like I'm defending the administration, but I do want to seem like it's important that we get true information out there.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  So it's like if they're doing proportional. Tariffs to that trade deficit. That would make sense. If it's reciprocal, it doesn't make sense because there's no way you could match a trade deficit from a country that is.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Right, but what I'm saying is, I think it also doesn't make sense as policy. Like, a trade deficit may or may not be helpful to us economically. Actually, it's not just a simple thing, like, "trade deficit, bad." So what I'm saying is, you use the tariffs in a much more targeted and specific way when you know that you either have that kind of unfair trade situation, or you're trying to protect a certain industry that you think is vulnerable domestically, right? But it's really important to know what you're doing, or else a whole bunch of people get screwed in the process. Like, the other day, I was having breakfast in Michigan, out, and a couple of people came up to me. They run a little shop that was right next to the breakfast place where I was eating. And the woman who runs it said, "I'm not sure what we're gonna do." It's like clothes, like, bags and stuff.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  And they source stuff from all over the world. And she said, "You know, we just put an order in. We don't even know how much it's gonna cost us." And I don't know what I'm gonna do for next month. I got some inventory here I can use this month, but we're gonna be screwed, especially if we don't even know how to plan. Because the other thing you need to do, it's like any form of diplomacy. Like, you do shots across the bow. You make clear what, you know, if you do this, we're gonna respond that way. And there has to be some, like, logic to it or order to it if you want to shape the behavior of other countries, right? And what we're seeing instead is this, like, really, like, chaotic, like, grab-ass policy, where, like, he changes his mind every couple of days on things, right?

• 28:55Speaker 04

  And that makes it that much harder, especially if you're a small business. Or if you're a giant corporation, you have all kinds of hedges and, like, ways you can maneuver through this.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Or they'll just remove the tariffs. That was another thing that really frustrated me. If you're gonna put the tariffs on, put them on everything. Seems to me like, "Hold it."

• 29:09Speaker 04

  Right, now they're like, picking and choosing what they're gonna.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so now Apple doesn't have the tariffs. And it's just like, but to me, that frustrates because Apple is the one that should be paying more than anybody. They're the one that parks their money overseas. They're the one that's skirting on taxes. The mom-and-pop businesses that are fucked by the tariffs are still gonna have to pay. So now you're disproportionately punishing the people that are actually doing the right thing for the country in the first place.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  They're building their small businesses, they're paying into the system.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  And I do think one thing that, again, I don't like the way it's executed. I don't agree with a lot of things that are happening in this administration. But I do like that it kind of shone a light on something that didn't seem like it was getting talked about by either party, which is, there is a lot of decay happening, which I do, that's one thing I really, I have a lot of hope for you, is that you live there, you reside over it, you've experienced it, and you speak to it. And I sometimes wonder if you get frustrated, and you have to, I mean, you can find a more diplomatic way of saying it, but have you been frustrated at all with the way that it's worded amongst the Democratic Party, where it seems like it's a lot more identity politics, which matters, but not, to me, it's not as prescient as, I don't know, some people are pressing as people who can't afford to feed their families and are losing jobs?

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, especially because like, there are a lot of people that I think Democrats are understood to care about, like, low-income people, black and brown people are disproportionately caught up in the economic pain when something like this happens. And so I do think my party needs to do a much better job, especially with the kind of finger-wagging that you're talking about. I think we are like, very prone to that. And I've seen it happen on any side. I think a lot of people, you get, you get this sense of like, moral conviction, and you're so sure of it, that you start to think it makes it okay to be an asshole. Because like, because you're deep down, like, the thing, and this is like, far-right and far-left movements through the ages, but I think it's definitely true of far-right and far-left in the US right now.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  You just think like, you can, you can treat people however you want, you say whatever you want about them, because like-

• 31:05Speaker 05

  They're evil.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're evil. And if they win, all is lost.

• 31:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, and their pain becomes intellectualized. Like, you'll see, like, think pieces of like, why does the South love MAGA? Like, how can we, like, why is neo-Nazism on the rise through like, a chart? And I feel like it misses the feeling of, you know, low-income people saying like, no, we're in, we're in pain.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, and I think pain is a really important place to start, because like, if you, if you encounter somebody in pain, and you approach that with compassion, and you actually listen- That's a very different place to come from than like, either how can I use this? Or how am I going to judge the choices that this person made while in pain? Especially if they have developed, very understandably, a distrust of everybody. Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  So what are things the Democratic Party can do better? Because like, I like you go speak to both sides.

• 31:56Speaker 05

  We've begged so many Democrats to come on this.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  You were the only guy that agreed, and then you had to back out allegedly because you had to do debate prep.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. Sorry.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  That seems like a big deal. I'm glad it worked out in the end.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Good excuse.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  We've been trying to, it was like Mark Cuban, who was obviously a surrogate for the party. He came on, he was fantastic, but like, everybody we asked, you know, they just wouldn't do it.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, there's this, even like going on.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  I don't want to get away from Alex's question.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, but I mean, to your point, like, part of it is like, where do we go? Right, to me, especially after we lose, our party or any party has this debate of like, what do we have to say and how do we say it? To me, there's actually three things we need to deal with. What do we have to say? I mean, like, the policies, the ideas. If they're right, we should hold to it. If we're not so sure they're right, we should rethink them. So there's that. Then there's how do we say it? That's the tone, the message, the style, whether you, people feel like you're wagging a finger at them or not. Whether people think you get the kind of pain they're going through or not, right? And, and then the part nobody talks about is where we say it. And I think right now, where we say it is kind of everything.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Because there are so many spaces where people, like, I'm sure you, you don't think yourselves as maybe a political show? Or a news show? Like, the reality is, there's probably a lot of folks who are like, this is where they're getting their news? Because like, they're not sitting watching CNN. I mean, I remember the, the moment when I was back in college that I realized I was getting more of my news from The Daily Show than I was from like, news sources, right? And, and so I think it's really important for anyone practicing politics, and definitely my party after what just happened to it, to be saying, okay, where else do we need to be? And like, it's, it's all well and good for me to keep going on Fox News, and I will, although they don't seem to be inviting me as much lately. But, you know, a lot of-

• 33:53Speaker 05

  He just called y'all pussy.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Talk your shit.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  Talk your shit, Pete.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  I'm just saying.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  We were really close to having a conversation about the whole like signal gate. Do you put the wrong dude on your?

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And what happened? Then they cancel it?

• 34:11Speaker 04

  It just didn't quite get around.

• 34:12Speaker 06

  Was it debate prep? They were working on something, dude.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  They were busy.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  But like, you know, a lot of people aren't watching left, right, or center. They're not watching like television, cable news all the time, right? And I mean, my party has this illusion that we're the savvy ones about tech. And 15 years ago, we were, right? Like, we were on to things like Facebook and social media, probably a little more than the right was, or we were there first. But at least since 2016, the Twitter election, like that has been true less, right? So, so I think we need to be prepared to go everywhere. And that's always been, that's always been my style. I mean, largely because I had to when I was first running for president. I would talk to anybody who would listen, which at first wasn't a lot of people. And I would go to any, any place that would have me. But, you know, to, to go back a little bit in, in what I was saying, like, I do think we also need to revisit, like, what it is we're offering.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Because if it sounds like what we're offering is, let's just go back. This isn't working out. Obviously, the terrorists are hurting people. He's consolidating absolute power. Like, lots of things are bad about this, which is true. Therefore, let's go back to that.

• 35:15Speaker 06

  You have Bernie and AOC who clearly have a message that's resonating. Why isn't the party getting behind that?

• 35:22Speaker 04

  So I think a lot of what they have to say will get more and more traction in the party, especially on, on the economic piece, right? This idea that you have a lot of regular people in regular life getting screwed over by the way things work. And if we don't have better services and fairer taxes, like, we're just never going to get through that.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  And it's thrown in their face. And it's thrown in their face quite often. Look how great Biden's economy is. Look at the stock market. And they're like, that doesn't affect me at all.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  Cereal's $10.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  And what are we talking about?

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would feel deeply offended if I was them, especially when you throw that kind of support behind, you know, one specific party. And that's, I think that's why you saw a lot of them start to migrate. So then what do you do? Like, what is, how do you get working class people back?

• 36:09Speaker 04

  Well, first, I think we need to be more disciplined and louder about that economic message. They'll look, to be clear, we will be advancing policies that make sure you're economically better off. What does that mean? That means that you can, you know, the one, the one thing I think people do give us a lot of credit for is healthcare, but there's more to do on that, right? We're not going to let them like tear up Obamacare. We're going to make sure that there is a fairer tax code, like not just standing against the tax cuts for the rich that he's about to push through Congress, but actually having a tax code where there's not a benefit to a corporation, like moving billions of dollars overseas, where there's not a benefit to, to kind of hiding your, your, we're not better off basically with wealth than work, which is where the tax code is right now. We, I think we need to be much more clear about what we would provide in terms of services

• 36:53Speaker 04

  for people. Like, we still, we're the only country, I think maybe Papua New Guinea is the only other country in the world that doesn't do a policy for parental leave, like some level of like national guarantee that when you have a kid, you will get leave.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Don't start this, bro. Don't start this. I got people trying to have kids working at this company right here. We cannot, we cannot recover from this financially.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  It can be done, I promise, because we did it when I was, when I was mayor, we did it locally for city employees and.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  We, at our company, we pay for anybody that wants to have their eggs frozen.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  We don't hire women, though. We will pay. There's always a loophole, dude. Always some type of loophole, dude. He's middle rich. We need to tax them. The cost of eggs are too high, bro.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  I tease, I tease, I tease.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  See what you did there.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  But yes, we should absolutely pay for it.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  Sorry, I'll continue to finish and then I have another question based on...

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Continue, continue.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  But I think there are also some things that we need to kind of rewire in the way government works to make it work better for people. And I lived this. So, for example, I'm watching them basically burn the federal government down. And obviously, I've got problems with the way they're destroying, you know, cancer research or making it harder for the FAA to keep airplanes safe. Like, a lot of that is bad. But I will also admit that I have been furious and frustrated with the way things work in our federal government. And it's actually gotten to where it makes it harder to do things that I think progressives in particular care about. Building things, building housing, building roads and bridges, which I lived for four years, building clean energy projects, like stuff we should objectively

• 38:40Speaker 04

  definitely be doing. And we've gotten in our own way with this, these layers of process, layers of procedure, all of them introduced with good intentions, but which collectively have made it almost impossible or unaffordable to do anything. So you want less regulations? So we need a, yeah, we, definitely they need to be smarter. And there needs to be less procedures. Still powerful regulations to keep people safe.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  So we should be a department to make sure the government is efficient. I think that's like really a great, I think that's where you're going and it's great.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Look, this is another example.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Didn't you work on that in the private sector? Isn't that what?

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  What was that company that you worked for, the consulting company?

• 39:17Speaker 04

  McKinsey.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  McKinsey, McKinsey. And isn't that partially like what governments will hire a company like that to for, to do Doge stuff, right?

• 39:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wouldn't call it, again...

• 39:25Speaker 05

  You're a fucking Doge.

• 39:30Speaker 04

  If Doge was actually about government efficiency, I'd be all for it.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  But it's not about that.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  No!

• 39:35Speaker 05

  What is it about?

• 39:36Speaker 04

  It's about power. Look, I'll give you an example. Because...

• 39:41Speaker 05

  You're telling me people in...

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Government a concern with power. I know.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  Hot take. Truth bombs being dropped on flagrant. No, but look at it this way.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  So, and yeah, when I was in government, like as mayor, when I had my kind of small government that I was running, we like took whole departments apart and put them back together. We removed people who weren't performing very well. And by the way, that was hard. Like, one of the reasons I've always had a problem with this president is like he emerged kind of play acting, like firing people for fun, right? It was like, just tagline is you're fired. For me, at least, as like a young, like CEO, basically, of a city government, other than dealing with violence and death, the worst part of my job was firing people. Like, I hated it, especially because like they weren't, it wasn't necessarily a bad person. But you had a person who was in a role that they didn't fit in, and their department wasn't doing as well as I thought it needed to do to serve presidents. I would have this very painful conversation where we'd sit down, I'd look them in the eye,

• 40:37Speaker 04

  and that sucked, obviously, most of all for them.

• 40:42Speaker 04

  But, but anyway, we were not afraid to do that, because you have to do that. Yeah. But look at what happened when they came in, right? If this is actually about government efficiency, then the problem you would be solving, which is a real problem, is that in the federal government, it is too hard to reward your top performers. So, you could be, somebody who could be commanding a multimillion dollar salary in the private sector, working on something wildly important, but there's just no way that you're getting, you know, you're in your particular pay grade, same as everybody else. Yeah. And to remove your bottom performers. Like, a lot of people who've been in and out of business in government will tell me, like, when I was in the private sector and the public sector, actually, like, the top 10% were pretty much the same, these amazing driven people. You know, the government ones weren't compensated as well, but they were purpose driven.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  But the bottom 10% was completely different, because I couldn't do anything about the bottom 10%. Yeah. Right? So, imagine if Doge had come in. And they had gone through every department and said, okay, we're going to create a way to reward the top performers and we're also going to analyze who's either whose job description is no longer needed or their job performance is not there. And even though it's painful, even though maybe it's politically tough, like we're going to show them the door. That would be one thing. But they just sent an email to everybody, many of whom were in fact, top performers. Like some of the people they fired who got caught up in this thing, the people got fired just based on whether you were in a category called probationary employee. But to be clear, probationary isn't like you fucked up and you're on probation. You could actually be because you were promoted.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  You could be a seven-year veteran at the FAA or maybe you'd been there as a contractor, but you were so good that the FAA said, we want to hire you now as a government employee. And even though it might've been a little pay cut, you went for it. And you're probationary. And then next thing you know, like you wake up one day and this this office department, whatever Doge is, clearly hasn't like gone through and checked like who's doing a good job or who's, there's no way because there wasn't even time to do that. And it's like, guess what? You're fired.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  I think there is, I wouldn't say unanimous support with the criticism of Doge, but I think that there is a lot of support for the way that it's been handled. Though I would also say that the idea of an agency that is attacking bloat and excess spending of the government is a bipartisan supported issue as well. I think initially when Doge, when Elon first announces this, and I think it's Elon and Vivek, people are really supportive, I think on both sides. They're like, yeah, let's cut some government spending.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  If you're actually doing it for real, and that's another part of the answer to your question of like what Democrats should be talking about, because I think we're the ones who believe, some say we believe it to a fault, like we believe it naively, but we're the ones who believe that there is, the government has, if you do it right, government has the power to make people better off. But if we're going to do that, let's actually do it. And part of that does mean like taking a hard look at everything we do. And I mean, I remember, again, most of my examples will come from transportation, right? But I remember something that went on with the FAA where they had to get some special waiver in order to allow a certain class of airplane to fly because there was no, because there's a regulation that said there had to be a switch to turn off the no smoking light.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  And this was written back when sometimes you turned off the no smoking light. Now, obviously, there's just always a no smoking light because you can't smoke on airplanes. And there's this like scramble, that's the kind of stuff.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. That we should absolutely be getting. And there are like things that we do in government sometimes or in the military. We call it a self licking ice cream cone. Like, there's definitely things that are there that is just like self perpetuating processes that nobody would, nobody would have come up with on their own, but they're still there. I think we should absolutely own that space because we have a good faith belief that government should serve people better and should work better. And we should be the ones who are making that happen.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  So on that, so this idea with Doge, it seems to me, and again, I only know like the most surface level version of it, is that the way that the government becomes more efficient is just firing a bunch of people. That seems to be like saving money. I don't know if that's how it becomes more efficient. The efficiency is getting rid of the bureaucracy that stops a plane from flying just because it doesn't have an on and off switch for a smoking light, right?

• 44:45Speaker 04

  But it's forgery because you don't want to get rid of the part of the bureaucracy that makes sure the planes don't crash.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  That is good and protects people. I hundred percent, because a lot of, I think that there is altruism and benevolence in a lot of these policies, right? They're trying to protect people.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  They're all there for some reason or another.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like, maybe some is like, I don't know, what have you experienced? Like, you were, you know, Secretary of Transportation, like, when you're trying to rebuild some bridge or whatever like that, what was the biggest hiccup that you experienced that you're like, we got to just get this out of the way? There's no way we're going to be able to improve people's lives if this is here. What is an example of that?

