The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Ep. 049 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Summary

Lemonade Stand Ep. 049: The Pete Buttigieg Episode

Podcast: Lemonade Stand
Date: February 11, 2026
Hosts: Aiden, Atrioc (Brandon), DougDoug (Doug)
Special Guest: Pete Buttigieg
Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network

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Episode Overview

This episode features former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, presidential candidate, and mayor Pete Buttigieg. The hosts, business and tech content creators, bring their signature mix of humor and probing questions to topics ranging from youth and politics, infrastructure and public spending, wealth inequality, the future of American democracy, AI disruption, and the shifting political landscape. Buttigieg shares his unique perspectives on the structural problems facing America, why the country is stuck with political and generational gridlock, and his views surrounding urgent reforms—interwoven with anecdotes, policy proposals, and the podcast’s comedic banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Pete Buttigieg’s Background & Youth in Politics

• Comparison and Humorous Introduction
  Aiden jokingly compares his Super Smash Bros. Melee achievements to Buttigieg’s academic and political accomplishments (01:18–02:34).
• Early Mayoral Run
  Buttigieg describes South Bend as a post-industrial “licking its wounds” city, and his youth candidacy was a message of belief in the city’s future.
  • Quote:

    “Running for office at that age, in a way, was my message... there are young people who believe that this community has a future.” — Pete (03:03)

  • Older voters appreciated seeing a fresh face, representing “serious change rather than the status quo.” (03:03–04:35)
• Barriers to Young People Entering Politics
  Buttigieg cites systemic and cultural inertia, “waiting your turn,” and structural features like first-past-the-post elections as obstacles.
  • Quote:

    “The younger you are, the longer you’re planning to be here, the more you have irreversibly at stake... These decisions are going to be made with or without you.” — Pete (06:21)

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Engagement & Local Politics

• Making a Difference Close to Home
  Buttigieg urges young people to get involved locally—attend meetings, run or support campaigns, “show up in 3D.” (08:02–10:30)
  • Congress is difficult to access; local government is porous and open.
  • Quote:

    “As mayor, anybody could come to a city council meeting, you could say whatever you wanted and everybody would have to listen.” — Pete (09:08)

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Transportation, Public Infrastructure, and Trains!

• The U.S. and Its Love/Hate of Trains:
  The show breaks into a nerdy fan moment about trains, the Brightline project, and compares US rail to Asia/Europe.
  • Buttigieg: “I’m very excited about trains.” (11:15)
  • “You get what you pay for... what we did was the biggest investment in passenger rail in 50 years... but even that’s a down payment.” — Pete (11:21)
  • Major challenge is cost—“exponential hockey-stick” increases the closer you get to city centers (13:55–15:35).
• Why is U.S. Infrastructure So Expensive?
  • U.S. spends a lot but often wastefully; cost inflation comes from political headaches, piecemeal funding, “irrational blockage” (16:36–19:14).
  • Comparison: Spain builds railways for a fraction of U.S. cost.
  • Buttigieg connects this to political dysfunction: “Every time that even might happen, it adds to the project timeline, and that adds to the cost.” — Pete (18:36)

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The Leaky Pipe: Efficiency Crisis in Government

• Systemic Waste Across Sectors
  • U.S. throws money at health care, military, infrastructure but poor outcomes—hosts analogize to pouring water into a leaky pipe (19:14–19:51).
  • Buttigieg connects this to lack of competitive democracy: only ~10% of seats are competitive in Congress (19:51–21:06).
• Political Dysfunction’s Real-World Cost
  • Partisan battles lead to irrational project delays, e.g. bridges/tunnels delayed for non-policy reasons (21:06–22:00).

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Deep Dive: Healthcare System & Reform

• Why U.S. Health Care is Broken
  • “Classic textbook example where the market doesn’t work”—few providers, insurance as middleman, inelastic and high-stakes demand (21:56–23:37).
• Medicare for All—But How Do You Control Costs?
  • Medicare’s inability to negotiate drug prices is political, not economic—now changing, “but they only pick 10” drugs (26:22–27:13).
  • Quote:

    “If Medicare is allowed to bargain for lower drug prices, you get lower drug prices.” — Pete (26:50)

  • A large majority of Americans agree on many reforms, but they can’t get through today’s Washington (27:13–28:41).

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Big Picture: Why U.S. Democracy Feels Stuck

• Constitution: Elegant, But Now a Stumbling Block?
  • The U.S. amendment process is harder than in almost any other country; “we haven’t done a substantive amendment in around 50 years.” (29:55–31:17)
  • Electoral college, gerrymandering, voting rights, money in politics—structural drags on accountability and fairness (32:15–34:13).
  • Quote:

    “We’re the only presidential democracy where you come in second place and you get to be president.” — Pete (32:50)

• It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
  • Buttigieg uplifts: Americans are “soaked” in a status quo that isn’t working, “but it doesn’t have to be that way.” (34:26)
• Reforming Institutions
  • Many fixes don’t even require new amendments: Supreme Court size, House membership, adding states (36:15–36:53).

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Wealth Inequality, Taxation, and Fiscal Responsibility

• On Raising Taxes and Fiscal Realism
  • “We need to have more and better sources of revenue, and need to be more efficient with our spending.” — Pete (42:07)
  • The U.S. dependence on debt will run out, necessitating a reckoning with borrowing and spending (44:33–45:13).
• Tax Policy and Enforcement
  • Buttigieg pushes for higher taxes on the wealthy and tightening up “leakage”/evasion (45:38–46:17).
  • Story of Svalbard, tax havens, and ATM tourism (46:31–47:16).
• Wealth Tax & Fair Share
  • Taxes on the wealthy need to be higher: “The idea of a wealth tax is not fundamentally different from the idea of a property tax.”
  • Calls out the myth that taxing the rich destroys economic growth—historically untrue. (48:34–51:05)
  • Quote:

    “Taxes are your membership fee to be in a civilized society.” — Pete (51:05)

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Intergenerational Fairness & Entitlements

• Social Security, Medicare, and the Generational Mortgage
  • Buttigieg acknowledges that most federal spending goes to older Americans through mandatory programs, but calls attention to “interest” (debt payments) as the least fair across generations (52:10–54:17).
  • Moving into adulthood and home ownership is harder than ever for Millennials and Gen Z (54:17–55:18).
  • Quote:

    “If you were born the year my mom was born... you got a 90% chance economically of coming out ahead of your parents. If you’re born the year I was born... it’s a coin flip.” — Pete (54:17)

• Housing Crisis & Political Inertia
  • Buttigieg critiques the political system for privileging property owners and resisting price corrections; supports more supply and fairer tax/spending reforms before touching “muscle and bone” of social programs (56:28–58:53).

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AI Disruption & The Economic Future

• AI: An OMG-Apocalypse or Opportunity?
  • Buttigieg is “in the 8s, 9s” on the AI concern-o-meter, believing policymakers are underreacting (60:48–61:11).
  • Automating not just routine but white-collar work; compares impending disruption to deindustrialization (62:43–63:49).
  • Major fear: AI will simultaneously end many “adjacent” careers—Threat to both legal and insurance professions, for example (63:01).
• Distribution of Wealth & Value in an AI Economy
  • Buttigieg: “AI can lead to either a shorter work week and more money for most people—or more ridiculous concentrations of wealth.”
  • History lesson—extreme inequality threatens democracy (66:45–67:08).
  • Quote:

    “If you appropriately capture some of the value from what AI might generate and return it to the people... that’s not confiscation, that’s participation.” — Pete (68:00)

• Policy Levers for the AI Era:
  • Smart, scalable policies are needed—“flex up or down” to capture/redistribute AI value based on scale of disruption.

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Election 2026, Political Landscape, and the Path Forward

• State of Play: Republican Fractures
  • Warning signs: GOP’s “death grip” is weakening as local and state Republicans break with national party on issues like gerrymandering and AI (69:04–71:21).
• Democratic Party Renewal
  • The Dems “can’t just restore the old status quo.” Need new, younger faces and a message tuned to “what we’re actually building toward,” focusing on tangible improvements (73:24–75:32).
  • Political change is about “pulling people together into a shared project,” not generational warfare (57:06).

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Democracy, Election Legitimacy, and Trust

• Fears of Election Subversion
  • Hosts voice anxiety about a repeat of 2020—Buttigieg cautions that as Trump gets weaker, he becomes “more dangerous” and is explicit about plans (78:13–78:35).
  • The only safeguard is mass, bipartisan refusal to accept authoritarian moves:

    “That doesn’t work if the people won’t tolerate it.” — Pete (78:59)

• Election & Political Reform
  • Encourages efforts to advance election reform (campaign finance, timelines, competitive districts).
  • Term limits: Buttigieg has become more skeptical, noting experienced lobbyists can dominate inexperienced legislatures when terms are short (82:32–83:44).

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Notable Quotes & Humorous Highlights

• “You get what you pay for... the more you get into these areas that are built up, the more expensive it is, and we shouldn’t tolerate it.” — Pete (13:55)
• “Our whole country got set up around an idea more radical than anything we’ve just talked about—not having a king.” — Pete (35:14)
• “Taxes are your membership fee to be in a civilized society—and we ought to think of it that way.” — Pete (51:05)
• “When the Roman Republic was hitting this level of inequality, that’s about the time it stopped being a republic and started being an empire.” — Pete (66:59)
• Banter:
  • On term limits:

    “Have you even considered that maybe the people in charge aren’t experienced enough?” — Aiden (82:25) “I need a president who cares more about the seed vault.” — DougDoug (46:39)

  • “Is it short for Peter?” — Aiden, in post-episode chit chat (88:14)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 01:15 – Introduction and Buttigieg’s background
• 03:03 – Youth, South Bend, and running for office
• 04:44 – Why are America’s leaders so old?
• 08:02 – How young people can get involved locally
• 10:32 – Department of Transportation, trains, infrastructure
• 13:55 – Why LA-Vegas Brightline project doesn’t go to downtown LA
• 16:36 – U.S. transportation and public spending inefficiency
• 19:51 – Systemic waste and the “leaky pipe” metaphor
• 21:56 – Why markets don’t work for healthcare; Medicare negotiation
• 29:55 – Amending the constitution – why it’s so hard in the U.S.
• 32:50 – “Coming in second place and getting to be president is nuts”
• 42:07 – Fiscal responsibility, taxation, and government efficiency
• 46:31 – Svalbard tangent—a rare, quirky interlude
• 60:48 – AI “hypometer,” job disruptions, and the wealth question
• 69:04 – Republican fractures, gerrymandering, party control
• 73:24 – What must Democrats do to earn real trust?
• 78:13 – Fears of election subversion and protecting democracy
• 85:55 – Final question: Building trust in government and each other

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Closing Reflections

• Buttigieg reiterates that the fundamental crisis is a breakdown of trust—between people, institutions, and within society.
  • Quote:

    “The breakdown of trust between people and their government, between people and each other, could be lethal if we don’t do something.” — Pete (85:57)

• Solid leadership, responsiveness, constitutional and economic reforms, and genuine outcomes can rebuild that trust and turn the tide.

