Pete Buttigieg: The Left's Identity Crisis, Wealth Tax, 2024 Mistakes, Plans for 2028

(0:00) Chamath and Jason welcome Pete Buttigieg (1:31) Why the Democrats lost tech (6:40) Taxes: Federal wealth tax, wealth disparity, billionaires, the role of government in the free market (23:17) Government efficiency: Democratic DOGE, breaking ranks on debt, his plan to control spending (33:01) Culture Wars: The costly role of democratic identity politics, navigating a primary with moderate views, the two Democratic Parties (40:07) Immigration: Trump shutting the border, Biden's failure (47:38) Working in the Biden Admin: good and bad, gatekeepers, cognitive decline, anointing Kamala Harris vs running a short primary (52:17) Thoughts on moving NASA under the Dept of Transportation (54:07) AI: self-driving, automation, and job loss (1:01:19) Running in 2028, Mamdani in NYC Follow Pete: https://x.com/PeteButtigieg Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There are certain trillion-dollar ideas that the private sector just won't do because it doesn't pencil or because of whatever market failure is there. That's where you need government. First of all, the debt path we're on is not sustainable. That I think identity has become too central to how my party thinks. My big worry is that if we're already at a level of concentration of wealth and power that no republic has ever survived, is this going to be a development that just makes wealth and power even more concentrated in even fewer hands?

• 0:30Jason Calacanis?

  All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions, I'm in it.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What'd you guys think? That was fun. That was great.

• 0:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All In Podcast interview series. Last week, we had Joe Manchin on. This week, Pete Buttigieg is here. Everybody knows Mayor Pete. Born in South Bend, Harvard, Rhodes Scholar, McKinsey, U.S. Navy, and of course, ran for president and was the Transportation Secretary under Biden. Welcome to the program, Pete Buttigieg. How are you? Good. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. Amit Shomoff-Pali-Hapatia, a former Democrat who re-underwrote his support of your party and now is a Republican. And really, the spirit of this program is to just have a candid discussion. We like to get into the details.

• 1:30Jason Calacanis?

  And so I thought I wanted to start with your perception of entrepreneurs, technologists, et cetera. I was watching a clip of you on Bill Maher, and you said, hey, you know, these libertarian, science-based folks in Silicon Valley, they made a very practical decision. These are rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for rich men. And these rich men include... Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, these are people who have been part of the Democratic Party for a very long time, huge donors to the Democratic Party, and they all made this sort of flip.

• 2:10Jason Calacanis?

  Do you think it was just pragmatically based upon the desire to have less regulations, a better business environment, to personally make more money? Or do you think there were other things at work with the loss in 2024?

• 2:25Speaker 00

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

• 3:10Speaker 00

  But, you know, for a lot of my friends who are scratching their heads, saying, wait a minute, these are folks who are from the tech and science world. How could they back a president or administration that's been deleting references to science and kind of censoring science, at least any time that climate is concerned? A lot of these guys are libertarian. How could they be on board with, you know, the administration that is sending troops into streets and has really let it crack down on freedom? That's kind of something out of the fever dreams of my conservative and libertarian friends back when we were, you know, arguing about politics over beers that I never thought I would see happen. These folks, some of these folks are gay, and how can they be backing an administration that's, you know, really assaulted LGBT rights? And, you know, if you just go down the list...

• 3:55Speaker 00

  There's a lot of things that are counterintuitive about some of these Silicon Valley leaders who flipped, in many cases flipped from being very, very active Democrats to backing Trump. And, you know, maybe there's an intuitive answer to that counterintuitive thing, which is that many of them feel their short-term business interests or personal financial interests are better served by Republicans. I get that. I would, I would counter, as I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are still Democrats would, that, look, a healthy business environment, you know, you don't want to be over-regulated, but you also want to make sure you're in an environment with rule of law. You want to be in a place where it's safe to say scientific truths out loud. You want to be in a place where

• 4:37Speaker 00

  somebody can't impose their interpretation of their religion on other people. I mean, you know, I have a whole counter to that. But, you know, I think that's the kind of swirl that we got into, definitely, just in those short years between 2020 and 24.

• 4:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 5:06Speaker 00

  So, this is an amazing example of some of the false equivalencies that I've seen thrown around out there. So, yeah, I would acknowledge, I think a lot of folks would say that, you know, it came really close to the stove some of the times when the administration was trying to make sure that, you know, bad information or misinformation wasn't being pushed into the kind of public health conversation and was engaging social media companies that were trying to, you know, be responsible and do the right thing. And, and there might be moments that, that, you know, they got that wrong or went too far. But, right now, we're in a moment, right, where the President of the United States doesn't like being criticized by a comedian and has the head of the FCC, which regulates corporations that are trying

• 5:48Speaker 00

  to buy TV networks, go out and threaten them and say, you know, you're, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. I mean, that is a whole different level of censorship, not to mention just the way they've gone through, like, every government website, right, and deleted anything that could accidentally be a reference to climate change. So, you know, I'm worried about the false equivalencies here. You could definitely say there were moments under the last administration, or any administration, where we could argue that, that having fidelity to free speech, you know, you should have done this way instead of that way, or these edge cases should have been different. But, but I am nervous that anybody would equate A president trying to direct the destruction, not only of journalists, but of comedians that

• 6:30Speaker 00

  he doesn't like, with public health authorities in a public health emergency that killed a million Americans, doing their best to try to make sure that people got good public health information.

• 6:40Jason Calacanis?

