Pete
Appearances
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
He did.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
Yeah, they need Doge.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
Maybe we should shoot a music video.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
Because that means something's going on. I mean, yeah. But hasn't Charlamagne said the thing about the little finger in there? Maybe in the past, though. Hold on.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
Shout out to Jason, dude. That's so good.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
270.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
It's just New York. Nah, but they wouldn't do that to any regular crowd. That was some cucky shit. That was unbelievable.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
He was in a group. That's stupid.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
Very fair. Very fair.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
How are you gonna prove it?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
You know, for the vibes and all that good shit. You're a phony. I hate this guy. I mean, how bad can it be? Nah, we good. I'll 5'4", yo.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
Five, seven. Okay.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
You're 5'8", yo. No, no, no.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
No, it's not. You're not 5'9". No, it's not. He's not 5'9". No, it's not.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
I'm a real 6'7". You're a fake 5'9". This makes me feel bad.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
Bro, he's looking at the tape measure. Get in here. Get in here, bro.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
What are you seeing?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Is DOGE Saving America? Matt Damon is a Hero, & Steve Smith Sr. Is a Demon
That's actually totally what I thought. Everybody's a liar except your boy. Unless I shrunk, there's no way. 5'10", bro.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And yeah, not to like repeat myself too many times, but this could be about, it might be that this is about to get much worse because there is a debate happening like right now, like through this summer in Congress. Where I think there's a lot of people who hope that no one's paying too close attention to the tax changes and the tax cuts that they're about to put in.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So this is a great time to hold members of Congress accountable. Because I do think, you know, even if you live in a very Republican area and you've got a Republican member of Congress, like most people in that district don't love the idea of skewing the tax code even more toward corporations and wealthy people. Like there's a real moment here, I think, to do something about that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So, like, they're talking a good game.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Studebaker made cars. Before the big three, it was the big four. And we were one of them. It dominated our city, grew our city. And then in 1963, they shut down. That's 20 years before I was born. And we were still dealing with it 20 years later. We were still dealing with it 50 years later when I became the mayor there at the age of 29. And what had happened was...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I mean, when we were going to school, I would go in between just acres of collapsing factories that literally looked like a war zone. I have been to war zones that look very similar to the way a lot of places in the industrial Midwest, like where I grew up, looked because of some of these things you're talking about. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Which is why I think there's an appeal to saying, we're going to bring back manufacturing, right? And by the way, again, I don't want to like... Move away from what I was saying that we shouldn't go back to where we were because I think a lot needs to change.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But I would point out that in our entire lifetime, the year when there was the most investment in factories in the United States, the most factories being built was last year because there were a lot of policies. The chip stuff, the manufacturing stuff, trying to get more of the green economy stuff to be built on U.S. soil. That led to a lot of these factories.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Now, a lot of them are still in construction as we speak. Some of them actually opened. Some of them still haven't. But right now in Kokomo, Indiana, I just read a story today about 370 workers at Stellantis who just got laid off. Auto workers who got laid off because of the tariffs. So this is a tool that you can use for sure.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But it's absolutely critically important that you know what you're doing when you do. And if you're just making shit up as you go along, or if you're doing it for a reason that's actually less about helping middle America and more about consolidating power, which is what I think is actually happening. We can get into that. Yeah. Then it's not going to work.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But I don't want to completely disagree with what you're saying earlier. Like, yeah, part of what's happening is like a part of why things cost more is that they actually cost more. But also we've seen a lot of expansion of technology. the corporate profits that people cash in on, right? Which helped to explain why a lot of things cost more.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But to me, the answer to that is, okay, let's have a fairer tax system. How do we do that? That says, well, I mean, at risk of sounding simplistic, like you pass a law, like we can do this, right? It's not like profoundly mysterious.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It doesn't have to be like all the way at the level that it used to be.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Right. And what is that if you're just sitting on it? At a certain point, especially if you're past a certain point in how much you're sitting on, you've got to contribute a little bit. I mean, this is not a novel—property taxes are that way, right? Like, you don't wait—it depends on where you live, but usually you don't wait until you sell a home to have to pay property tax on every year.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like, you contribute a little bit of the value of the real estate you're sitting on, and that goes to— You know, the county roads and the school and the sheriff's department or whatever else you count on, right? So there is a way to do that nationally. But property tax is going to close that gap? I don't think it's going to close that gap.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I mean, if you had all these – well, you have pieces of that. A lot.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, yeah, yeah, dude. He had such a pure heart. Don't bully this guy. Yeah, that is true. And then the three women seem fine after witnessing a mass shooting. Like, they're just laughing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
A whole bunch of these corporations.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I don't really care about their emotions.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. So I think what you do is you peg it. Basically, you do what they're pretending to do. So what they said they were doing. is they're kind of scanning all of the different countries and they're saying, okay, here's some countries that are really not trading with us on fair terms. Like they're restricting our trade with them or they're artificially manipulating their currency.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
China does this for sure. What does that mean?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So in a nutshell, the cheaper the exchange rate, the more you're going to export because the cheaper your goods are. Right. So the strong dollar. Right. Basically, the weaker the dollar is, actually, the cheaper our stuff looks to the rest of the world and the more they're going to purchase our things. So if you're China, one thing you're going to do is you're going to it sounds counterintuitive.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like usually you think like a nationalistic country. We want our currency to be.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
You have a competitive advantage. Yes.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
If you ever traveled in Southeast Asia and the dollar is doing really strong, you're like, wow, I'm going to buy everything here in Thailand. It's the first thing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So that applies on everything from your experience as a tourist to major industrial production. And how does one do that? Do they print more money? So you can print more money. You can buy and sell bonds. Some countries just officially set an exchange rate and then use their central bank. There's all kinds of ways to do it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But the point is, part of trading deals is you're supposed to promise not to do it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And so what I'm saying is what you do is you look for a place where there's an unfair trading practice and then you respond and you say, okay, you either drop this trading practice or we're going to impose these restrictions on how you trade with us, which again is exactly what they say they're doing, but it is not what they're doing. What are they doing? They came up with this weird formula.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It's actually the same thing that ChatGPT would suggest. If you just ask ChatGPT, like, hey, make up a table of how I should charge the tariffs. They used a totally different measure called the trade deficit, which we could get into, and said, okay, whatever the trade deficit is, we're going to do this formula off of that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And by the way, there was a math mistake that a conservative think tank discovered in the way they did it. And they just randomly applied. There were islands that don't even have people. There are islands that are actually like U.S., U.K.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Either way, it showed the sloppiness of the process.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I think it also doesn't make sense as policy. A trade deficit may or may not be helpful to us economically. It's not just a simple thing like trade deficit bad. So what I'm saying is you use the tariffs in a much more targeted and specific way when you know that you either have that kind of unfair trade situation or
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Or you're trying to protect a certain industry that you think is vulnerable domestically, right? But it's really important to know what you're doing or else a whole bunch of people get screwed in the process. Like the other day I was having breakfast in Michigan out and a couple of people came up to me. They were on a little shop that was right next to the breakfast place where I was eating.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
She seems fine. She becomes the woman that she's always hated. Yeah. She doesn't use the same language. I think so. I think she's like the same words that Tanya uses. I have to do something for myself. Yeah. Yeah. But like the whole show, I was worried about her.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And, um, the woman who runs it said, I'm not sure what we're going to do is like clothes, like bags and stuff. And they, they source stuff from, from all over the world. And she said, you know, we just put an order in, we don't even know how much it's going to cost us. And I don't know what I'm going to do for next month.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I got some inventory here I can use this month, but we're going to be screwed, especially if we don't even know how to plan. Cause the other thing you need to do. It's like any form of diplomacy. Like, you do shots across the bow. You make clear what, you know, if you do this, we're going to respond that way.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And there has to be some, like, logic to it or order to it if you want to shape the behavior of other countries, right? And what we're seeing instead is this, like, really, like, chaotic, like, grab-ass policy where, like, he changes his mind every couple of days on things, right? Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, and that makes it that much harder, especially if you're a small business or if you're a giant corporation, you have all kinds of hedges and like ways you can maneuver through this.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Hold it. Right now they're like picking and choosing what they're going to buy. Yeah, so now Apple doesn't have the tariffs.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Physically, not morally.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And then it turns out I was well done.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, especially because there are a lot of people that I think Democrats are understood to care about. Low-income people, black and brown people are disproportionately caught up in the economic pain when something like this happens. And so I do think my party needs to do a much better job, especially with the kind of finger wagging that you're talking about. I think we are very prone to that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I've seen it happen on any side. I think a lot of people, you get... you get this sense of like moral conviction and you're so sure of it that you start to think it makes it okay to be an asshole because like, because you're deep down, like the thing, and this is like far right and far left movements through the ages.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, but I think it's definitely true of far right and far, far left in the U S right now. Um, you just think like you can, you can treat people however you want. You say whatever you want about them because like they're evil. You're yeah, they're evil. And if they win, all is lost. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, yeah. And I think pain is a really important place to start because, like, if you encounter somebody in pain and you approach that with compassion and you actually listen— That's a very different place to come from than, like, either how can I use this or how am I going to judge the choices that this person made while in pain?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Especially if they have developed, very understandably, a distrust of everybody, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I don't want to get away from Alex. Yeah. No, but I mean, to your point, like part of it is like, where do we go? Right. To me, especially after we lose our party or any party has this debate of like, what do we have to say and how do we say it? To me, there's actually three things we need to deal with. What do we have to say? I mean, like the policies, the ideas.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
If they're right, we should hold to it. If we're not so sure they're right, we should rethink them. This is that. Then there's how do we say it? That's the tone, the message, the style, whether people feel like you're wagging a finger at them or not, whether people think you get the kind of pain they're going through or not, right? And then the part nobody talks about is where we say it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I think right now where we say it is kind of everything because there are so many spaces where people, like I'm sure you don't think yourselves as maybe a political show or a news show.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like the reality is probably a lot of folks are like this is where they're getting their news because like they're not sitting watching CNN. I mean, I remember the moment when I was back in college that I realized I was getting more of my news from The Daily Show than I was from like news sources. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And and so I think it's really important for anyone practicing politics and definitely my party after what just happened to it. to be saying, okay, where else do we need to be? And like, it's, it's all well and good for me to keep going on Fox news. And I will, although they don't seem to be inviting me as much lately, but he just called y'all pussy.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
talk your shit i'm just saying like we were really close to having a conversation about the whole like signal gate do you put the wrong dude on your yeah yeah and what happened then they canceled just didn't quite get around was it debate prep they were working on something they were busy yeah um but like you know a lot of people aren't watching