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To Listeners Who Didn’t Tune In

This episode offers a blend of sharp policy analysis, historical reflection, and uniquely Lemonade Stand humor—a spirited hour-plus that covers today’s biggest issues, ground-level action steps, and why hope might just be justified after all.

Transcript

[Aiden]

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[Brandon]

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[Aiden]

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[Pete Buttigieg]

Dead.

[Aiden]

Oh, yeah.

[Brandon]

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[Aiden]

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[Brandon]

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[Doug]

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[Aiden]

I'm not.

[Brandon]

Finally. PDFs back from the dead. Certain.

[Doug]

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[Brandon]

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[Aiden]

Is registered broker, dealer, and member of FENRA, NFA and SIPC. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Lemonade Stand podcast featuring special guest Pete Buttigieg. Welcome to. Welcome to the Stand.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Thank you. Glad to be here. Hi, Pete.

[Brandon]

Thanks for being here.

[Pete Buttigieg]

This is awesome.

[Aiden]

Yeah, this is really cool for us. I wanted to start by introducing you a little bit to our audience. Maybe they don't know. And I wanted to showcase some of your accomplishments because you're an accomplished man. So if we could pull up this. This scene. Perry, at age 22, you graduated from Harvard. And I'm just doing a bit of comparison here to one of our hosts. This is Aiden. I don't know if you met him across the pod here at 22. I don't know if you know this, he actually got 502nd place at a Smash Brothers Melee video game tournament.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Ooh.

[Aiden]

So, like, he was, you know, I'm saying it's both.

[Brandon]

And is that a prestigious video?

[Aiden]

It's very prestigious.

[Brandon]

Okay, cool.

[Aiden]

Then by 25, you guys diverged even further because you were a road scholar and went to Oxford. But he actually moved up in his placement and got seventh at a Super Smash Melee.

[Doug]

You went to Oxford too. That was a big tournament. That was a big tournament.

[Aiden]

Yeah. I'm getting my point, because by 29 then, you were elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana. But Aiden is not yet 29. So his potential in super satchel is melee is kind of unlimited. And so I want to ask you, how can the American public trust somebody who doesn't have that many melee tournament experience as.

[Brandon]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Fair question.

[Aiden]

You haven't accomplished nearly as much as my friend Aiden here.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Everywhere I go, people ask me, just try.

[Doug]

I didn't know this segment was happening. I didn't know I was on trial.

[Aiden]

I wanted to spotlight your big deal. You've done a lot of stuff. Aiden, I do want to ask the.

[Brandon]

Idea that you're, you know, Aiden's age and you are becoming mayor after going to Oxford, and it's this. This is crazy.

[Pete Buttigieg]

So what.

[Brandon]

What is it like being that young running one of these positions?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Still trying to figure out where you found some of those photos.

[Aiden]

They did not line up with the year.

[Pete Buttigieg]

So the thing is, I should probably start by explaining a little bit about South Bend. People have heard of it usually because they watch Notre Dame football or basketball, but we were a city that. That really grew up around the auto industry. Studebaker was as big of a car maker as the big three. It would have been the big four if they hadn't gone out of business in the 60s. And it was a city that was really trying to figure out if it was going to make it, kind of licking its wounds. And a lot of young people kind of got the message growing up, as happens across the industrial Midwest, that if you want to succeed, you have to get out. And I was one of a lot who did. All of which is to answer your question by saying, when I. When I realized that I belonged there, wanted to come back, and then ultimately wanted to run for mayor, running at that office, running for office that age, in a way, kind of was my message. It was this way to say, look, there are young people who believe that this community has a future. And to my amazement, there are actually a lot of older voters who are particularly excited about the idea of a younger person stepping forward to try to take the city in a different direction. So it was, you know, obviously there was some work to do to establish some credibility that I was up to the task. And it was a leap of faith. It's kind of always a leap of faith when you put somebody in charge of your city or your state or your country as a voter. Right. But that much more so when you're in your 20s. But I actually found a lot of people embrace that as kind of a way to kind of certify that I was serious about change and not just gonna represent a status quo that people were frustrated with in the city.

[Aiden]

Why do you think it is that we have so few young people running for we have such an elderly Senate presidency? Why do you think that is?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, and to be clear, this is not normal. So the gap between the average age of our elected officials and the average age of our citizens is wider in the United States than it is in a lot of other places. Some of that, I think, is cultural. I think we've grown up with this idea that you're supposed to wait your turn or wait many, many turns before you step forward. Obviously, I didn't believe in that. I'm running for mayor in my 20s, I ran for president in my 30s, and people responded. But there is that kind of cultural expectation. Expectation that you just kind of wait. And I encourage young people who care about politics and care about their. Their country or their community not to do that. Not to wait. Yeah. I mean, you should know what you're doing, have a vision if you're thinking about running for office. But I wish more people would. There are also some features of our system that might actually systematically make that more true. So compared to other democracies, we have more of a winner take all system in the way that our congressional elections work. For example, a lot of countries, you'd be in a place where there would be multip members in a single district and the top three or something like that get through. Some political scientists have argued that in that setup, you tend to have more young candidates or new candidates, because a party will put forward a whole roster of people versus here, where it's down to whichever two people had the money and the institutional support to become the nominees of the two parties in every race. Yeah, at least in most places, you do have those open primaries, which I think can help with that a little bit. And we have seen very young people, obviously that are an exception to the rule. But I'm really concerned that there are a lot of structural things in the US that systematically kind of repress the chances for a lot of young people to step up at a very moment where we need more young people to be engaged. The pitch I always make is the younger you are, the longer you're planning to be here, the more you have irreversibly at stake a whole set of decisions. And these decisions are going to be made with or without you. So at the very least, you ought to be voting. But also you should find ways to be involved in Those processes, you know.

[Doug]

The system is putting Forward the best 75 year olds possible.

[Aiden]

We talked about on this show. But, you know, I think in my lifetime, I'm. I'm 34. Every president, maybe other than Obama was born exactly in 1946. Every single one.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Think about that.

[Aiden]

That's astounding.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I mean, Trump, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, they were all born within a few weeks of each other. Yeah. And so, you know, we became. We. They entered our consciousness maybe at different ages, but they're all the same age as each other, except they have the same kind of.

[Aiden]

They grew up in the same values, they have the same understanding.

[Brandon]

Do we need some sort of like mega birth year where we create when the millennials take over the five greatest millennials? And then we got.

[Aiden]

Can we run it for you?

[Brandon]

I am curious. I was going to ask this later about your role as mayor, but since you brought it up, we have a lot of young folks, including. We're young.

[Aiden]

We're young, right?

[Brandon]

We're young, right?

[Aiden]

Check.

[Brandon]

And what you just said about being involved. I personally have felt a sense of helplessness with politics. I think that's why I often am just drawn to tech and not to current events, because it feels like, well, at least I can make a computer do a thing. There's like a result that can happen. So, you know, for you in your 20s who have gone and successfully do this, how specifically would you encourage people to go out and be involved when it feels so intractable?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Well, start, I would say start with what you care about. So, you know, for different people, that means different things. For me, it had to do with the fate of the city that I'd grown up in. We were being called a dying city in the national press. And I wanted to be part of a generation that would change that. But I would also say more broadly, there's a lot of processes that play out close to home, like these very unsexy things, like the way a planning board is meeting or a zoning board or a city council or something like that. And maybe that doesn't sound like your idea of a fun way to spend a Tuesday night, but things that everybody should care about, like whether housing is going to be built in your community that'll take the edge off of what it costs to rent or to try to own a home. Those play out in some of these processes. Not a lot of people go. So I'm not even just talking about the people who run or appointed to a board or a commission or city council or something like that. But just the people who even show up tend to skew older. They tend to be people with a direct special interest. And I think a lot of folks don't realize those processes are open. Like, you can show up. You could show up at. I mean, when I was mayor, anybody could come to a city council meeting, and I think you got three minutes, you could say whatever you wanted, and everybody would have to listen. And I actually think there's something important and healthy about that if and only if a lot of people step up. I mean, you compare that to Congress, where in order to testify in Congress, you have to be invited or subpoenaed, like one or the other. And there are so many other processes in state and local government where have to do to make your voice heard is show up. Right. And I think, I worry sometimes that in a more kind of virtualized digital environment that the younger you are, the more that's kind of the environment you came up in. You might overlook the fact that there are a lot of these processes where if you show up in 3D, you can literally require four selected officials to hear what you have to say. As far as running, I think the important thing is to again, obviously have a vision, know what you care about, and, you know, watch a certain office. Maybe it's your member of Congress, maybe it's something more local. And, you know, one of two things will happen. Either you'll see a leader and you'll think, all right, they make a lot of sense. I want to. I want to support them with my vote, maybe more. Maybe you want to donate. Maybe you want to volunteer, be part of a campaign. Or you watch them and you're like, well, shit, I could do it better than that. Right? And if you have that instinct, then that's a pretty good indication that maybe you should try.

[Brandon]

After mayor and then a stint in the military, you went and became the Department of Transportation head, which is pretty important and incredible job. We are big fans of trains here. We talk about trains of trains. Like big fans of trains. In fact, maybe actually. Perry, do you have it ready? Can we have the train hyper meter? So we have a kind of running height meter of where exactly we all stand on trains at the moment. So we've been talking a lot about Brightline. We've read in books about China and what they've been doing with their development. Right now, Atrioc, I think he's sitting at like maybe a four, so, you know, high fours, weirdly low.

[Aiden]

That's not.

[Brandon]

Aiden is currently the most enthusiastic about trains. And I believe recently, yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle. But we're taking that. We're big trains fans. I'm wondering, you know, of all the things that you handled at the dot, how do you feel about trains? Specifically, how excited are you about trains?

[Pete Buttigieg]

I'm very excited about trains.

[Doug]

Yes.

[Pete Buttigieg]

The potentials.

[Brandon]

And yeah, put them up at the 10.

[Pete Buttigieg]

That's good. I think that first of all, if you are at all kind of competitive about the idea that America ought to be leading the way, then you got to ask yourself, how is it that people in so many other countries enjoy a higher standard of train service than we do? And compared to what we're used to in the U.S. i wouldn't even be asking for Japanese level. Italian level would be a lot better than we've got. And there's all kinds of reasons why and we can dig in on that. But I think the more basic reason why is you get what you pay for. Right. So what we did was the biggest investment in passenger rail in 50 years since Amtrak was set up in the first place. And even that's kind of a down payment on what's going to be needed in the long run. But also working with. You mentioned Brightline, right. Running from Las Vegas to Southern California, incredibly exciting. And part of why I was really excited about that and we funded it with billions of dollars to help make it happen is I would love for the conversation to. With anybody who comes back from Las Vegas instead of just like, you know, somebody who got back from Japan and they're like, why can't we have this? So many people go to Vegas and if you see it there and come back and say, why can't we have this in more places? I think it becomes something that there's more and more public demand for. But we've got to also just never mind a high speed rail like Brightline. We just need regular speed rail to be better in this country. We'll take slow speed. I mean, what most people would consider regular speed would be a big improvement.

