The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Ep. 049 Lemonade Stand 🍋

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Go to tastytrade.com/leminade. Today. Tretty is registered broker dealer in member of Fenra and F.A. and S.I.P.C. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Lemonade's damn podcast featuring Special Guest, Pete Buttigieg.

Welcome to the stand. Thank you, glad to be here. Hi, Pete. Thanks for being here. This is awesome.

Yeah, this is really cool for us. I wanted to start by introducing you a little bit to our audience, maybe they don't know. And I wanted to showcase some of your accomplishments because you're in a accomplished man.

So if we could pull up this scene, Perry, at age 22, you graduated from Harvard.

And I'm sure a bit of comparison here to one of our hosts. This is, oh, hey, none of you met him across the bottom of the bottom of the bottom. At 22, I don't know if you know this. He actually got a 502nd place at a Smash Brothers melee video game tournament. Ooh.

Like he was, you know, I'm saying it's your both and it's that prestigious video game. It's very prestigious. Okay, cool. Then by 25, you guys diverge even further because you were a Rhodes Scholar went to Oxford. And he actually moved up in his placement and got seventh at a super Smash Brothers melee.

You went to Oxford too. That was a big tournament. That was a big tournament. Yeah, I'm getting my point because by 29, then you were elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana. But Aiden is not yet 29.

So it's potential in Super Specialist melee is kind of unlimited. And so I want to ask you, how can the American public trust somebody who doesn't have that many melee tournament experience? Yeah, it's a good point. Fair question.

You haven't accomplished nearly as much as my friend Hayden. Ever where I go, people ask, yes, yes, yes, yes. I didn't know this segment was happening, I didn't know, I was on trial. Oh, I just, I want to, I want to spotlight your big deal. You're going to want to stuff Hayden.

I do want to ask him the idea that you're, you know, Aiden's age and you are becoming mayor after going to Oxford and it's this, this is crazy. So what, what is it like being that young running one of these positions? I'm still trying to figure out where you found some of those photos. They did not line up with the year I proposed.

So the thing is, I should probably start by explaining a little bit about South Bend. People have heard of it usually because they watch Notre Dame football or basketball, but we were a city that really grew up around the auto industry. Studa Baker was as big of a car, maker is the, the big three it would have been the big four if they hadn't gone out of business in the '60s.

And it was a city that was really trying to figure out if it was going to make it, kind of looking at swoens and a lot of young people kind of got the message growing up as happens

“across the industrial Midwest, that if you want to succeed you have to get out.”

And I was one of a lot who did, all which is to answer your question by saying when I, when I realized that I belong there wanted to come back and then ultimately want to run for mayor, running at that office, running for office that age in a way kind of was my message is this way to say, look, there are young people who believe that this community has a future, and to my amazement, I actually a lot of older voters who were particularly

excited about the idea of a younger person stepping forward to try to take the city in a different direction. So, it was, you know, obviously there was some work to do to establish some credibility

that, you know, I was up to the task and it was, it was a leap of faith, it's kind of always

a leap of faith when you put somebody in charge of your city or your state or your country as a voter, right, but that much more so when you're in your 20s, but do you find a lot of people embrace that as it is kind of a way to kind of certify that I was serious about change and not just going to represent a status quo that people were frustrated within the city. Why do you think it is that we have so few young people running for, why we have such an

elderly Senate presidency, how, why do you think, why do you think that is? Yeah, and to be clear, this is not normal. So the gap between the average age of our elected officials and the average age of our citizens is wider in the United States than it is in a lot of other places. So, some of that I think is cultural. I think we've grown up with this idea that you're supposed to wait your turn or wait many, many turns before you step forward.

Obviously, I, you know, didn't believe in that. I'm running for mayor, my 20s, I run for president, my, in my 30s, and people responded. But there is that kind of cultural expectation that you're just kind of kind of wait. And I encourage young people who care about politics and care about their, their country, their community, not to do that, not to wait. Yeah, I mean,

“you should know what you're doing. You know, have a vision if you're, if you're thinking”

about running for office, but I wish more people would. There are also some features of our system that might actually systematically make that more true. So compared to other democracies, we have more of a winner take all system in the way that our, our congressional elections work,

members in his single district when the top three or something like that get through.

Some political scientists have argued that in that set up, you tend to have more young candidates or new candidates because a party will put forward a whole roster of people versus here, where it's down to the, whichever two people had the money and the institutional support to become the nominees of the two parties in their race to, yeah, at least in most places. You do have those open primaries, which I think, I think can help with that a little bit. And when we have

seen very young people, obviously, that are an exception to the rule, but I'm really concerned that there are a lot of structural things in the US that systematically kind of repress the chances for a lot of young people to step up. At a very moment where we need more young people to be engaged.

The pitch I always make is, you know, the younger you are, the longer you're planning to be here,

the more you have irreversibly at stake. You know, a whole set of decisions, right? And these decisions are going to be made with or without you. So at the very least, you ought to be voting, but also you should find a way to be involved in those processes. We know, the system is putting for the best 75-year-olds possible. We talked about this show, but, you know, I think in my lifetime, I'm 34. Every president, maybe other than Obama, was born exactly in 1946, every single one.

Think about that. That's astounding. I mean, Trump, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, they were all born within a few weeks of each other. Yeah. And so, you know, we became, they entered our consciousness maybe at different ages, but they're all the same ages each other. So they have the same kind of, they grew up in the same values, they have the same leadership. We need some sort of like mega birth year where we create the five greatest millennials. And then we go, I am, I am curious.

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

“about being involved. I personally have felt a sense of helplessness with politics. I think that's why”

I often am just drawn the tech and not to current events because it feels like, well, at least I can make a computer do a thing. There's like a result that can happen. Yeah. So, you know, for you and your 20s have gone and successfully do this, how specifically would you encourage people to go out and be involved when it feels so intractable? Well, start, I would say start with what you care about. So, you know, for different people, that means different things. For me, it had to do with the

fate of the city that I'd grown up in. We were being called a dying city. And in the national press, and I wanted to be part of the generation that would change that. But I would also say more broadly, there's a lot of processes that play out close to home. Like these these very unsexy things like the way a planning board is meeting, or a zoning board, or a city counselor, or something like that. And maybe that doesn't sound like your idea of a fun way to spend a

Tuesday night. But, you know, things that everybody should care about, like whether housing is going to be built in your community that'll take the edge off of what it costs to rent or to try to own home. You know, those play out in some of these processes, not a lot of people go. So, I'm not even just talking about the people we run or appointed do a board, or a commission, or city counselor, or something like that. But just the people we even show up tend to skew older, they tend to be

people with a direct kind of special interest. And I think a lot of folks don't realize those processes are open. Like, you can show up. You could show up at, I mean, when I was mayor, anybody could come to a city council meeting. And I think you got three minutes, you could say whatever you want, and everybody would have to listen. And I actually think there's something important and healthy about that, if and only if a lot of people step up. Yeah, I mean, you compare that

“to Congress, where in order to testify in Congress, you have to be invited or subpoena, like one of”

the others. And there are so many other processes in state and local government where all you have to do to make your voice or to show up, right? And I think I worry sometimes that in a more kind of virtualized digital environment that, you know, the younger you are, the more that's kind of the environment you came up in, you might overlook the fact that there are a lot of these processes where it's show up in 3D. You can literally require four selected officials to hear what you have to

say. As far as running, I think the important thing is to, again, obviously have a vision, know what you care about. And, you know, watch a certain office, maybe to remember Congress, maybe it's something more local. And, you know, one of two things will happen, either you'll see a leader and you'll think, all right, they make a lot of sense. I want to support them with my vote, maybe more. Maybe you want to donate, maybe you want a volunteer, be part of a campaign,

or you watch them and you're like, well, shit, I could do it better than that. Right? And if you have

“that instinct, then that's a pretty good indication that maybe you should try. After Mayor and then”

just into the military, you went and became the Department of Transportation Head, which is

a pretty important and incredible job. We are big fans of trains here. We talk about trains.

Could we have the train hype a meter? So we have a kind of running height meter of where exactly we all stand on trains at the moment. So we've been talking a lot about Brightline, we've read a books about China and what they've been doing with their development. Right now, A-Shirak,

“I think he's sitting at, like, maybe a fort. So, you know, high scores. We had lead love.”