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Left, right, or center, they're not watching, like, television cable news all the time, right? And I think my party has this illusion that we're the savvy ones about tech. And 15 years ago, we were, right? Like, we were on to things like Facebook and social media, probably a little more than the right was, or we were there first.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But at least since 2016, the Twitter election, like, that has been true less, right? Yeah. So I think we need to be prepared to go everywhere. And that's always been my style. I mean, largely because I had to when I was first running for president. I would talk to anybody who would listen, which at first wasn't a lot of people, and I would go to any place that would have me.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But to go back a little bit in what I was saying, I do think we also need to revisit what it is we're offering. Because if it sounds like what we're offering is... Let's just go back. This isn't working out. Obviously, the terrorists are hurting people. He's consolidating absolute power. Like, lots of things are bad about this, which is true. Therefore, let's go back to that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So I think a lot of what they have to say will get more and more traction in the party, especially on the economic piece. This idea that you have a lot of regular people in regular life getting screwed over by the way things work. And if we don't have better services and fairer taxes, we're just never going to get through that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Well, first, I think we need to be more disciplined and louder about that economic message. To be clear, we will be advancing policies that make sure you are economically better off. What does that mean? That means that you can, you know, the one thing I think people do give us a lot of credit for is healthcare, but there's more to do on that, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We're not going to let them like tear up Obamacare.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We're going to make sure that there is a fairer tax code, like not just standing against the tax cuts for the rich that he's about to push through Congress, but actually having a tax code where there's not a benefit to a corporation like moving billions of dollars overseas, where there's not a benefit to kind of hiding your worth, where you're not better off basically with wealth than work, which is where the tax code is right now.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
The space flight? Yeah. I'm glad they got back okay. I mean, yeah, I guess. I mean, it seems to me there's some other things we could probably be paying a little more attention to. But, you know, it's exciting. Look, we're in this era of commercial space flight, which is exciting. Yeah. I worked on this when I started air transportation like that. Oh, you were part of that. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We, I think, need to be much more clear about what we would provide in terms of services for people. Like, we still, we're the only country, I think maybe Papua New Guinea is the only other country in the world that doesn't do a policy for parental leave. Like, some level of, like, national guarantee that when you have a kid, you will get leave.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It can be done, I promise. I think it's great. When I was mayor, we did it locally for city employees.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That's great.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But I think there are also some things that we need to kind of rewire in the way government works to make it work better for people. And I live this. So, for example, I'm watching them basically burn the federal government down. And obviously, I've got problems with the way they're destroying cancer research or making it harder for the FAA to keep airplanes safe. A lot of that is bad.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But I will also admit that I have been furious and frustrated with the way things work in our federal government. And it's actually gotten to where it makes it harder to do things that I think progressives in particular care about.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Building things, building housing, building roads and bridges, which I lived for four years, building clean energy projects, like stuff we should objectively definitely be doing. And we've gotten in our own way with this pandemic.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
These layers of process, layers of procedure, all of them introduced with good intentions, but which collectively have made it almost impossible or unaffordable to do anything.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So we need a—yeah, definitely they need to be smarter, and there needs to be less procedure. Still powerful regulations to keep people safe.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
You're such a Doge. If Doge was actually about government efficiency, I'd be all for it. But it's not about that. No. What is it about?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, I mean, it's transportation, right? Our main thing was just making sure on the way—it's actually very Wild West right now, big picture-wise. The main concerns are making sure you don't hit anything on the way up, because you've got to go through the national airspace, and that if anything blows up on the ground, you don't hurt anybody on the ground. Those are kind of the main concerns.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
This is insane. I know. Hot take. Truth bomb. It's being dropped on playground. No, but look at it this way. So, and yeah, when I was in government as mayor, when I had my kind of small government that I was running, we took whole departments apart and put them back together. We removed people who weren't performing very well. And by the way, that was hard.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like one of the reasons I've always had a problem with this president is like he emerged kind of play acting, like firing people for fun. Right. For me, at least as like a young CEO, basically of a city government, other than dealing with violence and death, the worst part of my job was firing people. Like I hated it, especially because like they weren't.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It wasn't necessarily a bad person, but you had a person who was in a role that they didn't fit in and their department wasn't doing as well as I thought it needed to do to serve residents. I would have this very painful conversation where we'd sit down, I'd look them in the eye, and that sucked for most of all for them. But but anyway, we're not afraid to do that because you have to do that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. But look at what happened when they came in. Right. If if this is actually about government efficiency, then the problem you would be solving, which is a real problem, is that in the federal government, it is too hard to reward your top performers.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So you could be somebody who could be commanding a multimillion dollar salary in the private sector, working on something wildly important, but there's just no way that you're getting, you know, you're in your particular pay grade, same as everybody else. And to remove your bottom performance.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like, a lot of people who've been in and out of business and government will tell me, like, when I was in the private sector and the public sector, actually, like, the top 10% were pretty much the same, these amazing driven people. You know, the government ones weren't compensated as well, but they were purpose-driven.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But the bottom 10% was completely different because I couldn't do anything about the bottom 10%, right? So imagine if Doge had come in. And they had gone through every department and said, okay, we're going to create a way to reward the top performers. And we're also going to analyze either whose job description is no longer needed or their job performance is not there.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And even though it's painful, even though maybe it's politically tough, we're going to show them the door. That would be one thing. But they just sent an email to everybody, many of whom were, in fact, top performers. Some of the people they fired who got caught up in this thing, people got fired just based on whether you were in a category called probationary employee.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But eventually, we'll have to start—
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But to be clear, probationary isn't like you fucked up and you're on probation. You could actually be because you were promoted. You could be a seven-year veteran at the FAA, or maybe you'd been there as a contractor, but you were so good that the FAA said, we want to hire you now as a government employee. And even though it might have been a little pay cut, you went for it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And you're probationary. Yeah. And then next thing you know, like, you wake up one day and this office, department, whatever Doge is, clearly hasn't, like, gone through and checked, like, who's doing a good job or who's... There's no way because there wasn't even time to do that. And they're just like, guess what? You're fired. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
regulating that like we do commercial air travel right uh in order to make it like now i think there's a sense of fly at your own risk right you you understand if you're being blasted permission when you're ready to go is i'm guessing there's all kinds of i don't i haven't seen it but i'm guessing there's all kinds of releases and and paperwork if only we could talk to the transportation secretary um
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
part of the answer to your question of what Democrats should be talking about. Because I think we're the ones who believe, some say we believe it to a fault, like we believe it naively, but we're the ones who believe that there is, the government has to, if you do it right, government has the power to make people better off. But if we're going to do that, let's actually do it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And part of that does mean taking a hard look at everything we do. I remember, again, most of my examples will come from transportation, right? But I remember something that went on with the FAA where They had to get some special waiver in order to allow a certain class of airplane to fly because there was a regulation that said there had to be a switch to turn off the no-smoking light.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And this was written back when sometimes you turned off the no-smoking light. Now, obviously, there's just always a no-smoking light because you can't smoke on airplanes. And there's this scramble. That's the kind of stuff that we should absolutely be getting rid of. And there are things that we do in government sometimes or in the military, we call it a self-licking ice cream cone.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
There's definitely things that are there, these just self-perpetuating processes that nobody would have come up with on their own, but they're still there. I think we should absolutely own that space because we have a good faith belief that government should serve people better and should work better. And we should be the ones who are making that happen.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yes. But it's surgery because you don't want to get rid of the part of the bureaucracy that makes sure the planes don't crash.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Well, so there's an entire process where to permit a federal project, you have to listen to every—you have to take in every comment from anybody who wants to weigh in, and then you have to respond to every comment, or a human has to kind of review all of that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Which, by the way, one thing I'm really worried about is if you have—let's say there's some regulation coming and an industry wants to stop it, can they use AI? They can just keep commenting. Yeah. Or can you use AI? Because it used to be like, well, you'd have to take the trouble to write a letter or at least go to the trouble of like getting people to write form letters. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Now you could write customized letters. So you use bureaucracy to fight bureaucracy. Well, use bureaucracy to stop something from happening. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a real problem if that's a thing that needed to happen, especially because you also need to go through that process to remove a regulation or to replace or to modernize it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So there's this level of problem, and I encountered it all the time. I mean, right here in New York, right, there are so many major transportation projects going. And I'm proud to have worked on them. BQE, Hudson River Tunnel. I mean, that's one of the biggest transportation projects in our time. Second Avenue Subway.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But there's an understanding there's a different level of risk. Whereas on commercial aviation, we have zero tolerance for risk. And actually, that's worked out pretty well. I think one thing that we always talk about the things that are going poorly, we pay attention to the bad thing before we notice the good thing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I don't know my New York geography as well as you do, but the really crazy thing about the 2nd Avenue subway is the tunnel's already there. It's been there for 50 years.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I will always defend SEC News. This is a neighborhood that deserves good transit the way everybody else has good transit. It doesn't go all the way up to 125th. Nobody needs to go up to 125th and 2nd Avenue.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Crosstown blocks, though, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I'm pushing the limits of my New York expertise here. No, no, you got this. You got it down. And, like, to get to the airport. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. This is my bike.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I don't want to, like— Is there a subway there, be honest? I don't want to, like, you know, challenge your expertise as somebody who once went near it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I went near it. A lot of New Yorkers seem to really want this because I got a lot of calls and we worked hard on it. That's bots. That's bots.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It does feel like that a little bit recently that the planes aren't making it as much. We can get into that. But we had 15 years. With zero commercial airline fatal crashes. 15 years. Think about that. Just in the time I was secretary, we had about 4 billion people get on airplanes. Statistically, if you took your seat on an airplane and you were sitting there...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Because it makes everything because they're not going through the regular like any kind of process. We have to like check with Congress or evaluate which of the programs are actually doing something and which ones aren't or which people are good at their jobs and which aren't. It means all that really matters is whether you're on the White House's good side.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And they're doing this with everything. The tariffs are like this. Of course. In the end, if your company or your country or your industry gets on his good side, then you get out. That has nothing to do with whether it's good economic policy or whether it's going to help, you know, my neighbors in Michigan. But it is something that helps consolidate power. Right. Law firms.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
He's sending this message like if your law firm doesn't get on my good side. then you're going to be screwed because we're going to use, even though it's completely illegal, we're going to manipulate your access to security clearances or anything else because I don't like you. Isn't that what Biden did to Mayor Adams, though, when he was just trying to get some upgrades?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
No, I would argue the opposite is true. I would argue what happened was, and I know he was just sitting in here talking about this. He just wants some upgrades, dude. He wants to build a 24-hour strip club. Everybody wants upgrades. I get it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Being a politician. But that can't be how low our expectations are. That's how we all look at it. Hold on, hold on.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
What did you do? If I got an upgrade—and by the way, not because the Turkish government liked me, but because I was a frequent flyer on United or whatever—if I got an upgrade, I would have my security detail go to the gate agent.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