  Let's talk a little bit about where the rubber meets the road, which is tax policy. And I think a lot of what we've seen in this back and forth to add to why the Democrats lost all of these amazing entrepreneurs and capitalists who build these amazing companies that create all the jobs in the tax base for this country. Two tax proposals recently, New York City with Mondami, and I don't know if you've come out and publicly supported him yet, but he's proposing 54% tax for the top earners there. Here in California, we have the floating of a bill to charge a wealth tax of 5% on billionaires. At a recent Mondami rally, they were chanting "Tax the Rich," and Elizabeth Warren, Bernie

• 7:24Jason Calacanis?

  Sanders, who I think are far left of you, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, are saying, "Hey, ban the billionaires." And we have this sort of movement that being a billionaire is in some way immoral or unethical. So let's start with some brass tax here. Would you support, and obviously you're going to run for president again in 2028, and you're one of the lead candidates, would you ever support a wealth tax?

• 7:47Speaker 00

  In principle, maybe. Yeah, I mean, you rightly said, you know, folks like Bernie are to my left. I don't know the details of the state and local proposals you just mentioned, but those sound on their face like they're further than I would go. But look, in reality, we tax across a variety of things, right? There's income taxes, payroll taxes, there's property tax. Wealth tax would be kind of along the lines of a property tax. And the thought, of course, is that you've got a lot of folks who have become incredibly wealthy, and importantly, the way taxation works now...

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Less and less of the way the wealthiest people accumulate their income is actually booked as income, right? And this is why you have these stories of, you know, multi-billion dollar corporations or multi-billion dollar individuals somehow paying an effective tax rate that's lower than a teacher or a firefighter. And I think most people get that that's wrong. So I guess my overall take is, you know, everything has a balance, everything has limits. But if you're asking me the question, are the wealthiest people in America right now paying too much tax or too little tax? I would say the wealthiest are paying too little tax. And whether you adjust that through income tax, whether you adjust that through, you know, something like a wealth tax, and there's a lot of ways to do it. I think what's

• 9:04Speaker 00

  important is that it's fair, that it makes sense, and that you do it in a way that can make sure that the people who are spectacularly rewarded by our system are contributing to it without being so extreme that, you know, you're crushing wealth creation.

• 9:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's, that's super important. And people's willingness to pay taxes depends on some level on their, you know, sense that they're getting good value for their money. So I cut my teeth as a mayor. We didn't, we couldn't, you know, print more dollars if we wanted to. As the city is out there, we had a cash budget, had to balance it every year. If we took on debt, we really had to think hard about how we were going to pay on that debt. We made sure that anytime we're asking people to be paying revenue into the city. They know what they're getting for that, whether it's police service, or parks, or trash pickup. I don't think that's the worst metaphor to think about how things should work at the national level, too. Right? We should believe that we're getting good services, good infrastructure.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  That was obviously what I worked on when I was at the federal level as Secretary of Transportation. We should get good national defense and all the other things that we, you know, as a country are.

• 10:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 10:58Speaker 00

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

• 11:40Speaker 00

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

• 12:20Speaker 00

  the program, knowing that that meant most of the chargers would go in in 2026, 2027, but well ahead of 2030. Now, the second thing, this is really important, too. We made a conscious decision to insist that the chargers be made in America. Now, when you do that, you're deciding that it's going to take longer. I'll just admit that, because just buy them off the shelf from China would be dramatically quicker. We thought that was worth it, because we thought it was important to have a US-based industry with, you know, American workers, ideally, union electrical workers, making and installing these chargers. Again, we knew that if the goal was to get them all done by like 2023 or 2024, we wouldn't have had the luxury of doing that. But since we thought most of the chargers would be needed

• 13:04Speaker 00

  by 2030, we were okay with that. Now, here comes Washington politics, right? And somebody gets a hold of the numbers, they see it's a $7 or $8 billion program, and then falsely try to make it look like we spent the $7 or $8 billion already on the handful of chargers that they already managed to build first, even though we never thought most of the chargers would be built even during our first term. And that's where the Washington game comes in, right? Take something that, I mean, the jury's still out, right? The program's not done. We'll see how the Trump administration does in completing the program. But, you know, you can't really say whether it was a success or a failure until the program's been run, but they moved the goalposts. And I'm not challenging you that, like, there's ways that there's bad things that happen in, and

• 13:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's your best guess, Pete?

• 13:47Speaker 00

  You know, government spending that I don't like, but

• 13:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 14:12Speaker 00

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

• 14:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is effective?

• 14:52Speaker 00

  No, I don't. Uh, this is, this comes to the other part of what I was going to say. I mean, I think about my time in the military, for example. You know, there was a building, I think it was Leatherneck, maybe it was Kandahar, but I think it was Leatherneck. When I traveled out there, there was a building that had taken years to go up. I think it was like $30 million and just before they were about to activate it, uh, they tore it back down. I mean, it's just a complete boondoggle and, and we see stuff like that happening for sure. We see cost escalations on a lot of projects. So it's not, you know, it's not the same as fraud. I mean, that's the like under 1%, but it's still a huge waste. If you have a project costs 1% or 10% or some kids, sometimes 100% more than it should, right? I mean, by definition,

• 15:36Speaker 00

  every penny it takes to build something more than what it was actually required is wasted. And I do think there's a lot of that. I think government gets in its own way with procedure.