That's not. Adenus is currently the most enthusiastic about trains. And I believe recently, you have somewhere in the middle, but we're taking out. We're big trains fans. I'm wondering, you know, all the things that you handle at the DOT. How do you feel about trains specifically? How excited are you about trains? I'm very excited about trains. Yes. The potentials. Yeah, put 'em up at the 10. There we go. That's good. I think that,

a first of all, if you are at all kind of competitive about the idea that America ought to be

leading the way, then you gotta ask yourself, how is it that people in so many other countries enjoy a higher standard of train service than we do? And you know, compared to what we're used to in the US, I wouldn't even be asking for a Japanese level. Like a Italian level would be would be a lot better than we got. Right? And there's all kinds of reasons why and we can dig in on that.

“But I think the basic reason why is you get what you pay for. Right? So, what we did was the biggest”

investment in passenger rail in 50 years since Amtrak was set up in the first place. And even that's kind of a down payment on what's going to be needed in the long run. But also working, you mentioned bright line, running from Las Vegas to Southern California, incredibly exciting. And part of why I was really excited about that. And we funded it with Billion's dollar sale. They could happen is I would love for the conversation with anybody who comes back from Las Vegas. Instead of just

like, you know, somebody got back from Japan and they're like, "Why can't we have this?" Just so many people go to Vegas. And if you see it there and come back and say, "Why can't we have this in more places?" I think it becomes something that there's more and more public demand for. But we've got to also

just never run to high-speed rail like Brightline. We just need regular speed rail to the better.

Yeah, I mean what most people would consider regular speed would be a big improvement for us. Is it faster than LA traffic? We're fine. Like, we're really fine. Let's jump in a great basic of LA. I actually do have a question about that specific project because maybe maybe you can illuminate some of it. So when we had looked into that, what admittedly one of my frustrations with it is seen that instead of going all the way into LA to a place like Union Station,

which is the main station in the center of LA. It starts out pretty far east, more towards Ontario. And when you just like math out with like driving takes to Vegas or even the cost of like a cheap flight from like Burbank airport to go to Vegas, it all of a sudden like wasn't as appealing to me anymore. And I'm not saying that that project shouldn't exist. It's like one of my number one personal priorities is that I want to see that type of transportation expand. But I am wondering that

with an example like this that seems so it would be so obviously more successful if it went into the heart of LA and was more accessible to the population here, what keeps a project like that

“that has all that funding from having that kind of obvious access point. Like what stops that?”

So in a word cost. So first of all, I don't disagree. And I think the long run vision for a mature

developed network and set of routes has to be city center to city center downtown to downtown population center gravity to population center gravity. But I think where we are right now in the U.S. as you've got to start somewhere. So getting it as far as basically Rancho Cucomanga gets you into Southern California. And I think creates more of a level of demand and expectation that we start facing the cost or tearing down the barriers that create the cost. It's like

exponential hockey stick kind of thing. The more you get into these areas that are built up. And just to give you a sense of how extreme it is. In New York, we worked on a project to extend the second avenue subway, something like that, but we really need to be done. Up, get it up past where it goes now, 125th Street. And it is in the billions now to get that extension. And the tunnel is already there. The tunnel was built 50 years ago. So just getting the stations, the

signaling, the the right away, the clearance to do that is that expensive. Now, we shouldn't tolerate that either. And there's a whole body of work going on about how to make it less expensive, pound for pound per square mile, however you want to measure it, to build anything in this country, definitely including transportation. That's here require legal reform, structural reform, permitting reform. When we do that, I think we have a better shot at these these things getting built

out. But I think where we are now is we just need somewhere in America. We need actual butts in seats on a revenue service high speed rail. And then I think it becomes unstoppable. And I think we become more willing as a country to tear down the barriers that have made it hard to build. Could you speak a little more to the to the funding part of that? Because I think it touches on a broader subject that we wanted to get to. But the it just with public transportation, it's kind of

Like a lot of cities, even LA Metro spend have a enormous budget to be able to spend on their

“public transport network. And compared to other cities that where I would say are like more successful,”

like if you looked at a Tokyo or a Paris or or really anywhere else in the world or any rural farm in China. They have like kind of more scrutiny, more stringent budgets and they're able to make it work. And I'm wondering, is there some sort of like chicken egg issue with public transportation funding in the country? Because we do spend a ton, we do spend a ton of money on it. So what's the gap there and like how that money is being spent versus how people are able to

successfully accomplish that in other places? Well, one issue we have is relative to where

we're willing to spend on public transit or trains. We're always spending much more on cars and roads.

And obviously I want our cars and roads to function well. But we've torqued in a way that actually pushes people on to the roads. And by the mix of kind of subsidies and deficiencies on the other end. So that leads to kind of a vicious cycle where the land gets starts to get planned and used in ways that assume that everybody has to have a car. And that's definitely true in parts of the Midwest, is true in Southern California. It's true in a lot of kind of low-in-middle density places.

That then makes it that much more expensive if you try to shift things or improve things, like what we're trying to do with transit. Now here's another thing that's interesting, right? We don't have to have transit built on the same logic that dominated the way we did it, let's say 50 years ago, like a hub and spoke system for bus routes. That was basically the only way to do it before you had things like GPS or on-demand rides. Now it's not obvious in a middle-density

“area that that's the best way to organize your transit because you can have more on-demand,”

pooling, micro-transit, all these things adding up into a more rational network that per person or per ride should be cheaper. The other thing you mentioned is that the comparison to other countries, and I think this is why, and frankly, this is a challenge in my party,

this is why we can't just accept that this is what things are always going to cost because,

as you mentioned, you look at some of these European countries, they have environmental standards, at least as good as ours, probably better. They have labor standards, at least as stringent as ours, often tougher, and they are still managing, like the amount of money it takes to build a mile of railway and Spain, for example, is a fraction of what it costs here. And that is a result of really not so much technical but political barriers here. The number of

steps you have to get through to get anything funded, the uncertainty of funding. I mean, right now, the president is holding a $16 billion round of funding for a tunnel that is more than 100 years old in New York, New Jersey, the Hudson tunnels. There are 110 years old, they were damaged by

Superstorm Sandy. That was more than a decade ago. Hundreds of thousands of people a day go through

this tunnel. It needs to be done like yesterday, and now it's getting stopped because of political bullshit, really. When that happens, every time that happens, every time that even might happen, it adds to the uncertainty that adds to the project timeline and that adds to the cost. So there's no question that we need to design and build things in a better way. I worked on that in my time at DOT, but we got a long way to go as a country. This feels like a bigger, we talk about

something along this line of the show a lot, bigger than just transportation though. We add this idea of like, imagine a leaky pipe and you're pouring 10 gallons of money into it. And only a little bit comes out for the actual service. And it just feels like we throw more money than a country at health care. We throw more money at the military. We more money at transportation and a lot of things. But the outcomes we get are often subpar, like a way less than the dollar

amount we're spending. And so you mentioned like, specific problems with transportation, but why do you think this political bullshit has invaded almost every aspect of what the government

“is supposed to be doing? Well, I think part of it is that the government is less and less structured”

to solve problems. So think about, think about a Congress, for example, our legislature. We got 435 seats. About 40 of them are actually competitive. Like you actually really would have to wonder whether the Democrat or the Republicans can win. You might estimate that number a little higher or lower, the small percentage. It's just one out of 10. And the rest of them, it's pretty much decided when you have your nominee, all the really matters is the fight within

the party, the primary, for what's going to be a deep red Republican seat or a deep blue Democratic seat. That makes it much less likely that when there's a political obstacle to solving a technical problem, that people are really going to come together and get it done, because the only thing you really have to worry about is the political extreme of your own party.

really concerned about, because it's the largest single transportation project in the country,

and they just stopped because the president just stopped it. He just doesn't like Chuck Schumer, and he's shutting down a plane. It's not like he's shutting down a plane. There's no way to be fixed. Chuck had a lot of had to lately. I've been, I've been keep it on. It's not like they said, "Oh, we just discovered this huge design flaw." Right. It's not like that. It's just, they're nakedly admitting. He even said that they would, he would start funding the

“project again, if they named Dolas Airport and Penn Station after Donald Trump, right?”

Now they're trying to do that so much dance. Now they're trying to do all the highways after him in the train. I heard the tunnels woke. There's a bridge to Canada, the Gordie Howe Bridge, the Canadian's actually paying for it. It's included a lot of American materials. Who's paying for it? Yeah, Mexico didn't pay for the wall, but Canada was paying for the bridge.