and negotiate the downgrade so I didn't have to deal with, not because there was a rule about it, but so I didn't have to deal with, like, a bunch of people on Twitter saying, like, look at this asshole in first class.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That's crazy.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Who gets a downgrade on Delta or United? Because I don't want people to ask. I'm regulating airlines. I shouldn't be like up there. Now I take the upgrade. Private sector. I love the upgrade. Yeah. Anyway, this is not about upgrades. This is about whether somebody who has been indicted for a crime can get out of it by getting on the good side of the... The whole point of this country...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Buckle your seatbelt, eat your snack. You would be statistically more likely to randomly die of natural causes than to be involved in a fatal crash. Right. Wow. And that didn't just randomly happen. They have years of technology, regulation, policy, like a lot of things go into that. And.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
is that no one person should have too much power. Like to me, that's the whole point of a cut. The king was somebody who had too much power. And we said, we're not gonna do it that way. There were ferocious debates at the time of the founding over whether to even create a presidency. Because Jefferson was worried that if we had a president, it would turn into a king.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And they kind of hit a compromise where we created the president, but we took all these measures in the Constitution to make sure that presidency didn't become too powerful. Yeah. And this is like a part of the texture of our country. My favorite fun fact about Washington, D.C.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
is the Jefferson Memorial, the round domed column structure with the statue of Jefferson right in the middle, has him perfectly aligned with the exact center line of the White House. So that if you're standing in the blue room, which is in the middle of the White House, looking south, you have just, there's a straight line. He's watching you. Because he's watching.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
He's watching the executive saying he doesn't want the executive office president to get out. Kind of a question about that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
For the time? Jefferson.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Kind of both, right? I mean, he was agrarian. He was definitely more kind of libertarian, if we were to try to map it on today's terms. You're shitting on your whole joke right now. Fucking idiot. I love that. I love that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I think what he said about California was pretty— I'm not going to shit on one state or another, but— Good. Yeah, there is obviously a relationship between the results you see and your willingness to trust that there's anything you're getting out of your tax dollars.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That's what it looks like kind of on the other side of that process, where with commercial spaceflight, it's very new. It's understood that it's very risky. And I guess that's OK. But I don't want to lose the first thing you asked about, which is taxation, because I think, you know, a big thing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But if you put the money in and you do it right, then the public's going to be more trusting, right, that you're getting something out of those tax dollars.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So if you're good looking, there's going to be a higher perception of tax payers.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I think most Americans, definitely my party, but I think most Americans believe that if you're making a billion dollars, good for you. But like you should at least be paying an effective tax rate that's comparable or I would argue more than like a firefighter. And that's not true right now. Because nobody really makes a billion dollars. Right, because it's all equity.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I'm saying that if people don't see the results, especially we're coming along saying like, okay, everybody's going to have to like pay into this. Fuck off. I'm not, I'm not seeing the results. Yeah. Right. Um, Now, I think that's a nuanced story because the best results sometimes, especially when you're in safety, a big part of my job, it wasn't just building, it was transportation.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
A big part of the results is what doesn't happen. Good, bad things that don't happen. You don't notice your school being good. You just notice when it's bad. Yeah, and you don't notice your road being smooth. You just notice when there's a pothole in it, right? And you don't notice when an airplane doesn't crash. And you don't notice when you have clean, safe drinking water.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
By the way, that's okay. Like, that's the point. Like, you shouldn't have to worry about whether your drinking water is clean. Because if you did, you wouldn't be able to worry about whatever else matters to you in life. So I don't think anybody can argue that the American taxpayer has gotten their money's worth. I think there's lots of reasons for that. Part of it is, though, that we underinvest.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And we underinvest not because the overall tax rates are too low. I don't think that most people should be paying more in taxes. I do think certain people should be paying much more in taxes. And that's where we get to the giant multi-billion dollar corporation that figures out a way to do their books and pay zero. And then brag about it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Tell him to pay up. But you can't blame him for using the rules of the system.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Because if the whole capitalist system, for good and for ill, is that if you don't play that to your advantage, somebody else will and they will beat you. So instead of asking somebody to leave money on the table, we should just fix the rules so that they're more fair. Yeah. And that's the investment side. But the other side of it is throwing money at the problem is not enough.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It is clearly true. And this is the other point about the Second Avenue subway, which, again, I will defend to my death that it is a good project. Have you been on it? We can't, dude.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
What's really impossible to defend is how long it has taken I'm not joking when I say it's been there for 50—the tunnel's there for 50 years. It's a 100-year project. It got started in 1920. Which is nuts. And the cost of it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. I don't know that that's true, but I know that if you see that much money going in and you don't see results, I don't blame you for assuming it's corruption. Right. Well, where could it go? I think a lot of it is bureaucracy, actually. And it's the inability to get even basic things done. There are exceptions we worked on.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
The one thing I worked on that I'm very excited about is another high-speed line that goes from Las Vegas to California, to Southern California. They could be open by 2028 if they hit all of their marks and everything goes well. There's some reasons why that was different, though. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And part of why it was different was the public-private partnership, which created a different—and it's a red state next to a blue state. But it's California, too, right? So it's Nevada and California, sponsored by Nevada, which is a swing state, by the way, not a red state, I would argue. Good point. Hey, good point.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And they did some right-of-way stuff where a big part of the route is actually just right down the median of I-15. So it's easy, comparatively easy, compared to having to buy. The problem with the Second Avenue subway, the cost of it, sounds like you know a lot about this. Loves trains. Do love trains. Good. I love trains, too.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
The reason it's costing so much here is to even put in a little power facility, let alone a station, you've got to buy real estate out in one of the most dense and expensive places, probably the most dense and expensive place in the entire world. The most expensive buildings in the world. It's incredibly complicated to even just do the signal work in the stations, right? Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Anyway, my point is I agree that we have to have better results, better return on taxpayer money. But when it goes well, I mean, again, we're all living off of the value, even though the Internet has proven to be a mixed bag. Yeah. Many people, including like these Doge guys, right, made all of their money off of something that was literally invented by the federal government, the Internet.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That's a great point, honestly. So it can work. I'm not here to say it always does work. It can work, but you have to actually have people who care about it working versus just gathering their own power and making it all about us.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
No, I think that's true. When you live in a city, when you live in a dense neighborhood, you're, like, more aware of the importance. Although I'd also argue wherever you live, right? Sure, 100%. You count on things from national defense to, you know, railroads.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, it's more in your face here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because you can't confuse yourself for not—if you get on the subway, which I still can't tell if you ever have. You— What, me? Me? I don't know.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
This is great.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Listen, I know. Okay, so when you're sitting on the subway... Name one stop, I'll tell you where it is. You can't miss the...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. So I think first of all, you, you have to acknowledge why people are skeptical. And I do think that's, I mean, look, anybody who's been in a relationship knows that like, if somebody's upset or pissed, like you don't start and say like, you should feel, you should feel better than you do. Actually. Here's why you're wrong to be upset. Right. Right. Like we, we, we can't be caught doing that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We are doing that with a dude. No, it's the same. Really? Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
My side's got a lot to offer, but it's that part.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Okay, please continue. So part of it's kind of that approach. Part of it is to demonstrate the things that... are going well or that can be done well. So we talk about crime, right, in cities. And you would think if you watch like the Republicans that like every city is a like hellhole of crime. Now, if we respond and we're like, what crime?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Then like obviously when you got like people getting pushed into the subway and you've got carjackings up, it's gonna sound like we're just making shit up. If on the other hand, we point to the fact that like Boston is at something like a 70 year low in the murder rate there.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Or we point to the achievements in Denver under their mayor there about tackling some of the hardest problems in the world, like homelessness and housing. And having lived that as a mayor in a largely low-income community, that is one of the hardest things that people working in government can ever try to solve, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I doubt it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And there are people who are doing it well, and most of those people, in my experience, are Democrats.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Now, they may not be, like, Washington Democrats or, like, federal, like, congressional part of our party, but because I think the folks who are saying, like, government got this wrong, which might be true any number of times, what they're really saying is, like, the policies of this person in government got it wrong, but they don't have an answer. Their answer is burn it all down, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
If we haven't solved poverty... Their answer is we're going to slash Medicaid, which is what the Republican budget moving through Congress right now will do is slash Medicaid. Medicaid may not be perfect. In fact, I know for a fact, like many issues come up in the way it's administered, the way people have access to it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But I also know for a fact that if your answer to that is just to cut out a bunch of poor people. Or VA, like any veteran can tell you. The horror stories of all the times things didn't go right in dealing with the VA. But if you think the answer is to just cut it or privatize it, that's not an answer. We can do better than that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I think my party's job is to make clear what that looks like and how we would do it better. How would you do it? Well, I would follow the lead of some of these mayors we're talking about who are solving some of these problems in a more localized area. City governments that... It makes systems work better in ways that complicated federal systems like Social Security or like VA could.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. I mean, usually those numbers are based on arrests more than prosecutions, but yeah, I hear you. He was giving me crime statistics, not arrest statistics, but, but sure.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Well, there's that perception and reality thing. I mean, back again to aviation, right? So a lot of folks are nervous flyers, don't know if it's safe to fly. Meanwhile, like I said, there was this horrible crash in January, but America went 15 years without a fatal commercial airline crash.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Meanwhile, the number of people who are going to die today in car crashes is basically the same as the number of people you can fit into a 737. And yet most of us... Every day. Every single day. 40,000 people a year. Yeah. Ish. Yeah. Same as gun violence, roughly. And yet most people feel safer when they get in a car. Yeah. Especially if they're the ones driving. You're on the ground.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
You have some level of control.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But the reality is your life is in way more danger.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So then it's kind of a psychology question. You're like, how do you find people where they are? You don't want to blow off those fears, but you do want to reach people with real data and real numbers and information that is real. And the thing that really scares me about the moment we're in is it's harder and harder for everybody to have access to the same facts.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It's one thing, like I grew up in a world where you watch TV, you got your news from TV, which is like antique technology. From what I can tell, talking to students now, but you would watch a TV show and maybe the, you know, maybe the, the, that TV show, that network didn't do it perfectly.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But generally what they would try to do is they would cover an issue, whatever it is, abortion taxes, some bill, the moving through Congress, and they would have the Republican saying Republican things and the Democrats saying democratic things. And you would, you would think about it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And watching that, like often hearing the other side would just make you feel what you believed even stronger because you'd be thinking of your own counter arguments. And other times something the other side said would actually get through to you. But the point is you would think about it. And you would have to contend with what other people had to say.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And while there were different opinions going around based on different values, they tended to be in an argument that was over the same facts. Now, we don't even have the same facts. And that is a massive problem.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like, this is a big time, you know. Yeah, I hate to say it. I love him. He's a good kid, right? Yeah. But just from a narrative perspective, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a real problem and I think they should get rid of it. I mean, this is this is not a problem for me because I didn't have a lot of wealth. But and look, I get it. If I was a millionaire, I'm sure I would like to think twice before taking a public service job if that meant having to divest.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But like, you know, we're talking about people who are sometimes responsible for like.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
multi-billion dollar decisions or in terms like the course of the national economy like trillion dollar level outcomes right and if they think even for a second about like oh what's this going to do to my stock in google or whatever that's a problem yeah right um and you know that coupled with and this is less politically popular but i also think a lot of public servants don't get paid enough
