The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Ep. 049 Lemonade Stand 🍋

19:19We had this idea of like, imagine a leaky pipe and you're pouring 10 gallons of money into it and only a little bit comes out for the actual service. And it just feels like we throw more money in our country at healthcare. We throw more money at the military. We want more money at transportation and a lot of things, but the outcomes we get are often subpar, like way less than the dollar amount we're spending. And so you mentioned like specific problems with transportation, but why do you think this political bullshit has invaded almost every aspect of what the government is supposed to be doing?

19:48Like what? Well, I think part of it is that the government is less and less structured to solve problems. So think about, um, think about our Congress, for example, our legislature, uh, we've got 435 seats, about 40 of them are actually competitive. Like you actually really would have to wonder whether the Democrat or the Republican is going to win. Um, you might estimate that number a little higher, a little lower. It's a small percentage. One out of 10, right? And the rest of them, it's pretty much decided when you have your nominee, all that really matters is the fight within the party, the primary, right?

20:27For 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, right? Because the only thing you really have to worry about is the political extreme of your own party. Right. And this can, so for example, when it comes to this New York tunnel that I'm really concerned about, because it's the largest single transportation project in the country. And they just stopped because the president just stopped it. He just doesn't like Chuck Schumer and he's shutting down the project.

21:03It's not like he said. That doesn't sound like a Trump idea. There's no way. To be fair, Chuck's had a lot of attitude lately. I've been keeping an eye on it. 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 he would start funding the project again if they named Dulles Airport and Penn Station after Donald Trump.

21:26Aiden:It's not so much to ask. Now they're trying to do all the highways after him and the trains. I heard the tunnels woke. There's a bridge to Canada, the Gordie Howe Bridge. The Canadians are actually paying for it. It 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. I didn't much appreciate it. You didn't ask me about that. And now the president's saying, well, I'm not going to let it open. Not really clear why. Well, because he's mad at Canada, I guess. But it's not exactly irrational. That kind of irrational is really costly.

22:04And 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 like stop a bridge into 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 saying, you can't do this, but we don't have that. So I know that it can sound kind of, you know, technical or arcane to be talking about things like the way districts are drawn in Congress and connect that up to how much it costs to build a mile of tunnel or a stretch of road.

22:40But I really think there was a relationship between those things. You know, 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.

23:12And maybe you have an extra willingness to pay for it if it's better, but only so much. Then all your textbook market dynamics kick in, supply, demand, and it pushes the cost down to be relatively close to what it actually costs to produce. None of that's true in healthcare. I mean, first of all, you can't just jump in and be an alternate provider of healthcare. It takes years to be a doctor. And there's a lot of restrictions on the number of doctors in a particular specialty who gets certified every year. the person who is making the purchasing decision is not always the same thing as the customer because you've got this insurance company as a middleman, right?

23:45Your willingness to pay is not really on a normal hire. It's not like peanut butter, right? Especially if you think - 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 a gazillion or whatever, like 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.

24:16That'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 hopeful in healthcare that it's one of many areas where if we get AI right, I'm not sure we will, but if we do, it could really benefit the cost. Yeah. Nope.

24:51Aiden:Well, I actually wanted to ask about healthcare because I think it's a really good example. So I'm - We'll come back to AI later. We're going to talk about vibe coding apps and for 45 minutes.

25:01Atrioc:We're going to have you do a vibe-coded to-do list app.

25:03Aiden:We're going to do a bunch. Yeah, yeah. Very pro-universal healthcare of some kind, right? 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 checkup and they don't have insurance or they have bad insurance, it is terrible at 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. And to cover everyone under a system like Medicare now is literally, it's as much as I would like to just say spend the money.

25:46Aiden:It's literally not, to me, it literally is not possible. And I think there's a lot of rhetoric around let's create some sort of like more encompassing Medicare program that more people are covered under, but how do you combat the cost part? Like the fact that some drug here might be hundreds of dollars versus like the 10 or 20 that it is in another country or a treatment the same way. And I think that's such a critical component of solving this that never gets talked about. And I'm wondering when you think about a healthcare solution in the long run, like how that part of it gets changed. Yes, I think this is hugely important because the debates over how we structure the insurance They really matter.