Thanks. And yeah, I didn't. It's clear about that. And now the president's saying, "Well, I'm not going to let it open." Not really clear why I, well, because he's a man of Canada, I guess, but it's not exactly irrational. That kind of irrational is really costly. And the reason that has to do with what I was just saying earlier is that, normally, regardless of right-left, the people from that region would stand up,

even to a president of their own party, the elected officials, right? You'd expect Michigan Republicans to say,

"No, you can't just stop a bridge in the Michigan that's critical to our economy.

Republicans in New Jersey and New York would be standing right next to Democrats in New Jersey and New York, and you can't do this." But we don't have that. So I know that it can sound kind of technical or arcane to be talking about things like the way districts are drawn and Congress and connect that up

“to how much it cost to build a mile of tunnel or a stretch of road. But I really think there was”

a relationship between those things. You go through the different industries. Every example is a little different you mentioned, healthcare. I mean, part of that is because it's actually a classic textbook example of where a normal market tends not to work, right? If you think about just what you learn in economics about where a market works well, you know, the market for peanut butter, where you got a set number of choices, anybody can enter, anybody can make their own brand of peanut

butter, everybody knows what peanut butter is, and you have a certain willingness to pay for it, and maybe you have an extra willingness to pay for it if it's better, but only so much, right? And then all your textbook market dynamics kick in, supply demand, and it pushes the cost down to be relatively close to where it actually costs to produce none of that's true in healthcare. I mean, first of all, you can't just jump in and be an alternate provider of health care. It takes

years to get to be a doctor and there's a lot of restrictions on the number of doctors in a particular specialty you get certified every year. The person who is making the purchasing decision

is not always the same thing as the customer because you got this insurance company as a middleman,

your willingness to pay is not really on a normal high as not like peanut butter, right? Especially you can't walk away. Yeah, or if you think you're going to die if you don't get this treatment, then like you don't care if it's, you know what I really get it for me, right? And so there are all these examples where normal market conditions don't apply, which is why in my view, we need to be ready to have a public system where the private sector can still be there,

but they have to demonstrate that they're better than the public system in order to get your business. We call it Medicare for all who want it versus Medicare for all whether you want it or not. That's what we call it when I was running for president. Because places that do that don't just take better care of people, they actually have a record of having more efficient use of dollars. In other words, more of the dollar that goes into your health care actually goes toward treating you

instead of going into this administrative muck where it just kind of disappears in bureaucracy. Although I am helpful, hopeful in health care, that it's one of many areas where if we get AI right, not sure we will, but if we do, you can really set it the call. I actually wanted to ask about health care,

“because I think it's a really good example. So we'll come back to AI later. We're going to talk about”

five coding apps for 45 minutes. I'm going to have to do a five-coated to-do list app. We're going to do a bunch, yeah. I'm a very pro universal health care of some kind. The system that we have at every turn, whether I talk to friends who are doctors, whether I talk to my friends who are just trying to get a check up and they don't have insurance or they have bad insurance, it is terrible at like every level. It feels like one of the problems with Medicare for all or a public system of any

kind is that Medicare will cover the bills as they are in an American system. To cover every one under a system like Medicare now is literally as much as I would like to just say spend the money. It's literally not, to me it literally is not possible. I think there's a lot of rhetoric around

but how do you combat the cost part? The fact that some drug here might be hundreds of dollars versus like the 10 or 20 that it is in another country or a treatment the same way. I think that's

such a critical component of solving this that never gets talked about and I'm wondering when you

think about a health care solution in the long run like how that part of it gets changed.

“Yes, I think this is hugely important because the debates over how we structure the insurance,”

they really matter but if we do nothing about the actual underlying cost of care then we're not solving the problem and and we have to do both. So getting the insurance structure right means more of the dollar actually goes toward the actual cost. Yeah, meanwhile you have to make sure the actual cost is lower. How do you do that? Part of it is making sure you use the market power that you're insurer has. So for example, we know for a fact that if Medicare is allowed to bargain for lower drug

prices you get lower drug prices. Or are we not allowed to? Right, they're usually prevented from yeah. Yeah. There's a 10 that we can do. Right. Yes, they only pick 10. Yeah. I'm sorry to side by my own question. Why? Why is that not allowed? That seems psychotic. And I feel like I must get, I must be missing something politics. It's politics. Right. It's it's the fact that obviously

you've got some very powerful industries that can get their way and make sure that what seems

like the most common sense of the whole thing in the world doesn't actually happen and if I can zoom out for a bit. Yeah. There are so many things in this country where, okay, you don't have 100% agreement where we got lots of different ideas in this country. But basically, at least two thirds of the country, things we ought to do something in a certain way. Whether we're talking about having a more progressive tax code, where the wealthiest are paying more than they do now.

Whether we're talking about health care, having the government, maybe not take over everything, of course, but but play a more aggressive role in making sure you can get your health taken care of. Whether we're talking about social personal liberties, or right to choose marriage equality.

Whether we're talking about gun safety, wherever you are on second amendment, at least make

sure there's universal background checks. These are all things that have at least two thirds of the country on board and they can't happen in today's Washington. When the entire concept of America, like the whole way we invented this country, was the idea that if you have a certain democratic system of government, what that government comes up with will be more aligned with what most people want. We don't have that right now. And to me, that's a foundational problem

that kind of, if we address that properly, and there's a whole set of things that I could take you

“through on what I think that looks like, then all the other specific problems around health care”

policy, transportation policy, tax policy, start to get better. Do you have any idea how you, I think an overwhelming feeling I have about what you're saying is this feeling of being at the bottom of this whole, we've dug so deep. And when I look at, not to say that other countries don't have problems with their own. But like if you looked at China, like they can, they can cut out a lot of this through like kind of authoritarian means. You can skip a lot of the like the red tape and the

political bullshit by being authoritarian. I'm not saying going that directly. I'm saying like that's one way. Or you could look at another country like Denmark that I think probably has a stronger democracy right now than we do. And they're able to approach these problems in a different way. Yes. And I see we're in like this tangled horrific web of political polarization. It's how at a national level, how do you begin to like undo some of this stuff? And I know that's

vague. But it's, that's the, that's the like big boogey man I see that I feel like, I feel like I feel difficult to offer. So tack on what you just said, you could go in the details. I would love to do it. Yeah. I want to like, what are some things we can actually do instead of just acknowledging there's problems. So I think part of the answer to your question is the, we have this kind of first mover disadvantage with our constitution. Because we were kind of the first

country to try to do it this way. So we innovated with this technology of kind of constitutional democratic republic representative system of government. You know, other countries reviewed as constitutional, but they didn't actually write the constitution down. We think constitution by definition is a document. Actually, in the British system, they think of themselves as having the constitution, but it's not written, which creates its own set of problems that you might imagine.

But anyway, there were a few things that was very elegantly designed. And the most elegant thing about the constitution is the capacity for amendments. So you write this basic law that everything else is built on top of. But you also realize that it, there might be something in there

“that you need to change or fix or develop. So you have the process of creating an amendment.”

And it's, it's not easy, but, but it's something you can do if you really want to as a country.

developing democratic systems. And by the way, some of our own states, most of our own states,

“within the US, came it at a little differently. How do we, you could amend your constitution?”

They actually do it more often. We haven't done a substantive amendment to the constitution about 50 years. It was the last one. There was a technical one of the 90s about congressional pay. But actually, one of the last big ones was about lowering the voting age, which went from 21 to 18. Good move. I would say. Right. You know, in the 20th century, we had quite a few, not all of which were good, right? We had prohibition an amendment to the constitution. So you

can get a drink. But then, after a few years, realize that was a bad idea. Change it back with another amendment. Right. The bill of rights is amendments. That was an in kind of one point of a constitution. They padded, they tacked that on. Right. So that's where I would begin to answer your question, is we should entertain some constitutional amendments to improve the democratic nature of our constitution. Do you have an example of what? Yes. You could weigh the magic on.