• 15:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 16:14Speaker 00

  You know, that was an example where we needed to invest, right? So it's that tough situation and needing to swallow hard and go before Congress as a taxpayer and say, look, we need more funding for this. Uh, that's what we did. And by the way, this is one of the rare areas where I agree with my successor who's done pretty much the same thing. Uh, to make sure we got the funding to upgrade the technology. Now, this is one of the few audiences that might be nerdy enough that, that I can geek out a little bit and talk about the big upgrade to the communications backbone that, that we were doing. It was to go from TDM to IP, from, from copper to fiber and to, I think a lot of people would be astonished to know that, you know, something as important and theoretically modern as our aviation system

• 16:53Speaker 00

  uh, is working on TDM. Uh, so that obviously had to be upgraded. We launched a contract, uh, Verizon was the contractor. You know, obviously a multi-year, multi-billion dollar IT contract when you have to have, you know, not even five nines, but like. Billion to one chance of anything going wrong, 24 by 7 by 365. You know, it's challenging and it takes a while, but you know, that's one of the reasons why we felt a lot of urgency on that particular issue. But again, there's two ways of looking at this, right? Both of which are true. One thing is to look at the system and say, how can the system not be more modern? Like, we need to make better use of the dollars that go into the system to have more up-to-date communications infrastructure, to have more controllers who are both well-equipped and well-rested.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  And FAA has got to do better on that. The other way to look at it is, consider the civilizational achievement that is aviation safety in this country. So it's easy to grumble, and I grumble, and more than grumble. I mean, I got pretty upset with a lot of things about how aviation works as a passenger, which is why we push airlines so hard on passenger protections. But, you know, just in the four years I was secretary, we had about 4 billion passenger implantments. So 4 billion times somebody got on an airplane, right? And zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of that 4 billion. In other words, what this kind of clunky, imperfect federal government has achieved is a standard of safety on a form of transportation that involves being propelled through the

• 18:22Speaker 00

  air almost at the speed of sound by flammable liquids miles above the ground. And, you know, frankly, you and I are, one of us is more likely, not to be flip about it, but one of us is more likely to randomly die of natural causes during this taping than to be involved in a commercial airline fatality.

• 18:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I hope it's Jason.

• 18:40Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I was gonna say, I mean, it is like, in some places in our, some places in our infrastructure, we're incredibly blessed. And I'm wondering, as, you know, now you're in your 40s, you've seen a lot of the world, whether it's your military service, or, you know, just being a mayor of a small town, and then obviously working in a cabinet position. How has your view of free-market dynamic solving problems versus the government solving problems evolved, if at all? Because when we talk about these problems, you look at what's happening with space. We now can get to space for, you know, 5% of the cost than we used to, thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX.

• 19:22Jason Calacanis?

  We have superchargers and chargers everywhere, thanks to Tesla and a number of other.

• 19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Folks putting them out there, ChargePoint, etc. When it comes to putting fiber into rural areas, which the FTC was trying to do, they were going to spend $5,000 to $25,000 per home. And now we have Starlink and their competitors, again, back to Elon, which your party decided under Biden, you wouldn't even invite the guy to the EV summit.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  So let me talk about that, but I want to park that to the side because we should probably talk about what happened there.

• 19:54Jason Calacanis?

  Because by the way.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  But don't let us forget that because I want to mention that.

• 19:57Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, because when you, when, you know, I'm a, I'm a moderate, but voted Democrat about 65% of the time and Republican a third of the time. When I look at it, I just can't understand how the Democratic Party hates us so much, hates entrepreneurs. And that's how they feel.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  I mean, I gotta tell you.

• 20:13Jason Calacanis?

  But that's how, that's how Silicon Valley feels.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  All right, we'll talk about the vibes.

• 20:15Jason Calacanis?

  Whether you want to deny it or not, but it feels like this.

• 20:18Speaker 00

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

• 21:01Speaker 00

  to deal with, even if it's done by contractors, it's kind of done in a way that you can tell is designed by the government and it's not pretty. On the other hand, you know, when you talk about capital allocation, the federal government literally invented the internet, right? So there's things, there are certain trillion dollar ideas that the private sector just won't do because it doesn't pencil or because of whatever market failure is there. That's where you need government. That's things like basic research. That's things like filling in gaps that especially on network effects, like, you know, broadband, EV charging networks, that sort of thing where the bulk of it can be done quite well by the private sector, but there are pieces that just don't click unless you have, unless you have federal involvement. And that's the attitude we try to take on things like EVs, like. I never thought that we were gonna, you know, create a government EV

• 21:46Speaker 00

  or that you even needed the government to make sure that a transition to electric happened. But we did believe that for it to be made in America, for it to happen as quickly as we wanted and for it to reach people who maybe couldn't afford those initial buy-in costs, who we really wanted to help out. You know, that's where there's a role for policy. That's where there's a role for funding.

• 22:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Look, I love people being entrepreneurial, creating something and doing well by it. I mean, that's the basic idea.

• 22:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But to a certain level, like beyond a certain point of entrepreneurial success.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  If you create a monopoly, yeah, if you create a monopoly, I might not like it. If you hurt other people, I might not like it. If you concentrate power into your hands to an extreme extent, I might not like it because that's just, that's just not American. But in general, if we're talking about taxation, I just want to make sure people who are really well off do their part to pay into a system that has helped them to thrive. Because, you know, that's what it takes for the next generation to do well. And that's what it took for all of us to do well. I mean.

• 23:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's just assume you're a president. You get trillions of dollars of receipts. I'm gonna guess the party line that you have to take is Doge was bad. Okay, fine. What is the version of Doge that you would implement?

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Great question.

• 23:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So that we could figure out what percentage of that dollar that we're giving you is wasted and stop it?