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Well, so there's, there's an entire process where to permit a federal project, you have to listen to every, you have to take in every comment from anybody who wants to weigh in, and then you have to respond to every comment, or a human has to kind of review all of that. Which, which by the way, one thing I'm really worried about is if you have, let's say there's some regulation coming and an industry wants to stop it, can they use AI? Yeah, or can you use AI? Because it used to be like, well, you'd have to take the trouble to write a letter, or at least go to the trouble of like getting people to write form letters, right? Now, you could write customized letters.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  So you use bureaucracy to fight bureaucracy?

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Well, you use bureaucracy to stop something from happening.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Which is, which is a real problem if that's a thing that needed to happen. Especially because you also need to go through that process to remove a regulation. Or to replace or to modernize.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  So there's this, this level of pride, and I encountered it all the time. I mean, right here in New York, right, there are so many major transportation projects going. And I'm proud to have worked on them. BQE, Hudson River Tunnel, and that's one of the biggest transportation projects in our time. Second Avenue subway.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  That Second Avenue subway, we don't want. I'm gonna tell you once, as a, as a New Yorker, we don't want it, we never needed it, it's never been an issue. I remember when you got started building, we're like, who the fuck is this for? Nobody on the Upper East Side, from where it goes to where it ends, uses the subway. That's all old ladies, they take Uber, taxis. Nobody, there, there hasn't been a dumb, I'm sorry, this is your idea, but it's so fucking stupid. There's never been a dumber idea for a subway. There are so many other places we could put subways, we could add some more trains, but Second Avenue specifically, there's a train on Lex.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  But here's the crazy thing.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  You walk two more blocks, you get a train.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  I don't know my New York geography as well as you do, but the really crazy thing about the Second Avenue subway is the tunnel's already there. It's been there for 50 years.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  Well, just because there's a tunnel, you don't need to put a subway. How is the Jew's gonna get around?

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, we need to organize like a bar.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  This is the fanciest way to organize a train. Like, this is why, don't come on these podcasts.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Okay, go, go, go, go. Upper East Side.

• 47:28Speaker 04

  I will, I will always defend Second Avenue, because I, there's like, this is a neighborhood that like deserves good transit, the way everybody else.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  It has.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  It has good transit, yeah, but it doesn't go all the way up to, what is it, past 125th.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  To where? Nobody needs to go up to 125th and Second Avenue.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  He doesn't ride the subway.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  I'm telling you, you don't need, I'm telling you, we don't use it.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  It's also in the charter.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. I used to live up there.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  Okay, would you have used it if it was there?

• 47:50Speaker 03

  I did, I went to school on the Upper East Side my entire life. You didn't live, you didn't live. I did live on the Upper East Side, but I didn't live on the Upper East Side. I was on the subway, man.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  You live in Far Rock. Yo, doesn't my boat or something? I used to work, yeah. Come on, fuck out of here.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  I know, that's crazy. I used to work in New York transportation. And that walk did suck walking from York Avenue to Lexington.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  Okay, so how are you gonna get there?

• 48:16Speaker 04

  I'm just saying.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  How are you gonna get to that Second Avenue line?

• 48:19Speaker 04

  What are you talking about?

• 48:20Speaker 05

  It's First Avenue.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  We're talking about the subway right now.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I'm talking about the walk that I would have to do every day going and to and from work to York to Lex suck. It would have been great if they a Second Avenue train was there.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Cause it's not Third. They gotta walk two less blocks.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yo, avenues are like three blocks.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Cross town blocks, right?

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, those are avenues.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Crossed avenues, yeah. Pushing limits of my New York expertise. No, no, you got this, you got it down.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  And like to get to the airport.

• 48:45Speaker 03

  I can't believe it.

• 48:46Speaker 04

  Once we get to the.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  This is my bike. This is what we need, we need a subway on Second Avenue. Never said one New Yorker.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  That's just not.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  I actually, I actually went, I went near it.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  You went near it?

• 48:59Speaker 03

  I didn't go on it, I went near it. I went near it and I was like. Nobody even there, I looked, I was like, nobody did.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  I don't wanna like.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  Is there a subway there beyond?

• 49:07Speaker 04

  I, I don't wanna like, you know, uh, challenge your expertise as somebody who once went near it.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Not a challenge.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  I went near it.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  A lot of New Yorkers seem to really want this because I got a lot of calls and we worked hard on it, but to think.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  That's bots.

• 49:20Speaker 05

  Now the sixth train.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  That's bots. God hasn't been on a subway in 10 years.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  That's Chinese bots. Bro, that's people from Jersey trying to drain our money.

• 49:28Speaker 05

  The 456 is the most crowded train.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  It's very crowded.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  So if you're on it, you're like, yo, if there's something to ease congestion relief.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  That'd be nice.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  There's safety.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Sounds like a great idea. There's safety in it being crowded.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  That's the whole system.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  There's safety in it being crowded. You never had a homeless guy jerk off on you when it's crowded.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  Actually, that's what they're trying to do at the.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  No.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  Cause there's so much cover and he just says, ow, ow, what's this?

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Put it on me. This is what we do for a living.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  Before we get too far away from it, you said that, uh.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  That's a New York City term.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  You said, you said.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  We all agree that there's, um, um, money being wasted.

• 50:06Speaker 06

  in government and we were for the idea of Doge but you said they're only doing it for power how is what they're doing for power because it seems like they're just focusing on cutting down expenditures so they have something that can be like look we cut all we saved all this money but how did a power play

• 50:22Speaker 04

  because it makes everything because they're not going through the regular like any kind of process we have to like check with Congress or evaluate which of the programs are actually doing something and which ones aren't or which people are good at their jobs and which aren't it means all that really matters is whether you're on the White House's good side and

• 50:40Speaker 03

  yeah so if you're on the White House's good side it sends a message basically be on our good side we won't clip your program that is one way of interpreting it for sure

• 50:47Speaker 04

  and they're doing this with everything the tariffs are like this of course in the end if your company or your country or your industry gets on his good side then you get out that has nothing to do with whether it's good economic policy or whether it's gonna help you know my neighbors in Michigan but it is something that helps consolidate power right law firms he's sending this message like if your law firm doesn't get on my good side then you're gonna be screwed because we're gonna use even though it's completely illegal we're gonna you know manipulate your access to security clearances or anything else because I don't like you

• 51:16Speaker 03

  isn't that what Biden did to Mayor Adams though when he was just trying to get some upgrades

• 51:20Speaker 04

  no I would argue the opposite is true I would argue what happened was and I know he was just sitting in here talking about this

• 51:26Speaker 03

  he just wants some upgrades dude he wants to build a 24 hour strip club

• 51:30Speaker 04

  everybody wants upgrades I get it

• 51:32Speaker 03

  that's way better than a secondhand subway if you want to talk about

• 51:40Speaker 04

  but what really happened is

• 51:43Speaker 06

  this is why they don't come off of it

• 51:46Speaker 03

  a little different than Fox News right

• 51:48Speaker 04

  no like think about what it means if you get if you get caught or accused of like in his case being mixed up with a foreign government and making policy decisions based on that

• 52:00Speaker 06

  being a politician

• 52:01Speaker 04

  and but that can't be what that can't be how low our expectations are

• 52:05Speaker 03

  that's how we all look at

• 52:07Speaker 04

  hold on hold on during your time as the as the you know Secretary of Transportation right

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Did what? Did nobody try to bribe you or anything like there was no?

• 52:19Speaker 04

  If I got an upgrade.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  How'd you keep the planes in the air? What'd you do?

• 52:22Speaker 04

  If I got an upgrade, and by the way, not because the Turkish government liked me, but like because I was a frequent flyer on United or whatever.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  If I got an upgrade, I would have my security detail go to the gate agent and negotiate the downgrade. So I didn't have to deal with, not because there was a rule about it, but so I didn't have to deal with like a bunch of people on Twitter saying like, "Look at this asshole in first class."

• 52:41Speaker 03

  I'll take all your upgrades. You're better than me, bro. If you know your global services, I'm not. That's crazy. I need that global services. Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete. Pete, come on now.

• 52:50Speaker 04

  And don't get me wrong, I love the upgrade.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  You're doing downgrades and trying to build a second half of your subway. You're making horrible decisions.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  People do not relate to this stuff right here, Pete. Pete, who gets a downgrade on Delta or United?

• 53:03Speaker 04

  Because I don't want people to ask, I'm regulating airlines. I shouldn't be like up there. Now, now I take the upgrade.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  I love the upgrade.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  Anyway, this is not about upgrades. This is about whether somebody who has been indicted for a crime.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Can get out of it by getting on the good side of the. The whole point of this country is that no one person should have too much power. Like to me, that's the whole point of a country. The king was somebody who had too much power.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  And we said, "We're not, we're not going to do it that way." There were ferocious debates at the time of the founding over whether to even create a presidency. Because Jefferson was worried that if we had a president.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Know what would happen?

• 53:44Speaker 04

  It would turn into a king.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  And they kind of hit a compromise where we created the president, but we took all these measures in the Constitution to make sure that it didn't, that presidency didn't become too powerful.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  And this is, this is like a part of the texture of our country. One of my favorite fun fact about Washington DC is the Jefferson Memorial, the round domed, columned structure with the statue of Jefferson right in the middle.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  Has him perfectly aligned with the exact center line of the White House. So that if you're standing in the Blue Room, which is in the middle of the White House, looking south, you have Jeff, there's a straight line.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  He's watching you.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  Goes, because he's watching. He's watching the executive, saying he doesn't want the executive office president to get out of here.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Question about that. Lincoln, Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial, right? Both liberal politicians.

• 54:38Speaker 06

  For the time?

• 54:40Speaker 04

  Uh, Jefferson.

• 54:42Speaker 06

  You think he was like, extreme conservative?

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Kind of both, right? I mean, he was agrarian, he was definitely more kind of libertarian, if we were to try to map it on today's terms.

• 54:50Speaker 05

  He's shitting on your whole joke right now.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  But...

• 54:53Speaker 05

  Fucking idiot.

• 54:54Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm good with you.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  He's a fascist. I was trying to shoehorn a joke.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  Let's go with it.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  No, the joke is...

• 55:03Speaker 04

  Come on, buddy.

• 55:03Speaker 05

  I say nothing, I say nothing.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  He's so right. He's so right. Let's try, we say the Second Avenue subway after 50 years.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  There was never a Second Avenue subway.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  Okay, Pete, here's the actual question I have.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  That's so bad.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  I hear a lot of, what you're saying is, tax the rich, they need to pay their taxes. I remember moving from Texas to California, Texas, I started paying taxes and it was like, I remember I was working at Verizon Wireless, doing a horrible job selling cellphones, and my commission would get taxed at like 40%. And I was like, okay, fair enough, but then I'm driving, the roads suck, the schools, from what I heard, sucked. New York, same thing, very high taxes, there's no Second Avenue subway, schools are horrible. If you have any kind of money, it seems like you're sending your kids to private schools, or you live in such a rich neighborhood that the public school is basically a private school. What? The tax money seems like it gets wasted, and doesn't get used wisely. So, I have like an aversion to, oh, they should pay their taxes, because my reaction is,

• 56:03Speaker 05

  I've seen what happens when people pay taxes.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  I agree with what he said about California.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  I think what he said about California was...

• 56:10Speaker 04

  I'm not gonna shit on one state or another, but...

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Good.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, there is obviously a relationship between the results you see, and your willingness to trust that there's anything you're getting out of your tax dollars.

• 56:22Speaker 05

  My trust is very low.

• 56:24Speaker 04

  Especially with Americans' trust is very low, right? And if you look at, I know Democrats always like to point to Scandinavian countries, but, I'm gonna do it. One thing you notice about those countries, which do have a pretty high tax burden, but the reason there's also a higher sense among people that it's fair, is that they get good results, they have good healthcare and good education, and that doesn't just happen because you put the money in. But if you put the money in, and you do it right, then the public's gonna be more trusting, right? That you're getting something out of those tax dollars.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  I think it's easy to do when like, every girl's hot.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Just got it. No, like, have you been to Scandinavia? Have you been to Scandinavia? It's like, every girl's hot, right?

• 57:05Speaker 05

  You asked the wrong guy.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  The dudes are hot there, too. The dudes are good-looking guys. If you're into that, look. I don't know if you're into that, look. Ow, what's going on? They're so good-looking. They're like, I'll spend 75%. Listen, this is crazier take than building a fucking subway on Second Avenue. Who the hell's gonna use that, I'm cautious, see?

• 57:31Speaker 03

  What I'm trying to say is, if you go to Denmark, you go to Sweden.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  Saying if you're good-looking, there's gonna be a higher perception of taxpayer.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  You'll spend a little bit more. You'll, you know what I mean? It's something to look at.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  Because you're just happy to be there.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  You're happy to be there. Have you talked to Scandinavians when they travel abroad and what they see?

• 57:45Speaker 05

  Can I get a real answer from this man? We're asking real fucking.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  This is a real.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  You're asking about the girl.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Live experience. I'm asking, I got.

• 57:53Speaker 05

  This is efficiency.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Dudes, too, they're tall, they're handsome, they have facial hair, they're Vikings.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  Where, where were we?

• 58:04Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, we have.

• 58:06Speaker 05

  We were getting to a real point.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  It was Scandinavia.

• 58:10Speaker 05

  You're real like a Second Avenue subway.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  You're basically saying, if you pay, have faith that it will get fixed.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  No, no, no, I'm not saying that.

• 58:19Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, okay. I back off.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  I'm saying, if people don't see the results.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  Especially where come along saying like, okay, everybody's gonna have to like pay into this. They're gonna say, well, fuck off, I'm not, I'm not seeing the results.

• 58:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 04

  Right?

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Now, I think there's, that's a nuanced story, because the best results, sometimes, especially when you're in safety, you know, my, kind of, a big part of my job, it wasn't just building, it was transportation, right? A, a big part of the results is what doesn't happen.

• 58:44Speaker 05

  Right.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  Good, bad things that don't happen.

• 58:46Speaker 05

  You don't notice your school being good, you just notice when it's bad.

• 58:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you don't notice your road being smooth, you just notice when there's a pothole in it, right? And you don't notice when an airplane doesn't crash. And you don't notice when you have clean, safe drinking water. By the way, that's okay, like, that's the point. Like, you shouldn't have to worry about whether your drinking water is clean.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Because if you did, you wouldn't be able to worry about whatever else matters to you in life.

• 59:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:06Speaker 04

  So, I don't think anybody can argue that the American taxpayer has gotten their money's worth.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  I think there's lots of reasons for that. Part of it is, though, that we under-invest. And we under-invest not because the, the overall tax rates are too low. I don't think that, that, that most people should be paying more in taxes. I do think certain people should be paying much more in taxes. And that's where we get to like the giant multi-billion dollar corporation that figures out a way to do their books and pay zero.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  Right?

• 59:34Speaker 03

  And then brag about it. Why is Warren Buffett bragging about it?

• 59:37Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it's, look.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Tell him to pay up. Why the, like, don't.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  But we can't, you can't blame him for using the rules of the system.

• 59:44Speaker 05

  I actually like him calling attention to. I find that.

• 59:48Speaker 04

  Because if so, if, if they don't, if the whole capitalist system, every, you know, for good and for ill, is that if you don't play that to your advantage, somebody else will and they will beat you. Right? So instead of asking somebody to leave money on the table, we should just fix the rules so that they're more fair. And that's the investment side. But the other side of it is throwing money at the problem is not enough. Like, it is clearly true, and this is the other point about the Second Avenue subway, which again, I will defend to my death that it is a good project.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Have you been on it?

• 1:00:19Speaker 05

  If you can't, dude, it's not there.

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  We haven't built it.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  You haven't built it yet?

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  It's, it's not there.

• 1:00:23Speaker 05

  I remember reading about this in 2008 on the subway. They had ads, "Coming in 2015, Second Avenue subway."

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  Right, so that's my point.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  And we were so excited, dude.

• 1:00:31Speaker 05

  I was, can I?

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  I was excited.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  There was parades in New York City.

• 1:00:36Speaker 05

  I was excited.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  I'm telling you, there was parades in New York City. There was, there was a memo sent out there, like, "We're building a Second Avenue." We were like, "Our fucking sucker off in your subway."

• 1:00:44Speaker 05

  That was the Port of the Golden Gate Parade. They live off the east side.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  I mean, it was.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  But what is very hard to defend.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  It was gonna totally reinvigorate that economically destitute area called the Upper East Side.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  What's really impossible to defend is how long it has taken. I'm not joking when I say it's been there for 50, the tunnel's there for 50 years. It's a 100-year project. Yeah. It started in 1920. Which is nuts. And, and the cost of it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  But it's also, it's not that. It's like, obviously, the rail project in California. We were doing a show in Hawaii, and there's, it was, you know, it was a joke that everybody kind of makes, but there's a rail project out there, not underground, and they put $12 billion into it, hasn't moved a centimeter in 10 years. And from my understanding, for people out there, they're like, "It's just pure corruption. It's not even bureaucracy."