[Brandon]

For if it's faster than LA traffic, we're fine. Like, we're.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Well, let's go.

[Aiden]

The great city of la.

[Doug]

I actually do have a question about that specific project because maybe, maybe you can illuminate some of it. So when we had looked into that, admittedly one of my frustrations with it is seeing that instead of going all the way into LA to a place like Union Station, which is the main station in the center of la, it starts out pretty far east, more towards Ontario Yeah. And when you just like math out what like driving takes to Vegas or even the cost of like a cheap flight from like Burbank Airport to go to Vegas, it all of a sudden like wasn't as appealing to me anymore. And I'm not saying that that project shouldn't exist. I. It's like one of my number one personal priorities is that I want to see that type of transportation expand. But I am wondering that with an example like this that seems so, it would be so obviously more successful if it went into the heart of LA and was more accessible to the pop. What keeps a project like that, that has all that funding from having that kind of obvious access point, what stops that?

[Pete Buttigieg]

So in a word, cost. So first of all, I don't disagree. And I think the long run vision for a mature, developed network and set of routes has to be city center to city center, downtown to downtown, population center of gravity to population center of gravity. But I think where we are right now in the US is you just got to start somewhere. So getting it as far as basically Rancho Cucamonga gets you into Southern California and I think creates more of a level of demand and expectation that we start facing the cost or tearing down the barriers that create the cost. It's like a exponential hockey stick kind of thing. The more you get into these areas that are built up and just to give you a sense of how extreme it is, you know, in New York we worked on a project to extend the second Avenue subway. Something I believe really needs to be done up, get it up past where it goes now, 125th Street. And it is in the billions now to get that extension. And the tunnel is already there. The tunnel was built 50 years ago. So just getting the stations, the signaling, the, the, the right of way, the clearance to do that, is that expensive now? We shouldn't tolerate that either. And there's a whole body of work going on about how to make it less expensive. Pound for pound per square mile, however you want to measure it. To build anything in this country, definitely including transportation, that's going to require legal reform, structural reform, permitting reform. When we do that, I think we have a better shot at these, these things getting built out. But I think where we are now is we just need, somewhere in America we need actual butts in seats on revenue service, high speed rail. And then I think it becomes unstoppable. And I think we become more willing as a country to tear down the barriers that have made it hard to build.

[Doug]

Could you speak a little more to the, to the funding part of that, because I think it touches on a broader subject that we wanted to get to. But the just with public transportation, it's kind of my understanding that we actually do spend a ton of money on transportation in the country. Like a lot of cities, even LA Metro spend, have enormous budgets to be able to spend on their public transport network. And compared to other cities that I would say are like more successful. Like if you looked at a Tokyo or a Paris or really anywhere else in the world or any rural farm.

[Brandon]

In China.

[Doug]

And they, they have like kind of more scrutiny, more stringent budgets, like and they're able to make it work. And I'm wondering, is there some sort of like chicken egg issue with public transportation funding in the country? Because we do spend a ton, we do spend a ton of money on it. So what's the gap there and like how that money is being spent versus how people are able to successfully accomplish that in other places?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Well, one issue we have is relative to what we're willing to spend on public transit or trains. We're always spending much more on cars and roads. And obviously I want our cars and roads to function well. But we've torqued it in a way that actually pushes people onto the roads in a way by a mix of kind of subsidies and, and deficiencies on the other end. So that leads to kind of a vicious cycle where the land starts to get planned and used in ways that assume that everybody has to have a car. And that's definitely true in parts of the Midwest. It's true in Southern California. It's true in a lot of kind of low and middle density places. That then makes it that much more expensive if you try to shift things or improve things like what we're trying to do with transit. Now here's another thing that's interesting. We don't have to have transit built on the same logic that dominated the way we did it, let's say 50 years ago, like a hub and spoke system for bus routes. That was basically the only way to do it before you had things like GPS or on demand rides. Now it's not obvious in a middle density area that that's the best way to organize your transit because you can have more on demand pooling micro transit. All these things adding up into a more rational network that per person or per ride should be cheaper. The other thing you mentioned is the comparison to other countries. And I think this is why, and frankly this is a challenge in my party. This is why we can't Just accept that this is what things are always going to cost. Because as you mentioned, you look at some of these European countries, they have environmental standards at least as good as ours, probably better. They have labor standards at least as stringent as ours, often tougher. And they are still managing. Like the amount of money it takes to build a mile of railway in Spain, for example, is a fraction of what it costs here. And that is a result of really not so much technical but political barriers here, the number of steps you have to get through to get anything funded, the uncertainty of funding. I mean, right now the President is holding a $16 billion round of funding for a tunnel that is more than 100 years old in New York, New Jersey. The Hudson Tunnels, they're 110 years old. They were damaged by Superstorm Sandy. That was more than a decade ago. Hundreds of thousands of people a day go through this tunnel. It needs to be done like yesterday. And now it's getting stopped because of political bullshit. Really, when that happens, every time that happens, every time that even might happen, it adds to the uncertainty, it adds to the project timeline, and that adds to the cost. So there's no question that we need to design and build things in a better way. I worked on that in my time at dot. But we got a long way to go as a country.

[Aiden]

This feels like a bigger. We talk about something along this line of the show. A lot bigger than just transportation, though. We had this idea of like, imagine a leaky pipe and you're pouring 10 gallons of money into it and only a little bit comes out for the actual service. And it just feels like we throw more money in our country at health care, we throw more money at the military, more money at transportation on a lot of things. But the outcomes we get are often subpar, like way less than the dollar amount we're spending. And so you mentioned, like, specific problems with transportation. But why do you think this political bullshit has invaded almost every aspect of what the government is supposed to be doing? Like what?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Well, I think part of it is that the government is less and less structured to solve problems. So think about, think about our Congress, for example, our legislature. We got 435 seats. About 40 of them are actually competitive. Like, you actually really would have to wonder whether the Democrat or the Republican is going to win. You might estimate that number a little higher, a little lower, but sure, that's a small percentage. So 1 out of 10.

[Doug]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

And the rest of them, it's pretty much decided when you have your nominee. All that really matters is the fight within the party, the primary. Right. For what's going to be a deep red Republican seat or a deep blue Democratic seat. That makes it much less likely that when there's a political obstacle to solving a technical problem, that people are really going to come together and get it done. Because the only thing you really have to worry about is the political extreme of your own party. So, for example, when it comes to this New York tunnel that I'm really concerned about, because it's the largest single transportation project in the country, and they just stopped. Because the president just stopped it. He just doesn't like Chuck Schumer and he's shutting down the President. It's not like he said that doesn't.

[Aiden]

Sound like a Trump idea. There's no way to be fair.

[Doug]

Chuck's had a lot of attitude lately. I've been keeping an eye on it.

[Pete Buttigieg]

It's not like they. It's not like they said, oh, we just discovered this huge design flaw. Right. It's not like that. It's just they're nakedly admitting he even said that they would. They. He would start funding the project again if they named Dulles Airport and Penn Station after Donald Trump. Right now they're trying.

[Doug]

It's not so much to ask.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Now they're trying to do all the.

[Aiden]

Highways after him and the train.

[Brandon]

I mean, I heard the tunnel's woke. So if we get that.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Exactly. Yeah. There's a bridge to Canada, the Gordie Howe Bridge. The Canadians are actually paying for it, and it included a lot of American materials.

[Doug]

Who's paying for it?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, Mexico didn't pay for the wall, but Canada was paying for the bridge.

[Brandon]

Thanks.

[Doug]

And, yeah, I didn't clear that much appreciation. Didn't ask me about that.

[Pete Buttigieg]

And now the President's saying, well, I'm not gonna let it open. Not really clear why. Well, cause he's mad at Canada, I guess. But it's not exactly irrational. That kind of irrational is really costly. And the reason that has to do with what I was just saying earlier is that normally, regardless of right left, the people from that region would stand up even to a president of their own party. The elected officials. Right. You would expect Michigan Republicans to say, no, you can't just stop a bridge into Michigan that's critical to our economy. Republicans in New Jersey, New York would be standing right next to Democrats in New Jersey and New York saying, you can't do this. But we don't have that. So I know that it can sound kind of technical or Arcane to be talking about things like the way districts are drawn in Congress and connect that up to how much it costs to build a mile of tunnel or a stretch of road. But I really think there's a relationship between those things. You go through the different industries. Every example is a little different. You mentioned healthcare. Part of that is because it's actually a classic textbook example of where a normal market tends not to work. If you think about just what you learn in economics about where a market works well, the market for peanut butter, where you got a set number of choices anybody can enter, anybody can make their own brand of peanut butter. Everybody knows what peanut butter is. And you have a certain willingness to pay for it. And maybe you have an extra willingness to pay for it. If it's better, but only so much. Then all your textbook market dynamics kick in. Supply, demand, and it pushes the cost down to be relatively close to what it actually costs to produce. None of that's true in health care. I mean, first of all, you can't just jump in and be an alternate provider of health care. It takes years to get to be a doctor. And there's a lot of restrictions on the number of doctors in a particular specialty who gets certified every year. The person who is making the purchasing decision is not always the same thing as the customer. Because you got this insurance company as middleman. Right. Your willingness to pay is not really on a normal higher. It's not like peanut butter. Right. Especially thinking you can't walk away. Yeah. Or if you think you're going to die if you don't get this treatment, then you don't care if it's anything, whatever, get it for me. And so there are all these examples where normal market conditions don't apply. Which is why, in my view, we need to be ready to have a public system where the private sector can still be there, but they have to demonstrate that they're better than the public system in order to get your business. We call it Medicare for all who want it versus Medicare for all whether you want it or not. That's what we call it when I was running for president. Because places that do that don't just take better care of people. They actually have a record of having more efficient use of dollars. In other words, more of the dollar that goes into your healthcare actually goes toward treating you instead of going into this administrative muck where it just kind of disappears in bureaucracy. Although I am hopeful in healthcare that it's one of many areas where if we get AI right, I'm not sure we will, but if we do, you're unlikely benefit the cost.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Nope.

[Doug]

Well, I actually wanted to ask about healthcare because I think it's a really good example. So I'm.

[Brandon]

We'll come back to AI later. We're going to talk about Vibe coding apps and for 45 you could have to do a Vibe coded to do list app. We're going to do a bunch of.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah, very like pro universal healthcare of some kind. Right. Like this, the system that we have at every turn, like, whether I talk to friends who are doctors, whether I talk to my friends who are just trying to get a checkup and they don't have insurance or they have bad insurance. Like, it is terrible at like every level. It feels like one of the problems with Medicare for all or a public system of any kind is that that Medicare will cover the bills as they are in an American system. And to cover everyone under a system like Medicare now is literally. It's as much as I would like to just say spend the money, it's literally not. To me, it literally is not possible. And I think there's a lot of rhetoric around let's create some sort of like, more encompassing Medicare program that more people are covered under. But how do you combat the cost part? Like the fact that some drug here might be hundreds of dollars versus like the 10 or 20 that it is in another country or a treatment the same way. And I think that's such a critical component of solving this that never gets talked about. And I'm wondering when you think about a healthcare solution in the long run, like how that part of it gets changed.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yes, I think this is hugely important because the debates over how we structure the insurance, they really matter. But if we do nothing about the actual underlying cost of care, then we're not solving the problem and we have to do both. So getting the insurance structure right means more of the dollar actually goes toward the actual cost. Meanwhile, you have to make sure the actual cost is lower. How do you do that? Part of it is making sure you use the market power that your insurer has. So, for example, we know for a fact that if Medicare is allowed to bargain for lower drug prices, you get lower drug prices. Are we not allowed to currently. Right. Legally prevent.