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I would love, in theory, a Department of Government Efficiency that was actually about government efficiency. I think that would make tons of sense. It's what I tried to do again when I was mayor. We took apart the small government that I was in charge of. It was about a $300 million operation and put it back together and found that it could be radically more efficient in many ways, and we need to do that at the federal level. We need to-

• 23:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How much money did you take out from that 300?

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Uh, we, we used it better, I would put it that way. So, uh, you know, we didn't, I mean, there were areas where we were able to kind of have, uh, have a certain, uh, budget line item shrink, but in a city where the average per capita income was 18 or 19,000 dollars per person when I came in, uh, we weren't handing that over in tax breaks to wealthy residents. We were putting it to other use on, uh, on public safety, uh, and fundamentals like that. But look, again, I agree that the Doge we could have could do a lot of really good work. It could find duplicative regulations. It could find cases where we could move from input-based to output-based, uh, evaluation of our programs. In other words, instead of saying like, "This is a meaningful program because how many billions went into it",

• 24:43Speaker 00

  uh, figure out how much value came out of it. But the Doge we got was one that couldn't even count, that put, uh, information, sometimes that was wrong by three orders of magnitude on its own website, then erased its own information because they didn't believe in the transparency. The Doge we got sent an email to every air traffic controller in the country during an air traffic controller shortage and suggested they quit being an air traffic controller and get something, quote, "more productive to do in the private sector", only later on to be told, "Actually, uh, that was a mistake. The Doge we got apparently wasn't supposed to send that information to all the air traffic controllers. Whoops, the Doge we got fired people in charge of making sure our nuclear weapons were safe

• 25:26Speaker 00

  and in charge of making sure that bird flu didn't spread. And then, whoops, you know, tried to hire them back in a hurry." So, you know, there's a huge difference between the Doge we got and the Doge we could have had. But i- if you're talking about, in principle, should we unleash, like, really smart, talented people with an outside-in perspective and a free hand to evaluate what is working and where we're not getting value for our money in government? Like, you and I would be on, in violent agreement that that's a good idea and there's no better place to find some of those opportunities than the things that the federal government does. Because it just does, or because there was a good reason once upon a time, but that reason has expired, or maybe the reason wasn't that good to begin with.

• 26:05Jason Calacanis?

  Can we just debt maybe as part of this? I don't know where you were going to go, but I think maybe talking about.

• 26:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I wanted to go to the inner workings of the Democratic Party, but go ahead to debt and then we can.

• 26:15Jason Calacanis?

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

• 26:35Speaker 00

  First of all, the, the debt path we're on is not sustainable. And that's one area where you're right, neither party has covered themselves in glory. And it's an area where I would part with some in my own party. I think for too long, you've heard the message from Democrats is basically debt doesn't matter, like, or there's no such thing. And there was a moment when this felt a little more credible, some of the evidence as of a few years ago, put a lot of wind in the sails of what was called modern monetary theory. I think a lot of that looks different now.

• 27:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It looks stupid.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  And then you had the, and then you had the Republicans, right? Who say that debt matters, but then act the exact opposite. Now, look, as, as a good Democrat, I could point out that I would argue there's a difference in terms of what history empirically has shown us, in terms of the return on investment you get when you raise debt to fix roads and bridges and other productive infrastructure versus if you blow up the debt in order to give massive tax breaks to the wealthiest people in the country, because that has just never generated the growth that, you know, I mean, the Laffer curve has collapsed empirically and it just doesn't work that way, right? So I could quibble over if you're going to do debt, what's the best thing to do with it? And I would argue the best thing to do with it is education, healthcare, investing it,

• 27:51Speaker 00

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

• 28:30Jason Calacanis?

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

• 29:12Speaker 00

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

• 29:57Speaker 00

  people are paying again and again, and then call this a sustainable budget.

• 30:01Jason Calacanis?

  The trillion dollars of cuts, what is that specifically that's being cut?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Oh, you mean on the, on the tax side?

• 30:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  We'll start with OBBA, right? And then TCGA too. Like, we know that the vast majority of the benefits of those tax cuts went to the wealthiest. We could say the same about the broader pattern of cutting taxes going back to, I mean, I guess if you look back over the 50 years. I mean, why do you think that the American entrepreneurial class was more productive in terms of annual productivity growth back when taxes were higher?

• 30:30Jason Calacanis?

  How do you measure that?

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know. Productivity growth and income taxes. I mean, those are two pretty simple measures you could use.

• 30:36Jason Calacanis?

  And this isn't, this isn't which era?

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Well, look at the seventies and eighties, right? Sixties, seventies, eighties. Look at GDP growth, productivity growth, and tax rates. I'm sure you're aware that those growth rates were higher, and the tax rates were higher, too. I'm not saying there's no correlation, where like, if you overtax, you'll eventually get less productivity. But, you know, if you look at where we are in the spectrum, between too far this way and too far that way, it's not like we're doing this in a vacuum. Like, there's historical data.

• 31:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I just want to make sure. You think the BBB was a giveaway to rich folks? Like, no taxes on tips, extending the Trump tax cuts that disproportionately affected middle-income folks? Those are giveaways to rich people?

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Do I think the majority of the OBVA tax cuts went to rich people? Yes.

• 31:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And how do you define majority? Like, to dollar tonnage of depreciation? Or actual dollars in pockets of humans?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  I mean, either way you look at it, right?

• 31:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, it's important how you look at it, because it's math.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Actually, if you're low income, dollars in your pockets is going down when you account for what they've done with the subsidies. I mean, remember, this is, I don't care how you measure...