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  I don't know that that's true, but I know that if you see that much money going in and you don't see results, I don't blame you for assuming that's corruption. Right. Well, where could it go? I think a lot of it is bureaucracy, actually, and it's the inability to get even basic things done. There are exceptions. We worked on, the one thing I worked on that I'm very excited about is another high-speed line that goes from Las Vegas to California, to Southern California. They could be open by 2028 if they hit all of their marks and everything goes well. There's some reasons why that was different, though. And part of why it was different was the public-private partnership, which created a different, and it's a red state next to a blue state. But it's California, too, right? So it's Nevada and California. Sponsored by Nevada, which is a swing state, by the way, not a red state, I would argue. Good point. And Good point.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  And they did some right-of-way stuff where a big part of the route is actually just like right down the median of I-15. So it's easy, comparatively easy, compared to having to buy. The problem with second Avenue subway, the cost of it, sounds like you know a lot about this. Loves trains. Is Do love trains. You're Good. I love trains, too.

• 1:02:32Speaker 04

  Don't let him laugh. I'm sure like this facility to trains over here.

• 1:02:37Speaker 06

  Unless somebody in the room is on board with trains.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  It's just you and I in this car. This podcast is now me and you. Just don't let them laugh.

• 1:02:45Speaker 05

  We love trains and mostly right on top of them, host.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  So the reason it's costing so much here is to even like put in like a little power facility, let alone a station, you've got to buy real estate out in one of the most dense and expensive places, probably the most dense and expensive places. Tunnel and the most expensive buildings in the world. It's incredibly complicated to even just do the signal work in the stations, right? Anyway, my point is, I agree that we have to have better results, better return on taxpayer money. But when it goes well, I mean, again, we're all living off of the value. Even though the internet has proven to be a mixed bag.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  Many people, including like these Doge guys, right? Made all of their money off of something that was literally invented by the federal government. The internet.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  That's a great point, honestly.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  So it can work. I'm not here to say it always does work.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Speaker 04

  It can work, but you have to actually have people who care about it working versus just gathering their own power and making it all about.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  We're not, by any means, and don't let me speak for you guys, like hardline, the government is horrible and everything about is horrible at all. We live in New York City, like we understand the importance of like rules and regulations. You got someone living above you and below you, they're blasting music. After 10 o'clock, you're like, I would like the government to step in here and make a rule where they can't do that. It's nice. So like, I think we understand more than most Americans, how important regulation can be to you living like a happy fruitful life. So if you're living in a house somewhere in the middle of nowhere, your next neighbor's three miles away. I get why you're like, government, get the fuck out of my life. I get it. When you live on top of people and below people.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I think that's true. When you live in a city, when you live in a dense neighborhood, you're like more aware of the importance. Although I'd also argue wherever you live, right?

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  You count on things from national defense to, you know, railroads.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  I'm not saying you don't, but I think that it's easier for them to ignore them.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's more in your face here.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, because you can't confuse yourself for not living, if you get on the subway, which I still can't tell if you ever have. You.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  What, me?

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  I don't know, I'm just, I'm trying to infer.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  I grew up, I was born and raised on the subway.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  Oh, this is great.

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  I was growing up.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  I did, listen, I know.

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  Okay, so when you're sitting on the subway.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  Name one stop, I'll tell you where it is.

• 1:04:57Speaker 04

  You can't miss the.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  One stop.

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  I'll tell you what it is.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  59th Street, 59th Street.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Name any train, name any train.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  I think he has a sugar train, sorry.

• 1:05:13Speaker 06

  I apologize.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  Name, I'm off sugar for a minute. Name your favorite train, I'll tell you my favorite.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  No one's fucking telling you. Guys, guys, come on, we're saving America. Listen.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  When there's big projects like that, that nothing happens, it feels like when construction, where it's like the construction crew tells you, oh, we'll get this done in three months, and then they take three years because they just wanna squeeze it out. So it's like, we have no faith in government getting shit done because we don't see a lot.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Less, less faith.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  Less faith.

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  I'm gonna be completely transparent, I have almost no faith, anything will get done. And I think that that is specifically positioned on liberals. I think that the Republicans have done a really good job of projecting that on Democrats. Like, you hear a lot of rhetoric, whether it's right or wrong, whether there's data to back it or not, who knows? But they've done a really good job of going, hey, look at California, look how California looks, look at these cities, they spent this much on homeless people, and there are even more of them that are homeless, right? And look at San Francisco, look what's happening, people moving out of city, etc. And I think they've done a really good job of marketing the perceived failures of Democrats in these states. How do you, as a Democrat, change that perception?

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  While also, while not gaslighting the people who live there that do feel like their cities have, um, have, I don't wanna say have become ruined, but have definitely like decreased the standard of living.

• 1:06:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think, first of all, you, you have to acknowledge why people are skeptical. And I do think that's, I mean, look, anybody who's been in a relationship knows that, like, if somebody's upset or pissed, like, you don't start and say, like, you should feel, you should feel better than you do, actually. Here's why you're wrong to be upset, right? Like, we, we can't be caught doing that. We are rightly proud of.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  Is it easier doing that with a dude?

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  No, it's the same.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  No. Fuck, this whole time I was like, man, at least you could be like, you're wrong, bro. And they'd be like, yeah, I was.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  No, I'm sorry, my side's got a lot to offer, but it's, that part, that part's the same.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  There's no loopholes in relationships. Damn. Okay, please.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  Continue. Or was I? So, so part of it's, you know, kind of that approach. Part of it is to demonstrate the things that are going well or that can be done well. So we talk about crime, right, in cities. And you would think, if you watch like the Republicans, that like every city is a like hellhole of crime. Now, if we, if we respond and we're like, what crime? Then like, obviously, when you got like people getting pushed into the subway and you've got carjackings up, it's gonna sound like we're just making shit up. If, on the other hand, we point to the fact that like Boston is at something like a 70-year low Yep. in the murder rate there. Or we point to the achievements in Denver, under their mayor there, about tackling some of the hardest problems in the world, like homelessness and housing.

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  And I, having lived that as a mayor in a largely low-income community, like that, that is one of the hardest things that people working in government can ever try to solve. Right? And there are people who are doing it well, and most of those people, in my experience, are Democrats. Now, they may not be like Washington Democrats or like federal, like congressional part of our party, but because I think the, the folks who are saying like government got this wrong, which might be true any number of times. What they're really saying is like, the policies of this person in government got it wrong, but they don't have an answer. Their answer is burn it all down. Right? If we haven't solved poverty, their answer is we're gonna slash Medicaid, which is what the Republican budget moving through Congress right now will do, is slash Medicaid. Medicaid may not be perfect.

• 1:08:45Speaker 04

  In fact, I know for a fact that like many issues come up in the way it's administered, the way people have access to it. But I also know for a fact that if your answer to that is just to cut out a bunch of poor people or VA, like any veteran can tell you, the, the horror stories of all the times things didn't go right in, in, in dealing with the VA. But if you think the answer is to just cut it or privatize it.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  That's not an answer.

• 1:09:12Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:09:12Speaker 04

  We can do better than that. And I think my party's job is to make clear what that looks like.

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  And how we would do it better.

• 1:09:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  How would you do? Well, I would follow the lead of some of these mayors we're talking about, who are solving some of these problems in a more localized area. City governments that make systems work better in ways that complicated federal systems like social security or like VA could do.

• 1:09:33Speaker 06

  I mean, how would you get the messaging out? How would you help people realize good things are actually happening?

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  We had Mayor Adams on and we brought up the subway system and the perception that it's incredibly dangerous right now.

• 1:09:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  And he was like, it's the safest it's been in X amount of years. He gave examples for crimes being down. Now, there's other ways to fudge these crime numbers. If you're not, what is the word? Where you actually punish people for the crime? If you're not trying, if you're not prosecuting crimes, I guess you could say that these crimes didn't happen. So then all of a sudden, it looks like crimes are down. So I think there are ways of fudging numbers.

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, usually those numbers are based on arrests more than prosecutions. But yeah, I hear it.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  He was giving me crime statistics, not arrest statistics.

• 1:10:14Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  But sure. But still, he came and he gave me this data or he gave us this data. And then we were kind of shocked. We were like, oh, I thought the subway was dangerous again.

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  Well, there's that perception and reality thing. I mean, back again to aviation, right? So a lot of folks are nervous flyers, don't know if it's safe to fly. Meanwhile, like I said, we went, there was this horrible crash in January, but America went 15 years without a fatal commercial airline crash. Meanwhile, the number of people are going to die today in car crashes is basically the same as the number of people you can fit into a 737. And yet, most of us.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Every day.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Many, every single day. Forty thousand people a year.

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  Ish.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  Same as gun violence, roughly. And yet, most people feel safer when they get in a car.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  Especially if they're the ones driving.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  You're on the ground, you have some level of control.

• 1:11:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. But the reality is, your life is in way more, way more danger.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  So then it's kind of a psychology question, like how do you find people where they are? You don't want to blow off those fears, but you do want to reach people with real data and real numbers and information that is real. And the thing that really scares me about the moment we're in is it's harder and harder for everybody to have access to the same facts. It's one thing, like I grew up in a world where you watch TV, you got your news from TV, which is like antique, from what I can tell, talking to students now. But you would watch a TV show and maybe the, you know, maybe the, that TV show, that network didn't do it perfectly. But generally what they would try to do is they would cover an issue, whatever it was, abortion, taxes, some bill moving through Congress, and they would have the Republican saying Republican things and the Democrat saying Democratic things. And you would, you would think about it.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  And watching that, like often hearing the other side would just make you feel what you believed even stronger because you'd be thinking of your own counter arguments. And other times, something the other side said would actually get through to you. But the point is you would think about it and you would have to contend with what other people had to say. And while there were different opinions going around, based on different values, they tended to be in an argument that was over the same facts. Now, we don't even have the same facts.

• 1:12:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  And that is a massive, massive problem.

• 1:12:22Speaker 06

  Trusting statistics, like me personally, I have an issue with like data in that regard. Because like what's the saying, like you can torture the numbers, they'll tell you anything you want, you know, like it's difficult because every side has different data interpretations to support their idea.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  And now they're just making up stuff.

• 1:12:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, and like a lack of public trust is, I think, is probably the, one of the largest issues, I think, in American politics is that you can't trust the data, you can't trust the politicians. I think that's the general feeling. And I think even like congressional stock trading is like a major issue with this. I'm curious your opinion on like private holdings for publicly elected officials when it comes to the stock market. And I think that is one of the main things that is eroding the public trust in politicians.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's a real problem and I think they should get rid of it. I mean, this is, this is not a problem for me because I didn't have a lot of wealth. But, and I look, I get it. If I was a millionaire, I'm sure I would like to think twice before taking a public service job if that meant having to divest. But like, you know, we're talking about people who are sometimes responsible for like multi-billion dollar decisions, or in terms like the course of the national economy, like trillion dollar level outcomes, right? And if they think even for a second about like, oh, what's this going to do to my stock in Google or whatever, that's a problem.

• 1:13:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  And, you know, that coupled with, and this is less politically popular, but I also think a lot of public servants don't get paid enough. And I would go to bat for them getting paid, maybe not the same as the public, private sector. Like, I get that that's never going to be the same. But, but I do think that they need to be compensated well enough that they don't have to swallow quite as hard.

• 1:13:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, you have to incentivize the best and brightest to do the most important jobs.

• 1:14:01Speaker 04

  And again, ideally reward the ones who are.

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

  Politicians, but you can't trade stock to make up for the difference, I think.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  But I think it's interesting what you said, like, if people feel like they can't trust the data, they can't trust the politicians. Like, I think those two things are linked. Because actually, the data, it's actually very, very rare for data to be put out that is objectively false. They can happen. Like, usually, like, the data are like based on some real set that.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  It can be manipulated.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  But yeah, how it looks or how you make it sound. I mean, they're doing this right now. Again, the doc says they make it sound like there's like millions of dead people getting social security. It was just not, that is just not true.

• 1:14:34Speaker 05

  So how many are getting, are there dead people? That's, because this seemed to me fact.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, like.

• 1:14:42Speaker 05

  Biden can get it.

• 1:14:43Speaker 04

  One thing to think about is like, obviously, the vast majority of people who die of old age are getting social security the day they die, right? So like, for at least a minute, or a week, or a month, or however long it takes, right? There's that process of updating. But part of it had to do with how the database was built. And you just didn't, didn't necessarily like remove everybody from the database. It didn't mean they were getting money, but it meant they were in the database. And so you could twist that into looking like this is what the president did in his speech. Like, it's true, there's this database that had all these people from like, you know, 100 years ago. It was not true that they were getting checks. Okay? But he said the one part, and your brain fills in, fills in the blanks. And now you think, oh, shit, there's like millions of people who are 150 years old getting checks. It was not true. So, but, but the real thing is, we don't

• 1:15:28Speaker 04

  trust the people who are supposed to be interpreting the data.

• 1:15:33Speaker 04

  And that is like a societal problem. It's not just politicians, right? It's it's an erosion of trust in every institution where somebody is supposed to help us make sense of this. And you know, I come out of the local, right, where we're a little more connected to reality. Because if like if the roads are in shitty condition and I'm the mayor and I can produce some statistics saying that the roads are great, people can call me out and say, no, they're not like I drive on these roads all the time and they're not.

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  And they're gonna see you at the supermarket.

• 1:15:59Speaker 04

  And they will find me and they will tell me what they think of the condition of our roads, right? You get up to the national level and you're so removed from that that you start to get into these like alternate reality zones. And then you add to that the fragmentation of where people get their information. Because there isn't the, you know, Walter, the famous example is Walter Cronkite, right? Like everybody in the 60s like turns on Walter Cronkite. And it's not so much that he told people what to think. It's that he laid out a certain set of facts, certain set of things that happened. Everybody, they could argue over what it means, but they they would generally agree on what just happened. And we don't even have that.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're in the echo chambers and the algorithms are just making those echo chambers more extreme.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  So the algorithms are even worse. I mean, the other problem I would say is like, we no longer have the edit, access to the editorial function. By which I mean, like a professional news organization. I like, I used to get so mad at ever from the South End Tribune to the New York Times. There were times when I was so pissed over a story or framing or whatever. But I will say, if I actually found that they got something actually factually wrong and showed it, they would correct it. Like there is that ethos.

• 1:17:10Speaker 03

  There was no.

• 1:17:11Speaker 04

  And you know, like professional journalistic organizations have to do that. But if we're in a world where somebody waits like what some dude on the internet says the same as a as an organization where there are people who have to hold to journalistic standards, if that's the same, well, that dude on the internet doesn't have to issue a correction. He doesn't even have to reveal like who he is, right? I guess a lot of people looking at their feeds and those two things seem equal.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Also, yeah, go, go, go, go. The algorithm is gonna reward the more salacious version of that information?

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  Yes, it rewards the lizard brain.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  Because your lizard brain is taught, you see, the thing we don't realize is every time we click on something, look at something, let alone like something or share something or I don't know. I'm still talking in Twitter terms like an old man, but whatever the kids are doing these days. You are actually making a statement about your editorial preferences.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:06Speaker 04

  You're not intentionally doing it.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  They know it better than they know ourselves.

• 1:18:09Speaker 04

  Give me more, but to me, it's not just saying how they know us. It's there, we all have different levels. It was like what we want and what we want to want. There's what we think is important.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  This is why TikTok works better than Instagram.

• 1:18:23Speaker 04

  How do you mean?

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  Because TikTok is what we actually want. And Instagram is what we want to want. We follow all these people. We think we want information about what's going on in the world. But TikTok is like, motherfucker, I know what you want. Just, just shut up, sit down and scroll. And that's why we watch more TikTok. And Instagram is trying to compete, but the reality is we don't want to look at all the people we follow.

• 1:18:45Speaker 04

  But also because like both of those things are true. Like both of those are us, right? The me that clicks on the stupid bullshit because it's funny.

• 1:18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52Speaker 04

  Is the same me as the one who if you just sat me down and said, okay, if I want to allocate like what topics are covered in the hour, I'm going to spend online today would like try to like choose the more high minded stuff, right? They're both us, they're both real.

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

  But the algorithm is empowering the lizard brain.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  Over the actual, like the citizen brain.