[Brandon]

That? We can do as of this year, Right? Yes. They only pick 10.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah.

[Doug]

I'm sorry to sideline my own question. Why? Why is that not allowed? That seems psychotic and I feel like I must. I must be missing something.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Politics. It's politics, right? It's. It's the fact that obviously you've got some very powerful industries that can get their way and make sure that what seems like the most commonsensical thing in the world doesn't actually happen. And if I can zoom out for a bit, yeah, there are so many things in this country where, okay, you don't have 100% agreement. We got lots of different ideas in this country, but basically, at least 2/3 of the country thinks we ought to do something in a certain way. Whether we're talking about having a more progressive tax code where the wealthiest are paying more than they do now, whether we're talking about health care, having the government maybe not take over everything, of course, but play a more aggressive role in making sure you can get your health taken care of. Whether we're talking about social, personal liberties, right to choose, marriage equality, whether we're talking about gun safety, wherever you are, on Second Amendment, at least making sure there's universal background checks. These are all things that have at least 2/3 of the country on board, and they can't happen in today's Washington when the entire concept of America, like, the whole way we invented this country, was the idea that if you have a certain democratic system of government, what that government comes up with will be more aligned with what most people want. We don't have that right now. And to me, that's a foundational problem. That kind of. If we address that properly and there's a whole set of things I could take you through on what I think that looks like, then all the other specific problems around healthcare policy, transportation policy, tax policy start to get better.

[Doug]

Do you have any idea how you. I think an overwhelming feeling I have about what you're saying is this feeling of being at the bottom of this hole we've dug so deep. And when I look at. Not to say that other countries don't have problems of their own, but, like, if you looked at China, like, they can. They can cut out a lot of this through, like, kind of authoritarian means. You can skip a lot of the, like, the red tape and the political bullshit by being authoritarian. I'm not saying go in that direction. I'm saying, like, that's one way. Or you could look at another country, like Denmark, that I think probably has a stronger democracy right now than we do, and they're able to approach these problems in a different way. Yes, and I see we're in, like, this tangled, horrific web of political polarization. It's how at a national level, how do you begin to, like, undo some of this stuff, and I know that's vague, but it's, that's the, that's the like big boogeyman. I see that. I feel like it's really difficult to overcome.

[Brandon]

Also tack on what you just said. You could go in the details. I would love to go. I want to like, what are some things we can actually do instead of just acknowledging there's problems.

[Pete Buttigieg]

So I think part of the answer to your question is the. We have this kind of first mover disadvantage with our Constitution because we were kind of the first country to try to do it this way. So we innovated with this technology of kind of constitutional, democratic, republic, representative system of government. Other countries were viewed as constitutional, but they didn't actually write the Constitution down. We think constitution by definition is a document. Actually in the British system, they think of themselves as having a constitution, but it's not written, which creates its own set of problems, as you might imagine. But anyway, there are a few things. It was very elegantly designed. And the most elegant thing about the Constitution is the capacity for amendments. So you write this basic law that everything else is built on top of, but you also realize that there might be something in there that you need to change or fix or develop. So you have the process of creating an amendment and it's not easy, but it's something you can do if you really want to. As a country, we set the threshold for how to do it a little too high. So other countries after us developing democratic systems, and by the way, some of our own states, most of our own states within the US came at it a little differently, had a way you could amend your Constitution. They actually do it more often. We haven't done a substantive amendment to the constitution in about 50 years.

[Aiden]

What was the last one?

[Pete Buttigieg]

There was a technical one in the 90s about congressional pay, but actually one of the last big ones was about lowering the voting age, which went from 21 to 18. Okay, good move. I would say, right. In the 20th century, we had quite a few, not all of which were good.

[Doug]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

We had Prohibition, an amendment to the Constitution so you couldn't get a drink. But then after a few years realized that was a bad idea, change it back with another amendment. Right. The Bill of Rights is amendments. That wasn't in kind of 1.0 constitution. They tack that on. Right. So that's where I would begin to answer your question is we should entertain some constitutional amendments to improve the democratic nature of our country.

[Aiden]

Do you have an example of what if you could wave a magic Wand what's your.

[Doug]

Because I imagine you're not starting at the surface level of like the amendment's gonna be like, we'll finish the tunnel, like the 26th Amendment. It's gonna be something like deeper that has further consequences. So I'm curious what that would look like.

[Pete Buttigieg]

That's my point. It's easier to get things like the tunnel done if you fix democracy or improve democracy. So what might some of those amendments be? First of all, a super simple one that I just think is important in principle. One person, one vote. That everybody's vote ought to count the same.

[Aiden]

Wait a minute though. I'm richer than Aiden. Why would I have the same amount of votes as him?

[Pete Buttigieg]

That's the whole point.

[Aiden]

That doesn't mean.

[Brandon]

And we're older, we should have more influence.

[Aiden]

Older and we're wealthier. We should be able to have more impact.

[Doug]

No, I like this because one day I'll be richer than you and then I want to have more. I want to be able to go more than you.

[Pete Buttigieg]

So we actually don't have one even for picking the president? Right, we don't have that, especially for picking the president. Yeah, because of the electoral college. We should just. We're the only country in the world that. We're the only presidential democracy where you come in second place and you get to be president. And the person who came in first place in terms of getting the most votes doesn't get to be president. That is nuts. So that's one we could fix. Another one we could do is about gerrymandering. These districts that are drawn in the most bizarre shapes. I saw one of them, it was described as the shape of goofy kicking Donald Duck on a map so that you can predetermine the results. Making sure that there is fairness in the way that districts are drawn, making sure that there's a little more specificity around the right to vote. I would argue that if you're a low income American and you got two jobs or three, having to stand in line for more than an hour in order to vote means you didn't really have the right to vote. But right now there's no constitutional protection saying that it is a responsibility to make sure you can actually go in and cast that vote. We could adjust the way money works in politics. You know, right now the Supreme Court holds that basically a corporation is the same thing as a person for the purpose of intervening in politics. And spending money to manipulate the outcome of an election is the same thing as me giving a speech about my views. Money is speech. Corporations are people. We could clear that up with a constitutional amendment. I think we should.

[Doug]

You're anti free speech.

[Aiden]

My good friend McDonald's has a lot of thoughts on regulation of fast food that I want to hear. And if he's not able. And I think he's a he. If he's not able to see free.

[Pete Buttigieg]

This is the thing. Right. We don't have to. If there's one thing I'm trying to say everywhere I go, it doesn't have to be this way. We've gotten soaked in things being a certain way that isn't working, and it doesn't have to be that way. So those are just a few examples of structural democratic reform. But there's also reforms ahead, I think, in terms of how our economy works that we need to get ready for, especially given what AI is going to do do. And I think when I'm not saying it fixes everything, I am saying that a lot of other problems would be easier to solve if we had a government that was more accountable to the people and more representative.

[Brandon]

I would like for that to happen. I hope somebody makes that happen.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I'm working on it.

[Aiden]

Yeah, this is like the repeal Citizens United type.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yes, that's part of it.

[Aiden]

Okay. Yeah. Yes, I would like that.

[Doug]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

But this is the thing. I think we all feel so jailed, like it's. We feel like it's too much to ask and it's not, it's not too much to ask. Like our whole country got set up around. I mean, you know, it was way more radical than anything we've just talked about is the idea of not having a king and setting up a democratic government. This is super radical idea. Right. When, when the founders did it and they did it.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

And more or less worked out.

[Aiden]

What do you think about the, the structural problems with the senate where it's 2 per state? Some states have way smaller population. Here in California, we have 60 times Wyoming or whatever, but we have. Is that. What do you think about that?

[Pete Buttigieg]

I mean, I cannot imagine that that's what the founders had in mind. I know that, you know, they struck these deals that, that, you know, you get equal representation in the Senate per state. But I mean, again, if you think about within, for example, we have state senates. Right. Within every state. Yeah. One state's unicameral, has whatever. You know, the U.S. senate isn't the only Senate, but it's the only Senate where the seats aren't proportioned equally.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

But there's a lot of things we could do that. Don't require amending the Constitution. I think we should launch a package of constitutional amendments to make our country more democratic. But just to be clear, things like reforming the Supreme Court to make it less partisan, which might involve a different number of justices that actually the number nine. Nine justices in the Supreme Court. That's not in the Constitution. We started out with three and they changed it and then they stopped changing it. We the number of representatives in the House of Representatives, the number of states in the United States. Like none of those things are locked in in the Constitution. We should be able we have to.

[Aiden]

Make a whole new flag though.

[Pete Buttigieg]

It would be such a. I know you'd have to find another star and.

[Brandon]

It is really unfortunate. 50 is a great. It's a great.

[Aiden]

We really gotta lock it in.

[Pete Buttigieg]

That.

[Brandon]

That is. It is tough that we.

[Doug]

Sorry Puerto Rico. 50 is just too clean.

[Aiden]

We already made so many flags.

[Brandon]

Support for Lemonade Stand comes from Adobe Acrobat Studio.

[Aiden]

Guys, I have a I have an actual thing that I have been using lately that actually helps me. If you have a real let's say I'm still in school. This is an example for people that are tiny little baby children like Aiden and you have a book that you need to read or 18 pages or whatever.

[Doug]

You didn't read books at school.

[Aiden]

You can put that in a PDF into Adobe Acrylic PDF spaces and it will generate a literal It'll generate a podcast for you or a presentation for you that you can then use to summarize and understand the takeaways from this longer.

[Brandon]

It's actually amazing for learning.

[Aiden]

It literally is just like you can have it. You could like have it generate a quiz for you. It's like it is a helpful thing for summarizing a very large document that's in a PDF is a useful.

[Doug]

You need resources for your baby mind. But I consume the material in one go and I keep it all in my head. That's how I keep everything so straight and easily managed.

[Aiden]

In front of me you're always saying.

[Brandon]

Disaster communicating with you. Be like Atriok. Use Adobe. Learn [e-mail] do that with Acrobat. And now you can use PDF spaces to learn so much more from your files.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Man.

[Doug]

Be forgetful, be free.

[Aiden]

He's just channeling the constraints of the office and the workspace that I'm working.

[Doug]

In make your co workers mad.

[Brandon]

Support for this episode comes from Tastytrade and I wanna ask what's the time you forged your own path in life right we're just talking to Mr. Pete Buttigieg. He forged a path early in his life. How are you forging at age 28? Aiden Name Gaiman.