26:27But if we do nothing about the actual underlying cost of care, then we're not solving the problem. And we have to do both. So getting the insurance structure right means more of the dollar actually goes toward the actual cost. Meanwhile, you have to make sure the actual cost is lower. How do you do that? Part of it is making sure you use the market power that your insurer has. So, for example, we know for a fact that if Medicare is allowed to bargain for lower drug prices, you get lower drug prices. Aren't we not allowed to currently? Right. Yeah, yeah. Legally prevented. 10 from, yeah.

26:57Atrioc:There's 10 that we can do as of this year. Right. Yes. They only pick 10. Yeah.

27:02Aiden:I'm sorry to sideline my own question. Why? Why is that not allowed? That seems psychotic. And I feel like I must, I must be missing something. Politics. It's politics, right? It's, it's the fact that obviously you've got some very powerful industries that can get their way and make sure that what seems like the most commonsensical thing in the world doesn't actually happen. And if I can zoom out for a bit, 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, like at least two-thirds of the country thinks we ought to do something in a certain way.

27:38Whether 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 healthcare, having the government maybe not take over everything, of course, but play a more aggressive role in making sure you can get your health taken care of. Whether we're talking about social personal liberties, right to choose, marriage equality. Whether we're talking about gun safety, wherever you are on Second Amendment, at least making sure there's universal background checks. These are all things that have at least two-thirds of the country on board and they can't happen in today's Washington.

28:11when the entire concept of America, like the whole way we invented this country, was the idea that if you have a certain democratic system of government, what that government comes up with will be more aligned with what most people want. We don't have that right now. And to me, that's a foundational problem that kind of if we address that properly, and there's a whole set of things I could take you through on what I think that looks like, then all the other specific problems around health care policy, transportation policy, tax policy start to get better.

28:39Aiden:Do you have any idea how you, I think an overwhelming feeling I have about what you're saying is this feeling of being at the bottom of this hole we've dug so deep. And when I look at, not to say that other countries don't have problems of their own, but like if you looked at China, like they can cut out a lot of this through like kind of authoritarian means. You can skip a lot of the red tape and the political bullshit by being authoritarian. I'm not saying go in that direction. I'm saying like, that's one way. Or you could look at another country like Denmark that I think probably has a stronger democracy right now than we do.

29:18Aiden: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 that's the big boogeyman I see that I feel like it's really difficult to overcome.

29:44Atrioc:Also, Tackon, what you just said, you could go in the details. I would love for you to try it. I want to go in the details. No, let's kick out on that. 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 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 a kind of constitutional, democratic, republic representative system of government. You know, other countries were viewed as constitutional, but they didn't actually write the Constitution down.

30:18We 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, as you might imagine. But anyway, there are a few things. It was very elegantly designed. And the most elegant thing about the Constitution is the capacity for amendments. So you write this basic law that everything else is built on top of. But you also realize that there might be something in there that you need to change or fix or develop. So you have the process of creating an amendment. And it's not easy, but it's something you can do if you really want to as a country.

30:55we set the threshold for how to do it a little too high. So other countries after us developing democratic systems, and by the way, some of our own states, most of our own states within the U.S., came at it a little differently, had a way you could amend your constitution. They actually do it more often. We haven't done a substantive amendment to the constitution in about 50 years. What was the last one? There was a technical one in the 90s about congressional pay, but Actually, one of the last big ones was about lowering the voting age, which went from 21 to 18. Good move, I would say. In the 20th century, we had quite a few, not all of which were good.

31:33We had prohibition, an amendment to the Constitution so you couldn't get a drink. But then, after a few years, realized that was a bad idea, changed it back with another amendment. The Bill of Rights is amendments. That wasn't in kind of 1.0 Constitution. 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 country. Yes. You could wave a magic wand. You bet. What's your amendment?

32:01Aiden: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 26th Amendment is it's going to be something like deeper that has further consequences. So I'm curious 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.

32:31Why would I have the same amount of votes as him? That's the whole point. And we're older. We should have more influence. We're older and we're wealthier. We should be able to have more impact.