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, it's less cognitive effort. It's more cognitive effort to think about what you want to consume that day and put some work into it.

• 1:19:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  Way less to just scroll.

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Even though if it makes you better off in the same way that like reading a good book might actually at the end of the

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Enhance your whole life experience.

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

  Better, like make you feel better.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:19:27Speaker 05

  Guys, let's take a break real quick. So we talked about the NBA playoffs. Pete, this is not his bag. You know what I mean? Even though the men are in shorts.

• 1:19:36Speaker 05

  You're a fan finally.

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, it's the time of year.

• 1:19:38Speaker 05

  That's great. Knicks have played two playoff games. You've watched both of them, I assume?

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  I mean, you know.

• 1:19:44Speaker 05

  There you go. So guys missed 50% of the Knicks playoff games. Didn't go to a single regular season game. Didn't watch game two.

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  I didn't watch game two, they lost.

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  So clearly, they need my eyes to win. I didn't watch game two either. Exactly. They need our eyes. They need New York's eyes. I don't know why that is.

• 1:19:57Speaker 05

  It is the least important in a seven game series.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, when was game two?

• 1:20:01Speaker 05

  Last night.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  It was last night, right? Yesterday, yeah. Jesus Christ, dude. I don't know. I wasn't about it. It's like something about Detroit. Like, I don't even need to see Detroit.

• 1:20:10Speaker 05

  Well, it's 1-1, so you might need to see Detroit.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I might need to. I might need to.

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  Game five, Tuesday, we're going.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:20:17Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? As long as Schultz can get on Celebrity Row. Yo, we should go and then just heckle the fuck out of him. We should get seats as close as we can to Celebrity Row and just heckle the fuck out of Schultz.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Now we're talking. Y'all too cheap.

• 1:20:33Speaker 05

  Last minute, you can get some tickets for cheap.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  So, let's do it. So who we got game three now that our eyes are gonna be on it?

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  Now that our eyes are gonna be on it. Now, we definitely.

• 1:20:42Speaker 05

  We're gonna watch game three, so who do we got? Knicks, Knicks. I think so, 100%.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  Even though it's in Detroit?

• 1:20:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Next game three, what about Lakers-T Wolves?

• 1:20:50Speaker 05

  I think the Lakers get game two. That's happened though before this comes out. I think that's tonight. And I think game three will go Lakers as well, I think.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  Okay, so Lakers taking care of that.

• 1:20:59Speaker 05

  I just trust Luca, but that's because I'm biased.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  All right, listen, put your money where Akash has put his money historically. That's always worked out. Whatever team Akash is rooting for.

• 1:21:09Speaker 05

  You guys wanna give me back my Bitcoin, that'd be great. Knows you who stole it from me. I'd appreciate that.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  Steak is the leader in global betting in US social casinos. Bet on top sports and political events. Use the promo code FLAGRANT for your welcome bonus. Now let's get back to the show.

• 1:21:22Speaker 05

  You said one thing that's important for the Democrats is to, it's where they go. And not just kind of staying in the echo chamber. So you're coming on this podcast, which again, I commend you and thank you for. But is that getting met with a lot of like, um, I guess, acceptance and like, oh, yes, we should do that? Or you kind of the only Democrat doing this?

• 1:21:42Speaker 04

  I think, it sounds like your experience has been not a lot of people in my party are willing to.

• 1:21:45Speaker 05

  I'm begging these people.

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  Do this.

• 1:21:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  Um, I think that's a mistake.

• 1:21:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, I think. Look, to be fair, you know, if you're in politics, you know that anything you do, you can get shredded for. Even not something you do, but something that somebody sitting next to you does, and you don't make the appropriate face or scold them for it, right? Yep. And there's even a contagion of cancel culture, where if you're around somebody who does something, right? And I want to parse, like, some of that's maybe legitimate, and some of it is problematic, right? But all of that's there. And people who are running for office want to win. Obviously, they want to keep their jobs. And to me, it's worth some risk in order to reach everybody.

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  And again, that's partly the habits that I formed while I was an unheard-of, you know, 30-something-year-old Indiana mayor running for president. So we did everything. Like, we would do CNN if they would have me, but we would do, I mean, literally, like, Iowa college lesbian radio. It was like, I would like do a show, like, anybody who would talk to me. I think that's better, though, because I think it better resembles what politics is supposed to be. Like, politics, obviously, has a bad name. People are pissed at politics, frustrated at politics, and hurt by politics. But like, to me, politics is a process of making decisions about how we're gonna have laws and rules that all of us have to live by,

• 1:23:17Speaker 04

  and how we're gonna spend resources that all of us are paying into. And for that to make any sense, there has to be a process of encounter. Like, we have to be encountering people who don't think like us and don't view the world the way we do, both in order to actually legitimately become smarter and better, and make better choices and have better positions, and just in order to persuade. There's no persuasion now, or there's, I think there's not enough persuasion. And that's why we have these 50/50 elections, like this current election. The president won, he says it was a landslide, but like, we used to have actual landslides in this country. Reagan, that was a landslide. And I think that my party should aspire to be like a 60% party.

• 1:23:57Speaker 04

  And I think we could do it, because most of the issues that most people care about, not all, but most issues, taxes, abortion, guns, educate, like, things that affect how your day-to-day life goes. Healthcare, for sure.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  You think guns is one of them?

• 1:24:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, maybe, look, obviously, there's a big divide.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  Depends on where you're at.

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  But if we're talking about like-

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  I think there's support for regulation, there's support for background checks, but I don't know if I would like-

• 1:24:21Speaker 04

  But think about backgrounds, think about what it says. Sure, sure, but what I'm saying is like, something like universal background checks, that's got like between 80% and 90% support.

• 1:24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I-

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  80% of Republicans are supporting it.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  And they're trying to reverse it.

• 1:24:33Speaker 04

  And yet, we don't have, yeah, like, it's hard to even hold on to what we've got, right?

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  So, anyway, my point is, like, my party should be, by the numbers, doing better than it does, because more people agree with us more of the time on more policies than not. And so, yes, we have some work to do on policy, too.

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  So what have you got to change? Like, how do you just, sorry, how do you change that perception? If you know that more people agree with the policies that you guys have, why aren't they agreeing with you? And what are you doing wrong?

• 1:25:02Speaker 04

  I think the biggest problem-

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  Piggyback on that?

• 1:25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  So, I think it's great going everywhere to speak to people. One thing that I don't see happening from the Democratic Party is getting their message out and actually convincing people, or letting them know, like, hey, we're doing stuff, or these are the stuff we've gotten done. This is something I don't like that Trump does, but it actually works with, like, permeating the culture. Like, he ran on, hey, I'm gonna get all these criminal migrants out of the country. And then he makes a video where you see all these guys chained up, coming off a plane, going in. That's messaging that you don't even need to understand, you see it, and it's like, hey, he said he's gonna do something, and look, he's getting it done. So it's like, I think he knows how to play that social media-

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  A game where it's like, oh, I know how to speak to people. And that's something Dems aren't doing at all. So it's great that you go talk to other places. But what other ways can you get your messaging through to people?

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  The only one, the only one that does it is, is AOC and Bernie. And it's very specific and very targeted and it works. And it feels like everybody else is worried about, you know, offending somebody or being yelled at by one of your constituents or one of those groups that you're supposed to be protecting.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think two things. One, I think what, what they're getting right, which is also what Trump understands about politics and attention, is that you can't be afraid of controversy. And sometimes it takes controversy to get something recognized. So there's like part of why the country is talking about these deportations is there's a couple of things that are traveling together. Like one, like I think most people would agree with the idea that like violent criminals shouldn't be here, right? But then other things are happening. Like they take some guy and just send him by mistake to a Salvadoran prison, right? Which is obviously, first of all, a huge, huge problem, like morally and policy wise. But in terms of the media games that he's playing,

• 1:26:58Speaker 04

  even if it's bad luck to have screwed up in that way, it helps him draw attention to what you're talking about. In addition to like the social media pictures of it being lined up in the chains. I experienced this a little bit in our stuff because when we did something, when we like got a bridge or a road built, it was incredibly hard to get attention on that. Like we did it, like I was out there, go on TV, I'd wave the flag, we'd do an event, cut a ribbon.

• 1:27:24Speaker 04

  But it turns out when something was uncontroversially good, it was way harder to get anybody to notice. The, the projects we got the most coverage on, didn't get the most coverage because the project was really great. Although I believe in our projects. We did 70,000 projects around the country from like little airport thing to like the Hudson River Tunnel. The projects that got the most coverage were the ones where we caught a Republican congressman trying to take credit for the project after they voted against it.

• 1:27:53Speaker 04

  Because it just created like a different, more interesting story, right? So like, nobody would even know that we were, or very few people would have ever heard that we were doing a rapid transit project in Charleston, South Carolina. If the member of Congress there, Nancy Mace, hadn't tried to take credit for it and then got blown up on the internet because she tried to stop the funding from happening in the first place. So it's complicated to figure out what lesson Democrats should learn from all this. But part of it, and part of what I think Bernie and AOC are doing quite well, is they're not afraid of some controversy of naming bad guys, of talking about kind of why we are where we are. And I think we need to-

• 1:28:28Speaker 03

  So just addressing societal utility. Like, if you want attention for a project that has to meet societal utility, people have to need it, they have to want it, and they have to feel like they're not allowed to have it. And then you bring it to them, and then they're really excited. If people aren't tripping about a bridge, or like worried about a second Avenue subway, like, I'm telling you, nobody's gonna care when else gets that subway. And it's not gonna be anything that you get patted on the back about. But if there's something that people in New York City do really care about, and they're really concerned about, and you guys address it, you will be heroes. It's the nature of what, so it's like-

• 1:28:59Speaker 04

  I think so, but it's, it is tougher when it just goes well.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  No, no, I understand what you're saying. I think that makes perfect sense. Like, when we expect the roads to work, so when they work, we don't go, "Great job, Pete", right? Or whoever's in control, right? We expect the plane to land. We don't go, matter of fact, if they applaud for the captain, you're like, "Who are these cornballs? Like, it's supposed to land, right?" Like, that is like a reaction people have. But if there are things that we, and this is, this is one of those situations where it's like, if there's things that we want, the people want, and you are the one to bring it to us, you will be really applauded, especially if we feel like we've been asking for it for years and nobody's listened to us at all. I think if, if you do certain things for us, not you, somebody in your position, that we're not asking for- Right? And then go, but this is what you need.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Now we're back at the finger wagging. We're like, bro, I didn't even want that to be fixed. Why do you want credit for this thing? We're not even asking for. So I think it's really about listening. What, what do you think people actually in America? What do you think people really need? If there's five issues, what are the things that they're concerned about?

• 1:30:01Speaker 04

  Like, all of them are some version of the same thing, which is freedom and security. And with that, I think democracy. But, but really, I don't think a lot of people like come up on the streets saying like, I want more democracy. I think there's a way that's absolutely true. But, but in terms of what people really want, I think people want to live a life of their choosing. They want things to work. They want our country to be better than any other country in terms of the quality of our roads and the strength of our economy and the kind of education they can get. Right? We want America to be the best place to live.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  Roads. We go all over the country. Like, we're actually weirdly good people. Comedians are good people to talk about when it comes to like the different parts of this country and how people are living, because we go every single weekend to every different weird, obscure part of this country. We're there. It's not just the big cities. Like, we're everywhere. And it's roads everywhere. I ask people every time I go to a city, because I want to know what's going on. I want to know what they're frustrated by. It's roads every single time. If Pete, this day one, you're like, I'm fixing every fucking road in America. And then you did? You'd be president. Because it's something people are actually frustrated by, and they don't feel like the government is, is answering. You know? What are the other five things like that? Okay, so that's one. Security is the other one.

• 1:31:13Speaker 04

  Well, before we get to security, I think there's also like, there's this sense that you can afford what you need in order to live. Like, that's why prices are such a huge problem. And it's why I think terrorists are the wrong medicine, because they might make certain things, or be designed to make certain things better, but they don't make prices better, they make prices worse. So affordability, housing, right? The ability to just like, believe that, that you get a job, you get a promotion, you're going to get a house, or you're going to get a better house.

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  All right, how do we do it?

• 1:31:39Speaker 04

  Right? So we got to build more houses.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  How?

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  Well, we've got to strip away some of the barriers to building houses.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Talk that, this is what I like. Tell me, take back land.

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  I don't know, it sounded fine.

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  I want to see the Democrats be a little more gangster. Like, Republicans would go, "We're taking Greenland." What is your "Build a Wall"? What is your statement? What is your outlandish thing that you might not do, but it kind of riles people up? It gets the people going. Like, if you want to say, "Hey, we're gonna seize this land, and we're gonna build 200,000 affordable housing units on it," that might make some people get excited.

• 1:32:14Speaker 04

  It would get attention, yeah. It would solve for that controversy thing. Not exactly how I would solve the problem. But, yeah, point is like, we need to...

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  I'm being facetious, but there is a truth. There is some truth in it, which is like, I don't know what the statement is for Democrats. I don't know what your "Build a Wall" is. And you need a version of that, because those are the things that people attach themselves to. As Alex said, like, he's like, "Hey, we're deporting all these people who are here illegally." And then you show the video, and then people are like, "That's what I voted for, and it's happening?" I feel good.

• 1:32:41Speaker 05

  I thought the "Build Back Better" that Biden tried to do was a good idea, and then it failed fairly quickly, and then that was just kind of the end of that.

• 1:32:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm sorry. I feel like the thing we're kind of skirting, like, touching on a little, I'm curious what you think. Like, it seems like, from like, a political philosophy point of view, it's easier for conservatives. When looking at like, the conservative-liberal paradigm. Because for liberals, they have to have a direction to go. They have to say, "Where are we going to go?" And it seems like within the Democrat Party, there's a fracturing, or like, a bifurcating, where you have the anti-Trump people that are like, "We just hate Trump." And then you have sort of the economic leftist liberal that says, "We need to tax the rich." And then you have sort of the social-cultural war Democrat that's like, "You know, we need to support all the downtrodden people."

• 1:33:22Speaker 05

  Different ideas for progress.

• 1:33:23Speaker 06

  And it seems so, you know, spread and disorganized, whereas the conservatives just have to say, "Let's go back." And they can point at all the liberals and say, "Look how crazy they are, let's just go back." And so it seems like it's way easier for the conservatives.

• 1:33:34Speaker 04

  Oh, no question, yeah. I mean, if the conservative project is just, "We're gonna demol..." You know, government is frustrating, irritating, doesn't always meet your expectations, so we're just gonna burn it down, right? Or, "Everything was better way back when, so we're just gonna take you back there." Absolutely, and that's what makes America great again.

• 1:33:47Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:33:48Speaker 04

  The problem is like, but the reality is like, there is no such thing as... In the real world, there is no "again." The future's gonna look different. Look at the world we're going into. We're going into a world where AI is transforming everything. I think we're still at the outset of that. We're going into a world where China is a very different kind of player than it was not that long ago. We're contending with some really heavy things that are going to require really original thinking. And part of, I think, where both parties have a problem is a kind of nostalgia. So you've got Republicans who are kind of nostalgic for the social order of the 50s.

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  Like, women are in their place and we don't have to worry too much about, like, you know, any kind of minority, whether it's a racial minority or a gender minority, like asserting too much desire for freedom or equality. Like, everything's just, everybody's in their place. And Democrats have a nostalgia for this kind of New Deal and post-World War II order. Like, in terms of foreign policy, it's the post-World War II framework that we set up with the UN and NATO that kind of made, you know, was our response to everything that happened. And then domestically, we set up this administrative state, which solved a lot of problems, but has now run the risk of collapsing under its own weight. Right? So we've got to cure ourselves of our nostalgia in my party and recognize that, like, there's no going back.

• 1:35:12Speaker 05

  I do think it's a bit unfair to say that about Republicans. There is a faction of Republicans I absolutely believe that about with the social order. But again, you go to middle America, and then it was very eye-opening for me. I went to a city, I think it was Toledo in Ohio, where I was like, oh, I expected a city, and this place is, like, decaying. And anytime I made a joke about it at a show, they would, like, laugh so cathartically, like, finally someone gets it. And I think when they hear "Make America Great Again," I'm sure some people think about social order. But a lot of them are probably thinking, much like your town, we used to have the Studebaker or whatever here, we used to have manufacturing here, bring that, bring that back. The racial stuff, I don't, I don't care about that. I just want to make my city great again. That was what America was to me.

• 1:35:52Speaker 04

  But to your point, and to your point, like, what we had to do when I was mayor of South Bend was to move on from that. And it wasn't saying, like, we're done with manufacturing, we're never going to make things anymore. It was saying, we're not go, there's no such thing as going back to the Studebaker days.