• 31:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Which subsidies?

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Can you name me a measure? Can you name a measure by which it is not...

• 31:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm asking you. I'm asking the politician. I don't know.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't have a line item breakdown in front of me. What I'm telling you is that it is not terribly contested. Like, if anybody listening to this podcast feels like opening up a window and looking it up for themselves, just to figure out which one of us is right, it's not terribly contested that the majority of the benefit of TCGA and OBVA went to wealthy people. And it's definitely not contested, or I'd say generally not contested, that OBVA represents one of the largest transfers of wealth from lower-income people to upper-income people in global history.

• 32:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do you measure that?

• 32:23Speaker 00

  You can measure it in terms of wealth before and after. You can measure it in terms of the incidence of the different forms of taxation. You can measure it in a total package that accounts for subsidy, as well as benefit. I mean... Any number of ways, but again, if you measure it a different way, I'd love to hear it. Because I don't, I don't regard this as something that's deeply contested, but it sounds like you have a measurement in mind that's different and I'd love to run with it and look it up so I can see where you're coming from.

• 32:47Jason Calacanis?

  We definitely cut corporate taxes and personal taxes because of TCJ, yeah, right? I mean, that was significant.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  And to be clear, again, because the Laffer curve turns out to be bullshit. We did not just grow our way out of the deficits that created, right?

• 33:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me ask you a question about the inner workings of the Democratic Party. I'm sure you've been asked this 100 times, so sorry for us being the 101st, but in Kamala Harris's memoir, she points in part to your identity as a reason why you weren't considered as her running mate. Can you explain to us the role of identity in democratic politics? Both perhaps you on the way in when you were nominated for secretary? And then maybe on the way out when you were not considered as a credible VP candidate?

• 33:33Speaker 00

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

• 34:15Speaker 00

  I'm thinking about the economic interest of poor people and low wealth people in this country, for example, who are black, white, and of every ethnicity and identity and gender, of course, who maybe didn't hear a unifying message that was speaking to them as a group. Because it felt like my party was, it was like a salad bar, like here's something for your group and here's something for another group and here's something for another group. It just didn't add up into a story. Now, I would argue that Trump practices a kind of identity politics too, a sort of a white identity politics that makes people feel like they're encircled by the other, that immigrants are sort of an invasion. I mean, we can go down that road, and I often have. But the more straightforward way to answer your question about my party is that I think

• 34:58Speaker 00

  identity has become too central to how my party thinks.

• 35:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 35:17Speaker 00

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

• 35:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Well, this is the classic issue with going from primaries to generals, right? You are pressured to say one thing to appeal to the base in your party. And then you wind up, if you're not careful, saying things that make it hard for you to have credibility in a general election when you're trying to paint a picture that the broadest number of people possible can see themselves in. That's nothing new. But one thing that has happened more and more and more is that that's happening in more and more races. So the presidency is always a little bit like this, but the presidency is also the one that gets painted in the broadest strokes because it's a campaign for the whole country. And it's all the different jostling around all the issues and all the groups all boiled down into two people running for one office. But where I think this actually hurts us the most...

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Is in Congress. So we've got 435 seats in the House. Last time I checked, less than one out of 10 of them is considered to be seriously competitive. At best, like, less than 40 are actually competitive, which means in nine out of 10 races, the primary is pretty much it. So you never even have to bother thinking about whether some stance you took in the primary is going to make it harder for you to work across the aisle, or harder to win people over or bring them together in the general, because these districts are so gerrymandered, right, that, uh, that all you have to worry about is your right flank if you're a Republican, uh, or your left flank if you're a Democrat. That's where I think it hurts us the most.

• 37:15Jason Calacanis?

  Is the Democratic Party really two parties right now? The classic Democratic Party, I'll call it the Clinton Obama Party, you know, hey, we're socially liberal, but we're not, like, absolutely crazy and insane. We don't necessarily, uh, need to advocate to have trans kids get surgeries and, uh, when they're 12 years old and 14 years old and all the stuff that's now become, you know, illegal in most modern countries. Is it two parties now? Because I'm watching Mamdani and, like, that group go, hey, ban the billionaires, more taxes, and socialism, and here's all the handouts, we're going for it. And then there's guys like you and, you know, the, I would say, the, the more

• 37:57Jason Calacanis?

  Clinton era, Obama era, kind of moderate Democrats now, is, is kind of how I'd frame it. And then can those two ever coexist in the same party?

• 38:07Speaker 00

  I think both parties have their contradictions, and that's definitely true for my party. Uh, I mean, the way I view it is, one of the biggest problems we have as a society is this level of inequality we've hit, that, like, historically, there's no evidence that any republic can reach this level of equality, to hold on to it and continue to be a republic. And so the question is, what do you do about it? And you've got, obviously, a socialist left that says the answer is socialism. Uh, you've got, uh, Republicans who tend to say this is not a problem at all. And then you've got where I think of is the center, or at least what I would like to be the center of my party, which is saying, yeah, we've got to do things. We've got to lean in, we've got to use, uh, the, the tools of the state, not in a socialist way, but, uh, in a way to try to have things be

• 38:50Speaker 00

  more balanced in this country. Um, is there a contest between kind of the center left and the far left, or however you want to characterize it? Sure. But then, you know, I mean, today's Republican Party is a coalition of normal Chamber of Commerce business Republicans, more of the kind of tech Republicans who to me are more libertarian, even though it puzzles me that they're for such dramatic government control over society right now and Trump, but whatever. My point is you have, you have normal business Republicans, you have techno libertarians, you've got economic populists, right, who's, who are in many ways to the left of even, even left of center in some weird ways on, on, on trade and some issues like that. And then you got white nationalists, right? And I don't know

• 39:33Speaker 00

  that they can coexist for long if they're not held together by the awe of or fear of, you know, the personality of Donald Trump. And, you know, people keep imagining maybe, what if we had a third party? And, you know, I look at other countries that have, it's not, it's not unusual in a lot of other modern countries to have four, five, six, seven parties. In some ways, it feels on its face like that would make more sense in the US. But I, I think the reality in practice is anytime somebody tries to go off and start a third party, it just, it just winds up screwing it up for one of the other two and we're right back where it started.