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I would go to bat for them getting paid, maybe not the same as the public private sector. Like, I get that that's never going to be the same. But I do think that they need to be compensated well enough that they don't have to swallow quite as hard.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But I think it's interesting what you said. Like, people feel like they can't trust the data, they can't trust the politicians. Like, I think those two things are linked. Because actually, the data, it's actually very, very rare for data to be put out that is objectively false. They can happen. Like, usually, like, the data are, like, based on some real set of data. But it can be manipulated.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But, yeah, how it looks or how you make it sound. I mean, they're doing this right now. Again, the Doge says they make it sound like there's, like, millions of dead people getting Social Security.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We're just not.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
One thing to think about is like, obviously the vast majority of people who die of old age, um, are getting social security the day they die. Right. So like for at least a minute or a week or a month or however long it takes, right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
There's, there's that process of updating, but part of it had to do with how the database was built and you just didn't, didn't necessarily like remove everybody from the database. It didn't mean they were getting money. But it meant they were in the database. And so you could twist that into looking like this is what the president did in his speech. Like, it's true.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
There's this database that all these people from like, you know, a hundred years ago, it was not true that they were getting checks. Okay. But he said the one part and your brain fills in the blanks. And now you think, oh shit, there's like millions of people who are 150 years old getting checked. It was not true.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So, but, but the real thing is we don't trust the people who are supposed to be interpreting the data.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And that is like a societal problem. It's not just politicians, right? It's an erosion of trust in every institution where somebody is supposed to help us make sense of this.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I come out of the local right where we're a little more connected to reality, because if like if the roads are in shitty condition and I'm the mayor and I can produce some statistics saying that the roads are great, people can call me out and say, no, they're not like I drive on these roads all the time. And they're not.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And they will find me and they will tell me what they think of the condition of our roads. Right. Right. You get up to the national level and you're so removed from it that you start to get into these like alternate reality zones. And then you add to that the fragmentation of where people get their information because there isn't the, you know, Walter, the famous example is Walter Cronkite, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like everybody in the 60s like turns on Walter Cronkite. And it's not so much that he told people what to think. It's that he laid out a certain set of facts, certain set of things that happened. Everybody, they can argue over what it means, but they would generally agree on what just happened. Right, right. And we don't even have that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So the algorithms are even worse. I mean, the other problem I would say is we no longer have access to the editorial function, by which I mean a professional news organization. I used to get so mad at... Ever from the South Bend Tribune to the New York Times, there were times when I was so pissed over a story or framing or whatever. But I will say...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
If I actually found that they got something actually factually wrong and showed it, they would correct it. Like there is that ethos. Ah, no.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And professional journalistic organizations have to do that. But if we're in a world where somebody waits like what some dude on the internet says, the same, as an organization where there are people who have to hold to journalistic standards, if that's the same, well, that dude on the internet doesn't have to issue a correction. He doesn't even have to reveal who he is, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I think there's a lot of people looking at their feeds, and those two things seem equal. Yeah. Also, yeah, go, go, go, go.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yes, it rewards the lizard brain. Yes. Because your lizard brain is taught... You see, the thing we don't realize is every time we click on something, look at something, let alone like something or share something or... I don't know, I'm still talking in Twitter terms like an old man, but whatever the kids are doing these days. You are actually...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Making a statement about your editorial preferences. You're not intentionally doing it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
To me, it's not just how they know us. We all have different levels. There's what we want and what we want to want.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But also because, like, both of those things are true. Like, both of those are us, right? The me that clicks on the stupid bullshit because it's funny is the same me as the one who, if you just sat me down and said, okay, if I want to allocate, like, what topics are covered in the hour I'm going to spend online today, would, like, try to, like, choose the more high-minded stuff, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
They're both us. They're both real.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But the algorithm is empowering the lizard brain over the actual, like, the citizen brain. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Even though if it makes you better off in the same way that like reading a good book might actually at the end of the time you read it, like make you better, like make you feel better.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And then stealing from it. Yeah, there's no question, especially because a lot of what that tax revenue goes into or is supposed to go into here in the U.S. is what then turns around and makes it possible for businesses to thrive. Can you give us an example of that? Yeah, my favorite example is probably the smartphone.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I'm begging these people do this. Yeah, I think that's a mistake. Yeah. But yeah, I think. Look, to be fair, you know, if you're in politics, you know that anything you do, you can get shredded for. even not something you do, but something that somebody sitting next to you does and you don't make the appropriate face or scold them for it. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like, and there's, there's even a, like a contagion of cancel culture where like, if you're around somebody who does something right. And I want to parse like some of that's maybe legitimate and some of it is, is problematic. Right. But all of that's there. And people who are running for office want to win. Obviously they want to keep their jobs. And, um, to me, um,
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
it's worth some risk in order to reach everybody. And again, that's partly the habits that I formed while I was an unheard of, you know, 30 something year old Indiana mayor running for president. So we did everything like we would do CNN if they would have me, but we would do, I mean, literally like Iowa college lesbian radio was like, I would like do a show, like anybody who would talk to me.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, I think that's better though, because I think it better resembles, um, politics is supposed to be. Like politics obviously has a bad name. People are pissed at politics and frustrated politics and hurt by politics.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Have you ever noticed in talks or whenever somebody mentions a smartphone, they start to pull it out of their pocket or touch it? Yeah. But so the federal government could not have invented the iPhone, right? Like, I don't think anybody, any of us would want a phone that was like invented by the federal government. That thing would suck.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But like, to me, politics is a process of making decisions about how we're going to have laws and rules that all of us have to live by and how we're going to spend resources that all of us are paying into. And for that to make any sense, there has to be a process of encounter. Like we have to be encountering people.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
who don't think like us and don't view the world the way we do, both in order to actually legitimately become smarter and better and make better choices and have better positions, and just in order to persuade. There's no persuasion now. I think there's not enough persuasion. And that's why we have these 50-50 elections, like this current election. The president won. He says it was a landslide.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But we used to have actual landslides in this country. Reagan, Mondale, that was a landslide. And I think that my party should aspire to be like a 60% party. And I think we could do it because most of the issues that most people care about, not all. But most issues—taxes, abortion, guns, education—like, things that affect how your day-to-day life goes. Healthcare, for sure.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. I mean, maybe—look, obviously, there's a big divide.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Sure, sure. But what I'm saying is, like, something like universal background checks, that's got, like, between 80% and 90% support.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
8% of Republicans are supportive. And they're trying to reverse it. And yet we don't have, yeah, like, it's hard to even hold on to what we've got, right? Yeah. So anyway, my point is, like, my party should be, by the numbers, doing better than it does because more people agree with us more of the time on more policies than not. And so, yes, we have some work to do on policy, too.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That is like all of the design, the manufacturing supply chains. That's the kind of thing that corporations can do very well. And Apple did it very well and their competitors. But. What makes the iPhone work? Well, among other things, the internet. The internet was literally invented by a federal research project.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. So I think... Two things. One, I think what they're getting right, which is also what Trump understands about politics and attention, is that you can't be afraid of controversy. And sometimes it takes controversy to get something recognized. So... Because like part of why the country is talking about these deportations is there's a couple of things that are traveling together.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like one, like I think most people would agree with the idea that like violent criminals shouldn't be here. Right. But then other things are happening. Like they take some guy and just send him by mistake to a Salvadoran prison. Right. Which is obviously, first of all, a huge, huge problem, like morally and policy wise. But in terms of the media game that he's playing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
even if it's a bad look to have screwed up in that way, it helps him draw attention to what you're talking about. In addition to like the social media pictures of the being lined up in the chains. I experienced this a little bit in our stuff because when we did something, when we like got a bridge or a road built, it was incredibly hard to get attention on that. Like we did it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like I was out there, go on TV, I'd wave the flag, we'd do an event, cut a ribbon. But it turns out when something was uncontroversially good, It's way harder to get anybody to notice. The projects we got the most coverage on didn't get the most coverage because the project was really great. Although I believe in our projects.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We did 70,000 projects around the country from like little airport thing to like the Hudson River Tunnel. The projects that got the most coverage were the ones where we caught a Republican congressman trying to take credit for the project after they voted against it. Hmm. Because it just created like a different, more interesting story. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So nobody would even know that we were or very few people would have ever heard that we were doing a rapid transit project in Charleston, South Carolina. If the member of Congress there, Nancy Mace, hadn't tried to take credit for it and then got blown up on the Internet because she tried to stop the funding from happening in the first place.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So it's complicated to figure out what lesson Democrats should learn from all this. But part of it and part of what I think Bernie and AOC are doing quite well is they're not afraid of some controversy of naming bad guys, of talking about kind of why we are where we are. And I think we need to.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And it would never have been possible to invent the internet with a private company because you wouldn't have got the kind of capital virtue, even though it's a trillion-dollar idea or a multi-trillion-dollar idea. Companies can do multi-billion-dollar ideas, but a trillion-dollar idea like inventing the internet, that requires basic research.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
All of them are some version of the same thing, which is freedom and security. And with that, I think democracy. But really, I don't think a lot of people come up on the street saying, I want more democracy. I think there's a way that's absolutely true. But in terms of what people really want, I think people want to live a life of their choosing. They want things to work.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
They want our country to be better than any other country in terms of the quality of our roads and the strength of our economy and the kind of education they can get. We want America to be the best place to live.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Well, before we get to security, I think it's also like this is a sense that you can afford. what you need in order to live. Like, uh, that's why prices are such a huge problem. Um, and it's why I think terrorists are the wrong medicine because they might make certain things or be designed to make certain things better, but they don't make prices better. They make prices worse.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So affordability, housing, right? The ability to just like, believe that, that you get a job, you get a promotion, you're going to get a house or you're going to get a better house. How do we do it? Right. So we've got to build more houses. How? Well, we've got to strip away some of the barriers to building houses. This is what I like. Tell me.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, it would solve for that controversy thing. Attention is good. Not exactly how I would solve the problem. But, yeah, the point is, like, we need to— I'm being facetious.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And that's the kind of thing the government's supposed to do, among many other things. It requires basic research. Basic research? What does that mean? Yeah, by basic research, I mean things that are so fundamental that you actually don't know for 50 or 100 years if they're going to have a return. They might never work out.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Oh, no question. Yeah. I mean, if the conservative project is just we're going to demolish, you know, government is frustrating, irritating, doesn't always meet your expectations. So we're just going to burn it down. Or everything was better way back when. So we're just going to take you back there. Absolutely. And that's what Make America Great Again is. Exactly. And that's why I think it works.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But the reality is like there is no such thing as in the real world, there is no again. The future is going to look different. Look at the world we're going into. We're going into a world where AI is transforming everything. I think we're still at the outset of that. We're going into a world where China is a very different kind of player than it was not that long ago.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We're contending with some really heavy things that are going to require really original thinking. And part of, I think, where both parties have a problem is a kind of nostalgia.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So you've got the Republicans who are kind of nostalgic for the social order of the 50s, like women are in their place and we don't have to worry too much about like, you know, any kind of minority, whether it's a racial minority or gender minority, like asserting too much desire for freedom or equality, like everything's just everybody's in their place. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Oh, yeah, you can't look at it as this thing that's going to be profitable. It has to be a benevolent endeavor for society. Yeah, it's different from research on like a pharmaceutical company researches a new medication expecting that they're going to have a return in the next 10, 20 years. Right. At least kind of within the profit.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And Democrats have a nostalgia for this kind of New Deal and post-World War II order. Like in terms of foreign policy, it's the post-World War II framework that we set up with the UN and NATO that kind of made, you know, was our response to everything that happened. And then domestically, we set up this administrative state, which solved a lot of problems, but