• 1:36:04Speaker 05

  I'm just touchy because I think for liberals, we often, well, we, liberals often will say that about conservatives, oh, they like the social order. And I feel that's a bit dismissive of their pain. And not that, you are very good about, I just think there's a messaging issue in the way they're often talked about.

• 1:36:21Speaker 04

  Sure, sure. And we should come back to that. But I think the conservative, if you look at the actual conservative governing plan, though, not the talk, not the campaigning, not the posturing, what they actually do.

• 1:36:30Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:36:30Speaker 04

  I would say the, the biggest social policy commitment that they've made, that they actually care about, to the point that they actually went through and kept it, was to get rid of the right to choose. Number one project, the Republican Party, on the social side. It's one of the few promises they actually kept.

• 1:36:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's valid, yeah.

• 1:36:46Speaker 04

  And then economically, the biggest promise they've actually kept is tax cuts for the rich. Biggest thing that he did in his first term. And right now, it's up for debate, right now, literally, Congress is, it's not getting as much attention because all the other crazy things going on. But it's more tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, right? So to me, like, most of the stuff he said he was gonna do, he didn't actually do. He didn't do the big infrastructure bill he talked about. We actually did it. He didn't even build the wall. That's the thing. Build the wall was like a galvanizing statement. It's not like he actually did it.

• 1:37:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying to you.

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  Two percent of it. But I want to do something you actually follow through on, right? Galvanizing statements, it's all bullshit. It's not good enough.

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  Give me something. What I'm saying is...

• 1:37:24Speaker 05

  Being hyperbolic, I can try to break it.

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  No, I'm not. I'm being dead serious.

• 1:37:27Speaker 05

  Speak to people at an emotional level, even if it's not realistic.

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  Okay, so this brings us to the other thing that I think we've been skirting around a little bit, right?

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  What I'm saying is, tell people, if you want to help them, say the thing that you think they need help with, out loud. Directly. And say that you're gonna do it, and then endeavor to do it. We already expect you guys not to do it. So the least you could do is fucking lie to me. You don't even lie to me. Like, have the decency, it's like, we're married, okay? You're out there cheating on me with Scandinavians.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  He's good. You're out there cheating on me with Scandinavians, right? You don't have to throw it in my face. Do you know what I mean? Like, at least just do the decency of telling me the thing that I want to hear, and then endeavor to do it. Because right now, I don't know what the, what is the platform? What is the... The Republicans did an amazing job of making the Democratic platform feel like, this wasn't it at all. This is completely wrong. But they made it feel like, we're gonna let the school do whatever they want to your kids' balls.

• 1:38:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  That's...

• 1:38:36Speaker 04

  No, that was their message, for sure. And they talked about more about that than they talked about the economy.

• 1:38:40Speaker 05

  College for they/them is one of the greatest political ads I've ever seen.

• 1:38:43Speaker 04

  No question, it was incredibly effective. Because it made it sound like that was all we cared about.

• 1:38:48Speaker 03

  And you didn't have a message of something that you cared about that was loud enough to refute that?

• 1:38:54Speaker 04

  Or, again, controversial enough to get people's excited. Because our, look, our message in a way is like...

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  What did you care about?

• 1:38:59Speaker 04

  I want everyday life to be better.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  That's what they want too.

• 1:39:02Speaker 04

  You get up in the morning, yeah, but importantly, like, all the controversies are over what that's like. Like, I want you to be able to get up in the morning... And the first thing you do is you commute to work. And by the way, if you're on EV, I want that to be affordable for you. Or if you're on public transit, not to get back into the subway situation, but I want you to have good public transit to get to where you're going. And then when you get to that job, I want you to be paid well. And if you're about to have a kid, I want you to know that you're going to have parental leave when you have that kid. And if you don't want to have a kid, I want you to have the right to choose whatever kid, which means access to birth control and abortion. And those things that give you the freedom to decide on that. And if you already have a kid, when you pick them up at school, I want that school to be good, not having its funding slashed while they set fire to the Department of Education. And then when you get home, I want you to be in a neighborhood that is safe

• 1:39:47Speaker 04

  and where you can breathe the air, because we didn't let them get rid of the Clean Air Act. And you don't have to think for one moment about whether the air you breathe or the water you drink is clean and clear, which actually takes a lot, because it means the government has to constrain those actors that would make you unfree by polluting the air and polluting the water. And then when you go to bed, I want you to know that your family's going to be fine, even if it's family like mine, despite there being some Supreme Court justice who wants to obliterate your family because it doesn't match his interpretation of his religion. Like, that's the life I want everybody to be able to live.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think.

• 1:40:20Speaker 04

  And I think we can deliver that.

• 1:40:21Speaker 06

  Cut that, that's.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  Listen, I like hearing that. I thought it was awesome. I thought it was beautiful. I know you want that. Tell me that it's gonna happen.

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  We can make.

• 1:40:36Speaker 03

  And then how is it gonna happen? Like, that's the difference between like, it's build the wall. And I keep harping on this, but I think it's important for Democrats to understand the effectiveness of that statement. Build the wall wasn't even about build the wall.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  It was an idea that satisfied a concern that people felt. So what are your ideas that are going to satisfy the concern? What you just told me are all these things that I also want. So now we're together. We both want the same things. But you didn't give me the solution to the feeling that I have. I too want a safe home. You didn't say, "security guard outside of your door every night," whatever bullshit, you know what I mean? If it's more police on the street, whatever the thing is. Punish petty crimes, whatever the thing is. And I think that there's a lot of Americans that are at the end of their hope. Right? And they feel really disillusioned and they feel this lack of trust that we've spoken about today. And simply wanting things that they want isn't enough.

• 1:41:32Speaker 03

  They, and I think that's when you said like, current circumstances lead to a Trump victory. It's not like Trump populism. I think there was a rejection of the establishment for a lot of people. And then hearing from Kamala that she wasn't really going to do anything differently. I think that was a big mistake because I think people wanted to change. So, so I think that's something that you guys should endeavor to do is, is tell us specifically what you're gonna do that satisfies those things we're feeling. It seems you know exactly what we're feeling. Because that was beautiful. I think we're, all of us were like, yo, you just hit it. You knocked out the park. But I need the statements that are gonna satisfy those feelings because that's what gets people to sway over. And that's what they're fucking good at.

• 1:42:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, the bumper sticker.

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  They are, what, so what's a, what's a democratic bumper sticker?

• 1:42:15Speaker 04

  I'm working on it.

• 1:42:17Speaker 03

  Fair enough. But that is the important.

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  And I think people need to know that we see them and we don't see them as the problem. Right? Because I do think to the finger wagging point, so much of politics is about what people think you think of them, or how you make people feel about themselves. Before people even start to decide what they think about you, they're thinking about how you make them feel about themselves. And this is a struggle, especially because I belong to a party that has deep moral convictions. And you could argue we take it too far, whatever, but like, we are propelled by a lot of deep moral convictions. Whether we're talking about an economy where we think that it's too easy for the wealthy and too hard to, to work your way up. Or whether we're talking about a society where we're worried about racial justice and marginalized groups, right?

• 1:43:07Speaker 04

  But there is a way to engage people who don't start with where you, you can't lead people to where they already are anyway. Like, one thing I think about a lot is, right around the time I came out, which is like a terrifying thing to do as a, like, elected official in Indiana, right?

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  This was after you got back from Afghanistan.

• 1:43:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:43:25Speaker 03

  What happened? What did you eat out there?

• 1:43:32Speaker 04

  No, honestly, what happened was, you know, you, when you get deployed, they tell you to write a letter. And I still have it in a drawer somewhere. And it's the letter, it just says just in case on the outside.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:43:46Speaker 04

  And it's everything from you that you want your loved ones to know. From your internet passwords to like how you feel your life went, right? Everybody should do this, by the way. You shouldn't have to like wait to be sent to war to do this.

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:02Speaker 04

  And I, I was the sitting mayor of my hometown, because I was a reservist. So I got deployed while I was in office and I just took a leave, stopped being mayor, started being lieutenant and went into my other job, basically. So I was the sitting mayor of my hometown. I had a, I had a beautiful house. I had good friends. I like a good life. And that was part of what I wrote about in that letter. But in the back of my head, I'm thinking, all right, but I'm also, I'm a grown ass man in a position of responsibility. And I don't actually know what it's like to be in love. And if I get back, I'm not going to let that continue. Like whatever the implications, I'll just, I'd rather deal with that

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  than once again contemplate the idea that I could go to my grave not knowing what it's like to be in love. So then, you know, it was awkward timing because it's actually the middle of a reelection. But I took some time, like I took months to think through, okay, how do I do this? How do I say this? Like, what is that? And then, and then one day I did it. I wrote a little ob-ed in the local paper. I said, I don't think this should be anybody's business, but I know it's a thing. Here's something you should know about me. And it was fine. I mean, it wasn't fine. There were, you know, people upset. There was some ugliness around it, but like, you know, nothing ever happened that made me regret that I did it. But the story I was starting to tell was that sometime after that, when I started dating Chasten, maybe, I don't know, some months.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  Did he jump on that immediately? Was he like, oh, hell, yeah. They like slide into the DMs. He was like, he's, he's, he's, you know what I mean? Like, was that quick afterwards?

• 1:45:39Speaker 04

  No, no, I found him. Well, we were on, it was like, it was Hinge, you know, the dating app.

• 1:45:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Speaker 04

  Wasn't grind?

• 1:45:44Speaker 03

  Grind is for Republicans.

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  We do need to talk about why every time the RNC happens, Grindr.

• 1:45:56Speaker 05

  I'm just saying. Out them.

• 1:46:00Speaker 06

  It's like a lot of letters need to be written.

• 1:46:03Speaker 05

  They don't serve.

• 1:46:05Speaker 04

  So, anyway, I met him, fall in love, start dating, and this, I run into this woman I know, I think in the lobby of the county city building, I'm walking into work. I know she's a little more conservative. And she comes up and she says, "I ran into your friend, and he's wonderful."

• 1:46:28Speaker 04

  And it was one of those moments, right, where like, I think it was very important that the thing to recognize is like, for her, she was signaling something pretty big for her.

• 1:46:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:37Speaker 04

  Like, I don't know exactly, but I can guess like how she thought about and talked about gay people probably all her life. She knew me, she met him, he's wonderful, like, right?

• 1:46:47Speaker 04

  Versus if I like, treated her to a lecture on the difference between a friend and a partner, right?

• 1:46:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:53Speaker 04

  You know, that would have pushed her right back into the arms of these people who don't want anything good from me. So, what I take from that is this broader process that needs to go on, where we find people, and as passionate as we are, and as right as I believe we are about the big things, even though I'm open to the fact that we may not be right about everything, we're not telling people that they are bigoted, or racist, or whatever, because they don't already start out in the same place that we are. There has to be that process of kind of inviting people to look at things the way we look at things.

• 1:47:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30Speaker 04

  Versus commanding them to. And I think that is something that in the culture of my party has been especially challenging in the last like 10 or 20 years. But that we need to work through, because again, politics is about persuasion, it's about finding people where they are, it's about how they feel about themselves. I think there is a desire for belonging that is not just something liberals care about. I actually think the loss of belonging that happens in a town like where I grew up, when you're, you lose your auto job. And the Workforce Development Agency comes along and says, "Good news. I've found a job that you can get qualified for based on your education and it pays just as much and you're going to be a nursing assistant."

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13Speaker 04

  Maybe that's a perfectly good job, obviously, but like if the last 20 years of your life have been about, not just the way you make your money, but the way you see where you fit in the world, is about what you know how to do in a machine shop and some well-intentioned person with a clipboard is telling you, "Guess what? Now you get to be a nursing assistant." Like, that is not finding people where they are. That's not, because something has happened to their sense of belonging. And we really care about belonging, maybe to a fault, but like we try to make sure that there's room for everybody at the table in society and in different processes and in our politics. But if we really take that seriously, like if we really live up to that, that means

• 1:48:55Speaker 04

  recognizing that some crises around belonging are a big part of why some people, many of whom voted for the other guy this last time, are really prepared to just burn the house down and think that's no worse than any of the other things that could happen.

• 1:49:11Speaker 03

  So including them in those groups of people that you are looking out for.

• 1:49:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and meaning it.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  And meaning, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:18Speaker 04

  You can't really be persuasive about that unless you actually mean it.

• 1:49:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that there's a really beautiful story about giving that woman grace.

• 1:49:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  And choosing maybe to not correct her and understanding. Now, you had the benefit of having a relationship with that person and understanding maybe how difficult it was for her to even come there. And you both had this amazing experience where you connected with people as individuals before you knew things about each other that might

• 1:49:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:49:45Speaker 03

  create some separation, which is kind of a really awesome thing about the human spirit. It's like, once I kind of know who you are as a dude or a chick, like, these are the things in your life, all of a sudden I have a little bit more empathy for or understanding, or at least want to understand, because I like who you are. But what a great experiment. How do we get to that point? And how do Republicans also do that? Like, this is something I've been, every time I go on like a really conservative podcast, the trans discussion comes up and then like... And what I've tried to explain, at least from my perspective, is like, both sides are trying to protect kids. They just think the protection is different, right? And I imagine like, the most benevolent part of the left is going, hey, these kids might be

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  suffering in the wrong body, and their parents might not create a space for them at home where they can like be their true selves. And then, parents on the right go, hey, I don't want to be in second place for the decisions made about my kid to the school. Like, I don't even know the principal. Why are they like, and I have empathy for that, too. And if, how do we get to a point where we're not constantly trying to dunk on one another?

• 1:50:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:50:51Speaker 03

  And we're actually trying to, like you said, meet people where they are?

• 1:50:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  Like, well, how do we do that as a country in general?

• 1:50:58Speaker 04

  Like, the key word there is the empathy, right? To like, understanding. So I think you put it really well, like, having empathy for parents or students who are in that position, which is terrifying, belonging to one of the most tiny and, and kind of harassed minorities that there is in the country, but also empathy for people who sincerely want to make sure that sports are safe and fair, and want to make sure that they have the most important say in what's happening in deciding what's best for their children. Like, that, these are like, very human things, that if you strip away all the layers of the politics of it, come from a place of very understandable concern, and like, humanity, right?

• 1:51:37Speaker 03

  There is humanity in both positions, and I think that's lost in the dialogue sometimes.

• 1:51:42Speaker 04

  Yes, which brings us, in some ways, back to the algorithms. So I think a big part of the answer to your question is offline. There have to be spaces that are offline, or at least that are not like shaped by algorithms, where these conversations happen. Because to your point, if all I know about you is that you're, you know, some random account on Twitter, shitposting like, something I really care about, then I'm going to assume you're an asshole.

• 1:52:07Speaker 04

  But if I know you and then we discover like we view these things in different ways. We're away from the keyboards, right? Then it's a completely different conversation. And I really worry, and sometimes this is coded as like a conservative worry, but I think liberals should be just as worried about it, about things like neighborhoods and faith communities and other sources of belonging and meaning that overlap the different political commitments that we have. Because it's in those spaces. I mean, again, I think back to the military. Like, if I was getting in a vehicle to go outside the wire, like, the other people getting in a vehicle with me

• 1:52:46Speaker 04

  definitely did not care if I was a Republican or a Democrat or like what country my dad immigrated from or if I was going home to a girlfriend.

• 1:52:54Speaker 03

  Malta.

• 1:52:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  I'm really excited for the next hour, we're gonna talk about Malta, by the way.

• 1:53:04Speaker 04

  Like, all they wanted to know, obviously, was that they could trust me to do my job. Same thing, you know, vice versa, because we're trusting each other with our lives. Every time we went outside the wire.

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Speaker 04

  And to be clear, I was not into like a combat or maneuver. You know, my job is just to like drive them safely to where they needed to go. But that, that could be scary.

• 1:53:18Speaker 03

  That does have risk.

• 1:53:20Speaker 04

  And, uh, not that everybody should be in the military, but like, everybody should be in environments where you know people as people first. We start this way. We grew up, families are like this.

• 1:53:31Speaker 03

  Sports a lot of times.

• 1:53:32Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:53:33Speaker 03

  Team sports, it's like this. I agree with you a million percent.

• 1:53:36Speaker 04

  You know how somebody handles themselves in a tough situation? And, and then you find out like how each of you comes to something, right? That's just such a more honest and human and ultimately respectful and decent process of encounter.

• 1:53:47Speaker 03

  It's amazing how understanding we can be when we have that type of relationship built first.