• 40:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 40:13Speaker 00

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

• 40:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Biden, you're saying?

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And why do you think Biden looked the other way?

• 40:35Speaker 00

  And what was the strategy? Was there a strategy? Yeah, I think what happened was he was really looking to Congress to do it. He came out of Congress, he was a creature of Congress and thought, you know, Congress can forge a bipartisan, since, you know, it was actually a bipartisan agreement among the American people on what to do, right? Which is what most people believe, what I believe, which is let's make it harder to come in illegally and easier to come in legally and, and to get legal if you're not. But that's where most people are. That's about 80% of the country. Yeah. And that's where most of the space for compromise has been on the Hill. And yet, you know, I think it was the eighties, the last time we had an actual bill to fix it. So I think he, and this is speculating, I mean, I never really, you know, was in the middle of the immigration side of things. But I think he felt like the way to do this was to get things done in Congress. He, he felt that, you know, to manage to get the

• 41:20Speaker 00

  infrastructure bill done, IRA.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  But what's interesting is when he finally gave up on Congress, when it was clear that we just weren't going to get very far. And meanwhile, you had had that that set of executive orders that came late in the term. That had a major effect on the number of illegal crossings. So you've got to ask yourself if that executive order that happened toward the end, if that had been done in year one, year two, would we be in a different place? Now, of course, we're on the other extreme. I mean, we got we got citizens who just have an accent or look brown, getting picked up, sometimes getting detained without access to a lawyer for a frighteningly long amount of time. And that's citizens, let alone other people who, you know, maybe they shouldn't be here, but they also shouldn't be brutalized, right? And I think one reason you see the pendulum swinging on on this

• 42:08Speaker 00

  is we're seeing just how extreme it's gotten at a time when, again, I think the only way forward really is a kind of a grand bargain, where we bring together the the the people who believe in these simple realities, that we've got an economy and a society that exerts a pull that actually needs more people, like for our demographics and our economy to work, then there is room in the kind of legal pipeline to come in.

• 42:32Jason Calacanis?

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

• 42:42Speaker 00

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

• 43:02Jason Calacanis?

  We can go to the second piece, too. I mean, if everybody has consensus that the border should be closed and it should be orderly and legal, you know, great. It's 80% of the country. And then the majority of the country doesn't like what we're seeing with ICE agents without badges, wearing masks. That's the majority of the country is uncomfortable. This is a large percentage of the moderates who voted for Trump. At least this is what the surveys are saying. People are not comfortable with this. So I'm curious about what you think the motivation is. And you can go into conspiracy corner if you want. It's allowed here on this program. We can speculate, but the conspiracy corner for Biden was he wanted to let a lot more people in, in order to build the democratic base, in order to get voters. Okay, that's one theory.

• 43:45Jason Calacanis?

  Now, the theory here is Trump is doing these violent deportations, tackling people, spending a lot of money while doing it. Um, why? Why is Trump doing it this way? Why does he think he's doing it this way?

• 44:00Speaker 00

  I, I, I think he thrives on a politics of fear. I think chaos is good for him. I think he thrives on chaos. Uh, I think when you see images of, uh, people getting beaten up or, you know, what, what he used to call American carnage, like anything that validates that. Basically, the worst it, it's a weird thing, but the worse it feels to be in this country, the better off Donald Trump is, whether he's running for president or whether he is president. And sending troops marching into the streets.

• 44:29Jason Calacanis?

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

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Do you feel safer about the fact that a Latino doctor crossing the street in Washington, DC, uh, is getting hassled or harassed because they're brown?

• 44:51Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think that I've heard that. Now.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Okay. So you're not aware of any case in which a US citizen who is.

• 44:57Jason Calacanis?

  Me, me no.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Like you're, you're.

• 44:59Jason Calacanis?

  But I, but I will tell you, for example, after nine 11.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  You, you, you, wait, wait. You're on a podcast commenting about immigration. Surely you have some level of awareness.

• 45:05Jason Calacanis?

  Let me, let me tell you what, after nine 11, for example, for years I had SSS on my boarding passes. I, and I was pulled over constantly and people probably thought that I was a Muslim hijacker. So I know what it feels like to be harassed. And what I'm telling you categorically is I feel safer in this presidency than I have ever felt. And I'm just letting you know that. Just, it's just my lived experience.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, I think we're all well aware.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  I'm worried about how most Americans feel.

• 45:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, I think we're all aware that people are being picked up and they're being racially profiled and their fourth amendment rights are being suspended here.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Let me put it a different way. Has it crossed your mind that if right now they started by going for people who are illegal and then they've started roughing up people who are citizens, but who are speaking up against the administration, that even if you feel safe now? In a country where that sort of thing can be done, where people can, you know, where even comedians could lose their jobs for criticizing the government, does any part of you wonder if that might ever come for you?