[Doug]

I think a few years ago, after I was working in esports for a while, I was living with my friend Ludwig and he had become a big, you know, he had become a big YouTuber.

[Brandon]

Not following.

[Aiden]

Sort of a grandma's cocktail there.

[Doug]

He kind of had this big coat behind him that I like that I reached out and grabbed and then I got a job. Is that what you meant?

[Aiden]

Yeah, that's.

[Brandon]

That's kind of what I meant.

[Aiden]

It's like following all the greats did that, you know, they grabbed the coattails and.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, hung on in business.

[Doug]

And to forge my own path, you.

[Brandon]

Got to forge your own path, make your own decisions. With Tasty Trade, you can trade stocks, option futures, and more all in one platform and offers low commissions so you keep more of what you earn. So if you want to learn to trade, go on or just discover new strategies.

[Aiden]

What I was thinking, you could sign up and get access to dozens of free educational courses.

[Brandon]

Platforms packed with trading features help you trade smarter, like advanced charting tools, back testing, pre built strategy sector. Become the trader you always wanted to be. Go to tastytrade.com lemonade today. Tastytrade Inc. Is a registered broker, dealer, and member of FINRA.

[Aiden]

FINRA. And SIPC.

[Brandon]

And SIPC.

[Doug]

Support for this show comes from cloaked.

[Aiden]

All right, Doug. You know how every time I get mad at Aiden the show, I leak his address to the public to try and, like, get people to hurt him?

[Brandon]

Perry's been trying to censor it out of the show and I don't think it works. No, you like graffiti it everywhere?

[Aiden]

Yeah, I do a lot to get it out there. He's figured out that if you use cloaked, it actually not only takes down your private information, prevents it from leaking again.

[Brandon]

Ooh, interesting.

[Aiden]

It's like really frustrating for me trying to get him in trouble or get him hurt.

[Doug]

You shouldn't be frustrated about this.

[Brandon]

You should just.

[Doug]

You're my disagree with me all the time. My private information support. If you. You could protect things like your Social Security number, prevent identity theft. It catches all of this. It will not physically approach your friend to get him to stop putting the address in the physical space of your show.

[Brandon]

I'm confused. Will or will not cover up all the graffiti that Brandon has been putting in here?

[Doug]

It won't. Admittedly, cloaked won't do that. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that's the one thing Cloaked won't do.

[Brandon]

But only the one you had normal.

[Doug]

Friends who didn't try to out your address. You know what? You could just go to cloaked.com lemonade. You can take your pre first free privacy scan and if you choose to subscribe to Cloaked use code lemonade for 30% off your cloak subscription. I hate you.

[Brandon]

He lives in la.

[Doug]

I did want to ask. I think the early part of this kind of focuses on the idea of how money is spent, spending money more efficiently. The flip side of this is raising taxes, especially on the wealthiest people. And I think just looking at what is necessary from a policy perspective, a fiscal perspective in the future, it seems like we need to cut spending by making spending at least more efficient, but also by raising taxes. And it feels like that platform of let's raise taxes and cut spending is historically very unpopular. Yeah, but we're getting further and further along into a place where that's necessary and someone kind of needs to be the guy and presumably will not be liked for it. And I'm wondering if that, since that does seem necessary, I'm wondering if you agree with that to begin with, but also if that's like a politically tenable platform for anyone to even have in the future.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, I guess. A fair question. I think it's. It's pretty obviously true though that we need to have more and better sources of revenue and we need to be more efficient with our spending. I think most people just accept that that's true. And again, having cut my teeth as a mayor where there's no Federal Reserve for the city of South Bend, we did our budget in cash and we could only borrow so much and we couldn't print money. And so if I want to do more of this, I had to do less of that or we had to ask the taxpayer. And I think we've really drifted away from that in terms of our national policy because that forces you to make.

[Aiden]

The hard choices you have to make. Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Right. Which is the last thing that any, I mean look, any political body is going to have a hard time with that. But for reasons we just went over like we're especially hard pressed to do it right in today's currently.

[Brandon]

You guys consider designing South Bend just using the tariff money?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, I just saw new numbers on the, on the tariff money. The average household now has paid about an extra thousand dollars last year alone and that's set to go up this year from the tariffs. So this idea that this is just some Abstract economic thing. This is hitting a lot of families that can't afford an extra thousand dollars right now. And it's not exactly helping our trade balances. So even on its face, in terms of what it was supposed to do, it has not led to an improvement in manufacturing. China actually just had their biggest year of trade surplus ever.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

It was just not even working. And coming back to the spending side, this is part of why the whole Doge thing kind of breaks my brain, is that we really do need work on government efficiency. If we had had an actual serious effort to have a department of government efficiency versus the one we got, I really think it would have found some things that we could do differently and better. But instead, what they did was, first of all, they made a bunch of shit up. I mean, if you look at the numbers, journalists went back to look at some of that, the savings they claimed and literally wrong. There's one case where they just. I can't believe this actually happened. They said billion instead of million and just overstated their savings by a factor of 1000. This literally happened. I'm not making this up.

[Doug]

We all make mistakes.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah. Who among us hasn't. Who among us hasn't accidentally fired the people in charge of nuclear weapons safety? But you know, the stuff they tore down and overall spending went up.

[Aiden]

Yes.

[Pete Buttigieg]

It's not even like they actually, we.

[Aiden]

Have the line of. It's, it's up over last year, so it's.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, but should we rethink the way we spend money in terms of our federal government? Yeah, like, of course.

[Aiden]

Are we forced to. I mean.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Well, so this is the other interesting thing. Right. I think that there will be a kind of a reckoning that is forced because I don't think the world is willing to lend America money indefinitely, forever. Especially, by the way, the number one reason they did was because our political system was seen as a gold standard. So if our, if, if our leadership and political system are just kind of transparently a mess, they're going to be limits on our ability to borrow, which is going to create limits on our ability to spend, which is going to force the kind of conversation that, that you're raising. But look, we know where we can find some revenue. I, I don't mean to say that it's as simple as, like, you find the one richest guy in the country and you, you tax his brains out and then all the problems will be solved.

[Doug]

It's not Elon, however, it's a shakedown. It's a shakedown. It's The Elon Shakedown. It's an amendment.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I mean, I didn't know this one.

[Brandon]

We sacrificed one a year, like in that old story, the Hunger Games Reverse.

[Pete Buttigieg]

But I'll tell you, you what, a guy like that and a lot of other people like that are paying a lower percentage of their true income in taxes than a firefighter or a teacher.

[Aiden]

Or their secretary or.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, or their own employees, which is insane. So if you had a fairer taxation system that asked more of the wealthiest and if you did a better job of collecting what people actually owe. So part of what they've done, unfortunately, is fired a bunch of people in the IRS whose job was not to raise anybody's taxes, but just to make sure people paid the taxes that they're supposed to be paying. Which, again, if you're a firefighter or a teacher, you probably are. If you have some complicated multimillion dollar financial scheme underpinning your family finances, or if you're, you know, the Elon Musk's of the world, then you're probably not paying. I don't, you know, like you.

[Doug]

Like you do.

[Aiden]

Yeah. All my money's in a shelter in.

[Doug]

Ireland, in small part Svalbard.

[Aiden]

Routing it through.

[Doug]

I don't think they have any tax havens in Svalbard. I just pulled Svalbard.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I've been waiting for years just to. For somebody to mention Svalbard.

[Aiden]

Please don't let him get started on Sweden. He is trying to.

[Doug]

I need a president who cares more about the seed vault.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I am obsessed with Svalbard. I went up there. This is my guy. It is fascinating. Do people know about. About this?

[Doug]

No. Like, barely.

[Pete Buttigieg]

This is. This is the northernmost place you can get to using frequent flyer miles, which is how I wound up there. And it's pretty much the northernmost everything. Like, if you get money, the little. The little ATM screen says in Norwegian, world's northernmost ATM. And the church there is the world's northernmost 78th parallel is like way, way beyond anything else we think of as Arctic. And I just think it's a fascinating place. So. Sorry, I got very excited when you mentioned.

[Doug]

That's okay.

[Pete Buttigieg]

And the seed vault. Where were we? Taxation. So, yeah, tax evasion by very rich people is clearly a problem in this country. I'm not saying that would cover the entire deficit. I'm saying it would make a big difference if we collected properly.

[Doug]

So I do have.

[Pete Buttigieg]

And let me say, before Elon sues me, I'm not accusing him of tax evasion directly. I have no idea.

[Aiden]

Wink.

[Doug]

I Do have two questions about raising taxes. The first is I watched your all in interview and I think on that you describe Bernie as further to the left of you on tax policy when it comes to like the wealth tax or like what you might do. And I think there's fair critiques of how like a wealth tax might function. But I think critiques of taxes on the wealthy often come at the expense of doing anything at all. Yeah. And historically we do have, we had incredibly high tax rates through some of the countries most successful time.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yes.

[Doug]

And I, I guess I'm just wondering for, for you, who would is stating that your tax policy would be different than somebody like Bernie's. Do you have an idea of what direction or what you would be looking for to like what, what type of tax policy would you take to not not only the wealthy but like people in general?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, I mean I think it should be first of all, to be clear, taxes on the wealthy need to be higher. They just do. If you look at what's fair, if you look at what it's going to take to meet our revenue goals, if you look at international comparisons, in my opinion that's clearly the case. And at the same time I think it would be misleading to suggest that's all we've got to do. That's why I'm bringing up collection leakage and evasion. That's why I'm bringing up spending and being more efficient. I think we got to do all of those things at the same time. So yes, we need a tax code that, that requires the wealthy to pay their fair share. And the idea of a wealth tax is not fundamentally different from the idea of a property tax, which is how we got most of the funds that I used in my first experience in elected offices as mayor. So I don't think there's anything wrong in principle with assessing some kind of tax now. It has to be reasonable. It has to be set up in a way that it's not going to have unintended consequences. But again, this is something that I think people blithely say about taxes on the rich in cases where it's not actually true. So you may have heard me sparring with the all in guys a little bit on this where there are times in our past when the highest income tax brackets were much higher than they are now and growth was actually pretty good economically. So this idea that you're just going to kill economic growth, middle class, this idea that you're going to kill your economic growth if you ever try to tax the wealthy or tax corporations in a way that draws more of those. Again, I want corporations, I want good businesses to do well, but I want them to pay their fair share along the way. Especially because all of us, through our tax dollars, are creating the things that allow those corporations to create value. And my favorite example of this is the Internet itself. The Internet was literally invented by the American taxpayer, the federal government. That's what DARPA did, famously created this thing, didn't really know how to commercialize it. Private, Private enterprise had to do that. But private enterprise never could have had the scale to do the basic research that made the Internet a thing in the first place. And I think we have this illusion that there are certain companies or certain people who just invented themselves when all of us do what we do in some kind of context. And part of the context for any business is infrastructure, research, the rule of law. If you don't have that, you can't build a business from, from a, from a coffee shop to a, to, to a major AI company. Look, none of that happens if you don't have those things, but they need to pay it.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

And those things cost money. And that's what taxes are for. It's like a membership fee. And it's sometimes been described as the taxes or your membership fee to, to be in a civilized society. And we ought to think of it that way.