• 1:53:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:52Speaker 03

  All right, guys, let's take a break for a second. It's time to stop the show. Like, when you came out, did you speak to any of your military brethren? And how did they feel about it?

• 1:54:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, and some of them, like, I gotta tell you, like, when I got to my unit, and by then, like, I wasn't out, but I, like, knew that I was gay, obviously.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:09Speaker 04

  You know, and like, gay jokes are flying around, right? Like, all the way down to like, oh man, that like memo that just came down from, uh, from the commands, is that the gayest thing you've ever seen? Like, Sergeant, what's the gayest thing you've ever seen? This is even gayer than that, right?

• 1:54:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  I know, to me, it sounded kind of retro, but that was definitely how people were talking. You know, uh, 2014.

• 1:54:30Speaker 03

  Children, lower intelligence.

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  But like, those seemed like, you know, they were all like, fine. Like, they either made it clear that they didn't care.

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:39Speaker 04

  Or they found some excuse, like, unrelated to anything, to like, check on how I was doing. Right?

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

  But that's endearing too, because you know that.

• 1:54:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:54:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:47Speaker 04

  And, and then a couple of people turned out, including somebody who I like, turned to more than once to volunteer for outside the wire drives that he didn't have to do with me.

• 1:54:58Speaker 04

  But I needed somebody else who was qualified on a long gun. Turned out, he was in the same boat. I never knew it.

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  You, you, you vampirized him.

• 1:55:11Speaker 06

  Is that contagious?

• 1:55:13Speaker 06

  Is that what you're saying?

• 1:55:15Speaker 03

  I don't know what's happening. He did have the long gun.

• 1:55:20Speaker 03

  No, no, okay, so wow.

• 1:55:22Speaker 04

  But you feel like we knew each other, we trusted each other, we understood each other. Something we like, went and suddenly agreed about politics, like some of the people I served with were like, super conservative and still are, obviously, but like, yeah, we, we kind of, you know, that wasn't like central, because we knew each other.

• 1:55:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:36Speaker 04

  Like, at a human level.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  And you built that trust up with them.

• 1:55:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, because we did something hard together, right?

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Speaker 06

  That's so interesting, because I feel like you're in a unique position to see both sides. You know what I mean? Like, because I feel like, there's a perception from many people on the left, like, oh, these, you know, these conservatives are racist and homophobic and da-da-da. Where I think many of them, at least like, you know, my family and all my friends in Florida that identify as conservative, they don't really care about, you know, their friend being gay, you know, or like, living in communities with like, you know, multi-ethnic backgrounds. It's not pressing for them. And sometimes they will say things that are problematic, you know? Like, they'll be like, yeah, I don't care if my friends are gay, but like, don't make my kids gay, which obviously is a problematic idea.

• 1:56:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:13Speaker 06

  But the core of what they're saying, I think the feeling that comes through, you're able to sort of, you know, understand in a way that I think a lot of people on the left don't. Because they hear that and they go, well, you shouldn't say that. But you can kind of be in a position to say, well, no, I understand what he's trying to say, he's just not saying it properly.

• 1:56:28Speaker 03

  It's almost like you, you, you treat everybody like a grandparent at first.

• 1:56:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, it suits me.

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  You know how like your granddad could say something really fucked up, but like, he comes from a good place.

• 1:56:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:40Speaker 03

  And you love it. And then eventually, after meeting your friend who's Asian, and you convince him that he's not Vietnamese, and you're like, and then he's like, "Oh, I love this guy."

• 1:56:50Speaker 06

  He still says Oriental.

• 1:56:53Speaker 03

  It's not the exact words, but there's love there and empathy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so can I just ask you, are you familiar with white boy fun?

• 1:57:02Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:57:03Speaker 03

  This term? Okay. So this is when straight guys pretend to be gay with each other?

• 1:57:08Speaker 05

  Straight white guys.

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

  Straight white guys. Black guys are just getting on it, and they're like, they're doing really good. They're like, really coming around.

• 1:57:14Speaker 06

  It usually happens.

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  You got a little bit late, and then you take it to the next level, and they're gonna completely dominate it. But, okay, so have you, did you never see any of that in the military, where guys would like do little gay jokes with each other and that kind of stuff?

• 1:57:27Speaker 04

  Uh, vaguely. I mean, that's like half of middle school humor.

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, also just like in your 40s, whatever.

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. So like, during this, and during this, and it's not like, to me, it's not like shrouded in like any like hatred for gays. It's more about just like, how can I do something that potentially makes my trolls my friend, or makes him feel uncomfortable in this moment, right? Are you ever in those scenarios, and at this time, you know you're gay, but you're not out, and then they're doing this game with you where like, "I'm gonna make Pete feel so uncomfortable," and you're like, "Joke's on you."

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  This is so weird, guys.

• 1:58:07Speaker 04

  Not really, no. But I know like, yeah, that happens to a lot of people, really, in this situation where like, there's this, some, just like, one of the few minorities that like, it's not obvious to everybody whether you're part of that minority, right?

• 1:58:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:18Speaker 04

  Unless you decide to tell people.

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:20Speaker 04

  And, uh, so yeah, I definitely know that like, that kind of thing can happen, but I can't, off the top of my head, think of it.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  Think of those things. Okay. All right, you finally come out.

• 1:58:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  Okay. Um, and I'm glad we waited to the end of the episode to talk about this, because I have so many questions about it, given your situations in life, but I didn't want to feel reductive, like this was your whole identity. I actually kind of wanted to get to know you before I asked about two things, which is ironic, we're having this conversation right now, but like, okay. So you come out, like, scariest thing, you've been at war?

• 1:58:55Speaker 03

  You mean like, is it, is it more terrifying than doing a drive where an IUD could go off? And like, what is the fear level?

• 1:59:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I had my blood pumping just as much, for sure. Even when it's not totally rational, telling my parents was not easy. And I had it way easier than most people. My parents were like, very loving and very kind of socially liberal. Like, it was not actually a problem.

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  Did they know, or were they surprised?

• 1:59:22Speaker 04

  They didn't, if they knew, they didn't say anything. I think they noticed at a certain point that I wasn't bringing girlfriends around.

• 1:59:27Speaker 03

  Did you, are you, are you like, gold star or platinum? Like, what? Do you know about this?

• 1:59:32Speaker 04

  Oh, right, yeah. Cheston tried to explain this to me once.

• 1:59:39Speaker 03

  I feel like you're still learning how to be gay.

• 1:59:42Speaker 04

  I'm not really the best representative of my people. No, I'm not.

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  Gold, okay, so you've, you've.

• 1:59:48Speaker 04

  What's platinum?

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  So platinum is you come out C-section. So you never even touch a vagina.

• 1:59:55Speaker 04

  No, I'm neither gold nor platinum.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  All right, fair enough. Okay, so, so in that process.

• 2:00:00Speaker 04

  That's really a thing. Like, I go all the way back.

• 2:00:03Speaker 03

  This is, this is what my gays tell me. My gays tell me this.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  So, uh, okay, so, so in this, in this process, like, you're, you're dating girls. You're like, I don't really know. At what point are you like, okay, I'm definitely gay? And is there a part of you where like, I had these aspirations to do these other things in my life? And this isn't my entire identity. Are you going in that moment? Do I stuff this down? Have you accepted it? Or have you not accepted it?

• 2:00:30Speaker 05

  I mean, yeah, you're running for mayor in the closet.

• 2:00:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, my entire twenties were like this. Like, because by then, like, I wanted, I really, really wanted to not be gay. Right? Because, I mean, separate apart from wanting to have a life in public service, like, I grew up in Indiana. Like, I don't think most kids, I don't think most gay kids growing up in Indiana in the 90s, like, if you really gave them a choice, right?

• 2:00:50Speaker 03

  Would, yeah, absolutely.

• 2:00:52Speaker 04

  And so, part of that was like, okay, like, I dated this like, string of amazing women. And like, over time, like, it was just very clear, as amazing as they were, that like, the things that are supposed to happen in terms of the way you feel about and fall in love with somebody, like, that's, you know, I'm not saying it's just process of elimination. Like, there are other ways you know who you're attracted to, but like, you can pack that away.

• 2:01:14Speaker 03

  God, once you came out, you must have made them feel so good. Right, because they got over that rejection.

• 2:01:22Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, they all did. Yeah.

• 2:01:24Speaker 03

  You're the only guy who was like, it was me and told the truth.

• 2:01:31Speaker 04

  But I knew, actually, before I became, like, years before the Afghanistan deployment coming out and all that, my first election, I won the primary. And the way things were shaping up, I knew that I would probably win the general election. I was probably gonna be mayor. And that was like, a huge leap in responsibility. Obviously, I had been like a consultant and, you know, I was a military.

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  Young, too. You're like 28.

• 2:01:55Speaker 04

  29, yeah, 28, 29.

• 2:01:58Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry. So, I, I knew that like I should not be in a position of that kind of responsibility, unless I've like resolved this in some way. And if I'm not ready to come out to the world, I gotta come out to somebody because that's the best way I can come out to myself, right? If I've like just told even one person, then, then it's kind of real. And I'm no longer kind of like in that fog mentally.

• 2:02:27Speaker 04

  And so I like took a deep breath and just a good buddy of mine from, from over the years, one of my best friends, Rover Beers, and I'm just like, look, I gotta tell you something. And one of the first things he, well, the first things he said, he kind of patted me on the shoulder and said, you know, Do it. I'm not into you like that.

• 2:02:47Speaker 04

  And he was straight.

• 2:02:50Speaker 04

  He felt like you didn't exactly make it easy on yourself. And what he meant was that

• 2:02:53Speaker 03

  So kind.

• 2:02:54Speaker 04

  My, you know, my career, to the extent I had a career, there were two parts to it, right? There was the majority of it, which was public office in Indiana.

• 2:03:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:04Speaker 04

  And there was the other part, which was service in the military, as a reservist. And by the way, that was still Don't Ask, Don't Tell back then, too, right? So I could literally be fired, which is another reason I didn't come out too quickly.

• 2:03:17Speaker 04

  And anyway, it was that process of like just coming to terms with that and just knowing, even if I wasn't ready to tell everybody or like deal with everything that went with it. And in my case, that meant I wasn't going to start dating either because I didn't want to like, I didn't want to be like hiding a boyfriend or like that just seemed really unhealthy. And, um, you know, I was so invested in my work that for a while I wasn't missing, I mean, I want to say I wasn't missing much. I didn't feel that I was missing a lot.

• 2:03:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:47Speaker 04

  Because I had this, I used to joke that like the city was a jealous pride, you know?

• 2:03:53Speaker 04

  And then there's the my whole, we talked about my deployment experience that put me over the edge.

• 2:03:56Speaker 05

  When did you first start to think, oh, okay, I might be gay. And then when, what was the gap between that and being like, I can't hide this. I can't compartmentalize this. This is what it is. And what are you going through mentally and emotionally in that time?

• 2:04:07Speaker 04

  I mean, there's years and years and years of that, right? Like, I mean, at some level, when you're a teenager, like you're, there's some data, there's some pretty strong data points. But the things you can tell yourself, if you really want something to not be true, the things you can tell yourself to try to make it not be true are, are pretty powerful. Right? I mean, you, you, you know, you can tell yourself, like everybody, you know, at like 14 or 15, every, every dude you know, seems like they, they want to nail anything that moves. Right? So like you can convince yourself like, oh, it's just like, everybody's all over the place. And I'm just like, you know, um, uh, and then like you start noticing like more of a pattern, especially when you're dating women and it's like not, um, and there's a lot of extrapolating,

• 2:04:52Speaker 04

  right? You're like watching like a straight love story and you're like trying to like relate to it.

• 2:05:00Speaker 04

  And yeah, I think by the time I was like, you know, mid to late twenties, I was like, okay, this is, I can't, uh, first of all, I can't like waste women's time or mine.

• 2:05:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:05:13Speaker 04

  Uh, messing around like hoping that somehow I'm like

• 2:05:16Speaker 05

  Those are valuable years for them.

• 2:05:19Speaker 04

  Cause like that, to the point where like, that's not a fair thing to do to somebody.

• 2:05:22Speaker 05

  Hundred percent.

• 2:05:24Speaker 04

  And also like wasting my time and you know.

• 2:05:27Speaker 06

  That's crazy. You've dated more women than me.

• 2:05:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:05:30Speaker 03

  These guys have only been with one woman each. Yeah. So you're straighter kind of in a lot of ways.

• 2:05:39Speaker 06

  And then, oh, sorry. Fast forward just a little bit. So now you're happy, you're out, you're in a relationship, and then you choose to adopt twins.

• 2:05:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:46Speaker 06

  Black twins, respect. How has fatherhood been?

• 2:05:50Speaker 04

  Crazy. Like, nothing I have ever attempted or done has come anywhere close, has been as rewarding or as hard. Like, I knew it would be more rewarding, based on what everybody said. I mean, you never really know, right? Until it's you. I didn't understand how hard it would be. I didn't understand how physically hard it would be, like, in those first weeks. And I say, obviously, you know, men relate to things differently. Like, I didn't have to, like, you know, neither one of us had to go into labor. But the, just the first few weeks, where, like, they tell you that, they tell you they need to feed every three hours or so, right?

• 2:06:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:06:26Speaker 04

  They don't mention that that means they need to start to feed every three hours.

• 2:06:29Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, you got it.

• 2:06:31Speaker 04

  And our daughter had this reflux thing where you couldn't really lay her down after feeding her. So it was really, like, at least an hour and a half upright. And anything else you want to do, you have to do in between. Like, you start the clock, you're feeding them, and there's two of them.

• 2:06:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:06:45Speaker 04

  And you got the bottles. We had this, like, contraption, this, like, pillow you could use to actually bottle-feed two twins at once, which is amazing.

• 2:06:52Speaker 06

  Where it's, like, fake breasts?

• 2:06:54Speaker 04

  No, there's just, like, I don't even know if that's a real thing or not. There's this, like, fake image that goes around online of me with one of these, like, contraptions, which I didn't know it existed. I don't know if it's a real thing or just someone being a dick, but, um... But no, it's, oh, yeah, this is, like, a whole thing. There's, like, these right-wing accounts. It's like this, like, contraption.

• 2:07:13Speaker 05

  Like fake breasts, like, a mechanism with fake...

• 2:07:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe that is a thing. I don't know. But, like, no, it's just, like, bottles, like, you might expect. And, uh, and that was just, like, the first few weeks and, and, and months. And then, um, one, both of them had some medical challenges early on. And one of them had extremely, uh, extremely serious medical problem, which he recovered from. And that was the most terrifying thing of my life. And then, and it's hard to believe because we were fighting, they were also kind of early, premature. It's not unusual with twins, but especially in their case. And we fought so hard just to get them on the chart. Like you would count down to the milliliter, like how much food they're taking and how much they're taking.

• 2:07:58Speaker 04

  And now like, they're just like wolfing down. He'll like take one of those Uncrustables. Their kids are three and a half now.

• 2:08:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04Speaker 04

  Our son will take one of those Uncrustables and just like, just the entire thing.

• 2:08:09Speaker 05

  One bite.

• 2:08:10Speaker 04

  And I think like, how in this short of a time has that happened? And just every day, there's this new challenge and you have to, just like relate to what is a big deal to them.

• 2:08:22Speaker 04

  Which is even harder than relating to somebody on the opposite end of the vertical spectrum, right? Because like you have to, obviously part of your job is to like teach them what does and doesn't matter and what to care about. But we, the other day, just two days ago, our son came into the kitchen and he was playing out on this little deck that we have. Yeah, it's a wooden deck. And he says, Papa, I need a Band-Aid. I got a boo-boo. And I'm like, oh, show me. And he like lifts up his foot and it's clear that what he's actually got is a splinter. And he has like some idea of what a splinter is, but not really. And then Chasten and I start, Chasten kind of was more on the ball than I was as usual. And like starts preparing like a thing of warm water to soak his foot in to try to help work it out. And then that doesn't exactly like do anything right away.

• 2:09:05Speaker 04

  And plus it starts hurting and by the time we got to the tweezers, it was like,

• 2:09:13Speaker 04

  it was like a civil war amputation.

• 2:09:17Speaker 05

  Give him the whiskey. He used to kill me. Oh God. I was such a baby about it. Yeah, you go deep in there, pull that stuff.

• 2:09:24Speaker 04

  It sounds like comical now, but like to him, like he's three, he doesn't know, right? It's terrifying for him and like, I'm trying to hold him because he's also a moving target and Chasten's got the tweezers. And then we're both starting to feel this guilt about like, is one of his foundational memories going to be, you know, plus like holding him while he's like shrieking in pain and afraid. And then as the splinter comes out.