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
has now run the risk of collapsing under its own weight, right? So we've got to cure ourselves of our nostalgia in my party and recognize that there's no going back.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But to your point, what we had to do when I was mayor of South Bend was to move on from that. And it wasn't saying like, we're done with manufacturing, we're never going to make things anymore. It was saying, there's no such thing as going back to the Studebaker days.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
about sure sure and we should come back to that but i think the conservative if you look at the actual conservative governing plan though not to talk not to campaigning not to posturing what they actually do okay i would say the the the biggest social policy commitment that they've made that they actually care about to the point that they actually went through and kept it was to get rid of the right to choose number one project the republican party on the social side that's one of the few promises they actually kept yeah that's valid yeah
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And then economically, the biggest promise they've actually kept is tax cuts for the rich. Biggest thing that he did in his first term. And right now it's up for debate right now. Literally, Congress is not getting as much attention because all the other crazy things going on. But it's more tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So to me, like most of the stuff he said he was going to do, he didn't actually do. He didn't do the big infrastructure bill he talked about. We actually did it. He didn't even build the wall. That's the thing. Build the wall was like a galvanizing statement. It's not like he actually did it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying to you. But I want to do something that you follow through on.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Galvanizing statements is all bullshit.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Speak to people at an emotional level, even if it's not realistic. Okay, so this brings us to the other thing that I think we've been skirting around a little bit.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Right. This is the whole idea of public goods. This is why we have governments, why we collect taxes. God, we're turning into such libs already, dude. Yeah. But there's a handshake, right? There are the things that only the government can do, and then there are the things that the private sector can and should do, and they meet in the middle.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And they talked about more about that than they talked about the economy. One of the greatest political ads I've ever seen. It was incredibly effective because it made it sound like that was all we cared about.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Or again, controversial enough to get people as excited because our look, our message in a way, what did you care about? I want everyday life to be better. That's what they want, too. You get up in the morning. Yeah, but importantly, all the controversies are over what that's like. I want you to be able to get up in the morning, and the first thing you do is you commute to work.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And by the way, if you're on an EV, I want that to be affordable for you. Or if you're on public transit, not to get back into the subway situation, but I want you to have good public transit to get to where you're going. And then when you get to that job, I want you to be paid well.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And if you're about to have a kid, I want you to know that you're going to have parental leave when you have that kid. And if you don't want to have a kid, I want you to have the right to choose whatever kid, which means access to birth control and abortion and those things that give you the freedom to decide on that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And if you already have a kid, when you pick them up at school, I want that school to be good, not having its funding slashed while they set fire to the Department of Education. And then when you get home, I want you to be in a neighborhood that is safe and where you can breathe the air because we didn't let them get rid of the Clean Air Act. And you don't have to think for one moment.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
about whether the air you breathe or the water you drink is clean and clear, which actually takes a lot because it means the government has to constrain those actors that would make you unfree by polluting the air and polluting the water. And then when you go to bed, I want you to know that your family's going to be fine, even if it's family like mine, despite there being some
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Supreme Court justice who wants to obliterate your family because it doesn't match his interpretation of his religion. Like, that's the life I want everybody to be able to live. Yeah, I think. And I think we can deliver that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I like hearing that. I thought it was awesome.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But if you start shorting—and part of what really worries me right now about this kind of war on academia, and there are some things about academia that need to change, but— The war on academia, the cuts to cancer research, the cuts to science research, this kind of general anti-science atmosphere that I think is emanating from the administration.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But that is the important— And I think people need to know that we see them and we don't see them as the problem, right? Because I do think, to the finger-wagging point, so much of politics is about what people think you think of them or how you make people feel about themselves.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Before people even start to decide what they think about you, they're thinking about how you make them feel about themselves. Right. And this is a struggle, especially because I belong to a party that has deep moral convictions. And you could argue we take it too far, whatever.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But we are propelled by a lot of deep moral convictions, whether we're talking about an economy where we think that it's too easy for the wealthy and too hard to work your way up, or whether we're talking about a society where we're worried about racial justice and marginalized groups. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But there is a way to engage people who don't start with where you, you can't lead people to where they already are anyway. One thing I think about a lot is right around the time I came out, which is like a terrifying thing to do as a like elected official in Indiana, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, exactly.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. No, honestly, what happened was, you know, you when you get deployed, they tell you to write a letter. And I still have it in a drawer somewhere. And it's the letter. It's just says just in case on the outside. Wow. And it's everything that you want your loved ones to know. From your internet passwords to how you feel your life went, right? Everybody should do this, by the way.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
You shouldn't have to wait to be sent to war to do this. And I was the sitting mayor of my hometown because I was a reservist. So I got deployed while I was in office. And I just took a leave, stopped being mayor, started being lieutenant, and went into my other job, basically. So I was the sitting mayor of my hometown. I had a beautiful house. I had good friends. I had a good life.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That costs us in ways that don't show up on a corporate profit and loss statement six months from now or a year from now. But in terms of whether a country, a society, an economy is productive and is growing and is innovating— That starts to really cost you over time.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, and that was part of what I wrote about in that letter. But in the back of my head, I'm thinking, all right, but I'm also, I'm a grown ass man in a position of responsibility. Uh, and I don't actually know what it's like to be in love. And if I get back, I'm not going to let that continue. Like whatever the implications, I'll just, I'd rather deal with that than, um,
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
once again contemplate the idea that i could go to my grave not knowing what it's like to be in law so then you know it was awkward timing because it's actually the middle of a re-election but um i took some time like i took months to think through okay how do i do this how do i say this like what is that and then and then one day i did it i wrote a little op-ed in the local paper i said i don't think this should be anybody's business but i know it's a thing here's
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Something you should know about me. And it was fine. I mean, it wasn't fine. There were, you know... People upset. There was some ugliness around it. But, like... you know, nothing ever happened that made me regret that I did it. But the story I was starting to tell was that sometime after that, when I started dating Chasten, maybe, I don't know, some months after that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
No, no, I found him. Well, we were on, it was like, it was Hinge, you know, the dating app. Yeah. Wasn't Grindr. Grindr's for Republicans.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Anyway, I met him, fall in love, start dating. And this, uh, I run into this woman. I know, I think in the lobby of the County city building, I'm walking into work. I know she's a little more conservative. Um, and she comes up and she says, uh, I ran into your friend and he's wonderful. And it was one of those moments, right? Where like, I think
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
it was very important that the thing to recognize is like for her, she was signaling something pretty big for her. Yeah. Like, I don't know exactly, but I can guess like how she thought about and talked about gay people probably all her life, but she knew me. She met him. He's wonderful. Like, yeah. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Versus if I treated her to a lecture on the difference between a friend and a partner, right? Yeah. That would have pushed her right back into the arms of these people who don't want anything but for me.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And if we're shorting that or if corporations and extremely wealthy people don't want to be paying into that through taxes, that is, I think, a classic example of a kind of short-term gain that causes long-term pain. Hmm. Yes. I'm really worried about that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So what I take from that is this broader process that needs to go on where we find people, and as passionate as we are, and as right as I believe we are about the big things, even though I'm open to the fact that we may not be right about everything, we're not telling people that they are... bigoted or racist or whatever, because they don't already start out in the same place that we are.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
There has to be that process of kind of inviting people to look at things the way we look at things versus commanding them to. And I think that is something that in the culture of my party has been especially challenging in the last like 10 or 20 years. But that we need to work through because, again, politics is about persuasion. It's about finding people where they are.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
You know, I think the dad has to sit with Chasten. My husband and I have been talking about this a lot. The dad should have to sit with, like, what he did. The guilt, yes. And there were so many parallels to what happens with Tanya where he's, like, floating, right, when he seems like he's dying or maybe sort of dead. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It's about how they feel about themselves. I think there is a desire for belonging that is not just something liberals care about. I actually think the loss of belonging that happens in a town like where I grew up when you lose your auto job.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And the Workforce Development Agency comes along and says, good news, I found a job that you can get qualified for based on your education and it pays just as much and you're going to be a nursing assistant.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Maybe that's a perfectly good job, obviously, but if the last 20 years of your life have been about not just the way you make your money, but the way you see where you fit in the world is about what you know how to do in a machine shop. Yeah. And some well-intentioned person with a clipboard is telling you, guess what, now you get to be a nursing assistant.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like, that is not finding people where they are. That's not—because something has happened to their sense of belonging. And, you know, we really care about belonging, maybe to a fault, but, like, we try to make sure that there is room for everybody at the table in society and in different processes and in our politics. But if we really take that seriously, like, if we really live up to that—
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That means recognizing that some crises around belonging are a big part of why some people, many of whom voted for the other guy this last time, are really prepared to just burn the house down and think that's no worse than any of the other things that could happen.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, and meaning it. Yeah, yeah. You can't really be persuasive about that unless you actually mean it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like the key word there is the empathy. Yeah. Right. They're like understanding. So I think you put it really well, like having empathy for parents or students who are in that position, which which is terrifying and belonging to one of the most tiny and and kind of harass minorities there is in the country, but also empathy for people who.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
sincerely want to make sure that sports are safe and fair and want to make sure that they have uh the the most important say in in what's what's happening in in in deciding what's best for their children like that these like very human things that if you strip away all the layers of the politics of it um come from a place of very understandable concern and like humanity right there's humanity in both positions and i think that's lost in the dialogue sometimes