32:40Aiden:No, I like this because one day I'll be richer than you and then I want to have more. I want to be able to vote 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 of the electoral college. We should just, we're the only country in the world, we're the only presidential democracy where you come in second place and you get to be president and the person who came in first place in terms of getting the most votes doesn't get to be president. That is nuts. So that's one we could fix. Another one we could do is about gerrymandering.

33:11these districts that are drawn in the most bizarre shapes. I saw one of them, it was described as the shape of goofy kicking Donald Duck on a map so that you can, you know, predetermine the results. Making sure that there is fairness in the way that districts are drawn. Making sure that there's a little more specificity around the right to vote. I would argue that if you're a low-income American and you got two jobs or three, having to stand in line for more than an hour in order to vote means you didn't really have the right to vote. But right now there's no constitutional protection saying that it is a responsibility to make sure you can actually go in and cast that vote.

33:50We could adjust the way money works in politics. You know, right now the Supreme Court holds that basically a corporation is the same thing as a person for the purpose of intervening in politics and spending money to manipulate the outcome of an election is the same thing as me giving a speech about my views. Money is speech, corporations are people. We could clear that up with a constitutional amendment. I think we should.

34:12Aiden: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, if he's not able to speak free... 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. It doesn't have to be that way. So those are just a few examples of structural democratic reform. But there's also reforms ahead, I think, in terms of how our economy works that we need to get ready for, especially given what AI is going to do.

34:48And 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.

35:01Atrioc: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. Yes, that's part of it. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. Yes. I would like that. Right. But this is the thing. I think we all feel so jail-like. We feel like it's too much to ask. And it's not. It's not too much to ask. Our whole country got set up around. I mean, you know what was way more radical than anything we've just talked about is the idea of not having a king and setting up a democratic government. It was a super radical idea, right, when the founders did it.

35:31And they did it. Right. And more or less worked out. What do you think about the structural problems with the Senate, where it's two per state? Some states have way smaller population. Here in California, we have 60 times Wyoming or whatever. 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 get equal representation in the Senate per state. But I mean, again, if you think about within, for example, we have state senates, right? Within every state. One state's unicameral has, whatever. The U.S. Senate isn't the only Senate, but it's the only Senate where the seats aren't proportioned equally.

36:13Right. 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 those things are locked in in the Constitution.

36:43We should be looking at it. We'd have to make a whole new flag, though. I know you'd have to find another star.

36:47Atrioc:It is really unfortunate. 50 is a great number. 50 is a great number. It's a great number. We really got to lock it in. It is tough. Sorry, Puerto Rico. 50 is just too clean. We already made so many flags.

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38:22Aiden:I did want to ask, I think the early part of this kind of focused on the idea of like 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.

39:16Aiden: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, I think it's a fair question. And 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 a mayor where, you know, there's no federal reserve for the city of South Bend. Like we did our budget in cash, right?

39:48And we could only borrow so much and we couldn't print money. And so if I want to do more of this, I had to do less of that or we had to ask the taxpayer. And I think we've really drifted away from that in terms of our national policy. Because that forces you to make the hard choices you have to make, right? Right, right. Which is the last thing that any, I mean, look, any political body is going to have a hard time with that. But for reasons we just went over, we're especially hard pressed to do it right in today's currently designed.

40:15Atrioc:Would you guys consider in South Bend just using the tariff money? Yeah, you were tariffing the other towns around you. Yeah, I just saw 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 tariffs. 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 balances. So even on its face in terms of what it was supposed to do, it has not led to an improvement in manufacturing.

40:45China actually just had their biggest year of trade surplus ever. It was just not even working. And, you know, coming back to the spending side, this is part of why the whole Doge thing kind of breaks my brain is that we really do need work on government efficiency. If we had had an actual serious effort to have a department of government efficiency versus the one we got, I really think it would have found some things that we could do differently and better. But instead what they did was, first of all, they made a bunch of shit up. I mean, if you look at the numbers, you know, journalists went back to look at some of the savings they claimed.