• 46:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pete, it did come for me. Here's what I'm trying to tell you. After the Patriot Act passed after 9/11, I had to come to terms with the fact that even as a legal immigrant into the United States, that I was going to get extra searches, I was going to get stopped, and it happened for six years. I came to terms with it, I put my head down and I kept working.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  But that didn't mean it was okay, right?

• 46:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was a law that was passed, and people felt, for whatever reason, that there was an amount of racial profiling that could happen then. And what I'm telling you is, every immigrant class at some point has felt this. My point is, it made things safer in the aggregate. And what I'm telling you now is, what is happening now makes cities safer. It makes places safer. If you go to Washington DC, it is the safest it's ever been. And you hear this consistently from many, many brown and black people.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  I guess what I'm telling you is, if you take the amount of money that it costs to do a full-scale military deployment in an American city, and you just used it on, you know, improving funding for the police and mental health and a whole lot of other things, you probably get a pretty good result that way, too. But I know there are a lot of people, and I have heard, you know, personal, direct examples of people who are, in some cases, US citizens, or in other cases, here illegally, who no longer think it's even okay to go outside, who ask people to run errands for them because of the atmosphere that has been created in Washington DC. So it's definitely not safer for them.

• 47:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me ask you a different question, which is, I really want to get some insight into what it was like for you to work in the Biden administration. We've had the sea of tell-alls coming out, Kamala Harris's book, KJP's book. We had Joe Manchin on last week, and one of the things that he said is that it was not that Joe Biden changed, but that the staff were nuts, and that Ron Klain was effectively a gatekeeper. And if you had reasonable proposals, they would go into some black hole and die.

• 48:09Jason Calacanis?

  Can you give us a sense of what it was like to work under Biden? And the positives, but also the negatives? Give us a fair representation.

• 48:18Speaker 00

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

• 49:03Speaker 00

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

• 49:41Jason Calacanis?

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

• 49:50Speaker 00

  You could feel that he was growing older. I mean, I think we all saw that. I think my experience, and obviously, you know, I wasn't at the White House every day. Most of the time I was, I was out in the field doing transportation work. But, you know, what I would see if I was at an event was the same as what you'd see, you know, watching TV. I think the debate was a real turning point. Yeah, I mean, the debate was a turning point, right? Where you just saw, I think everybody saw what everybody saw. On the other hand, you know, when we were handling-

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

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

• 50:39Speaker 00

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

• 51:08Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so now you get to that point, but just as a last thing about the speed run, there was no primary.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:15Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, we were speculating on our podcast, like, why not run a speed run? Just have the six or seven candidates, including yourself, just do three weeks. This would be like blockbuster television. Were you in favor of the speed run or not? Was there discussion of that? We're hearing that Obama and maybe some other people wanted to have a quick primary. And what do you think the outcome would have been? Would you have had a shot at, uh, winning?

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of chatter of that. And I think in hindsight, we've obviously got to ask, since the outcome of what did happen was not good, I think anyone serious in our party has to say, okay, what if we'd done that? And you could argue that it would have led to, I don't know, you could argue it would have led to a different nominee. You could also argue it would have led to the same nominee, but that she would have been stronger, right? I mean, if, if she had become the nominee by prevailing over another half dozen people who wanted a shot, presumably that kind of sharpening that, that happens, uh, would have served her well in the general. And, and let's remember that, that's actually more normal, right? Like, most countries don't drag out their, their presidential process for more than a few weeks.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

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

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Let me think of it. To be honest, I haven't, like, deeply reflected on this. Um, at a selfish and nerdy level, it would have been amazing as Secretary of Transportation to be working NASA too. Um, I think generally, anytime you can have, like, one

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Uh, box or on an org chart where you where there's two, you know, as long as it's justified. I think there are some benefits to that. I mean, definitely right now, the way that it let me put it this way. If we think the future of space is going to be more and more about commercial space, which is is clearly just a matter of numbers, what's happening? The mishmash we have now where you got NASA, obviously, leading government-driven space missions. You got the Department of Transportation, which actually already had responsibility over some things. And we did commercial space licensing. We wound up having to radically accelerate how that worked. Uh, because that actually comes under the FAA.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Um, largely because you have to go through the national airspace to get to space. Right? And there's actually parts of it that sit with commerce. So it would make sense to disentangle that one way or the other, whether it's inside of DOT or whether you configure it a new way. I mean, I do think that Washington in general, my party is definitely guilty of this. It's too attached to all of the like structures that we have right now and the existing org charts and existing habits. And, you know, one message I'm trying to get my party to accept is, you know, if and when we get another chance, a lot of the things that he has burned down just aren't coming back the way they were. Why would we put him back the way they used to be if it was full of problems anyway? So I don't have a really deeply considered answer for you, but I wouldn't be hostile to a change just because it's a change or just because it came from this administration.

• 54:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 54:41Speaker 00

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

• 55:24Speaker 00

  I mean, I met truck drivers who'd have, you know, 2 million miles with no crashes or accidents. But just as a general rule, most of us, the average driver thinks they're safer than the average driver. And the average driver stands a shockingly high percentage chance of getting somebody killed. So, you know, I think we're at the point where at least some of these technologies right now already are safer than human beings, and that's only going to increase and improve. And the irony of it is, you know, even if a handful of highly publicized negative incidents will really change public acceptance. So my approach was-

• 56:01Jason Calacanis?

  And they have, yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 00

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

• 56:30Jason Calacanis?

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

• 57:14Jason Calacanis?

  A serious issue on our hands, or do you think we'll be able to navigate it? And then what's the government's role in it? When you're president, what will it look like if you inherit this chaotic AI job displacement potential?