You bet what's your argument? Because I imagine, like, you're not, you're not starting at the surface level of, like, the amendments going to be like, well, finish the tunnel. Like, the 25th of the 90s. It's going to be so valid to infer that has further consequences. So I'm curious about what that would look like. That's my point. It's easier to get things like the tunnel done if you fix democracy or improve democracy. So what might some of those amendments

be? First of all, a super simple one that I just think is important in principle. One person

one vote that everybody's vote ought to count the same. Wait a minute, though. I'm richer than Aiden. Why would I have the same amount of votes as him? That's the whole point. That is a man. And we're older. We should have a divorce. That doesn't mean we should be able to have more impact. No, I like, because one day I'll be richer than you. And then I want to have more than you. I want to have more than you. So we actually don't have one, even for picking the

president, right? We don't have that. Especially for picking the president. Yeah. Because the electoral college, we should just, we're the only country in the world that really only presidential democracy, where you come in second place and you get to be president and the person who came in first place in terms of getting the most votes doesn't get to be president. That is nuts. So that's one. We could fix. Another one we could do is about jerrymandering. These

districts that are drawn in the list guide. Bizarre shapes. I saw one of them. It was described as the shape of goofy kicking Donald Duck on a map so that you can predetermine the results. Making sure that there is fairness in the way that districts are drawn. Making sure that there is a little more specificity around the right to vote. I would argue that if you're a low-income American and you got two jobs or three, having to stay in the line for more than an hour in order

to vote means you didn't really have the right to vote. But right now there's no constitutional protection saying that it is a responsibility to make sure you can actually go in and cast that vote. We could adjust the way money works in politics. You know, right now the Supreme Court holds

that basically your corporations are the same as a person for the purpose of intervening in

politics and spending money to manipulate the outcome of an election is the same thing as me giving a speech about my views. Money is speech, corporations are people. We could clear that up with

“a constitutional amendment. I think we should. You're anti-free speech?”

My good friend McDonald's has a lot of thoughts on regulation of fast food that I want to hear and if he's not able and I think he's a he, he's not able to see food. This is the thing, right? Like we don't have to, if there's one thing I'm trying to say everywhere I go, it doesn't have to be this way. Like we've gotten soaked in things being a certain way that isn't working and doesn't have to be that way. So those are just a few examples of structural democratic reform. But there's also reforms ahead

I think in terms of how our economy works that we need to get ready for especially given what AI is going to do. And I think when I'm not saying it fixes everything, I am saying that a lot of other problems would be easier to solve if we had a government that was more accountable to the people and more representative. I would like for that to happen. I hope somebody makes that happen. I'm working on it. Yeah. This is like the repeal citizens united type. Yeah, that's okay.

Yeah, yes, I would like. But this is the thing. We all feel like it's, we feel like it's too much to ask. And it's not, it's not too much to ask. Like our whole country gets set up around. I mean, you know, it's way more radical than anything we've just talked about is the idea of not having a king and setting up a democratic government is this super radical idea, right, when the founders did it. And they did it. Right. And more or less worked out.

What do you think about the structural problems with the Senate, where it's to per state some states have way smaller population here in California. We have 60 times Wyoming or whatever we have. Is that what do you think about that? I mean, I cannot imagine that

“that's what the founders had in mind. I know that they struck these deals that, you know,”

you get equal representation in the Senate per state. But I mean, again, if you think about within,

camera, has, whatever, you know, the US Senate isn't the only Senate, but it's the only Senate

where the seats aren't proportioned equally. Right. But there's a lot of things we could do that

“don't require amending the Constitution. I think we should launch a package of constitutional amendments”

to make our country more democratic. But just to be clear, things like reforming the Supreme Court to make it less partisan, which might involve a different number of justices. That actually, the number nine, nine justices in the Supreme Court, that's not in the Constitution. We start out with three, and they changed it, and then they stopped changing it. The number of representatives in the House of Representatives, the number of states in the United States, like none of the things

are locked in in the Constitution. We should be able to make a whole new flag though, but do you

such a thing? I know you'd have to find a little star. It is really unfortunate. 50 is a great

great way to lock it in. That is, it is tough. Sorry Puerto Rico. 50's just too clean, even so many flags. Support for this episode comes from tasty trade, and I want to ask, what's the time you forge drone path in life? Right? We're just talking to a repeat bootage edge.

“He forged a path early in his life. How are you forging at age 28, a name, Gaman? I think a”

few years ago, after I was working in esports for a while, I was living with my friend, Ludwig, and he had become a big, you know, he had become a big, not so far in your own country. No, no, no, no, in sort of a grab on. How did he deal there? And then he kind of had this big coat behind his neck, but I got a great shot and grabbed, and then I got a job. Is that what you meant? Yeah, that's kind of I meant. It's like following the greats did that. You know, they grabbed the co-tails and just hung on.

In business and in life. To forge my own path, make our decisions with tasty trade, you can trade stocks, options, futures, and more on one platform, and offers low commissions. So you keep more of what you earn. So you want to learn to trade, go on or just discover new strategies when I was thinking, you could sign up and get access to dozens of free educational courses. Platforms packed of trade and features help you trade smarter, like advanced

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be go do tasty tray dot com slash lemonade today. Tasty trading is a registered broker dealer and member of Fidra Fidra and SIP. Nuffuff and Sipk. Support for this show comes from cloaked. All right, Doug, you know how every time I get mad at it on the show, I leak his address to the public. We're trying to like get people to hurt him. Paris didn't try to censor it out of the show, and I don't think it works. You like graffiti it everywhere. Yeah, I do a lot to get it out there.

He's figured out that if you use cloaked, it actually not only takes down your private information, prevents it from leaking again. Ooh, interesting. And it's like really frustrating for me

“trying to get him in trouble or get him. You shouldn't be frustrated about this. You should disagree with”

you. You shouldn't disagree with me. You shouldn't disagree with me. You can protect things like your social security number, prevent identity theft, it catches all of this. It will not physically approach your friend to get him to stop putting the address in the physical space of your show. I'm confused. Which will or will not cover up all the graffiti that Brandon has been putting in here. It won't, it admittedly cloaked won't do that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's the one thing

cloaked won't do, but it won't get you hang normal friends who didn't try to out your address. You know what? You can just go to cloaked.com/lemenade. You can take your free privacy scan. And if you choose to subscribe to cloaked, use code lemonade for 30% off your cloaked subscription. I hate you. He lives in LA. I didn't want to ask. I think the early part of this kind of focus on the idea of how money is spent spending money more efficiently. The flip side of this

is raising taxes, especially on the wealthiest people. And I think just looking at what is necessary from like a policy perspective, a fiscal perspective in the future, it seems like we need to cut spending by making spending at least like more efficient, but also by raising taxes. And it feels like that platform of let's raise taxes and cut spending is historically very unpopular. But we're getting further and further along into a place where that's necessary and someone

kind of needs to be the guy and presumably will not be liked for it. And I'm wondering if that since that does seem necessary, I'm wondering if you agree with that to begin with. But also if that's like a politically tenable platform for anyone to even have in the future. Yeah, it gets a fair question. I think it's pretty obviously true though that we need to have more and better sources of revenue and we need to be more efficient with our spending. Like I think most people just

accept that that's true. And again, having cut my teeth as mayor where you know, there's no federal reserve for the city of South Bend. Like we did our budget in cash right then and we could only

or we had to we had to ask the taxpayer. And I think we've really drifted away from that in terms

“of our national policy. Now of course, is you to make the hard choices you have to make, right?”

Which is the last thing that any, I mean, look, any political body is going to have our time with that. But for reasons we just went over it. Like we're especially hard pressed to do it right in today's currently. You guys consider as I in South Bend just using the tariff money. Yeah, do you get the tariff cash? Yeah, I just saw a new numbers on the tariff money. The average household now has paid about an extra $1,000 last year alone. And that's set to go up this year

from the tariff. So this idea that this is just some abstract economic thing. Like this is hitting a lot of families that can't afford an extra $1,000 right now. And it's not exactly helping our trade balance. So even on its face in terms of what it was supposed to do, it has not led to an improvement in manufacturing. China actually just had their biggest year of trade surplus ever, right? This is not even working. And coming back to the spending side, this is why part of why

the whole doge thing kind of breaks my brain is that we really do need work on government efficiency. If we had had an actual serious effort to have a department of government efficiency versus the

“one we got, I really think it would have found some things that we could do differently in”

better. But instead what they did was, first of all, they made a bunch of shit up. I mean, if you look at the numbers, you know, journalists might back to look at some of that. The savings they claim to ensure that they're moving along. There's one case where they just, I can't believe

it's actually happened. They said billion instead of million and just overstated their savings by

a factor of 1,000. This literally happened. I'm not making this up. We all make mistakes. Yeah, who among us? Who among us has an accidently fired the people in charge of nuclear weapon safety? Yeah. But you know, the stuff they tore down and overall spending went up. Yes. It's not even like they actually say the line of it. It's up over last year. So it's yeah. But should we rethink the way we spend money in terms of our federal government? Yeah,

like a course force do. I mean, well, so this is the other interesting thing, Rhett. I think that there will be a kind of a reckoning that is forced. Because I don't think the world is willing to lend America money indefinitely for that. Especially yields we want. By the way, the number one reason they did was because our political system was seen as a gold standard. So if our if our leadership and political system are just kind of transparently a mass,

they're going to be limits on our ability to borrow, which is going to create limits on our ability to spend, which is going to force the kind of conversation that they you're raising. But look, we know where we can find some revenue. I don't mean to say that it's as simple as, like, you find the one richest guy in the country and you text his brains out and then all the problems will be solved. It's not very long. It's not very long. However, it's a shake down. It's the Elon shake down.