• 2:09:48Speaker 04

  And and and Chad's like, I got it. It's it's out. He go he's like weeping shriek. He goes, "Thank you."

• 2:09:57Speaker 04

  And there's just these moments you just can't script like you can't see them coming. And and every day it's like some new challenge. Our daughter like our daughter loves asking me now about my work, which is actually a really healthy way to be forced to explain what I do all day. So this started happening when I was secretary, like I put her down at bedtime. There's a whole bedtime ritual. This is coming your way. If you how old is?

• 2:10:21Speaker 03

  14 months.

• 2:10:22Speaker 04

  Okay, so you're you're getting there where like the proceed talk about like the Administrative Procedures Act was one thing when I was trying to build a bridge, but like just to like extract myself from the room. It's like, did you did you tell the neighbors to be quiet? Yes, yes, Ben, I told the neighbors to be quiet. And then Gus is like, are you going to scare away the dinos? I was like, yes, if any dinos come here, I'm going to scare them away. And this is like whole like ritual checklist you got to go through, right? But as partner, she was like, tell me your work. And I remember asking her like, because after she said it two or three times at bedtime, like, does me talking about my job like help you go to sleep?

• 2:10:56Speaker 04

  And she says, yeah. And, you know, the first time.

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  Curiosity is such a good trait, though.

• 2:11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, you want to nurture that. And you want them to relate to what you do. So the first time I was thinking like, well, tomorrow I'm testifying the appropriations committee. And then I got to make sure that we get this regulation out. Like, that probably doesn't make sense to her. But then gradually I realized I could say like, I'm gonna make the airplane safer tomorrow. Or like, there's a bridge that broke, and I'm gonna help make the bridge, get the bridge back together. And she relates. She's like, are you bringing tape?

• 2:11:29Speaker 04

  No, actually, this one like this one's even too big for for for tape. It's like, oh, a hammer. I was like, yeah, some hammers are definitely going to be involved. And having to explain what you do to a three year old is actually a pretty good exercise in in thinking about what really is important.

• 2:11:46Speaker 04

  Like now, so I teach, a day a week, I teach at the University of Chicago. And so I realized I could explain that to her. She'd tell me your work. Well, I'm a, I'm a teacher for grownups. And she thought about it for a while and she said, but, but I thought you were our Papa. I was like, well, yeah, yeah, I'm definitely your Papa. Like, that's my most important job and I'm also a teacher for grownups a little bit. And, and then she says, it's hard to be both. And I was like, yeah, work-life balance, that's a thing. But.

• 2:12:17Speaker 06

  Contractors suck. You're like, I know.

• 2:12:19Speaker 04

  Oh, man, our little guy Gus, like a lot of boys, he's like all about heavy equipment and, you know, like, you know, construction stuff. And so he's super excited. There's this massive road project going on in Traverse City in Michigan where we live. Which I might mention was funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and signed off by the Department of Transportation.

• 2:12:38Speaker 06

  So that's why you did it.

• 2:12:39Speaker 04

  Just saying. No, so you say that, another example of caring about rules. Like, I sent that one back three times to be like triple checked because I saw it on a list and I knew that I lived close to it. I was like, are you, I need to make sure that the career staff certify that this is a deserving project. Otherwise it looks like I sent a project to my neighbor. He's like, that's the kind of stuff you worry about or you should worry about in public office. But, but there's all this heavy equipment. There's, there's, there's excavators and bulldozers, just like, he's like so happy. But he's really like monitoring them. Like if it's ever like after hours, he's like, why aren't the workers working? I was like, what's?

• 2:13:16Speaker 06

  Wondering the same thing.

• 2:13:19Speaker 04

  I want them working overtime. What's overtime? Bubs, it's Sunday, like they're not working. And he's like, why aren't they working? But it's the best, it's the best thing, it's the hardest thing.

• 2:13:31Speaker 05

  Have you thought about like, when your son gets older, his.

• 2:13:35Speaker 04

  Experience in the world, probably different from yours. Yeah. How would you have those convos with him? Or even, let's say, your daughter, like. Yeah. Learning to deal with her hair. Yeah. It's gonna be a little difficult. Like, how have, have you thought about these things? Yeah. Do they concern you? Yeah, we think about it all the time. It's not like we have it all figured out. So we were in.

• 2:13:51Speaker 05

  But if anybody knows how important identity is.

• 2:13:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. Of course. So we were in a, what's called a surprise adoption scenario. So we, we, literally, we got, I was at work, I was traveling. I got a, we got a phone call. Chasten called me. And the next day, we were in a rural Midwestern hospital, holding him in our arms. And they were like. Oh, wow. One day old. Like, it was like that. Like, just from like, normal life to, and by the way, it's twins.

• 2:14:15Speaker 04

  Which was amazing.

• 2:14:16Speaker 05

  You didn't know it was twins?

• 2:14:18Speaker 04

  We were just on a list. You know, we, we said that we were willing to adopt. We, we wanted to adopt. We said that we wanted to adopt without regard for race. By the way, anybody who says race is not a thing in this country should experience an adoption process where there are literally different lists. If you say that you want a white kid only, versus if you say that doesn't matter. Like, literally a different list.

• 2:14:40Speaker 05

  What is that? What do you mean by that?

• 2:14:42Speaker 04

  The list for white kid only is longer.

• 2:14:47Speaker 04

  And not only that, there was actually a discount. Or you didn't have to pay a deposit on the fee. This is like how it works. I couldn't believe it. So we didn't know anything about the racial identity of the kids until they started to look mixed race, which they are. And like, contending with like, the hair thing is already like, a thing. And like, lots of advi, especially from like, black parents who like, see stuff on Instagram. Or they're like, let me tell you how to do it. Like, a lot of advice. And like, I, to begin with, like, the idea of being a girl dad and dealing with girl hair was pretty intimidating. Like, my hair is like, very simple and straightforward. Obviously, I'm a low maintenance kind of guy. Like, starting to learn about like, all the different products that are involved. Him too.

• 2:15:29Speaker 04

  Like, we, we have like, a whole sequence with, with, with, you know, a conditioner and then essential oils, all this stuff.

• 2:15:37Speaker 04

  And you're always asking yourself, like, how can I be? You're already constantly asking yourself, how can I be a good dad? And now it's like, how can I be a good dad for kids who have a different racial identity than I do? And how can I help them navigate that? And.

• 2:15:52Speaker 04

  And what are the circumstances where there's nothing I can do to help navigate that? And I need to connect them up to mentors and people in their lives? Because the reality is like, this is not a colorblind society. And like, their, their lives will be affected in some way by their racial. All of ours are, but one thing about being white is you don't have to think about the fact that when you're white, your racial identity is not something that you're reminded of all the time, in a way that they will be. And, and we live in a, a not super diverse, although it's getting more diverse, part of Michigan. But our hope is that they will, by the time they're old enough to even be wondering and thinking about these things, which I know is coming sooner than we think, that they

• 2:16:34Speaker 04

  know that they are loved and that they are safe and that they're, um, growing up into a world that has so much possibility for them. And that, that will be there for them any way we can. But it's, it's, it's pretty humbling, like as a parent to know that you'll be navigating.

• 2:16:51Speaker 03

  Are you, let's say, for example, in some like hypothetical scenario where you run for president, let's just say, right? Obviously, nobody has plans for that, but you know, let's just say, potentially. You wouldn't be announcing that here, but you can. As he takes a sip of water. There must be concern about the potential scrutiny on not only you, but like your family, like all these people have become public figures and unfairly so, you know? How do you manage that? Like what your kids could go through. They're gonna face unfair things. Yeah. What, what, like, how do you process all that?

• 2:17:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's tough because like they didn't sign up for this, right? I mean, it's hard enough on Chasten, who's like an adult, but you know, he didn't exactly sign up for this either. He's on, you know, he's supportive.

• 2:17:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:38Speaker 04

  But when we ran for president, obviously that was really hard on him and very costly for him in all kinds of ways. And that much more so for for little kids. And one of the worst things about politics is how little regard it it shows.

• 2:17:53Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 2:17:53Speaker 04

  People who go into public service in their family, even just the fact that like when somebody leaves an office or decides not to run, like if they ever say like, I want to spend more time with my family, that is immediately taken as code for like, I got caught in some scandal.

• 2:18:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:07Speaker 04

  Like I did something wrong, right?

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:09Speaker 04

  First is like, we should celebrate that. Like if somebody wants to spend more time with their family, like that's a really good way to spend your time.

• 2:18:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:14Speaker 04

  Part of what I've really been leaning into just these last few months, being out of office, like working but not working at the pace, the extreme pace that I did is that like, I'm usually the one to drop them off at school every day and and I'm just like in their lives more. And it's it's it's wonderful. But yeah, the costs are enormous. And one thing that makes you really think twice about running for any office and definitely, you know, the highest doing national politics is that, you know, lots of people wind up paying into that and not all of them had a say.

• 2:18:47Speaker 03

  What is that? What do you mean paying into that?

• 2:18:49Speaker 04

  Well, their sacrifice for your kids are sacrificed.

• 2:18:52Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:18:54Speaker 04

  They're paying a price.

• 2:18:55Speaker 03

  Right? So all these people pay the price for, some might say, your ambition. But if your ambition is to do something that would make the country a better place for your children, I imagine there's a way that you can justify justify that sacrifice that they would go through.

• 2:19:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:19:10Speaker 03

  I don't want to be answering the question for you.

• 2:19:12Speaker 04

  No, that's the whole thing.

• 2:19:12Speaker 03

  I'm just curious how you how you balance all those.

• 2:19:14Speaker 04

  No, yeah, and I, you know, I talked to a lot of, you know, I took a hard look at running for Senate just now because the Senate seat in Michigan where I live came open. I decided not to, but part, and there are all kinds of reasons why. But part of what was on my mind was that I really was looking to spend, you know, certainly this year, really putting family first. And, you know, I talked to a lot of people who were in the Senate or in Congress, and they talked about the the price that their families paid, but also at a certain point, their kids were old enough to be really proud of what they did, that that made a difference and set a good example of public service and made their lives better. But look, if you're if you're like, if you hold yourself to a tough standard,

• 2:19:55Speaker 04

  you have to ask yourself whether that's whether you're really not confusing your personal ambition with your ambition for the country, right? Like when you run for president, you obviously reveal that you're an ambitious person.

• 2:20:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:20:13Speaker 04

  Hopefully you do it because you have ambitions for the country. But there's something selfless about it and there's something selfish about it. There's something selfless about going through the extreme pace and the hard work and all of the bullshit and all of the risk and the very real chance that you'll lose and all the other things that happen. Right? But like also unlike the other people in your family who are coming along for the ride. Like you get like your name is on the poster and you get to, you know, have all of these experiences. And if it goes well, you get celebrated in all kinds of ways. Right?

• 2:20:47Speaker 04

  And you're always asking, or you should always be asking yourself, okay, why exactly am I doing this? And it's really hard to separate those things. I mean, nobody can perfectly separate those things. But I do know that there are things that are not worth, things that are more important than winning and things that are more important than running, which again is why I'm not running for senate right now.

• 2:21:11Speaker 06

  What drew you to public service in the first place, right? Like you're graduating from Harvard, you're McKinsey, you have the opportunity, obviously a brilliant guy, to make millions of dollars and live your life in privacy. But yet you sacrifice all of that for a more meager pay and more public scrutiny.

• 2:21:26Speaker 04

  So I grew up in a family and a household that was, it was not politically connected. Like I don't remember meeting any elected officials when I was growing up. But it was very politically aware. Like my parents were the kind of people, especially my dad, who would be like always watching the news, always talking about whatever was going on on the news.

• 2:21:45Speaker 04

  And kind of I think built in me the idea that the most important thing out there was kind of what's going on and how decisions are being made about our country and about the world. And so I had that in me even when I was a teenager and I thought I was going to be airline pilot. And that was my real like first ambition. And by the time I got to college, I was really, really interested in public service. But I didn't understand how compelling and exciting local public service was going to be. And then we talked about my hometown a little bit, like everything that South Bend had gone through. And I watched that over the years and thought about making a difference. But even then, I didn't know it would mean it would mean running. But by the time I was at McKinsey, which, you know, it's very maybe comfortable is the wrong word

• 2:22:28Speaker 04

  because you work very hard there, but like it's very like nice job in a lot of ways. It's good pay. I'm definitely more. I was making six figures out of grad school. Like it was good money and, you know, flying to all these interesting places, working on interesting stuff. But within a year or two, I figured out that like, I remember one time I was working on this kind of interesting, complicated set of problems about grocery pricing. And I was running this database and doing my job. And it was intellectually interesting, but the more I got into it. I remember this moment where I got up to get a cup of coffee and I just had this thought hit me that was like, I don't care. And once I realized that, that like at some deeper level, I cared about doing a good job,

• 2:23:13Speaker 04

  but I didn't like viscerally care that like this company that we were consulting for would go on to do better than its competitors, right? That was not what propelled me. And I realized that even if there was less money in it, I was going to be both happier and more effective, more productive, working on something that I did care about, something that was important, not because a client was paying me to care about it, but because it just mattered in and of itself. And then I don't want to get into like the entire long story, but we talked earlier about Kokomo, Indiana, Howard County. So that's got thousands of Chrysler jobs.

• 2:23:55Speaker 04

  And while I was having this struggle at McKinsey over whether I really wanted to keep being a consultant or not, I saw that the state treasurer of my home state of Indiana was for very like ideological reasons, trying to block the Obama administration from saving Chrysler. So the auto companies about to go under, all of them were, the administration intervened and they figured out a way to basically bail out and save these auto companies. So they get back on their feet and keep employing thousands and thousands of people across the country. And because I grew up in South Bend where an auto company had collapsed and because I had visited Kokomo where there was an auto company that hadn't collapsed, but I knew what would happen if it did.

• 2:24:39Speaker 04

  I was really, really fired up about this guy, the Indiana State Treasurer, going all the way to the Supreme Court, trying to sue to stop those companies from being saved. And there's a whole crazy legal theory of how he got to be the one to do it. But what he was really doing was politically, he, uh, and obviously, state treasurers are not very prominent, but he picked this big fight with Obama and it got him on TV and it was kind of a political maneuver.

• 2:25:01Speaker 03

  Ah, I see.

• 2:25:02Speaker 04

  And I thought like, the state treasurer should be the most boring job in government, right? You shouldn't be like out on crusades, especially ones that if you get your way, it would destroy auto jobs in a place that counts on them. So I started asking who's gonna run against this guy. And, um, this is 2010. It turned out like nobody in my party was gonna run against him.

• 2:25:22Speaker 04

  Probably because everybody correctly figured out that a midterm election in a state like Indiana for a down ballot, like obscure race, like running for state treasurer, like you weren't gonna, you're probably gonna get crushed. And I ran and I got crushed. But I learned everything there was to learn about kind of campaigns. I went to all these chicken dinners in 90 counties in Indiana and shook hands and introduced myself and, um, tried to explain why I thought that there needed to be a different approach in that office. And then as soon as that ended and I got beat and I was figuring out what to do next, was I gonna go back to the firm or get another job? That was when the longest-serving mayor in the history of my city said he wasn't gonna run again. And all those conversations that I'd been having over beers, like buddies from high school,

• 2:26:06Speaker 04

  after we'd grown up and mostly moved out, because we all got the message of like success meant moving out.

• 2:26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:11Speaker 04

  We're always saying like, what's going on back in South Bend? Like, why can't they like grow more? Why can't we like, why don't young people believe in that place? And started to feel like we could maybe do something about that. And so we had this crazy idea to have me run for mayor and, and, and just have a totally different message than any of the other, um, people, Democrats mostly, who were running. And then we won. So that was kind of my path. I always cared about this stuff, but I never would have guessed that I would run for state treasurer or that I would really find meaning in local government. And obviously did not think when I was running for mayor that I was gonna like turn around and seek the presidency. Like if it weren't for all of the unique things that were going on in our country in 2019, you know, at any other moment, somebody like me never would have run for president.

• 2:26:56Speaker 06

  That's fascinating. When we had Vivek on, I mean, I'm naive, like living in New York. There was a moment where they asked him, you know, you can't be president because you don't believe, or they said to him, you can't be president because you don't believe in Jesus Christ. Something to that effect. Like, do you believe in Jesus Christ? And they made it a moment. I'm gonna use the bathroom real quick.

• 2:27:14Speaker 04

  Sorry, keep going.