41:18and it turned out a little bit wrong. There was one case where they just, I can't believe this actually happened. They said billion instead of million and just overstated their savings by a factor of a thousand. This literally happened. I'm not making this up. We all make mistakes. Who among us hasn't accidentally fired the people in charge of nuclear weapons safety? But, you know, the stuff they tore down and overall spending went up. Yes. It's not even like they actually saved money. We had the line of it's up over last year. But should we rethink the way we spend money in terms of our federal government?

41:51Yeah, like, of course we should. Are we forced to? I mean— Well, so this is the other interesting thing, right? I think that there will be a kind of a reckoning that is forced. Because I don't think the world is willing to lend America money indefinitely forever. At the 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 leadership and political system are just kind of transparently a mess, there are 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 you're raising.

42:25But 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 tax his brains out and then all the problems will be solved. It's not that simple. Sorry, Elon. However, it's a shakedown. It's a shakedown.

42:39Aiden:It's the Elon shakedown. It's the Elon shakedown. It's an amendment. I mean, I do that.

42:43Atrioc:We've sacrificed one a year, like in that old story. Like a Hunger Games. Right. 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 their own employees, which is insane. So if you had a fairer taxation system that asked more of the wealthiest, and if you did a better job of collecting what people actually owe. So part of what they've done, unfortunately, is fired a bunch of people in the IRS whose job was not to raise anybody's taxes, but just to make sure people paid the taxes that they're supposed to be paying.

43:22Which 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's of the world, then you're probably not paying. I don't know.

43:37Aiden:Like you do. Yeah. You're a big dog. All my money's in a shelter in Ireland. In Svalbard. Svalbard. Yeah, routing it through. I don't think they have any tax havens in Svalbard. We're the worst spot to be a tax haven. I don't know. I just pulled Svalbard. I would get tax more. I've been waiting for years for somebody to mention Svalbard. Oh, I won't talk your ear off. Please don't let him get started on Sweden. He is trying to flee the country. I need a president who cares more about the seed vault. I am obsessed with Svalbard. I went up there. This is my guy. Let's go. Oh, no. It is fascinating.

44:10Do people know about this? No, like barely. 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, if you get money, the little, um, the little ATM screen says in Norwegian world's Northern most ATM, uh, and the church there is the world's Northern most streets. The 78th parallel is like way, way beyond anything else we think of as Arctic. And, uh, I just think it's a fascinating place. So sorry, I got very excited.

44:37Aiden:Um, and the seed vault, where were we? Uh, taxation. So, so yeah, tax evasion by very rich people is clearly a problem in this country. Uh, we, 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, I, let me say before you launch, excuse me, I'm not accusing him of tax evasion directly. I have no idea. Wink. I do have two questions about raising taxes. The first is I watched your all in interview. And I think on that you describe Bernie as further to the left of you on tax policy when it comes to like the wealth tax or like what you might do.

45:16Aiden:And I think there's fair critiques of how like a wealth tax might function. But I think critiques of taxes on the wealthy often come at the expense of doing anything at all. Yeah. And historically, we do have we had incredibly high tax rates through some of the country's most successful time. Yes. And I guess I'm just wondering for you who 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? Like what type of tax policy would you take to not only the wealthy, but like people in general? Yeah, I mean, I think it should be, first of all, to be clear, taxes on the wealthy need to be higher.

46:00They just do. If you look at what's fair, if you look at what it's going to take to meet our revenue goals, if you look at international comparisons, in my opinion, that's clearly the case. And at the same time, I think it would be misleading to suggest that's all we've got to do. That's why I'm bringing up collection leakage and evasion. That's why I'm bringing up spending and being more efficient. I think we've 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 used in my first experience in elected offices as mayor.

46:37So I don't think there's anything wrong in principle with assessing some kind of tax. Now, it has to be reasonable. It has to be set up in a way that it's not going to have unintended consequences. But again, this is something that I think people blithely say about taxes on the rich in cases where it's not actually true. So you may have heard me sparring with the all-in guys a little bit on this, where there are times in our past when the highest income tax brackets were much higher than they are now. And growth was actually pretty good economically. So this idea that you're just going to kill economic growth.