It's an amendment. I mean, it's just one word. We've sacrificed one a year, like a hunger game ever. But I'll tell you what, a guy like that. And a lot of other people like that are paying a lower percentage of their true income in taxes than a firefighter or a teacher or their secretary or yeah. Or they get over their own employees, which is insane. So if you had a fair taxation system that asked more of the wealthiest and if you did a better job of collecting what people

actually, oh, so part of what they've done, unfortunately, it's fired a bunch of people in the IRS, whose job was not to raise anybody's taxes, but just to make sure people paid the taxes that they're supposed to be paying, which again, if you're a firefighter or a teacher, you probably are.

If you have some complicated, multi-million dollar financial scheme underpinning your family

finances or if you're, you know, the Elon Musk to the world, then you're probably not paying every

“ever. I don't know. You know, like you, like you do. Yeah, I think all my money's in a shelter in Ireland.”

Yeah, I don't think they have any tax payments. I don't think they have any tax payments. I don't know. I just pull some all about it. I haven't more. I've been waiting for years to, for somebody to mention, it's all about it. And let me, let me, please let him get started on Sweden. He's trying to be honest. I need a president who cares more about the seed vault. I am obsessed with SmallBard. I'm going up there. This is my guy.

Oh, no. I just fascinating. Do people know about this? No, like, like, barely. This is, this is the northernmost place you can get to using frequent flyer miles, which is how I wound up there. And it's pretty much the northernmost everything. Like, if you get money, the little, the little ATM screen says in Norwegian, worlds northernmost ATM. And the church there, it's the world's northernmost. Just 78th parallel, it's like way, way beyond anything else we think of as

Arctic. And I just think it's a fascinating place. So, sorry. I got very excited about this. It's okay. And the seed vault. Where were we? Taxiations. So, tax evasion by very rich people is clearly a problem in this country. I'm not saying that would cover the entire deficit. I'm saying it would make a big difference if we collected properly. So, I do have, let me say before

Wink. I do have two questions about raising taxes. The first is, I'll wash your all-in interview.

“And I think on that, you describe Bernie as further to the left of you on tax policy.”

When it comes to like the wealth tax or like what you might do. And I think there's fair critiques of how like a wealth tax might function. But I think critiques of taxes on the wealthy often come at the expense of doing anything at all. And historically, we had incredibly high tax rates through some of the country's most successful people. Yes. And I guess I'm just wondering for you who would is stating that your tax policy would be different than somebody like Bernie's.

Do you have an idea of what direction or what you would be looking for to like what type of tax policy would you take to not only the wealthy but the people in general? Yeah, I think it should be

first of all to be clear taxes on the wealthy need to be higher. There's do. If you look at what's

fair, if you look at what is going to take to meet our revenue goals, if you look at international comparisons, in my opinion, that's clearly the case. And at the same time, I think it would be

“misleading to suggest that's all we've got to do. That's why I'm bringing up collection,”

leakage, and evasion. It's why I'm bringing up spending and being more efficient. I think we got to do all of those things at the same time. So yes, we need a tax code that requires the wealthy to pay their fair share. And the idea of a wealth tax is not fundamentally different from the idea of a property tax, which is how we got most of the funds that I've used in my first experience in elected offices as mayor. So I don't think there's anything wrong in principle

with assessing some kind of tax. Now, it has to be reasonable. It has to be set up in a way that it's not going to have unintended consequences. But again, this is something that I think people like blindly say about taxes on the rich, in cases where it's not actually true. So you may have heard me sparring with the all-in guys a little bit on this, where there are times in our past when the highest income tax brackets were much higher than they are now. And growth was actually

pretty good economically. So the idea that you're just going to hold your left hand on the growth of middle class. Yeah, yeah. This idea that you're going to kill your economic growth if you ever try to tax the wealthy or tax corporations in a way that draws more of those, again, I want corporations, you know, I want good businesses to do well. But I wanted to pay the fresh share along the way, especially because all of us through our tax dollars are creating

the things that allow those corporations to create value. And my favorite example of this is the internet itself. The internet was literally invented by the American taxpayer, the federal government.

“That's what DARPA did. Famously, created this thing, didn't really know how to commercialize it,”

like private enterprise had to do that. But private enterprise never could have had the scale

to do the basic research that made the internet a thing in the first place. And I think we have this illusion that there are certain companies or certain people who just invented themselves when all of us do what we do in some kind of context. And part of the context for any business is infrastructure, research, the rule of law, if you don't have that, you can't build a business from a coffee shop to a major AI company. None of that happens if you don't have those things.

But they need to pay it. And those things cost money and that's what tax is before. It's like a membership fee and it's sometimes been described as the taxes of your membership fee to be in a civilized society. And we ought to think of it that way. And ask you, this is going to be a harder question for a politician answer because it's bad for votes. But I want to ask it, which is that something like, I'd say, six out of 10, 60% of our tax dollars are going to things that primarily benefit

the old, which would be social security, Medicare, other things. And I'm not saying those are bad things. I'm supportive of in general social security. But there is a sense that most of this money is not going to regular working Americans in the middle. It's finding its way people who already have statistically the most, the most property, the most wealth, the most stocks, not every old person, that's it. But that's that's where it's going. And I want to know why your thoughts

are like, how do we meaningfully reduce the deficit or balance our budget if all of our money's going to interest Medicare social security? Like, that's almost everything. Military, I guess. Yeah, those are like interest is the one that's probably the most generationally unfair, because look, if we're talking about social security and Medicare, to be clear, the older you are, the more you've paid into it, to write people pay into that their whole lives. That's where I

worry about this word entitlement. In fact, I remember when I was campaigning, I said, I don't think it was an entitlement, I think it was a paid end of it, which maybe is an eternal catch on, but it's an honest way to think about it. Interest is another story, right? Because

at a level where there's going to be a return where it's going to pay off and where you're going

“to come out ahead. And that's true for a country. I think we've overshot that at this point. I think”

the debt has grown to a level that even the left cannot ignore. And I think that in many ways that does set up a younger generation for more pain. I mean, you know, not that long ago, the average age

to buy your first houses in your 20s. Now, by some measures, it's 40. Yeah. And I think even that's

slipping away, right? And that's related actually to our indebtedness, because that affects interest rates, which affects, you know, what's possible in terms of getting a mortgage. So, but I don't think it's going to be a generational warfare here. Like, I believe that, and again, I experience this in my very first elected office where older voters in my city were rooting for a younger mayor to kind of believe in a different kind of future that the people should want their grandkids to do

well, right? And yet, it's that generation that's under more and more pressure. Also, you know, I belong now to what's considered the sandwich generation as in where sandwiched between parents who were growing older, who were taking care of and kids who were taking care of. And those pressures

in terms of the time as well as the cost that a lot of people are growing through are massive.

And our country just isn't doing a very good job of supporting that. It's still got a lot of problems around things like long-term care that make it harder to take care of a parent. And then all kinds of things that make it harder to be a parent, like the complete lack of paid family

“leave in this country, only country to do that other than, I think, pop on New Guinea to have just”

no national, the big team, the big team. But do you economic powerhouse? We don't, it's another example where it doesn't have to be that way. If, literally, every other country in the world has figured out the way to do paid family leave, how are we not doing that in this country? We see universal childcare and not just, they're, they're seeking to do it in New York, but also

New Mexico has launched that. Like, these things can be done. They would make it dramatically

easier to go through that generational journey where you go from a young person to a parent to to retirement. But for all of that to work, every generation has to believe that they're contributing to something where they're going to be better off, right? If you were born the year, my mom was born and a world war, too. Statistically, you got a 90% chance, economically, of coming out ahead of your parents. If you're born the year I was born in the 80s, it's, it's a

coin flip. It's 50/50. And by some measures, that's now underwater if you're born more recently.