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yes, which brings us in some ways back to the algorithm. So I think a big part of the answer to your question is offline. There have to be spaces that are offline, or at least that are not shaped by algorithms, where these conversations happen.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Because to your point, if all I know about you is that you're some random account on Twitter or shitposting something I really care about, then I'm going to assume you're an asshole. Yeah. But if I know you, and then we discover that we view these things in different ways, we're away from the keyboards, right? Then it's a completely different conversation.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I really worry, and sometimes this is coded as a conservative worry, but I think liberals should be just as worried about it, about things like neighborhoods and faith communities and other sources of belonging and meaning that overlap the different political commitments that we have.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Because it's in those spaces. I mean, again, I think back to the military. Like, if I was getting in a vehicle to go outside the wire, like, the other people getting in the vehicle with me definitely did not care if I was a Republican or a Democrat or, like, what country my dad immigrated from or if I was going home to a girlfriend.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. I'm really excited for the next hour.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like all they wanted to know, obviously it was that they could trust me to do my job. Same thing, you know, vice versa. Cause we're trusting each other with our lives. Every time we went outside the wire. Yeah. And to be clear, I was not into like a combat or maneuver. You know, my job is just to like drive them safely to where they needed to go. But that, that could be scary. That does have risk.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So part of what's happening is the markets are responding to their belief that the tariffs will probably make the world economy less productive and make a recession more likely. But a tariff is a tax that people pay on stuff they buy every day. And proportionally, if you're, what do you call it, middle rich? Yeah. Versus people in the neighborhood I grew up in in South Bend, Indiana. Sure.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, and, uh, Not that everybody should be in the military, but everybody should be in environments where you know people as people first. We start this way. We grew up, families are like this. Sports a lot of times. Team sports is like this. I agree with you a million percent. You know how somebody handles themselves in a tough situation and then you find out how each of you comes at something.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That's just such a more honest and human and ultimately respectful and decent process of encounter.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Proportionally, it's the people in Indiana who are spending a much bigger portion of their income at, let's say, Walmart. And everything at Walmart is about to get more expensive.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. And some of them, like, I got to tell you, like when I got to my unit and by then, like I wasn't out, but I like knew that I was gay, obviously.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, You know, and, like, gay jokes are flying around, right? Like, all the way down to, like, oh, man, that, like, memo that just came down from the command. Is that the gayest thing you've ever seen? Like, Sergeant, what's the gayest thing you've ever seen? This is even gayer than that, right? To me, it sounded kind of retro, but that was definitely how people were talking.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Children, lower intelligence. But, like... those seem like, you know, they were all like fine. Like they either made it clear that they didn't care or they found some excuse, like unrelated to anything to like check on how I was doing. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. And then a couple of people have turned out, including somebody who I like turned to more than once to volunteer for outside the wire, uh, drives that he didn't have to do with me. Um, um, but I needed somebody else who was qualified on a long gun. Um, Turned out he was in the same boat. I never knew. So you vampired him.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I don't know. He did have the long gun. Hey! No, no. Okay, so, wow. Yeah, so, like, we knew each other. We trusted each other. We understood each other. It doesn't mean we, like, went and suddenly agreed about politics. Like, some of the people I served with were, like, super conservative and still are, obviously. But, like... Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We kind of, you know, that wasn't like central because we knew each other. Yeah. Like at a human level. And you built that trust up with them. Yeah. Because we did something hard together.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Vaguely. I mean, that's like half of middle school humor. Also, just like in your 40s, whatever.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
this is so weird guys not really no but but i know like that yeah that happens a lot of people are like in this situation where like there's some just like one of the few minorities that like uh it's not obvious to everybody whether you're part of that minority right yeah unless you decide to tell people yeah um and uh uh so yeah i definitely know that like that kind of thing can happen but i can't off the top of my head think of those things yeah
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, it had my blood pumping just as much for sure. Um, even when it's not totally rational, like telling my parents was not easy and I had it way easier than most people. My parents were like very loving and very kind of socially liberal. Like it was not actually a problem.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
They didn't, if they knew, they didn't say anything. I think they noticed at a certain point that I wasn't bringing girlfriends around.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Cheston tried to explain this to me once.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I'm not the best representative of my people. No, I'm not.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
No, I'm neither gold nor platinum.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah. My entire twenties were like this. Like, cause by then, like I wanted, I really, really wanted to not be gay. Right. Because I mean, separate and apart from wanting to have a life in public service, like in Indiana, like I, I don't think most kids, I don't think most gay kids growing up in Indiana in the nineties, like if you really gave them a choice, Right. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, and so part of that was like, okay, like I dated this like string of amazing women and like over time, like it was just very clear as amazing as they were that like the things that are supposed to happen in terms of the way you feel about and fall in love with somebody like that's, you know, I'm not saying it's just process of elimination.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like there are other ways you know who you're attracted to, but like you can pack that away.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But I knew actually before I became like, like years before the Afghanistan deployment coming out and all that, my first election, I won the primary and, And the way things were shaping up, I knew that I would probably win the general election. I was probably going to be mayor. And that was like a huge leap in responsibility.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Obviously I had been like a consultant and, um, you know, I was, I was a military. Um, so I, uh, I knew that like, I should not be in a position of that kind of responsibility. Um, Unless I've like resolved this in some way. And if I'm not ready to come out to the world, I got to come out to somebody because that's the best way I can come out to myself, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
If I've like just told even one person, then it's kind of real and I'm no longer kind of like in that fog mentally. Um, and so I like took a deep breath and just a good buddy of mine from, from over the years, one of my best friends over beers. And I'm just like, look, I gotta tell you something.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And one of the first things he, uh, one of the first things he said, he kind of patted me on the shoulder and said, you know, you do it. I'm not into you like that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But he felt like you didn't exactly make it easy on yourself. And what he meant was... Oh, that's so kind. My, you know, my career, to the extent I had a career, there were two parts to it, right? There was the majority of it, which was public office in Indiana.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And there was the other part, which was service in the military. Yeah. By the way, that was still Don't Ask, Don't Tell back then, too, right? So I could literally be fired, which is another reason I didn't come out too quickly. And... Anyway, it was that process of just coming to terms with that and just knowing, even if I wasn't ready to tell everybody or deal with everything that went with it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And in my case, that meant I wasn't going to start dating either because I didn't want to be hiding a boyfriend. That just seemed really unhealthy. And, you know, I was so invested in my work that for a while I wasn't missing. I mean, I don't want to say I wasn't missing much.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I didn't feel that I was missing a lot because I had this, I used to joke that like the city was a jealous bride, you know? Yeah. And then it was my whole, we talked about my deployment experience that put me over the edge.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I mean, there's years and years and years of that, right? Like, I mean, at some level when you're a teenager, like you're, there's some data, there's some pretty strong data points, right? But the things you can tell yourself, if you really want something to not be true, The things you can tell yourself to try to make it not be true are pretty powerful, right? I mean, you can tell yourself...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
you know at like 14 or 15 every every dude you know seems like they they want to nail anything that moves right so like you can convince yourself like oh it's just like everybody's all over the place and i'm just like you know um uh and then like you start noticing like more of a pattern especially when you're dating women and it's like not um and there's a lot of extrapolating right you're like watching like a straight love story and you're like trying to like
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Relate to it, but it just doesn't quite land. And yeah, I think by the time I was like, you know, mid to late twenties, I was like, okay, this is, I can't, first of all, I can't like waste time.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
women's time or mine yeah um messing around like hoping that somehow i'm like those are valuable years like um because like that there's a point where like that's not a fair thing to do just 100 um and also like wasting my time and you know um that's crazy you've dated more women than me yes these guys have only been with one women each yeah yeah so you're straighter kind of a lot of ways yeah
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Crazy. Like nothing I have ever attempted or done has come anywhere close, has been as rewarding or as hard. Like I knew it would be more rewarding based on what everybody said. Of course. I mean, you never really know, right? Until it's you. Yeah. I didn't understand how hard it would be. I didn't understand how physically hard it would be in those first weeks.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I say, obviously, men relate to things differently. I didn't have to... Neither one of us had to go into labor. But just the first few weeks where they tell you that... They tell you they need to feed every three hours or so, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But look at what's about to happen, right? As we speak, congressional Republicans are working on a budget framework that's going to cut corporate taxes. That's one of the biggest things it's going to do. And even this president, the least popular he ever was last time around was when they passed his tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. So a lot of this is about, look,
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
They don't mention that. That means they need to start to feed every three hours.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
You got it. And our daughter had this reflux thing where you couldn't really lay her down after feeding her. So it was really like at least an hour and a half upright. And anything else you want to do, you have to do in between. Like you start the clock.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
you're feeding them and there's two of them yeah and you got the bottles we had this like contrast it's like pillow you could use to actually bottle feed two twins at once which is amazing um there's like fake breasts no there's just like i don't even know if that's a real thing or not there's this like fake image that goes around online of me with one of these like contraptions which i didn't know it existed i don't know if it's a real thing or just someone being a dick but um
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
oh yeah this is like a whole thing there's like uh right wing account it's like this like contraption like fake breasts like a mechanism with fake yeah maybe that is the thing i don't know but like i just use like bottles like yeah you might expect um and uh And that was just like the first few weeks and, and, and months. And then, um, one, both of them had some medical challenges early on.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
The one of them had extremely, uh, extremely serious medical problem, which he recovered from. Um, and that was the most terrifying thing in my life. Um, and then, uh, and it's hard to believe cause we were fighting. They were also kind of earlier premature. It's not unusual with twins. Um, But especially in their case. And we fought so hard just to get them on the chart.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like you would count down to the millimeter, like how much food they're taking and how much they're taking. And now like, they're just like wolfing down. He'll like take one of those Uncrustables.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Our son will take one of those Uncrustables and just like... Just the entire thing. One bite. And I'm thinking like, how in this short of a time has that happened? And just every day there's this new challenge and you have to just like relate to what is a big deal to them. Yeah. Which is even harder than relating to somebody on the opposite end of the spectrum, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Because, like, you have to—obviously, part of your job is to, like, teach them what does and doesn't matter and what to care about. But the other day, just two days ago, our son came into the kitchen, and he was playing out on this little deck that we have. It's a wooden deck. And he says, Pop, I need a Band-Aid. I got a boo-boo. And I'm like, oh, show me.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And he, like, lifts up at his foot, and it's clear that what he's actually got is a splinter. Yeah. And he has, like, some idea of what a splinter is, but not really. And then Chasten and I start... Chasten kind of was more on the ball than I was, as usual, and, like, starts preparing, like, a thing of warm water to soak his foot in to try to help work it out.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And then that doesn't exactly, like, do anything right away. And plus, it starts hurting. And by the time we got to the tweezers, it was, like... It was like a Civil War amputation.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I was such a baby about it. Yeah, you're deep in there. It sounds comical now, but to him, it might as well be.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
He doesn't know. It's terrifying for him. And I'm trying to hold him because he's also a moving target and Chast has got the tweezers. And then we're both starting to feel this guilt about, is one of his foundational memories going to be... Plus like holding him while he's like shrieking in pain and afraid. And then as the splinter comes out and Chaz is like, I got it. It's out.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
He's like weeping, shrieking. He goes, thank you. And there's just these moments you just can't script, like you can't see them coming. And every day it's like some new challenge. Our daughter loves asking me now about my work, which is actually a really healthy way to be forced to explain what I do all day. So this started happening when I was secretary. Like, I put her down at bedtime.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
There's a whole bedtime ritual. This is coming your way. How old is your daughter? 14 months. Okay. So you're getting there. Talk about, like, the Administrative Procedures Act was one thing when I was trying to build a bridge. But, like, just to, like, extract myself from the room, it's like, did you tell the neighbors to be quiet? Yes. Yes, Penelope, I told the neighbors to be quiet.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And then Gus is like, are you going to scare away the dinos? I was like, yes. If any dinos come here, I'm going to scare them away. And there's this whole, like, ritual checklist you've got to go through, right? Yeah. but as part of, she's like, tell me your work.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I'm asking her like, is after she said it two or three times at bedtime, like, does me talking about my job, like help you go to sleep? Yeah. And, um, You know, the first time... Curiosity is such a good trait, though. Yeah, you want to nurture that, and you want them to relate to what you do.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I think just story-wise that otherwise, you know, I don't have a lot of notes for this year's White Lotus. I mean, it was incredible.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So the first time I was thinking, like, well, tomorrow I'm testifying to the Appropriations Committee, and then I've got to make sure that we get this regulation out. Like, that probably doesn't make sense. But then gradually I realized I could say, like... I'm going to make the airplane safer tomorrow.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Or like, there's a bridge that broke and I'm going to help make the bridge, get the bridge back together. And she relates to, she's like, are you bringing tape? No, actually this one, like this one's even too big for, for, for tape. Uh, it's like, Oh, a hammer. It's like, yeah, some hammers are definitely going to be involved.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And, um, having to explain what you do to a three-year-old is actually a pretty good exercise in, in thinking about what really is important. It's hard.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like now, so I teach a day a week. I teach at the University of Chicago. And so I realized I could explain that to her. She's like, tell me your work. Well, I'm a teacher for grownups. And she thought about it for a while. And she said, but... but I thought you were our Papa. I was like, well, yeah, yeah. I'm definitely your Papa. Like that's my most important job.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