[Aiden]

This is going to be a harder question for a politician to answer because it's, it's bad for votes. But I want to ask it, which is that. So something like, I'd say six out of 10, you know, 60% of our tax dollars are going to things that primarily benefit the old, which would be Social Security, Medicare, other. Other things. And I'm not saying those are bad things. I'm supportive in general Social Security. But there is a sense that most of this money is not going to regular working Americans in the middle. Like, it's, it's finding its way to people who already have statistically the most, the most property, the most wealth, the most stocks. Not every old person has that, but that's, that's where it's going. And I want to know what are your thoughts on, like, how, how, how do we meaningfully reduce the deficit or balance our budget if all of our money is going to interest Medicare, Social Security? Like, that's almost everything. Military, I guess.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah. And of those, I think interest is the one that's probably the most generationally unfair. Because look, if we're talking about Social Security and Medicare, to be clear, the Older you are, the more you've paid into it too, right? People pay into that their whole lives. That's where I worry about this word, entitlement. In fact, I remember when I was campaigning, a guy said, I don't think it was an entitlement, I think it was a paid endowment, which maybe isn't a term that'll catch on, but it's an honest way to think about it. Interest is another story, right? Because look, taking on debt, same as starting a business or buying a house, it makes sense if you do it, but at a level where there's going to be a return, where it's going to pay off and where you're going to come out ahead. And that's true for a country. I think we've overshot that at this point. I think the debt has grown to a level that even the left cannot ignore. And I think that in many ways that does set up a younger generation for more pain. I mean, not that long ago the average age to buy your first house was in your 20s. Now by some measures it's 40. And I think even that's slipping away. Right? And that's related actually to our indebtedness because that affects interest rates, which affects what's possible in terms of getting a mortgage. But I don't think it has to be like generational warfare here. I believe that. And again, I experienced this in my very first elected office where older voters in my city were rooting for a younger mayor to kind of believe in a different kind of future, that the, that people should want their grandkids to do well. And yet it's that generation that's under more and more pressure. Also, I belong now to what's considered the sandwich generation, as in we're sandwiched between parents who are growing older, who we are taking care of, and kids who are taken care of. And those pressures in terms of the time as well as the cost that a lot of people are going through, are massive. And our country just isn't doing a very good job of supporting that, that it's still got a lot of problems around things like long term care that make it harder to take care of a parent and then all kinds of things that make it harder to be a parent, like the complete lack of paid family leave in this country. Only country to do that, other than, I think Papua New guinea, to have just no national policy on paid leave.

[Doug]

But two economic powerhouses.

[Pete Buttigieg]

It's another example where it doesn't have to be that way. If literally every other country in the world has figured out a way to do paid family leave. How are we not doing that in this country? We see universal childcare. And not just they're seeking to do it in New York, but also New Mexico has launched that these things can be done. They would make it dramatically easier to go through that generational journey where you go from a young person to a parent to retirement. But for all of that to work, every generation has to believe that their. They're contributing to something where they're going to be better off. If you were born the year my mom was born, end of World War II, statistically, you got a 90% chance economically of coming out ahead of your parents. If you're born the year I was born in the 80s, it's a coin flip. It's 50, 50. And by some measures, that's now underwater. If you're born more recently, I think the generational bargain breaks down.

[Aiden]

That's where the anger I'm seeing is coming from. And so that's where the heart of my question's getting at, which is, you know, you mentioned housing. I think Trump just had a speech where he mentioned, I'm not going to let any housing price go down because then people. And it was like almost baffling that he would say that so publicly, because from the audience that we're talking to and hearing, it's like a huge source of their fury and nihilism. They can't get on the ladder.

[Pete Buttigieg]

But think of the kind of people who have memberships at Mar a Lago. I mean, think of the kind of people who Donald Trump spends all his time with. Right? These are people who are perfectly happy for real estate to get even more expensive because they own a bunch of it. So does he. He's a real estate guy. Right. So the last thing he's going to want to do is see housing costs.

[Aiden]

Go down, I guess, yes. For the, for the mega elite and people you're talking to, of course, and it's easy to do that. But the core of the problem he's talking about feels like a big issue in politics, which is that there is a large cohort of voting age boomers who I think will have to lose out a little bit. At least the wealthiest of them that own property, it will have to go down in value for. For regular people to be able to participate in the way that they participated.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Or at least go up less quickly.

[Aiden]

Sure, I guess wages have to.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I mean, exactly. Our income has to grow more quickly than the price of housing. Right now, the Opposite's happening.

[Brandon]

So that's kind of what I just want to drill it back down to, like what can actually be done, let's say in the 2028 election. You know, new administration's coming in, knock on wood. How do you possibly political make something politically tenable where we say we are going to spend less in areas like Social Security or Medicare or. Or are we saying we're not going to do that and it's strictly going to be from increased taxes? How do these numbers add up? There's part of me that is sort of nihilistic that makes me think we have to wait for the boomer generation to no longer be voting, to put it nicely. And I just don't.

[Pete Buttigieg]

It seems.

[Aiden]

How.

[Brandon]

How do you make a difference? How do you get people to actually vote for these changes?

[Pete Buttigieg]

So politically, I think it's calling an older generation to support. Remember, if you're an older generation, the people you love most are so often in a younger generation. And I think calling out to that is really important because we have so many dynamics in our policy that pit people against each other, right versus left, working class versus white collar, north versus south. And it could be old versus young. Right. And we don't need any more cleavages like that. So I'm interested in a style of politics that pulls people together into a shared project. And in American history, unfortunately, usually us coming together in a national project is in the face of something really terrible like a war. Right. Some of the highest levels of unity we ever had were World War II. Sort of a corresponding but lesser level of national unity was the Cold War.

[Doug]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

But it shouldn't take a war for us to want to pull together to do big things substantively. In terms of what I think it'll actually take, I think the outlines of it are actually visible to us. I think it's building more housing. I think the best way to make Medicare cost less is to make the delivery of healthcare cost less versus leaving people out in the cold or things like the Medicaid cuts that Trump and the Republicans push through. I'm not saying we don't have to have. Have hard choices. We can't always have our cake and eat it too. But there's so much money on the table right now in terms of fairer taxation on the revenue side and better use of our tax dollar on the spending side before you even get to the muscle and bone. Tough, admittedly tough decisions that we're gonna have to make as a country, which might affect by the time somebody who's born today is retiring might affect some things about the shape of Social Security and Medicare.

[Aiden]

They're gonna have the Trump accounts, they're gonna have the dollars.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Let me admit, I actually think that's a good policy. I hate to admit it. I definitely don't. I don't hate to. I hate to endorse something named after Trump. So maybe we can rename it. And I think there are different ways you could do it. But look, I think the basic idea of making sure that everybody has some kind of what an economist would call an initial endowment, that everybody has something to start with, makes sense. And there's. No one party should have a monopoly on that idea. We should make sure that everybody is set up with something. And I'm glad they did it in a bill full of a lot of really horrible things. I think that's one that had a lot of value.

[Brandon]

Another idea just thrown at you. If you're leading the country, you could start a war with Papua New guinea to unite people again.

[Aiden]

Right. We'd all be. Well, there are one. They're the only one that's on our same page. We could just pick.

[Brandon]

I have actually genuinely thought about this. If aliens came to Earth and declared war. Wow. It'd be easy to pass policy. Right.

[Aiden]

Get some stuff through.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I hope so.

[Aiden]

We should fail. We should.

[Brandon]

A reasonable time to bring up AI, the big scary thing in the cloud, I guess, sort of. So we do have a running like, AI hypometer as well. So kind of look at what we're doing right now. So I think Atrioc is pretty low right now based on last. Yeah, like two low. Two a little bit higher. And then recently I've been, let's see, 27.8. You recently, this past summer, wrote a substack saying that you are concerned about AI regulation. I'm curious, Even in the, what, seven months since that point, a massive amount has changed.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yes.

[Brandon]

Curious where you think about AI right now. And then that substack was largely. I think this is a big deal. I think we aren't preparing for it properly, which I super agree with. In terms of regulation, where do you currently stand?

[Pete Buttigieg]

So that continues to be my view. I'd say in the months since then, there have been ups and downs, for sure. I mean, we. Yeah, you put me in like, the dates, eights, nines.

[Brandon]

Oh, nice. I think that means he's on my side. We're closer together.

[Aiden]

I think numerically you're still.

[Doug]

Yeah, you're still out there. He's closer to me than to you.

[Brandon]

It's like that graph porn where the numbers do not make any sense.

[Pete Buttigieg]

It's like, let me put it this way. I think we're still underreacting, which might be a weird thing to say given how much people talk about AI and look, the capabilities. We never quite know. I was, a few months ago, I was in Silicon Valley. There had been a couple of model releases. They didn't seem quite what everybody expected. And so everybody was kind of a little bit down on these things. I was in the Bay Area a few days ago and Claude Code has dropped. And here everybody's talking about Bad Bunny there everybody's talking about Claude Code. It's the talk of the town and people are really impressed, alarmed about what that means. So. But my thing is, what I'm trying to push the policy world and my own Democratic Party to do more of is to think about this not just as a tech thing that you have to be a tech geek to care about, but as a political economy problem, as a question of how our economy is going to work, because I think some of those impacts are going to hit much faster than we're ready for. And again, I'm a product of where I'm from. So I grew up in the industrial Midwest, northern Indiana. Just as this wave of automation and trade comes in the 90s and early 2000s and knocks so many people and whole towns off course economically by just changing what it means to be part of this economy. I think we're facing a wave like that even bigger probably and even more widespread because it's hitting so many white collar professions. Right?

[Brandon]

From radiologists to Amadi, who's the head of Anthropic.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Right.

[Brandon]

A very long blog a week or two ago, and one of the things he warned about is that the reason that these techs are different than something like farmers getting replaced by, you know, a new implement on the farm is that the AIs will be able to cover many different white collar jobs simultaneously.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Right.

[Brandon]

If you're not going to be able to just go from one information job in the legal industry over to the insurance industry, it's just going to cover both of those at once. And it's just going to broadly just eliminate entire category, like high level categories, not specific ones. And that's an area I'm extremely concerned about as much as I am. I'm more excited about AI than the average person. The job displacement in the short term, in the next couple years seems to me like a incoming catastrophe, like incredibly concerning. So I did want to definitively ask that specifically, what are your thoughts around that? Like, I have a hard time imagining us suddenly being launching UBI for the population in the next two years. And I do see potential mass unemployment for entry level jobs the next two years. And how do you possibly deal with that right now?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah. So, you know, right now we have a system of unemployment insurance that was built in a time when a huge shock to employment would be like a 2% or a 4% change.