“I think the generational bargain breaks down. Yeah, that's, that's where the anger I'm seeing is”

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

memberships at Mara Logo? I mean, I think of the kind of people who Donald Trump spends all his time with, right, these are people who are perfectly happy for real estate to get even more expensive because they own a bunch of it. So does he, he's a real estate guy, right? So the last thing he's going to want to do is see housing costs go down. But I guess yes, for the, for the mega elite and people you're talking to, of course, and it's easy to do that. But the core of the problem he's talking

about feels like a big issue in politics, which is that they're easy large cohort of voting age rumors, who I think will have to lose out a little bit, at least the well these of them that own property, it will have to go down and value for, for a regular able to be able to participate in the way that they participate. Or at least go up less quickly. Sure. I guess wages have to be exactly our income has to grow more quickly than the price of housing, right now the opposite

to happen. So that's kind of what I just want to drill it back down to like, what can actually be done? Let's say in the 2020 election, you know, new administrations coming in, not going to, how do you possibly politically make something politically tentable where we say we're going to spend less in areas like Social Security or Medicare or are we saying we're not going to do that and it's strictly going to be from increased taxes. How do these numbers add up? There's there's

part of me that is sort of nihilistic that makes me think we have to wait for the boomer generation to no longer be voting to put it nicely. And I just don't, it seems, how, how do you make a difference? How do you get people to actually vote for these changes? So politically, I think it's calling an older generation to support. Remember, the people, if you're an older generation, the people you love most are so often in any younger generation. I think calling out to that is really

important. Because we have so many dynamics in our policy that pit people against each other, right versus left, working class versus versus white collar, North versus South, and it could be old versus young, right? And we just, we don't need any more cleavages like that. So I'm

And in American history, unfortunately, usually us coming together in national project is in the face of something really terrible like a war, right? Some of the highest levels of unity we ever had were World War II, the sort of a corresponding but less lesser level of national unity was the Cold War, right? But it shouldn't take a war for us to want to pull together to do big things. Substantably, in terms of what I think will actually take, I think the outlines of it are actually

“visible to us. I think it's building more housing. I think the best way to make Medicare”

cost less is to make the delivery of health care cost less versus leaving people on the cold or things like the Medicaid cuts that Trump and the Republicans push through. I'm not saying we don't

have to have hard choices. We can't always have our cake and eat it too, but there's so much

money on the table right now in terms of fairer taxation on the revenue side and better use of our tax dollar on the spending side. Before you even get to the muscle and bone, tough admittedly tough decisions that we're going to have to make as a country, which might affect, you know, by the time somebody who's born today is retiring, might affect some things about the shape of a social security in Medicare. They're going to have the Trump accounts. They're

going to have the, well, the dollar's enough. Let me admit, I actually think that's a good policy. I hate to admit it. I don't, I don't hate to. I hate to, I hate to endorse something named after

“Trump, so maybe we can do that. And I think there are different ways you could do it. But look,”

I think the basic idea of making sure that everybody has some kind of, you know, what an

commissar would call an initial endowment that everybody has something to start with makes sense. And, you know, it's, there's no work, one party should have a monopoly on that idea. We should make sure that everybody is set up with something. And I'm glad they did it. I mean, in a, in a bill full of a lot of really horrible things, I think that's one that had a lot of value. Okay. Another idea just thrown at you if, you know, if you're leading the country, you could

start a war with pop a new Guinea to unite people again. Right. We'd all be, well, there are ones. There's only one that's on our same page. We could pick some. Yeah, we could pick some. I have actually genuinely thought about this. If aliens came to earth and declared war, wow would be easy to pass policy, right? Get some stuff through. Yeah. I hope so. We should, we should. The reasonable time to bring up AI, the, the, the big,

yeah. Very thing to cloud. I guess, sort of, so we do have a running like AI hypometer as well. So kind of look at where we're doing right now. So I think a drug is pretty low right now. It's a little bit higher. All right. And then recently, I've been, let's see, 27. You recently is past summer wrote a substacks saying that you are concerned about AI regulation. I'm curious, even in the, what, seven months since that point, a massive amount has changed. Yes.

Here's where you think about AI right now. And then that substack was largely, I think this is a big deal. I think we aren't preparing for it properly. Yes, super agree with in terms of regulation. Yeah. Where do you currently stand? So that continues to be my view. I'd say in the months since then, there've been ups and downs for sure. I mean, we, yeah, because let me be like the dates, dates, nights, nights, nights. I think that means it's on my side. What closer

to go the right thing? You're, you're, you're still out there. You're closer to me. It's like that graph porn where the numbers do not make any sense. I was like, well, I put it this way. We're, I think we're still underreacting, which might be a weird thing to say given how much

people talk about AI. And, and, and look, the capabilities we never quite know, I was, you know,

a few months ago I was in Silicon Valley and there had been a couple of model releases. They didn't seem quite what everybody expected and served, but it was kind of a little bit down on on these things. I was in the very, a few days ago, and Claude Code has, has dropped, you know, here everybody's talking about bad money. There everybody's talking about Claude Code. It's the talk of the town and people are really impressed slash alarmed about what that means. So, but my thing is,

what I'm trying to push the policy world and, and my own democratic party to think more of,

“is to think about this not just as like a tech thing that you have to be like a tech geek to care”

about, but as a political economy problem, as is a question of how our economy is going to work, because I think some of those impacts are going to hit much faster than we're ready for. And again, I'm, I'm a product of where I'm from, right? So, I grew up in the industrial Midwest, Northern Indiana, just as this wave of automation and trade comes in in the 90s and early 2000s and knocks so many people and whole towns, off course economically, by just changing what

it means to be part of this economy. I think we're facing a wave like that, even bigger, probably, and even more widespread, because it's hitting so many white collar professions,

week to a go. And one of the things he warned about is that the reason that these texts are different

“than something like farmers getting replaced by, you know, a new implement on the farm,”

is that the AI's will be able to cover many different white collar jobs simultaneously. Right, if you're not going to be able to just go from one information job in the legal industry, over to the insurance industry, it's just going to cover both of those at once, and it's just going to broadly just eliminate entire category, like high level categories, not specific ones. And that's an area I'm extremely concerned about, as much as I am,

I'm more excited about AI than the average person. The job displacement in the short term the next couple years seems to me like a incoming catastrophe, like we incredibly concerning.

But I did want to definitively ask that specifically. What are your thoughts around that? Like I have

a hard time imagining us suddenly being launching UBI for the population in the next two years. And I do see potential mass unemployment for entry-level jobs in next two years. And how do you possibly deal with that right now? Yeah. So, you know, right now we have a system of unemployment insurance that was built in a time when a huge shock to employment would be like a 2% or a 4% change, right? Like if the unemployment rate went from 4% to 6% or 8%, that would be a massive

development in our economic system, and that would test the limits of our policy tools. And there is a non-trivial chance that it could be a multiple of that, right, in terms of what happens. Oh, look, through our experience at least in the last few hundred years, when a new technology eliminates certain tasks or even certain jobs, the long-term result is that there are different jobs that emerge and people find themselves doing different things.

But that's over the long-term. We don't, John Maynard Kansy economist said in the long run, we're all dead. And, you know, the job for policy makers and politicians, I think, is to deal with what's happening right now with a view to the long run. And so, if we have a massive and material difference in hiring, in entry-level coding, paralegals, I mean, you could go down the list of a lot of knowledge work professions. It's for service or I'm driving some of which, by the way, coding in

particular, those are job categories that policy makers actually pushed people into a generation. Yeah, you talked about the juxtaposition of, you know, the sad potential story of getting fed at the Rattarac of Rattarac of Rattaracode, being maybe, you know, in your 40s, 50s, and you're suddenly, you're making the effort. Like, I actually do want to pursue something new, get educated around this new thing, try to pursue this new career, and then you're a few years

“into it, and now this is happening. Right. But here's the thing to think about. We don't really”

know exactly what the level of disruption will be. Right. And we don't really know exactly what the level of value will be that it creates. But those two things, we can more or less assume we're going to travel together. In other words, a world where they, I doesn't do as much as we thought it did, is also one in which it probably doesn't disrupt as many jobs as we fear it might. And to put the other case, a world in which it is disrupting jobs, left right in the center,

means it is doing a huge amount of work that used to be impossible for a machine to achieve. And if that's true, that means generally for somebody, it's creating a huge amount of value. The question then becomes who gets them, right? Because I believe AI can lead to one of two results. I can either be for most people, a shorter workweek and more money in your pocket than before, or it can be even more ridiculous concentrations of wealth and power than we already have.