No, no, I get that argument. But honestly, there are ways to structure taxes so that they capture where the value and the wealth is actually created. How do we do that? You can have a P.O. box in the Bahamas or Ireland or whatever. So one of the things, for example, that happened in the last administration was an international agreement on a threshold, a minimum.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I'm also a teacher for grownups a little bit. And, and then she says, it's hard to be both. And I was like, yeah, we're life balance.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Oh, man. Our old guy, Gus, like a lot of boys, he's like all about heavy equipment and, you know, construction stuff. And so he's super excited. There's this massive road project going on in Traverse City, Michigan, where we live, which I might mention was funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
and uh signed off by the department of transportation so that's why you did it just saying no i so you say that another example of caring about rules like i sent that one back three times to be like triple checked because i saw it on the list and i knew that i lived close to it i was like are you i need to make sure that the career staff certified that this is a deserving project otherwise it looks like i sent a project to my neighborhood like that's the kind of stuff you worry about or you should worry about yeah in public office but um
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But there's all this heavy equipment. There's excavators and bulldozers. He's so happy. But he's really monitoring them. If it's ever after hours, he's like, why aren't the workers working? I was like, well, it's probably almost at the end of the day.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
What's over? Bob says, Sunday, they're not working. And he's like, why aren't they working? Right. But it's the best thing. It's the hardest thing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
It's not like we have it all figured out. But if anybody knows how important identity is...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
know of course so we're in a what's called a surprise adoption scenario so we we literally we got i was at work i was traveling i got we got a phone call chasten called me and the next day we were in a rural midwestern hospital holding him in our arms and they were like oh wow one day old like it was like that like just from like normal life to like and by the way it's twins uh um which was amazing you didn't know it was twins
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We were just on a list. You know, we said that we were willing to adopt or we wanted to adopt. We said that we wanted to adopt without regard for race. By the way, anybody who says race is not a thing in this country should experience an adoption process where there are literally different lists. If you say that you want a white kid only versus if you say that doesn't matter.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like literally a different list. What is that? What do you mean by that? The list for white kid only is longer. And not only that, there was actually a discount or you didn't have to pay a deposit on the fee.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I couldn't believe it. So we didn't know anything about the racial identity of the kids until they started to look. Mixed race, which they are. And contending with the hair thing is already a thing. And lots of advice, especially from black parents who see stuff on Instagram or they're like, let me tell you how to do it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And to begin with, the idea of being a girl dad and dealing with girl hair was pretty intimidating. My hair is very...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And now it only works if everybody agrees on it. That's part of why diplomacy matters so much. But no other country really wants to see too much of that happening either. So there's a way to create a floor that gets you a more level playing field.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
simple and straightforward obviously i'm a low maintenance kind of guy like starting to learn about like all the different products that are involved him too like we have like a whole sequence with with with you know a conditioner and then essential oils all this stuff um and you're always asking yourself like how can i be you're already constantly asking yourself how can i be a good dad and now it's like how can i be a good dad for kids who have a different racial identity than i do and uh how can i help them navigate that and
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And what are the circumstances where there's nothing I can do to help navigate that? And I need to connect them up to mentors and people in their lives because the reality is like, this is not a colorblind society and like their, their lives will be affected in some way by their racial, all of ours are.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But one thing about being white is you don't have to think about the fact that when you're white, your racial identity is not something that you're reminded of all the time in a way that they will be. And we live in a not super diverse, although it's getting more diverse part of Michigan.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But our hope is that they will, by the time they're old enough to even be wondering and thinking about these things, which I know is coming sooner than we think. that they know that they are loved and that they are safe and that they're, um, growing up into a world that has so much possibility for them. Um, and that, that we'll be there for them any way we can.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, but it's, it's, it's pretty humbling, like as a parent to know that you'll be navigating.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like how do you process all that? Yeah. It's tough because like they didn't sign up for this. Right. Uh, I mean, it's hard enough on Chasten. He's like an adult, but you know, he didn't exactly sign up for this either. He's on, you know, he's supportive.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, but when we ran for president, obviously that was really hard on him and very costly, uh, for him in all kinds of ways. Um, and that much more so for, for little kids. And one of the worst things about politics is how little regard it, it shows for the people who go into public service in their family. Even just the fact that like when somebody leaves, uh,
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
uh, an office or decides not to run, like if they ever say like, I want to spend more time with my family, that is immediately taken as code for like, I got caught in some scandal.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, versus like, we should celebrate that. Like if somebody wants to spend more time with their family, like that's a really good way to spend your time. Part of what I've really been leaning into just these last few months being out of office, like working, but not working at the pace, the extreme pace that I did is that like, I'm usually the one to drop them off at school every day.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And, and, and I'm just like in their lives more. And it's, it's, it's, it's wonderful. But, yeah, the costs are enormous. And one thing that makes you really think twice about running for any office and definitely, you know, the highest doing national politics is that, you know, lots of people wind up paying into that and not all of them had a say. What do you mean paying into that?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Well, they're sacrificing. Your kids are sacrificing. Your spouse is sacrificing. They're paying a price.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
No, no, that's the whole thing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
No, yeah. I took a hard look at running for Senate just now because the Senate seat in Michigan where I live came open. I decided not to. And there are all kinds of reasons why, but part of what was on my mind was that I really was looking to spend, certainly this year, really putting family first.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So it reduces the incentive to offshore your books.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And, you know, I talked to a lot of people who were in the Senate or in Congress, and they talked about the price that their families paid, but also at a certain point, their kids were old enough to be really proud of what they did that made a difference and set a good example of public service and made their lives better.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But look, if you hold yourself to a tough standard, you have to ask yourself whether— That's whether you're really, um, not confusing your personal ambition with your ambition for the country, right? Like when you run for president, you obviously reveal that you're an ambitious person, right? Um, hopefully you do it because you have ambitions for the country, but, um,
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
there's something selfless about it and there is something selfish about it. Right. There's something selfless about going through the extreme pace and the hard work and all of the bullshit and all of the risk and the very real chance that you'll lose and all the other things that happen. Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But like, also unlike the other people in your family who are coming along for the ride, like you get, like your name is on the poster and you get to, to, you know, have all of the, these experiences. And, um, if it goes well, you get celebrated in all kinds of ways. Right. Um, And, and you're always asking, or you should always be asking yourself, okay, why exactly am I doing this?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I don't know why they're beating up on Lesotho.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And it's really hard to separate those things. I mean, nobody can perfectly separate those things. But, I do know that there are things that are not worth, things that are more important than winning and things that are more important than running, which again is why I'm not running for Senate right now.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So I grew up in a family and a household that was... It was not politically connected. Like, I don't remember meeting any elected officials when I was growing up, but it was very politically aware. Like, my parents were the kind of people, especially my dad, who would be like always watching the news, always talking about whatever was going on on the news.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And kind of, I think, built in me the idea that the most important... thing out there was kind of what's going on in, in how decisions are being made about our country and about the world. Um, and so I had that in me, even when I was a teenager and I thought I was going to be airline pilot, that was my real, like first ambition.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, and by the time I got to college, I was really, really interested in, in public service, but I didn't understand how compelling and exciting local public service was going to be. And, uh, then we talked about my hometown a little bit, like everything that South Bend had gone through, um, Um, and I watched that over the years, um, and, and thought about making a difference.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, yeah, fine. And look, tariffs have their place, right? We don't have to make about tariffs yet, but just on taxation, yeah. But again, what really worries me about tariffs is those don't amount to a tax on corporations.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But even then I didn't know it would mean, it would mean running. But by the time I was at McKinsey, which, you know, it's, it's very, maybe comfortable is the wrong word. Cause, cause you worked very hard there, but like, it's very like nice job in a lot of ways. It's good pay. I'm definitely more, I was making six figures out of grad school. Like it was good money.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, and you know, flying to all these interesting places, working on interesting stuff, but Within a year or two, I figured out that... I remember one time I was working on this kind of interesting, complicated set of problems about grocery pricing, and I was running this database and doing my job.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And it was intellectually interesting, but the more I got into it... I remember this moment where I got up to get a cup of coffee, and I just had this thought hit me that was like... I don't care.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And once I realized that, that like at some deeper level, I cared about doing a good job, but I didn't like viscerally care that like this company that we were consulting for would go on to do better than its competitors. Right. That was not where it propelled me. And I realized that even if there was less money in it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I was going to be both happier and more effective, more productive, working on something that I did care about, something that was important, not because a client was paying me to care about it, but because it just mattered in and of itself. And then I don't want to get into like the entire long story, but we talked earlier about Kokomo, Indiana, Howard County.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
So that's got thousands of Chrysler jobs. And while I was having this struggle at McKinsey over whether I really wanted to keep being a consultant or not, I saw that the state treasurer of my home state of Indiana
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
was for very like ideological reasons trying to block the obama administration from saving chrysler so the the the auto company is about to go under all of them were the administration intervened and they figured out a way to basically bail out and save these auto companies so they get back on their feet and keep employing thousands and thousands of people across the country
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And because I grew up in South Bend where an auto company had collapsed, and because I had visited Kokomo where there was an auto company that hadn't collapsed, but I knew what would happen if it did, I was really, really fired up about this guy, the Indiana State Treasurer, going all the way to the Supreme Court trying to sue to stop those companies from being saved.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And there's a whole crazy legal theory of how he got to be the one to do it. But what he was really doing was politically, he, uh, obviously state treasurers are not very prominent, but he picked this big fight with Obama and it got him on TV and it was kind of a political maneuver. I thought like the state treasurer should be the most boring job in government, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
You shouldn't be like out on crusades, especially ones that if you get your way, it would destroy auto jobs in a place that counts on them. So I started asking who's going to run against this guy. And, um, this is 2010. Um, it turned out like nobody in my party was going to run against him.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, probably because everybody correctly figured out that a midterm election in a state like Indiana for a down ballot, like obscure race, like running for state treasurer, like you weren't gonna, you're probably gonna get crushed. And I ran and I got crushed, but I learned everything there was to learn about kind of campaigns.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I went to all these chicken dinners in 90 counties in Indiana and shook hands and introduced myself. And, um, tried to explain why I thought that there needed to be a different approach in that office. And then as soon as that ended and I got beat and I was figuring out what to do next, was I going to go back to the firm or get another job?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