• 57:27Speaker 00

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

• 58:11Speaker 00

  it wasn't connected to their, their sense of identity or belonging, then you continue to have a displacement that's not just economic, but, but, but really deeper than that. And I actually think a lot of that kind of leads directly to the populism and the nationalism that you see in this administration and this, in this political moment. So, and the thing that really haunts me is, you know, as much as any auto worker or electrical worker I know, like their sense of belonging and identity, you know, very much depends in many ways on being an auto worker and electrical worker. That's even more true for most white collar workers I know, people who work in law or, software, or, you know, you know, you see what's happening in radiology, just to take

• 58:55Speaker 00

  one example, what's happening in medicine that's really changing because of AI. And the displacement that could come with that, I think, is enormous, and I don't think we're prepared. You know, I don't know, you know, I don't want to get into prediction games about which things will happen in which order. But I think it's clear that it's big. It's clear that it's fast, it's coming, it's accelerating. And my big worry is that if we're already at a level of concentration of wealth and power that no republic has ever survived.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  Is this going to be a development that just makes wealth and power even more concentrated in even fewer hands? I don't think it has to be. I think that's where, you know, good policy can make a difference. But I think if we just sleepwalk into it, that could happen. It could be even more destabilizing.

• 59:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The thing that you just said is the key. It doesn't have to be. It requires very smart, thoughtful legislation. I think that we had some really idiotic legislation under Biden that President Trump and David Sacks have largely unwound. These diffusion rules, the gatekeeping, all of those things Pete would have seen us lose to China. Just to be very clear, as a technologist who's in the middle of it, who is investing and building. What I'm telling you is those historic rules were terrible and dumb. And they had one or two companies who would have basically had all the spoils and the rest of us would have been standing on the outside looking in. That's no longer the case. We can run the race now. But I think what you said there is very critical. It doesn't have to be a winner take all or winner take most outcome.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  And to me, that's, you know, that's not just a question of tech policy. Like, that's a question of political economy.

• 1:00:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, this is, by the way, and this is, by the way, I just want to be clear. The reason why it was likely under Biden is because it was so difficult to actually talk to him, he wouldn't talk to anybody. The difference with Trump, just so it's clear, is that he'll talk to everybody, he'll make his own decision, but he gets the broad tapestry of everybody's feedback. The danger of that Biden approach is that when one or two people are allowed in and everybody else is shut out, and you can't even find a way of just proposing ideas or explaining how it's going to be, you get things like the Biden diffusion rule. So just as something to think about, I think being open and being available to people is a really good way of running the country.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  That's one thing I definitely believe in.

• 1:01:09Jason Calacanis?

  If you win, Pete, are you going to forget us and not come back on the pod? And you invite us to the White House? Or if you win, can we still, can I get an invite to the White House?

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  I would love for this not to be our last conversation.

• 1:01:19Jason Calacanis?

  Our friends at Polymarket, I'm sure you know all about these prediction markets and how good they are.

• 1:01:27Jason Calacanis?

  Looks like Gavin, AOC oddly in second place and then yourself in third place right now. Gavin obviously is running up the hill. Who knows if he takes the arrows first, but it looks like you're in a pretty good position here. What are your thoughts here on the early indicators of who's connecting with the sharps over at Polymarket?

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

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

• 1:01:53Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe, maybe a day, Pete.

• 1:01:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Maybe a day, Pete, maybe a day.

• 1:01:58Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, what do you think about Gavin coming out just strongly and saying, "Hey, I'm running. Obviously, I'm running." He's been pretty clear about it. Do you think that's a smart savvy move or is that a crazy move three years?

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  I don't know. I mean, you know, one interesting thing about what the current president did is if I remember right, he didn't even wait for the midterms in order to announce. So, you know, it feels like the timelines keep shifting. I'll tell you, like, I'm in no hurry to be in the middle of presidential politics. Obviously, it's something I care about. It's something I have done already once before in 2020. But, you know, this year, this is the first year in about 15 that I haven't been in office or running for office and I'm kind of enjoying it. I mean, I'm working hard, supporting candidates I believe in. We have a PAC and I travel a lot and speak a lot. But, you know, there will be a time for those kinds of things and I'm not, I'm not going to try to rush that timeline.

• 1:02:52Jason Calacanis?

  Do you support Mamdammi? Did you support him? Did you come out publicly for him or you have concerns?

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  I'm not getting directly involved in that race or endorsing or anything like that.

• 1:03:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're gonna, you're gonna dock the globalize the intifada bullet? I mean, that is the craziest thing I've ever heard.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, that's, that's a, that's a problem. You know, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of views that, I mean, it's no surprise or secret that he is further left than I am in the Democratic coalition. That said, you know, I was a 29 year old mayor that a lot of people wrote off and didn't take seriously and was able to get big things done. So, you know, I expect that he's gonna win.

• 1:03:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Grand socialist experiment in the, what was at least before the greatest city in America and one of the greatest cities in the world.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  Well, you know, the thing about winning is you get a chance to find out very quickly how good your ideas are and whether they'll have the results you have in mind. And you know, that's something that I expected he'll win and then we'll all get to see.

• 1:03:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see when that 54% tax hits like if people are like, you know what, Miami and Texas look pretty great and maybe I'm going to bounce. All right, listen, P. Buttigieg, thanks so much for taking the time. We'll have you on again. Great to talk with you and we appreciate you coming on the program. See you all next time. Bye bye.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Same here.

• 1:04:06Jason Calacanis?

  Great job.