And what we already have, by the way, is pretty extreme. Like it's not just something that we look at the news about some of these really wealthy people and say, "Oh gosh, that's really unequal." This is historically pretty extreme. Like 1929 levels of wealth in it. Yeah, in fact, it's rare for a republic, a democratic system to hit this level of inequality and survive. Like when the Roman Empire, when the Roman Republic was hitting this level of inequality,

that's about the time it stopped being a republic. It'd be starting to be an empire. Well, we've been talking about this, the historical context of this level of wealth and

equality is like it dissolves society. Yeah. I mean, this is, look, we're not quite at pre-revolutionary

“France level, but that's kind of the next stop if we don't do something. But this is the irony, right?”

If you appropriately capture some of the value of what AI might generate and you return it to the people. And I don't think that's, I don't think that's confiscation. I think that's participation because again, the American taxpayer literally invented the internet. And all these models trained on data that all of us put out in the world for free. Yeah. So it seems to me only fair that we could get a slice of it, right? You could structure, you could use taxes to do that.

Some which will really push us in terms of our creativity as policy makers. Like do we really

“think it could make sense for there to be a public share in an AI hyperscaler? I think maybe.”

I think that's one example how to do it. Yeah. But my point is let's come up with policies that kind of flex up or down so that if the value's not that great and the disruptions are not that great, then the policy intervention does not have to be that great either. But if we have massive disruption and almost by definition, massive wealth being created, then it's really a question how that wealth is arranged and that is not a technology question. It's a policy choice. Even our timing, I want

to bring it to the real world short-term future of what's going on here because if you're talking about our massive changes and right now today, we live in a world where Republicans control the house, the Senate, the presidency, the judiciary and they're all basically voting and locks that with Donald Trump who's kind of doing whimsical random things day to day via tweet. Very right. It's a cool. Yeah. Whimsical probably the wrong one. So we have the midterms this year and I

first of all want to get your broad overview thoughts of how you see them going because it does seem like he is especially post economics low down post Alex. It feels like he is entering a very unpopular era where there is a tide turning. So do you think that is something that Democrats are going to be able to capitalize on given that they are not particularly seeing popularity spikes?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think the answer is yes. I think a few things have to happen. One thing is

Democrats need to realize that our job is not to just restore the old status quo because if it looks like that's all we're selling. That might get us through 26, but it's not a real answer substantively for all the reasons we've been talking about for the last hour. It's not enough,

“but also politically. I don't think it's going to work. The most important thing you need to know”

about the old status quo is that it led to this. Yeah. Created Trump. Right, essentially. Okay. So putting all of that on the table. I would say the other thing in terms of the the now, the political moment we're in, that I think is super interesting actually is the behavior of the Republicans, the endangered house Republicans. So in Indiana, for example, last year, the state Senate Republicans voted against Donald Trump's dairy-mandering plan. This might sound

like a pretty technical thing. I got to tell you it is a huge deal for state legislators in a Republican party in a place like Indiana where I grew up to directly be pressured by the president, to do something, and to say no. And we've seen patterns of this. We've seen those local

Republicans. We've never dreamed about what you thought. Because they didn't like it because people

across the state hated it. I would like to think it's partly because I showed up into the rally with like a thousand people reminding them of how much people in the state hated it. And because the pressure backfire, because they were being such, frankly the White House, they were being such decks about it that a lot of the legislators who were very conservative Republicans said, I'm not going to help you anymore. But my broader point is this. You got local

Republicans were belling and defying the president on jerrymandering. We had a handful of congressional Republicans defying the president on the Epstein files, right? Trump is trying to keep the Epstein files from being released and they vote against him and say they got to be released. Right now, you have some Republican governors breaking ranks on AI, which is very interesting. And what that tells me is that his grip, his death grip on the Republican party, which is how he began to take

power, is starting to come loose. And I think it's starting to become loose because he's on popular. And I'm mentioning this because we don't have to wait for election day for some of these things to play out.

“But in order for there to be changed, people have to really speak up. That's why it's so important”

for example, a lot of people. And by the way, not just liberals, right? But a lot of libertarians,

second amendment folks. They look at what's going on in Minneapolis where you've got federal agents,

shooting American citizens, basically for protesting and saying, this is insane in breaking ranks. I think that can begin to bear fruit in terms of political change before we even get to the midterms. And I think that's even more true after some of the primaries run their course. And fewer Republicans in office are worried about their right flank. Okay. I do feel like I agree with what you're saying. It feels like because of the cracking of the Republican

party right now and the momentum that there is, you could put up almost anybody on the opposing side. And they have a fighting chance at winning in the midterms. And my concern more has to do with like, do nobody likes the Democratic party right now. Like, none of I'm I'm pretty left leaning guy. Like, I'm up my very left friends, like hate the Democratic party. And, you know, people on the right hate the Democratic party. And kind of it's for many failures in the past like

few years, especially. So even though I think there's the momentum to get elected in the midterms or like the next presidential election, what substantial change do you think there needs to be for that

the strongest message I could say here is like, not a single person I talked to over the entire

year was happy that it was Biden Trump. They were like, this is this is insane that these are

“my two options. And I think with that in mind, like, are is it more of a, like, we've talked”

to young promising mayors. We've talked to Mayor Scott from Baltimore recently. We, I think Mumbdani is moving in like a really promising direction right now. So what is the future of that party that we can actually like get behind look like? Well, I think in terms of message, we got to make it clear what we're actually building toward because yeah, a tailwind in 26 might lead to a good result in 26. So that's not enough to substitute for governing vision. So we

got to make it clear the changes we would make, some of which I hope I've been able to convey

in our time just now to our political structure as well as our economic policy that would make your

everyday life better off. Not not just this team one and that team lost on Capitol Hill, but like your ability to afford a home and the chances that one job is enough and your sense of personal and economic security and the likelihood that you feel like you have a reasonable shot of like having kids and a family if that's an outcome you want in your life, that that is more likely because we got elected and because you voted against these guys. Right? So tangible. That's something

kind of more tangible results. Yes, and then at the same time as that, we do need to be putting

“forward different and I think in many cases younger faces. Right? So and this could be a”

little self-serving but I also think it's true. Like if we really, if I'm right that we have 60 or 70% of people agreeing with us on most of the really big issues, taxes, abortion, even immigration actually in terms of broadly what policy should be. If we have 60 or 70 percent agreement on the issues and we can't get 50% in an election, it raises the question of who is bearing the message and can we put forward more compelling leaders and I would argue

they're out there. There are a lot of people on the bench in the Democratic Party who deserve to be called off of the bench and beyond the field. I think more than we're coming forward stepping forward, you will see me, if you follow me online, you'll see me backing some of these candidates even this year who I think represent that. And they don't all have the same posture as each other. They have different ideas sometimes from each other to the point is each of them is exquisitely

true to who they are and where they're from and those are the kinds of candidates who I think are going to win and they will collectively make up, I think a new and different and better face for the Democratic Party. Support for elimination comes from the league. Okay so like a couple episodes ago we did a league advertisement where you mentioned one of our basketball friends put on the league to try it out because we are all currently relationships

so we can't use the league as a dating app. After we did that, one of my marketing Monday researchers reshout to me and said, I have a positive league story that he wanted to share. This is a true story from my researcher Dom, my wife and I met on the league in 2020. We both love the app and people who are more likely to have their life together versus endless pictures of men holding fish or overly edited photos. The league brought us together and we even

sent the founder a thank you letter for bringing us together. I can just sound like that. This sounds

amazing. Just to find this is a hand of God real story that my researcher actually had.