47:13The biggest middle class. 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 want them to pay their fair share along the way. Especially because all of us, through our tax dollars, are creating the things that allow those corporations to create value. And my favorite example of this is the internet itself. The internet was literally invented by the American taxpayer, the federal government. That's what DARPA did famously.

47:46Created 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.

48:26But they need to pay it, right? And those things cost money, and that's what taxes are for. It's like a membership fee, and it's sometimes been described as the taxes are your membership fee to be in a civilized society. And we ought to think of it that way. Can I ask you, this is going to be a harder question for a politician to answer because it's bad for votes, but I want to ask it, which is that, so 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.

49:00I'm supportive in general of 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 to people who already have statistically the most, the most property, the most wealth, the most stocks. Not every old person has that, but that's where it's going. And I want to know what are your thoughts on, like, how, how do we meaningfully reduce the deficit or balance our budget? If all of our money is going to interest Medicare, social security, like that's almost everything military, I guess. Yeah. And of those, I think interest is the one that's probably the most generationally unfair.

49:35Uh, because look, if we're talking about social security and Medicare, to be clear, the older you are, the more you've paid into it too, right? People pay into that their whole lives. That's where I worry about this word entitlement. Uh, in fact, I remember when I was campaigning, a guy said, I don't, I don't think it was an entitlement. I think it was a paid intimate, which maybe isn't a term that'll catch on, but, but it's the, it's an honest way to think about it. Um, interest is another story, right? Because look, taking on debt, same as starting a business or buying a house, like it makes sense if you do it 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.

50:07And 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 house was in your twenties. 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, uh, what's possible in terms of getting a mortgage. So, but I don't think it has to be like generational warfare here.

50:42Like I believe that, and again, I experienced this in my very first elected office where older voters in my city were rooting for a younger mayor to kind of believe in a different kind of future, that people should want their grandkids to do well, right? And yet it's that generation that's under more and more pressure. Also, I belong now to what's considered the sandwich generation, as in we're sandwiched between parents who are growing older who we are taking care of and kids who we are taking care of. And those pressures in terms of the time as well as the cost that a lot of people are going through are massive.

51:18And 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, Papua New Guinea to have just no national policy on paid leave. The big two. But two economic powerhouses. It's another example where it doesn't have to be that way. If literally every other country in the world has figured out a way to do paid family leave, how are we not doing that in this country?

51:52We see universal childcare. And not just they're seeking to do it in New York, but also New Mexico has launched that. These things can be done. They would make it dramatically easier to go through that generational journey where you go from a young person to a parent to retirement. But for all of that to work, every generation has to believe that they're contributing to something where they're going to be better off. If you were born the year my mom was born, end of World War II, statistically, you got a 90 % chance economically of coming out ahead of your parents. If you were born the year I was born in the 80s, it's a coin flip.

52:30It'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 where the anger I'm seeing is coming from. Yeah. And so that's where the heart of my question is getting at, which is, you know, you mentioned housing. I think Trump just had a speech where he mentioned, I'm not going to let any housing price go down because then people, and it was like almost baffling that he would say that so publicly because from the audience that we're talking to and hearing, it's like a huge source of their fury and nihilism that they can't get on the ladder.

53:01But think of the kind of people who have memberships at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, think of the kind of people who Donald Trump spends all his time with, right? These are people who are perfectly happy for real estate to get even more expensive because they own a bunch of it. So does he. He's a real estate guy, right? So the last thing he's going to want to do is see housing costs go down. I guess, yes, for the mega elite people you're talking to, of course, and it's easy to do that. But the core of the problem he's talking about feels like a big issue in politics, which is that there is a large cohort of voting age boomers who I think will have to lose out a little bit.

53:34At least the wealthiest of them that own property, it will have to go down in value for regular people to be able to participate in the way that they participated. Or at least go up less quickly. Sure. I guess wages have to... I mean, exactly. Our income has to grow more quickly than the price of housing. Right now, the opposite's happening.

53:49Atrioc:So that's kind of what I... I just want to drill it back down to, like, what can actually be done? Let's say in the 2028 election, you know, new administration's coming in. Knock on wood. How do you possibly make something politically tenable where we say we are 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 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.