That was when the longest serving mayor in the history of my city said he wasn't going to run again. And all those conversations that I've been having over beers, like buddies from high school, after we'd grown up and mostly moved out, because we all got the message like success meant moving out. We're always saying like, what's going on back in South Bend? Like, why can't they like grow more?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Why can't we like, why don't young people believe in that place? And started to feel like we could maybe do something about that. And so we had this crazy idea to have me run for mayor and just have a totally different message than any of the other people, Democrats mostly, who were running. And then we won. So that was kind of my path.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I always cared about this stuff, but I never would have guessed that. that I would run for state treasurer or that I would really find meaning in local government. And obviously did not think when I was running for mayor that I was going to turn around and seek the presidency.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
If it weren't for all of the unique things that were going on in our country in 2019, at any other moment, somebody like me never would have run for president.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Uh, yeah, it was definitely, it was definitely a thing, uh, last time around, although a lot of people were, I think in my party, especially people like get ahead of themselves or they get really wrapped up in this where there's only one way to actually find out. And that's to like go to voters and see what they're ready for.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I don't think a lot of people thought that my like Indiana city was ready for a mayor who was gay. When I got reelected after coming out, I had a higher vote percentage than the first time around.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, I would like to think that's cause I did a good job, but also it meant people didn't care that much.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And by the way, Indiana went for Obama. And I think that's really interesting. Like we, like that state had not voted democratic since LBJ. And so the idea that the person who would flip it for the Democrats was not Bill Clinton, not John Kerry, it was Barack Hussein Obama, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Was not something if you were sitting around, I don't know, six months before he got nominated saying, all right, who's the like safest choice who would even put Indiana on the electoral map? You wouldn't have said Obama, right? Yeah. But I think the lesson from that is that you can overthink these things. In the end, the only way to find out the answer is to get out there and try.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And I don't want to compare. Obviously, this is very different. But whenever there's some artificial barrier people make up for why somebody can't run or can't serve, I think you just got to test it. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yeah, I think it's going to be really tough for America to stay number one unless we do certain things right away. First of all, it's back to basics. It's taking care of our own infrastructure, our own education system. It's making it easier and more affordable to raise a family here. Just like all those core things that you don't think of as like international policy.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But if you do them right, then you get international primacy the same way that like part of how we won the Cold War and beat the Soviet Union. It wasn't obviously like there was a military side of that, but like their military was formidable too, right? The real like inarguable massive advantage we had.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
was that there were way more people living in the Soviet Union who wished they were living American lives than anybody in America wishing they could live a Soviet life, right? On some level, I think that was everything. That was how America truly came to be number one. So first of all, take care of the basics at home.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But also, we need to recognize that we're going into a ferociously competitive world stage here, where we can't just keep trading off the glories of having won World War II, which is pretty much how we were able to build the international system the way we like it over the 50 years that followed.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
maybe that's maybe that's what he's trying to showcase which is kind of what always they always get away with it yeah that's true yeah even the kid even the kid yeah um yeah because by the time they're on the boat it's like none of that even happened right yeah and then the poor security guards that are guarding the guy they die yeah yeah no one talks about them they were mean to what's his name yeah yeah
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And recognize that every country is not like just on its own finding its way toward liberal democracy. That comes and goes. I believe it's actually on the wane in our country and I'm trying to do something about it. But it's eroding in places like Hungary. A lot of places were more democratic 10 years ago than they are now.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But how is making middle America pay more a measure to help middle America? Right.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, so we've got to recognize that this is going to require a level of investment in technology and, uh, a level of commitment to our values that both earns friends and, uh, establishes the kind of economic power that you need in order to alongside your military power in order to be number one. Um, I really worry that what we're in right now is a mode that's going to make it not so much America.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
America first has to be America in first place to do it right. Yeah. If it's America first the way they're doing it, I think it means America alone. And we become just like another country out there, scrapping for advantage. But to your point about China, one of the things that the last administration did that I believe in is dealing with Chinese EV, unfair competition from the Chinese EV market.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
We should be making those here. The other part of the story I was telling you about, about Indiana, Howard County, where those Chrysler jobs were, and St. Joe County, where I grew up. And a lot of places in Michigan where I live now is the EV battery factories.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Like, there is a $3 or $4 billion GM battery factory going up on the western edge of the county where I grew up that is bigger than any manufacturing investment that happened there in my entire life.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
China is making big bets in EV. I don't believe the Chinese Communist Party is terribly concerned about being first in climate change. They understand the geostrategic implications of owning the 21st century vehicle market the way we did the last century. So is that an example of where it could be appropriate to use tariffs? Absolutely.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I mean, I think at the end of the day, we can do the clean tech stuff better. Better than them or just better? Both. Clean tech, what does that mean? Anything like from electric vehicles to solar energy installations, all that stuff. We can do it better, but we have to make a commitment as a country that we are going to invest in that. It doesn't just happen.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
There's this fiction that all of the things we see around us in the marketplace just came around without any policy choices. Right. There were huge policy choices that made the automobile possible in this country. Subsidies on everything from fossil fuels to the interstate highway system, right? We need to make similar choices around owning the clean tech market for the future, owning AI.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I think we have a real... problem with china could very well legitimately outpace us on ai if we let them and getting ai right is not just for the tiny proportion of people who understand how to code large language models and stuff that i can't even get my head around it's um
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Making sure that as a society, like part of our education is like people understand how to deal with AI the same way that like you can't say somebody is educated and can graduate into the workplace if they don't know how to use email. You know, it's a competency more than like a technical expertise. which is why I was a little bit alarmed when I found out that our U.S.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
education secretary today thinks there's something called A1 and read a speech about how we need to do more with, like, clearly not a lot of conceptual... Instead of AI? Holy shit. I think she's just, like, reading a prompter. Is this Linda McMahon? Yeah, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Oh, no, Linda.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
You know, you're right to be worried.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Well, it can't just be pretty please. I mean, this is where if the corporation we have, we have to either change the incentives on the front end so that there are tax advantages to taking better care of your people.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Or we have to be ready to do it through policy where this country says you're going to make one hundred billion dollars in wealth off of work that one hundred thousand people working for you generated. More of that needs to be going to them. And by the way, these things are actually related.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I think there's a way to deal in American citizens on kind of like a dividend off of the value that's being created from AI and from, I don't want to take it down a whole rabbit hole, but if you imagine- Like a UTI kind of thing?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
There's different ways to structure it. But I think it's giving everybody a share in the overall value that's being created by technologies, which, again, rest on technologies that the taxpayer paid for in the first place back in the 60s. So why shouldn't we all get a share? Yeah, we're investing it. Instead of it all going to this tiny handful of super, super wealthy people.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
who are consolidating their own power the same way the president's consolidating his political power. You got these, I don't even just like normal billionaires, but like mega, mega billionaires consolidating their power, right? We have to have a tax policy that does that. We have to have a system that requires people who amass that kind of wealth to be sharing it with citizens.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Because again, I know there's this myth, I have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs who create things and they should be hugely rewarded when they create things that are valuable. but they created those things based partly on infrastructure that all of us paid for, right? And by infrastructure, I don't just mean roads and bridges. I mean, national security.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
I mean, things like inventing the internet or mRNA vaccine technology or whatever it is. But more broadly, and this is both on the substance and the politics, I think you're naming something that's hugely important, which is the inequality in this country. It doesn't get talked about enough, right? It has gotten worse pretty much our entire lives.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And no republic has ever survived this level of inequality for long and remained a republic. That kind of income inequality leads to inequality in power, which leads to political instability, which leads to some of the things I think we're experiencing right now as a country.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And if we don't get a handle on that, and it can absolutely be dealt with in a way that is consistent with a strong economy and business doing well. We know that because there were times in our history, including the middle of the last century, when tax policy was asking more of the wealthiest. And also there was a lot of economic growth and a lot of productivity growth. So it can be done.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
The other thing that nobody talks about in either party much is poverty. You may notice in political rhetoric, like middle class, you're always supposed to say middle class. You always talk about the middle class. Can't go wrong talking about the middle class. But not all folks are talking about like poor and low wealth people, which depending how you count is more than 100 million Americans.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Yes, I agree on that. Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think what my party has to do is respond to this in a way that doesn't make it sound like our whole argument is let's just go back to 2024. Right. Like, yeah, yes.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
And by the way, it's an experience that binds together a lot of people who are divided in terms of first generation immigrants, white, black and brown people and so forth. And one of the things that should be the starkest wake-up call for my party is the idea of losing the vote of poor people.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Because if we're not winning the vote of poor people, like, what are we even doing out here? Yep. And we don't really talk about poverty or that kind of insecurity that people go through.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Which is why the way to not talk to low income people or union people, members or anybody else is to say like, oh, well, you're voting against your own self-interest. It's like, how are you going to tell me what I'm interested in?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
But also, you can picture a well-paid professional from, I don't know, somewhere near where we're sitting in New York City, going up to a union member who is living near where I live in Michigan. And if that person from New York says, you're voting against your self-interest, that guy can turn around and say, so are you.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Um, so it has to, it goes back to this respect.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
If it looks and feels like that, we're not going to get anywhere.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Pete Buttigieg on Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays
Things like this, moments like this, movements like the one that's in charge of the White House right now, don't spring up in a country or an economy where everything's going along fine. And look, I lived this, too. I grew up in South Bend, Indiana. People think South Bend, they know Notre Dame. Notre Dame, yeah. The big employer that propelled South Bend wasn't Notre Dame. It was Studebaker.
The Adam Friedland Show Podcast
The Adam Friedland Show Podcast - Aaron Chen - Episode 87
How do you mean?
The Adam Friedland Show Podcast
The Adam Friedland Show Podcast - Aaron Chen - Episode 87
Thank you, Pete.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, on the tech side, a little more exposed from sort of the addictive nature by design of how people are making money off of these things. And even as adults, even people in the tech industry that understand how these algorithms work struggle to control themselves.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
And if adults who know everything that's going on can't manage it, I don't think we can really expect developing preteens and teens to be able to do it. And just building on what Lindsay said, we're planning for a phone, but no social media, no apps, parental controls around those things because there are dangers out there.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
I don't work directly in it, but I work with colleagues in online safety who deal with digital crimes. I've had personal experiences with people I know who've had their children groomed unsuccessfully, fortunately, through social media. So... These things are scary, right? And we're aware of them. But then, like Lindsay said, it's a balance, right? We live in this digital world.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Phones have a lot of good things. We do work on them. You know, we don't want to raise an outcast Luddite, right? So how do we find a good balance? We try and model good hygiene in our own behavior, being at the dinner table or a meal and not having devices there and things like that.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
So hopefully, we can help model behaviors to learn how to use these devices for good and in healthy ways without getting sucked into some of the negative things that are out there. One of the things that I've come across in tech, and Jonathan, I'd love your take on anybody's take on this, is with the emergence of generative AI and now that coming into the social media space.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
How do we think about that as yet another thing to be anxious about for our kids and interacting with?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
That's the plan. Yes.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
We do. And I had the pleasure of seeing Jonathan speak through my work as well. So great work. Thank you for coming.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Yeah.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
That's correct.