• 2:27:16Speaker 06

  So I guess I'm curious, and I hope this doesn't sound reductive, but from your perspective, do you feel like America is ready for a gay president? And do you feel like that will be a major contention point if you were to run?

• 2:27:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was definitely, it was definitely a thing last time around. Although a lot of people were, I think in my party especially, people like get ahead of themselves or they get really wrapped up in this where there's only one way to actually find out. And that's to like go to voters and see what they're ready for. I don't think a lot of people thought that my like Indiana city was ready for a mayor who was gay. When I got reelected after coming out, I had a higher vote percentage than the first time around. I would like to think that's because I did a good job, but also it meant people didn't care that much.

• 2:27:58Mark Gagnon?

  I was shocked when Obama won. I didn't think we, the country was ready for a black president.

• 2:28:03Speaker 04

  And by the way, Indiana went for Obama. And I think that's really interesting. Like we, like, that state had not voted Democratic since LBJ. And so the idea that the person who would flip it for the Democrats was not Bill Clinton, not John Kerry, it was Barack Hussein Obama, right? Was not something if you were sitting around, I don't know, six months before he got nominated, saying, all right, who's the like safest choice who would even put Indiana on the electoral map? You wouldn't have said Obama, right?

• 2:28:34Speaker 04

  But I think the lesson from that is that you can overthink these things in the end. Like, the only way to find out the answer is like, get out there and try. And I don't want to compare, like, obviously, this is like, very different. But whenever there's some, like, artificial barrier people make up for why somebody can't run or can't serve, I think you've just got to test it.

• 2:28:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:28:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, looking forward to it. Go ahead.

• 2:28:55Speaker 04

  Oh, you got it. Oh, it's on a different subject. You probably.

• 2:28:59Speaker 06

  Oh, mine is different. I have a bunch of.

• 2:29:02Speaker 05

  So, China, you brought up an early interview. I hate to pivot back to this, but I do want to get some clarity from this. And I think one good thing the tariffs have done, the Chinese, whether it's propaganda or not, my Instagram now is nothing but Chinese electric vehicles. I've been ranting to them for days now. I'm like, oh, these guys are so far ahead of us. They have people coming forward. Andrew sent us an Instagram today of someone from China saying, hey, you know what happened? These billionaires in America took all this money, kept it for themselves. In China, they built up the infrastructure. I don't know if any of that is true, but it does seem like this is a very real threat. And it does seem like they're ahead in certain ways that we might not be ready to catch up for. What can we do? As I'm asking you to think, because it's obvious you understand one-year, five-year

• 2:29:47Speaker 05

  goal, like, needs very well. 10, 20, 30 years, and when you said, it's important for Americans to be number one. 30 years from now, how are we number one? What's your ideas for that?

• 2:29:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's going to be really tough for America to stay number one unless we do certain things right away. First of all, it's back to basics. It's taking care of our own infrastructure, our own education system. It's making it easier and more affordable to raise a family here, just like all those core things that you don't think of as, like, international policy. But if you do them right, then you get international primacy, the same way that, like, part of how we won the Cold War and beat the Soviet Union. It wasn't, obviously, like, there was a military side of that, but like, their military was formidable, too, right? The real, like, inarguable, massive advantage we had was that there were way more people living in the Soviet Union who wished they were living American lives than anybody in America wishing they could live a Soviet life, right? On some level, I think that was everything.

• 2:30:43Speaker 04

  That was how America truly came to be number one. So, first of all, take care of the basics at home. But also, we need to recognize that we're going into a ferociously competitive world stage here, where we can't just keep trading off the glories of having won World War II, which is pretty much how we were able to build the international system the way we like it over the 50 years that followed. And recognize that every country is not like just on its own finding its way toward liberal democracy. That comes and goes. I believe it's actually on the wane in our country, and I'm trying to do something about it. But it's eroding in places like Hungary. A lot of places were more democratic 10 years ago than they are now.

• 2:31:28Speaker 04

  So we've got to recognize that this is going to require a level of investment in technology and a level of commitment to our values that both earns friends and establishes the kind of economic power that you need in order to, alongside your military power, in order to be number one. I really worry that what we're in right now is a mode that's going to make it not so much America. America first has to be America in first place to do it right.

• 2:31:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:31:56Speaker 04

  If it's America first, the way they're doing it, I think it means America alone. And we become just like another country out there, scrapping for advantage. But to your point about China, like, one of the things that the last administration did that I believe in is dealing with Chinese EV unfair competition from the Chinese EV market. We should be making those here. The other part of the story I was telling you about, about Indiana, Howard County where those Chrysler jobs were, and St. Joe County where I grew up, and a lot of places in Michigan where I live now, is the EV battery factories. Like, there is a $3 or $4 billion GM battery factory going up on the western edge of the county where I grew up that is bigger than any manufacturing investment that happened there in my entire life.

• 2:32:39Speaker 04

  China is making big bets in EV. It's not because they're, I don't believe the Chinese Communist Party is terribly concerned about being first in climate change, right? They understand the geostrategic implications of owning the 21st century vehicle market, the way we did the last century. So is that an example of where it could be appropriate to use tariffs? Absolutely. Yeah. But again, we gotta, we gotta know what we're doing.

• 2:33:02Speaker 05

  And maybe this is touching on what Andrew was saying earlier about build a wall. Can you give me an idea of something you would want to do? And I guess this might be exactly what you were saying. What's something you would do to make me feel better as a guy who's looking at them and being like, oh, 600 mile batteries and fucking floating on air or whatever? What is an idea you would have? It's like, just in the global scale, how America can compete?

• 2:33:21Speaker 04

  You mean like a tech idea?

• 2:33:22Speaker 05

  Or just, yeah, this factory can go up that would create these jobs. Just kind of anything that I could grasp at to feel some hope.

• 2:33:28Speaker 04

  I mean, I think, I think at the end of the day, we can do the clean tech stuff better. But

• 2:33:34Speaker 05

  Better than them?

• 2:33:35Speaker 04

  Better than, both. Clean tech, what does that mean? Like? Anything like from electric vehicles to, to solar energy installations, all that stuff. We can do it better, but we have to make a commitment as a country that we are going to invest in that. It doesn't just happen. There's this fiction that all of the things we see around us in the marketplace just came around without any policy choices. There were huge policy choices that made the automobile possible in this country. Subsidies on everything from fossil fuels to the interstate highway system, right? We need to make similar choices around owning the clean tech market for the future. Owning AI, like I think we have a real problem with, China could very well legitimately outpace

• 2:34:19Speaker 04

  us on AI if we let them. And getting AI right is not just for the tiny proportion of people who understand how to code large language models and stuff that I can't even get my head around. It's making sure that as a society, like part of our education is like people understand how to deal with AI. The same way that like, you can't say somebody's educated and can graduate into the workplace if they don't know how to use email. Or, you know, it's a competency, more than like a technical expertise. Which is why I was a little bit alarmed when I found out that our US Education Secretary today thinks there's something called A1 and read a speech about how we need to do more with like clearly not a lot of conceptual.

• 2:35:00Speaker 05

  Instead of AI?

• 2:35:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:35:01Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 2:35:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think I think she's just like reading a prompter.

• 2:35:04Speaker 05

  We're fucking cooked, dog. Is this Linda McMahon?

• 2:35:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Speaker 05

  We're cooked.

• 2:35:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, right? I'm not making this up, right?

• 2:35:08Speaker 05

  Oh, no, Linda. We're, it's over.

• 2:35:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, like we need to make sure that they.

• 2:35:12Speaker 05

  We gotta make it A1. That's what she does. We gotta make it A1.

• 2:35:16Speaker 04

  I mean, so, you know, you're right to be worried.

• 2:35:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:35:21Mark Gagnon?

  Me personally, oh, sorry. Yeah.

• 2:35:22Speaker 05

  No, you gotta get out of here, Pete.

• 2:35:24Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, this is my last one. I think the biggest issue facing America is the wage gap. Salaries have been stagnant. CEO pays have skyrocketed. How can we convince corporations to pay higher salaries when their responsibility is to stockholders?

• 2:35:39Speaker 04

  Well, it can't just be pretty please. I mean, this is where if the corporation, we have, we have to either change the incentives on the front end so that there are tax advantages to taking better care of your people. Or we have to be ready to do it through policy where this country says you're going to make a hundred billion dollars in wealth off of work that a hundred thousand people working for you generated. More of that needs to be going to them. And by the way, these things are actually related. I think there's a way to deal in American citizens on kind of like a dividend off of the, the value that's being created from AI and from, I don't want to take you down a whole rabbit hole, but, but if you imagine.

• 2:36:21Speaker 05

  AI kind of thing?

• 2:36:21Speaker 04

  Well, how's that?

• 2:36:22Speaker 05

  Like a universal basic income kind of thing?

• 2:36:23Speaker 04

  It could be. There's different ways to structure it. But I think it's, it's giving everybody a share in the overall value that's being created by technologies, which again, rest on technologies that the taxpayer paid for in the first place, back in the 60s. So why shouldn't we all get a share?

• 2:36:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're investing it.

• 2:36:38Speaker 04

  Instead of it all going to this tiny handful of super, super wealthy people who are consolidating their own power, the same way the president's consolidating his political power. You got these, these, I don't even just like normal billionaires, but like mega, mega billionaires consolidating their power, right? We have to have tax policy that, that does that. We have to have a system that, that requires people who amass that kind of wealth to be sharing it with citizens. Because again, I, I know there's this, there's this myth, I, I have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs who create things and they should be hugely rewarded when they create things that are valuable. But. They created those things based partly on infrastructure that all of us paid for. Right? And by infrastructure, I don't just mean roads and bridges. I mean, national security.

• 2:37:22Speaker 04

  I mean, things like inventing the internet or mRNA vaccine technology, whatever it is.

• 2:37:28Speaker 04

  But more broadly, and this is both on the substance and the politics. I think you're naming something that's hugely important, which is the inequality in this country. It doesn't get talked about enough. It has gotten worse pretty much our entire lives. Yeah. And no republic has ever survived this level of inequality for long and remained a republic. That kind of income inequality leads to inequality in power, which leads to political instability, which leads to some of the things I think we're experiencing right now as a country. And if we don't get a handle on that, and it can absolutely be dealt with in a way that is consistent with a strong economy and business doing well. We know that because there were times in our history, including the middle of the last century,

• 2:38:14Speaker 04

  when tax policy was asking more of the wealthiest. And also, there was a lot of economic growth and a lot of productivity growth. So it can be done. The other thing that nobody talks about in either party much is poverty. You may notice in political rhetoric, like middle class, you're always supposed to say middle class. You always talk about the middle, can't go wrong talking about the middle class.

• 2:38:38Speaker 04

  But not all the folks are talking about like poor and low wealth people, which depending how you count is more than 100 million Americans. Jeez. And by the way, is an experience that binds together a lot of people who are divided in terms of first generation immigrants, white, black and brown people and so forth. And one of the things that should be the starkest wake up call for my party is the idea of losing the vote of four people. Because if we're not winning the vote of poor people, like, what are we even doing out here?

• 2:39:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:10Speaker 04

  And

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  Or what are you?

• 2:39:12Speaker 04

  We don't really talk about poverty.

• 2:39:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:39:14Speaker 04

  Or that kind of insecurity that people go through.

• 2:39:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, or like, what are you promoting, or seemingly promoting, or what are Republicans projecting to you that you're promoting, that they are so against, that they will reject whatever you endeavor to do to help them with their poverty?

• 2:39:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:39:32Speaker 03

  Meaning, there might be another thing out there that is equally or potentially more important.

• 2:39:36Speaker 04

  Right, which is why the way to not talk to low-income people, or union people, members, or anybody else, is to say like, oh, well, you're voting against your own self-interest.

• 2:39:43Speaker 03

  It's like, how are you gonna tell me what I'm interested in?

• 2:39:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, but also, like, you know, you can picture, like, a, like, well-paid professional from, from, I don't know, somewhere near where we're sitting in New York City, like, going up to a, a, a, a union member who is, you know, living near where I live in, in Michigan, and if that person from New York says, like, you're voting against your self-interest, that guy can turn around and say, so are you.

• 2:40:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, 100%.

• 2:40:10Speaker 04

  So it has, it comes back to this respect.

• 2:40:13Speaker 03

  But when that person, the coastal elite, does it, we're doing it because we're benevolent. I'm so heroic, I'm voting against my own interest for little old you. That's the idea, right?

• 2:40:22Speaker 04

  Well, if it looks and feels like that, we're not gonna get anywhere.

• 2:40:24Speaker 03

  That could be the, there's, there's one thing, and then, I know you gotta go, but, uh, so, uh, the guy who does all our partnerships here, one of my best friends, his name is Jamil, and he was working in, uh, England for a while. And, uh, when he came back after working in England for a while, he found out the American government was like, yeah, but even though you worked over there, you still gotta pay us tax. And he was like, what do you mean? I was working, I wasn't working. Yeah, but you're an American, so even if you have a job abroad, for a company abroad, you have to pay their tax, but you still gotta pay us taxes, you're American. If him as an employee has to do that, Apple gotta do it. Google's got to do it. Anybody else, I just cannot be that unfair. If there's that much transparency for the average, he wasn't working for an American company.

• 2:41:06Speaker 03

  Oh, actually, I'm not exactly sure what the company was, if it was American, was an American company. But the idea that he had to pay taxes out there and he also had to pay American taxes. Then that company should have to do the exact same thing. And I don't know how you implement that. I understand it's tricky. I understand these guys are paying tens of millions of dollars to these like attorneys that are just tax code nerds. They're trying to find the loopholes. I've spoken to some of these guys and they've literally, I've spoken to some hedge fund dudes. They were, they were literally like, listen, we could try to find ways to make money in the market. It's easier to attack the tax code. They've literally told me that they're like, the money is attacking the tax code, not the market.

• 2:41:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, not to like, repeat myself too many times, but this could be about, it might be that this is about to get much worse. Because there is a debate happening like right now, like through this summer in Congress. Where I think there's a lot of people who hope that no one's paying too close attention to the tax changes and the tax cuts that they're about to put in. So this is a great time to hold members of Congress accountable. Because I do think, you know, even if you live in a very Republican area and you got a Republican member of Congress, like, most people in that district don't love the idea of skewing the task code even more toward corporations and wealthy people. Like, there's a real moment here, I think, to do something about that.

• 2:42:24Speaker 03

  I mean, that's something that would, and I don't understand the wording, but to what we were speaking before, like speaking to people's feelings, like, finding a way to effectively tax these corporations, which would reduce taxes on working class people. Finding a way to turn that into one sentence, but letting a working class person know that they're going to pay 20% less. Because we found a way for these corporations to honor what their tax burden should be. I mean, when, when Trump or when Doge or whatever was saying, maybe it was Lutnik was talking about the tariffs. And, and they're like, yeah, well, yes, the goods are going to be more expensive. It's going to be more expensive for everyday people, but with the money that the tariffs come in, bring in,

• 2:43:07Speaker 03

  we're actually going to remove the income tax for people making under $150,000 a year. Whether or not they do that. That is, that is fresh meat for somebody who's going, I make under a hundred thousand dollars a year and that is a huge burden on me and I can provide for my kids so much better, they can go to that camp that they didn't tell me.

• 2:43:24Speaker 04

  What people don't understand is the reality is, the tariffs are absolutely a shift of the tax burden onto the lowest income.

• 2:43:31Speaker 03

  One hundred percent.

• 2:43:32Speaker 04

  So like, you're talking a good game.

• 2:43:34Speaker 03

  They're saying they're gonna offset it with, but they're, they're saying they're gonna offset that burden with the money that comes in for the tariffs, regardless if they actually implement this or not. I hope that you guys come up with strategies that sound just as seductive and then intend to execute them. And what a competitive advantage you would have. If you're saying, these guys are all talk, they say the nice shit, but they don't really do it. Well, we're not all talk. We're gonna say nice shit and we're delivering on it and here's why. How can you lose? You'll never lose, but give me some nice shit. Sell me on something. You know what I mean? Like, we need, anyway, thank you so much for being here, man. This was awesome. It was really incredible and, yeah, I'm looking forward to, I think we're all looking forward to.

• 2:44:17Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, brother. I really appreciate it.

• 2:44:19Speaker 03

  To see what you end up, end up doing, you know, and, yeah, yeah, I think that you're a really, really, you know, brave and amazing figure in our political sphere. So it'd be cool to see what else, what else you do, yeah.

• 2:44:31Speaker 04

  I'll be out there.

• 2:44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.