54:21Atrioc: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 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 white collar, north versus south, and it could be old versus young, right? And we don't need any more cleavages like that. So I'm interested in a style of politics that pulls people together into a shared project.

55:05And in American history, unfortunately, usually us coming together in a national project is in the face of something really terrible like a war, right? Some of the highest levels of unity we ever had were World War II. The sort of a corresponding but 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. Substantively, in terms of what I think it'll actually take, I think the outlines of it are actually visible to us. I think it's building more housing. I think the best way to make Medicare cost less is to make the delivery of health care cost less versus leaving people out in the cold or things like the Medicaid cuts that Trump and the Republicans push through.

55:49I'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 Social Security and Medicare. Yeah. They're going to have the Trump accounts. They're going to have the dollars in a – Let me admit, I actually think that's a good policy.

56:20I hate to admit it. I definitely don't – Oh, I like that. I don't hate to admit it. I hate to endorse something named after Trump, so maybe we can rename it. And I think there are different ways you could do it. But look, I think the basic idea of making sure that everybody has some kind of, you know, what an economist would call an initial endowment, that everybody has something to start with makes sense. And, you know, there's no one party should have a monopoly on that idea. We should make sure that everybody is set up with something. And I'm glad they did it. I mean, in a bill full of a lot of really horrible things.

56:53I think that's one that had a lot of value.

56:56Atrioc:Another idea just thrown at you, if you were leading the country, you could start a war with Papua 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. That's true. I have actually genuinely thought about this. If aliens came to Earth and declared war, wow, it'd be easy to pass policy, right? We'd get some stuff through. Yeah. I hope so. We should figure it out. We should...

57:24reasonable time to bring up AI the the big scary thing in the cloud I guess sort of so we do have

57:31Atrioc:a running like AI hypometer as well so we kind of look at what we're doing right now so I think atriok is pretty low right now based on last one yeah like two low twos a little bit higher all right and then recently I've been let's see 27.8 um you recently this past summer wrote a sub stack 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. Curious where you think about AI right now. And then that sub stack was largely, I think this is a big deal. I think we aren't preparing for it properly, which I super agree with in terms of regulation.

58:07Atrioc: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, you put me in like the dates, dates, nines. Oh, nice. i think i think that means he's on my side we're closer together i think numerically you're still yeah you're still out there he's closer to me it's like that graph porn where the numbers do not make any sense it's like well let me 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 look the capabilities we never quite know um i was you know a few months ago i was in silicon valley There had been a couple of model releases.

58:48They didn't seem quite what everybody expected. And so everybody was kind of a little bit down on these things. I was in the Bay Area a few days ago and Claude Code has dropped. They're going crazy. You know, here everybody's talking about Bad Bunny. There everybody's talking about Claude Code. It's the talk of the town. And people are really impressed slash alarmed about what that means. So, but my thing is, and what I'm trying to push the policy world and my own Democratic Party to do more of, is to think about this not just as like a tech thing that you have to be like a tech geek to care about, but as a political economy problem, as a question of how our economy is going to work.

59:30Because I think some of those impacts are going to hit much faster than we're ready for. And again, I'm a product of where I'm from, 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.

59:55Atrioc:I think we're facing a wave like that, even bigger, probably, and even more widespread because it's hitting so many white collar professions, right? Something like Dario Amadai, who's the head of Anthropic, wrote a very long blog. a week or two ago. And one of the things he warned about is that the reason that these techs are different than something like farmers getting replaced by, you know, a new implement on the farm is that the AIs will be able to cover many different white collar jobs simultaneously, 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.

1:00:29Atrioc: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 more excited about AI than the average person. The job displacement in the short term, the next couple of years, seems to me like an incoming catastrophe, like incredibly concerning. So I did want to definitively ask that specifically. What are your thoughts around that? Like I have a hard time imagining us suddenly being launching UBI for the population in the next two years. And I do see potential mass unemployment for entry-level jobs in the next two years.

1:01:07Atrioc: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. Now look, through our experience, at least in the last few hundred years, when a new technology eliminates certain tasks or even certain jobs, the long-term result is that there are different jobs that emerge and people find themselves doing different things.