[Doug]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Like if the unemployment rate went from 4% to 6% or 8%, that would be a massive development in our economic system and that would test the limits of our policy tools. And there is a non trivial chance that it could be a multiple of that. Right. In terms of what happens now, look through our experience, at least in the last few hundred years, when a new technology eliminates certain tasks or even certain jobs, the long term result is that there are different jobs that emerge and people find themselves doing different things. But that's over the long term. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, said, in the long run we're all dead. And the job for policymakers and politicians, I think is to deal with what's happening right now with a view to the long run. And so if we have a massive and material difference in hiring in entry level coding paralegals, you could go down the list of a lot of knowledge workers, professions, customer service, I'm driving some of which, by the way, coding in particular, those are job categories that policymakers actually pushed people into. A generation ago you talked about learning code.

[Doug]

The juxtaposition of this sad potential story of getting fed the rhetoric of learn to code being maybe in your 40s, 50s, and you're making the effort. I actually do want to pursue something new, get educated around this new thing, try to pursue this new career, and then you're a few years into it and now this is happening.

[Pete Buttigieg]

But here's the thing to think about. We don't really know exactly what the level of disruption will be. Right. And we don't really know exactly what the level of value will be that it creates. But those two things we can more or less assume are going to travel together. In other words, a world where the AI doesn't do as much as we thought it did is also one in which it probably doesn't disrupt as many jobs as we fear it might. And to put the other case, a world in which it is disrupting jobs left, right and center means it is doing a huge amount of work that used to be impossible. For a machine to achieve. And if that's true, that means generally for somebody, it's creating a huge amount of value. The question then becomes, who gets that right? Because I believe AI can lead to one of two results. It can either be, for most people, a shorter work week and more money in your pocket than before, or it can be even more ridiculous concentrations of wealth and power than we already have. And what we already have, by the way, is pretty extreme. It's not just something that we look at the news about some of these really wealthy people and say, oh, gosh, that's really unequal. This is historically pretty extreme.

[Aiden]

It's like 1929 levels of wealth inequality.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah. In fact, it's rare for a republic, a democratic system, to hit this level of inequality and survive. Like when the Roman Empire, when the Roman Republic was hitting this level of inequality, that's about the time it stopped being a republic and started being an empire.

[Doug]

Well, we've been talking about this. The historical context of this level of wealth inequality is like it, it like dissolves society.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is. Look, we're not quite at like, pre revolutionary France level, but like, that's kind of the next stop, stop if we don't do something. But this is the irony, right? If you appropriately capture some of the value of what AI might generate and you return it to the people. And I don't think that's confiscation. I think that's participation. Because, again, the American taxpayer literally invented the Internet and all these models trained on data that all of us put out in the world for free. So it seems to me only fair that we could get a slice of it. Right. You could structure, you could use taxes to do that. You could also structure it as more of a dividend. I mean, there's different models for how to do it, some of which will really push us in terms of our creativity as policymakers. Do we really think it could make sense for there to be a public share in an AI hyperscaler? I think maybe. I think that's one example of how to do it. But my point is, let's come up with policies that kind of flex up or down so that if the value's not that great and the disruption's not that great, then the policy intervention doesn't have to be that great either. But if we have massive disruption and almost by definition, massive wealth being created, then it's really a question of how that wealth is arranged. And that is not a technology question. It's a policy choice.

[Aiden]

Given our timing, I want to bring it to the real world, short term future of what's going on here. Because the things you're talking about are massive changes. And right now, today, we live in a world where Republicans control the House, the Senate, the presidency, the Judiciary, and they're all basically voting in lockstep with Donald Trump, who's kind of doing whimsical, random things day to day via tweet by whimsical.

[Brandon]

Yeah, whimsical.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Probably the wrong fairy tale.

[Aiden]

Chaotic. Dangerous. Okay, Right. So we have the midterms this year.

[Brandon]

Yep.

[Aiden]

And I first of all want to get your broad overview of thoughts of how you see them going, because it does seem like he is, especially post economic slowdown, post Alex Preddy. It feels like he is entering a very unpopular era.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yes.

[Aiden]

Where there is a tide turning. So do you think that is something that Democrats are gonna be able to capitalize on given that they are not particularly seeing popularity spikes?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Pete Buttigieg]

So I think the answer is yes. I think a few things have to happen. One thing is Democrats need to realize that our job is not to just restore the old status quo, because if it looks like that's all we're selling, that might get us through 26. But it's not a real answer substantively, for all the reasons we've been talking about for the last hour, it's not enough. But also politically, I don't think it's going to work. The most important thing you need to know about the old status quo is that it led to this.

[Aiden]

Yeah. It created Trump. Yeah, essentially.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Okay. So putting all of that on the table, I would say the other thing in terms of the now, the kind of political moment we're in that I think is super interesting actually, is the behavior of the Republicans, the endangered House Republicans. So in Indiana, for example, last year, the state Senate Republicans voted against Donald Trump's gerrymandering plan. This might sound like a pretty technical thing, I gotta tell you. It is a huge deal for state legislators in a Republican Party in a place like Indiana, where I grew up to directly be pressured by the President to do something and to say no. And we've seen patterns of this. We've seen those local Republicans, whatever.

[Aiden]

Jeremy, why do you think?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Because they didn't like it. Because people across the state hated it. It. I would like to think it's partly because I showed up and did a rally with like a thousand people reminding them of how much people in the state hated it, and because the pressure backfired because they were being such, frankly the White House, they were being such dicks about it that a lot of the legislators who were very conservative Republicans said, I'm not going to help you anymore. But my broader point is this. You got local Republicans rebelling and defying the President on gerrymander. We had a handful of congressional Republicans defying the President on the Epstein files, right? Trump is trying to keep the Epstein files from being released and they vote against him and say they gotta be released. Right now you have some Republican governors breaking ranks on AI, which is very interesting. And what that tells me is that his grip, his death grip on the Republican Party, which is how he began to take power, is starting to come loose. And I think it's starting to become loose because he's unpopular. And I'm mentioning this because we don't have to wait for election day for some of these things to play out. But in order for there to be change, people have to really speak up. That's why it's so important, for example, that a lot of people, and by the way, not just liberals, right, But a lot of libertarians, Second Amendment folks, they look at what's going on in Minneapolis where you've got federal agents shooting American citizens basically for protesting and saying this is insane and breaking ranks. I think that can begin to bear fruit in terms of political change before we even get to the midterms. And I think that's even more true after some of the primaries run their course and fewer Republicans in office are worried about their right flank.

[Doug]

I do feel like I agree with what you're saying. It feels like because of the cracking of the Republican Party right now and the momentum that there is, you could put up almost anybody on the opposing side and they have a fighting chance at winning in the midterm terms. And my concern more has to do with like, dude, nobody likes the Democratic Party right now. Like none of I'm pretty left leaning guy. Like I'm my very left friends, like hate the Democratic Party and you know, people on the right hate the Democratic Party and kind of it's it for many failures in the past, like few years especially. So even though I think there's the momentum to get elected in the midterms or like the next presidential election, what substantial change do you think there needs to be for that, for the party to actually be something that people are happy to vote for? I think that I guess the strongest message I could say here is like not a single person I talked to over the entire year was happy that it was Biden, Trump, they were like, this is insane that these are my two options. And I think with that in mind, like, is it more of a. Like, we've talked to young, promising mayors, we've talked to Mayor Scott from Baltimore recently. We, I think Mamdani is moving in like a really promising direction right now. So what is the future of that party that we can actually like, get behind look like?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Well, I think in terms of message, we gotta make it clear what we're actually building toward. Because, yeah, a tailwind in 26 might lead to a good result in 26, but that's not enough to substitute for a governing vision. So we got to make it clear the changes we would make, some of which I hope I've been able to convey in our time, just now, to our political structure as well as our economic policy that would make your everyday life better off. Not just this team, one and that team lost on Capitol Hill, but your ability to afford a home and the chances that one job is enough and your sense of personal and economic security and the likelihood that you feel like you have a reasonable shot at like having kids and a family, if that's an outcome you want in your life, that that is more likely because we got elected and because you, you voted against these guys. Right.

[Doug]

So tangible, kind of more tangible results.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yes. And then at the same time as that, we do need to be putting forward different and I think in many cases younger faces. Right. So. And this could be a little self serving, but I also think it's true, like if I'm right, that we have 60 or 70% of people agreeing with us on most of the really big issues, taxes, abortion, even immigration, actually, in terms of broadly what policy should be if we have 60 or 70% agreement on the issues and we can't get 50% in an election, it raises the question of who is bearing the message and can we put forward more compelling leaders? And I would argue they're out there. There are a lot of people on the bench in the Democratic Party who deserve to be called off of the bench and be on the field. I think more of them are coming forward, stepping forward. You will see me, if you follow me online, you'll see me backing some of these candidates even this year, who I think represent that. And they don't all have the same posture as each other. They have different ideas, sometimes from each other. But the point is, each of them is exquisitely true to who they are and where they're from. And those are the kinds of candidates who I think are going to win and they will collectively make up, I think a new and different and better face for the Democratic Party.

[Doug]

Support for Lemonade Stand comes from the League.

[Aiden]

Okay, so like a couple episodes ago we did a league advertisement where you mentioned one of our basketball friends who you put onto the league to try it out. Because we are all currently in relationships so we can't use the league as a dating app. After we did that, one of my Marketing Monday researchers reached out to me and said I have a positive league story that he wanted to share. This is a true story from my researcher Dom. My wife and I met on the league in 2020. We both love the app and people who are more likely to have their life together versus endless pictures of men holding fish or overly edited photos. The league brought us together and we even sent the founder a thank you letter for bringing us together. I can this sounds like made up.

[Pete Buttigieg]

This sounds testifying.

[Aiden]

Is that Hand of God real story that my researcher actually had?

[Brandon]

Does your researcher work at the league?

[Doug]

Here's the thing. More Is it better?

[Pete Buttigieg]

Better is better.

[Doug]

So you could join the league, find someone in yours, download the app and apply today.

[Aiden]

Dude, he even sent me his wife's original league profile picture blanked out.

[Brandon]

Oh wow, she's holding a fish.

[Pete Buttigieg]

This episode is brought to you by Indeed.

[Doug]

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[Pete Buttigieg]

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[Doug]

Over the last several years, AI companies of all shapes and sizes have been desperately trying to get their hands on every bit of available data to make their models better. This week on the Vergecast, we have the story of how Anthropic destroyed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of books and fed them all to Claude. Plus we have information on who intended tech is in the Epstein files. What's going on with Netflix, whether it's woke, whether it's going to buy Warner Brothers, and whether Peloton is going to successfully sell you a treadmill ever again. All that on the Vergecast. Wherever you get podcasts.

[Aiden]

Is there a fear in your mind at all of a nightmare scenario for this midterms where Feels crazy to say, but an attempt to subvert the election in any way? An attempt to it feels like with some of the Actions being taken, seizing voting records, suing all the different states. Like it feels like there's a real effort. Like it doesn't, it doesn't feel hidden to make a challenge. Is this something that's on your mind?