“Does your researcher work at the league? Here's the thing. More is it better,”

better is better. So you can join the league, find someone in yours, download the app and apply today. Do he even send me his wife's original league profile picture like that? Oh wow she's holding a fish. Is there a fear in your mind at all of a nightmare scenario for this midterms where feels crazy to say but an attempt to subvert the election in any way and attempt to it feels like with some of the actions being taken with seizing voting records,

suing all the different states like it feels like it's a real effort. It doesn't it doesn't feel hidden to make a challenge. Is this something that's on your mind? How do you guess? Okay. Look at earlier I described the reasons I think Trump is getting weaker. I think as he gets weaker he will also grow a more dangerous. And when he says he's going to do some of these things I believe him. I don't believe him that he's going to lower costs but I believe him when he

says he wants to nationalize elections. And we've seen so many cases where something that was just outside of the realm of imagination. Yeah, we're even just January 6 right? The idea of an armed attack on the United States Capitol by Trump supporters would have gotten you kind of laughed at in, I don't know, 2018. And it happened in 2021. And that was then. This is 10 times darker. So am I worried about that? Of course I am. I'll say this though. In addition to the fact that

there's good work happening in political and legal areas to prevent that. That doesn't work

abuses that we're seeing the authoritarian turn that we've seen. And if you talk to people in places

that feel like they lost their democracy or where it got away from them. Like if you talk to somebody who was standing up to Putin back when it seemed like you could get somewhere by standing up to Putin 10 or 15 years ago, they'll say they wish they had spent even more time in energy on kind of old fashioned sounding stuff like like taking to the streets just to make it clear that most people

“were not on board. But this remember MAGA is a minority movement. Republican Party legitimately”

got enough to win a majority or almost a majority in the presidential election. They want, I'm not saying they didn't. But MAGA, there's like 20% 30% depending what surveys you look at. So I don't want to do a rerun of my earlier stuff about our structure. It's a weakness in our country that we're the kind of country where you can have a 20% movement take over one of the two parties and then run the table as if they were animal. But it doesn't have to be that way either.

And we need, if it looks like that sort of thing is starting to happen, then our ordinary political and legal processes won't be enough to save us. There has to be enough people standing up, including by the way Republicans saying like, look, I'm a Republican, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with someone from my party trying to overrun or reverse or steal an election. That's my

biggest fear because in his first term it felt like there wasn't enough of those Republicans.

Yes. And this time it does not feel like there's any limit. So it sounds crazy when I first say and then the more we could closer, it feels like it's less crazy. So I guess. Yeah. Also, if the homework for my party is, if it isn't even close, then it's really hard to pull that kind of thing. True. Yeah. Do you think there's room in the kind of a national

“docket of stuff to be done because there's so much for more election reform to happen?”

Totally. Like we have to talk to, we have to, the money part feels like the most extreme. And I feel like it's the top of mine thing for a lot of people. And I think that feels, but there's little aspects like campaign, like campaign timelines. Like in Singapore, I think they campaign for like nine

days. Right. Something. Yeah. And it's so you don't waste a bunch of time, like having a call and

raise money in campaign when you could be doing the job. Yeah. No, it's exhausting to have like a two-year presidential cycle or a permanent congressional cycle. Now the challenge there, obviously, we've decided, you know, I disagree that that money on campaigns counts as the same as speech, but you know, I believe that campaigning is speech. And so it's very hard to find a way to restrict that that would be fair in a way that, you know, Singapore would do because they don't care about

free speech as much as you and I might. Yeah. So some of that we may just have to deal with. But just generally, again, I keep coming back to this, the political system we've inherited is not the only way for a political system to work. It's not even the only way for an American democratic representative republic based on our constitution to work. It doesn't have to be this way. And if everybody, if the one thing everybody agrees is the system sucks, then we can't keep acting

as if the system is fine. Yeah, we can't be done. Change it, right? What can you do? Yeah. Is it just term limits? What part of this? Do you feel like it's certainly, they've had the same folks every time. He's talking about you going younger. What if we go older? What if we start putting up 90-year-olds, 95-year-olds? And you even consider that the people in charge might not be experienced enough? That's the problem. Like a wisdom, I think, maybe.

“I mean, I think the best way we can deal with that is to make race as more competitive.”

The actual record of terminal that's has been mixed. This is one thing where I've actually changed my mind a little, but I used to be really drawn to this as a policy. I still think it's appropriate in certain contexts. And I think we should really think about it for the Supreme Court. But what I've noticed is in some states that do this, what winds up happening is the politicians come and go. And so just when they've built enough expertise to really take command of a policy issue,

there's somebody new there, which sounds like a nice refreshing thing, and it can be. But often what that means is the people who are there for 15 years, 20 years, 25 years around the state house, or the lobbyists, and they wind up legitimately knowing more about the policy issue than the committee chair of whatever part of the legislature is supposed to be doing, you know, whatever it is, you know, healthcare or utilities or whatever, and the lobbyists can run circles around the

legislatures. So I would want to know that there is a way to solve for that before I felt comfortable seeing that model, I seen in some of the states get bigger. Well, I am a big fan of this changing more frequently, finding a way I would argue through more competitive elections to change who's in office more often. This brings up a question I want to ask you. So after after the Biden administration, after Department of Transportation Secretary, you have still been

speaking on these issues coming to places like this, a lot of former secretaries just go

could we have that job in stack because it sounds awesome? Do we fill in for you on the lobbying

trail? Yeah, weirdly, I didn't get really approached. I probably because of what I did when I was in office, right? You were quite as friendly. I was like a pretty tough regulator on airlines, so they weren't like rushing to a higher gut. It's funny. Actually, ironically, my successor, the current Secretary of Transportation, is a former airline lobbyist. So he was a lobbyist and then they put him in charge of the department. I kind of flip that. That solves that term.

Flip it down. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So, you know, because we were really tough on the airlines and we made them take better care. They're passengers. We up the fines. We held them accountable for some of these meltdowns that

happen. We in some cases added a zero or two to the level of enforcement action and refunds and

settlements that they had offered. But I'll say this, like they still did well as businesses on my watch. They just, they made money. They just had to make money while taking better care of passengers. But anyway, I don't think that may be super popular in the industry lobbying worlds.

“Shockingly, those offers didn't come flying in when I, when I left office. I think you're”

underplaying either. They're quite good. I'm a big fan of those changes you made and I can see why they would not be. If you were running up on time, I want to thank you so much for coming on this show since you really appreciate it. Thank you, I'm talking to you. Thank you so much, my parents are fans of yours surprisingly because they, they, you know, they were the leader of public and for most of their life, but the Trump is really throwing

them out of it. And they overnighted me your book Trust. Oh wow. So I took a, I read through I didn't get 100% dumb, but I read it. Thank you. It's interesting that that was written in 2020. It feels like in the past six years, Trust, which was low then, has gotten astronomically well. I wonder if I got to give you this final question. It's everything you're saying that I in service of that goal of kind of reen, I think it doesn't, the thing I'm seeing from our audience

is a complete lack of trust and government on either side. Yeah, I wonder if you could frame that in

“it. Yeah, I think the breakdown of trust between people and their government, between people in our”

institutions, between Americans and each other, is something that could be lethal if we don't do something about it. And, you know, if you're talking about societies and systems and structures, I'd say it's not that different from how it is between two people, where it could take years to build a certain level of trust. And it only takes a couple of bad choices or one bad choice to tear that trust up and then you have a lot of work to do to build it, which is why I wrote a whole

book about trust driven by my experiences, not just in and around politics, but reflecting on what it meant that when, when I was in the military, I learned to trust my life to people I barely knew. I mean, part of my job is to take vehicles and, and people in my unit outside the wire and, you know, getting into a vehicle together, we didn't necessarily know each other very well. Sometimes all we had was a handshake and, you know, we had the same flag on our shoulder and

“that was about it. And yet we were trusting each other with our lives. And I think that's kind of”

a metaphor for where we're at as a country. We're all of us actually, part of living in the same country is somebody's, you're trusting everybody else with your life. And that could's played out through our political processes again and again. The good news is, under pressure and our country's under pressure, there are ways to earn trust and build trust quickly. And if we can get that done, through results, they're actually making problems better. Then you get more where that came from,

trust can build it can compound. And when you have a society with more trust, again, whether it's the government being viewed as more trustworthy or just us more ready to trust each other in our society, then our capacity to do big things gets much, much better. And it's one of the reasons why for

all the mess of the world we're in right now, I'm ultimately optimistic about what's possible.

Because I think it's not too late. Thank you. Thank you. This conversation made me a little more helpful. And I appreciate that a lot. Thanks much for coming on. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thanks for watching. Woo! Thank God we are in that guy. What's that? We're a little bit impregnating the whole time. I was just walked in. I see like I was walking in his vlogs. I don't know. I didn't think I know. Is it short for me? I don't know. That was fun. That was fun. We're a little

press for time. And I think we had some more things we wanted to chat about or talk about in that episode. But if you're interested, and that's talking about that a little more, you can come check out. Now we'll be asking. No, not just that. Just not. We do an extra episode every week on the Patreon. It's patreon.com/laminacin. But otherwise, we will see you back for a normal episode next week.

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

“There's a lot of videos. So I can go to tatetray.com/laminacin today to get started.”

You absolutely can. Probably.

We have a lot of questions and we're all about flexibles. Now let's start with Stepstown.de/alljobs. Stepstown.

Just a few things to find for all jobs.