[Brandon]

How do you.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Okay, look, earlier I described the reasons I think Trump is getting weaker. I think as he gets weaker, he will also grow more dangerous. And when he says he's going to do some of these things, I believe him. I don't believe him that he's going to lower costs, but I believe him when he says he wants to nationalize elections. And we've seen so many cases where something that was just outside of the realm of imagination.

[Brandon]

Greenland. Yeah.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Or even just January 6th. Right. The idea of an armed attack on the United States Capitol by Trump supporters would have gotten you kind of laughed at in, I don't know, 2018. And that happened in 2021. And that was then. This is 10 times darker. So am I worried about that? Of course I am. I'll say this, though. In addition to the fact that there's good work happening in political and legal areas to prevent that, that doesn't work if the people won't tolerate it.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Pete Buttigieg]

And that's kind of more broadly true, I think, of the abuses that we're seeing, the authoritarian turn that we've seen. And if you talk to people in places that feel like they lost their democracy or where it got away from them, like if you talk to somebody who was standing up to Putin back when it seemed like you could get somewhere by standing up to Putin 10 or 15 years ago, they'll say they wish they had spent even more time and energy on kind of old fashioned sounding stuff like taking to the streets, just to make it clear that most people were not on board with this. Remember, MAGA is a minority movement. Republican Party legitimately got enough to win a majority or almost a majority in the presidential election. They won. I'm not saying they didn't. But MAGA, it was like 20%, 30%, depending what surveys you look at. So I don't want to do a rerun of my earlier stuff about our structure. It's a weakness in our country that we're the kind of country where you can have a 20% movement, take over one of the two parties, and then run the table as if they ran the whole country. But it doesn't have to be that way either. And we need, if it looks like that sort of thing is starting to happen, then our ordinary political and legal processes won't Be enough to save us. There has to be enough people standing up, including, by the way, Republicans saying, like, look like I'm a Republican, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with someone from my party trying to overrun or reverse or steal an election.

[Aiden]

That's my biggest fear. Because in his first term it felt like there was enough of those Republicans.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yes.

[Aiden]

And this time it does not feel like there's any limit. So I, it, it sounds crazy when I first say. And then the more we get closer it feels like it's less crazy. So I guess. Yeah.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah. Now also, if the homework for my party is if it isn't even close, then it's really hard to pull that kind of thing off.

[Aiden]

True. Yeah.

[Doug]

Do you think there's room in kind of the national docket of stuff to be done because there's so much for more election reform to happen.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Totally.

[Doug]

We talked. The money part feels like the most extreme and I feel like it's the top of mind thing for a lot of people. And I think that feels. But there's little aspects like campaign, like campaign timelines. Like in Singapore, I think they campaign for like nine days or something.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And it's so you don't waste a bunch of time like having to call and raise money and campaign when you could be doing the job.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah. No, it's exhausting to have like a two year presidential cycle or a permanent congressional cycle. Now the challenge there obviously is we've decided, you know, I disagree that money on campaigns counts as the same as speech, but I believe that campaigning is speech. And so it's very hard to find a way to restrict that that would be fair in a way that Singapore would do because they don't care about free speech as much as you and I might. Yeah. So some of that we may just have to deal with. But just generally, again, I keep coming back to this. The political system we've inherited is not the only way for a political system to work. It's not even the only way for an American democratic representative republic based on our Constitution to work. It doesn't have to be this way. And if everybody, if the one thing everybody agrees is the system sucks, then we can't keep acting as if the system change it. Right.

[Doug]

What can you do?

[Brandon]

Is term limits a part of this? Do you feel like certainly we've had the same folks.

[Aiden]

He's talking about going younger. What if we go older? What if we start putting up 90 year olds, 95 year olds?

[Doug]

Have you even considered that the people in Charge might not be. Be experienced enough.

[Aiden]

That's the problem. Lack of wisdom, I think, maybe.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I mean, I think the best way we can deal with that is to make races more competitive. The actual record of term limits has been mixed. This is one thing where I've actually changed my mind a little bit. I used to be really drawn to this as a policy. I still think it's appropriate in certain contexts, and I think we should really think about it for the Supreme Court. But what I've noticed is in some states that do this, what winds up happening is the politicians come and go. And so just when they've built enough expertise to really take command of a policy issue, there's somebody new there, which sounds like a nice, refreshing thing. And it can be. But often what that means is the people who are there for 15 years, 20 years, 25 years around the statehouse are the lobbyists, and they wind up legitimately knowing more about the policy issue.

[Aiden]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Than the committee chair of whatever part in the legislature is supposed to be doing, whatever it is, healthcare or utilities or whatever. And the lobbyists can run circles around the legislators. So I would want to know that there was a way to solve for that before I felt comfortable seeing that model I've seen in some of the states get bigger. But what I am a big fan of is changing more frequently. Finding a way, I would argue through more competitive elections to change who's in office more often.

[Brandon]

This brings up a question I want to ask you. So after. After the Biden administration, after Department of Transportation secretary, you have still been speaking on these issues, coming to places like this, a lot of former secretaries just go become lobbyists. So how much were you offered to be a lobbyist? How much did you give up and could we have that job instead? Because it sounds awesome.

[Aiden]

We fill in for you on the lobbying trail.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah, Weirdly, I didn't get really approached, probably because of what I did when I was in office. Right.

[Brandon]

You weren't quite as friendly. I was.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I was like, a pretty tough regulator on airlines. So they weren't like, rushing to hire a guy. It's funny, actually. Ironically, my successor, the current Secretary of Transportation, is a former airline lobbyist. So he was a lobbyist, and then they put him in charge of the department kind of flipped.

[Brandon]

That solves that term limit thing.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Henry. You go back and forth, you know, because we were really tough on the airlines, and we made them take better care of their passengers. We upped the fines of. We held them accountable for some of These meltdowns that happened, we in some cases added a 0 or 2 to the level of enforcement action and refunds and settlements that they had to offer. But I'll say this, they still did well as businesses on my watch. They just, they made money. They just had to make money while taking better care of passengers. But anyway, I don't think that made me super popular in the industry lobbying world. So, shockingly, those offers didn't come flying in when I. When I left office.

[Brandon]

I think you're underplaying it. They're. They're quite good. I'm a big fan of those changes you made, and I can see why they would not be.

[Aiden]

Pete, we're running up on time. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I sincerely appreciate talking to you.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Enjoyed it. Thanks so much, Pete.

[Aiden]

My parents are fans of yours, surprisingly, because they, they, you know, they. They were the lean Republican for most of their life, but the Trump has really thrown them out. And they overnighted me. Your book, Trust.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Oh, wow.

[Aiden]

So I, I took a. I read through. I didn't get 100% done, but I read it.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Thank you.

[Aiden]

It's interesting that that was written in 2020. It feels like in the past six years, trust, which was low then, has gotten astronomically low. I wonder if I could ask you a final question. Is everything you're saying that in service of that goal of kind of re. I think it doesn't. The thing I'm seeing from our audience is a complete lack of trust in government on either side.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

I wonder if you could frame that.

[Pete Buttigieg]

In a. Yeah, I think the breakdown of trust between people and their government, between people in our institutions, between Americans and each other, is something that could be lethal if we don't do something about it. And if you're talking about societies and systems and structures, I'd say it's not that different from how it is between two people, where it could take years to build a certain level of trust. And it only takes a couple of bad choices or one bad choice to tear that trust up. And then you have a lot of work to do to build it. Which is why I wrote a whole book about trust, driven by my experiences, not just in and around politics, but reflecting on what it meant that when, When I was in the military, I learned to trust my life to people I barely knew. I mean, part of my job was to take vehicles and people in my unit outside the wire and, you know, getting into a vehicle together. We didn't necessarily know each other very well, sometimes all we had was a handshake, and, you know, we had the same flag on our shoulder, and that was about. And yet we were trusting each other with our lives. And I think that's kind of a metaphor for where we're at as a country, where all of us actually. Part of living in the same country as somebody is you're trusting everybody else with your life. And that gets played out through our political processes again and again. The good news is under pressure, and our country's under pressure. There are ways to earn trust and build trust quickly. And if we can get that done through results, through actually making problems better, then you get more where that came from. Trust can build. It can compound. And when you have a society with more trust, again, whether it's the government being viewed as more trustworthy or just us more ready to trust each other in our society, then our capacity to do big things gets much, much better. And it's one of the reasons why, for all the mess of the world we're in right now, I'm ultimately optimistic about what's possible because I think it's not too late.

[Aiden]

Thank you, babe.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Thank you.

[Brandon]

This conversation made me a little more hopeful, and I appreciate that a lot. Thanks so much for coming on.

[Doug]

Thank you.

[Pete Buttigieg]

Thanks, everybody.

[Aiden]

Thanks, guys, for watching.

[Doug]

Thank God we got rid of that guy who was.

[Brandon]

That was literally improving the whole time.

[Pete Buttigieg]

He just walked in. I see.

[Doug]

Like, he just walked in.

[Brandon]

CEO Peter.

[Pete Buttigieg]

I don't know.

[Aiden]

I didn't. I did not know.

[Doug]

Is it short for Peter?

[Aiden]

I don't know. That was fun.

[Doug]

That was fun. We were a little pressed for time, and I think we had some more things we wanted to chat about or talk about in that episode. But if you're interested in us talking about that a little more, you can come check out our Patreon.

[Aiden]

Not with Beach. You're gonna be us talking about.

[Doug]

Not just us. Just us. We do an extra episode every week on the Patreon. It's patreon.com lemonadesan. But otherwise, we will see you back for a normal episode next week.

[Brandon]

Thanks, everybody.

[Aiden]

Support for Lemonade Stand comes from Adobe. Guys, I took a look into the whole grandma thing that you guys mentioned earlier, and it turns out the Adobe product is really more about editing PDFs. My grandma's not coming back from the dead. I promised a lot to a family reunion that I can't.

[Brandon]

I've been jamming your grandma into a fax machine for three hours. You're telling me that's not gonna do.

[Doug]

Anything that doesn't make any sense legally.

[Aiden]

There's a problem with everything.

[Doug]

I've done so much with Adobe Acrobat Studio and I can't do that.

[Pete Buttigieg]

That's. That's what you're saying.

[Aiden]

That's the limit that you don't believe.

[Doug]

Right. So there's no limits to it. I mean, including being able to edit in PDFs and move things around. I think that's pretty incredible. And you could learn [e-mail] do that.

[Aiden]

With Acrobat Sport for this show comes from Tastytrade. Listen, I'll keep it a buck. You probably shouldn't trade anything, but if you do want to trade, if you're interested in trading stocks, options, futures and more in all one platform, you can do with low commissions on Tastytrade and keep more of what you earn.

[Brandon]

And there's a bunch of educational content on there where you can learn a whole bunch about how to actually trade. If you're interested in this stuff.

[Aiden]

Because of the jargon.

[Brandon]

Yeah, and there's a lot of jargon. There's a lot of stuff. I'm confused and scared about this.

[Aiden]

Well, there's a lot of videos that'll be Explain it.

[Doug]

So I could go to tastytrade.com lemonade today to get started.

[Aiden]

You absolutely could probably.