1:01:55But that's over the long-term. We don't, John Maynard Keynes, the economist, said in the long run, we're all dead. And, you know, the job for policymakers and politicians, I think, is to deal with what's happening right now with a view to the long run. And so if we have a massive and material difference in hiring, in entry-level coding, paralegals, you could go down a list of a lot of knowledge work professions.

1:02:21Atrioc:Store service, I'm driving. Some of which, by the way, coding in particular, those are job categories that policymakers actually pushed people into a generation ago. Yeah, we talked about.

1:02:30Aiden:The juxtaposition of, you know, the sad potential story of getting fed the rhetoric of learn to code 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 are going to travel together.

1:03:08In other words, a world where the AI doesn't do as much as we thought it did is also one in which it probably doesn't disrupt as many jobs as we fear it might. And to put the other case, a world in which it is disrupting jobs left, right, and center means it is doing a huge amount of work that used to be impossible for a machine to achieve. And if that's true, that means generally for somebody, it's creating a huge amount of value. The question then becomes, who gets that? Right? Because I believe AI can lead to one of two results. It can either be, for most people, a shorter work week and more money in your pocket than before.

1:03:48Or 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. No, like 1929 levels of wealth inequality. Yeah. In fact, it's rare for a republic, a democratic system to hit this level of inequality and survive. Like when the Roman Empire, when the Roman Republic was hitting this level of inequality, that's about the time it stopped being a republic and started being an empire.

1:04:20Aiden:Well, we've been talking about this. The historical context of this level of wealth inequality is like it dissolves society. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, look, we're not quite at like pre-revolutionary France level, but like that's kind of the next stop 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, 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.

1:04:58So it seems to me only fair that we could get a slice of it, right? You could structure, you could use taxes to do that. You could also structure it as more of a dividend. I mean, there's different models for how to do it. Some of which will really push us in terms of our creativity as policymakers. 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 of how to do it. But my point is, let's come up with policies that kind of flex up or down. So that if the value is not that great and the disruption is not that great, then the policy intervention doesn't have to be that great either.

1:05:30But if we have massive disruption and almost by definition, massive wealth being created, then it's really a question of how that wealth is arranged. And that is not a technology question. It's a policy choice. Given our timing, I want to bring it to the real world short term future of what's going on here. Because the things you're talking about are massive changes. And right now today, we live in a world where Republicans control the House, the Senate, the presidency, the judiciary, and they're all basically voting in lockstep with Donald Trump, who's kind of doing whimsical, random things day to day via tweet.

1:06:05Very whimsical, yeah. Whimsical is probably the wrong word. A fun fairy tale. Chaotic, dangerous. Okay. Right. So we have the midterms this year. Yep. And I, first of all, I want to get your broad overview of thoughts of how you see them going, because it does seem like he is, especially post economic slowdown, post Alex Petty, 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 gonna be able to capitalize on, given that they are not particularly seeing popularity spikes? Yeah. Yeah. So I think the answer is yes.

1:06:36I 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, it created Trump. Yeah, essentially. Okay. So putting all of that on the table, I would say the other thing in terms the now, the kind of political moment we're in that I think is super interesting actually, is the behavior of the Republicans, the endangered House Republicans.

1:07:14So in Indiana, for example, last year, the state Senate Republicans voted against Donald Trump's gerrymandering plan. This might sound like a pretty technical thing. I 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 break over Jeremy. Wait, why is that? Why do you think they? 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 and did a rally with like a thousand people reminding them of how much people in the state hated it.

1:07:54And because the pressure backfired, because they were being such, Frankly, the White House, they were being such dicks about it that a lot of the legislators who were very conservative Republicans said, I'm not going to help you anymore. But my broader point is this. You got local Republicans rebelling and defying the president on gerrymandering. 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've got to be released. Right now, you have some Republican governors breaking ranks on AI, which is very interesting.

1:08:28And what that tells me is that his grip, his death grip on the Republican Party, which is how he began to take power, is starting to come loose. And I think it's starting to become loose because he's unpopular. And I'm mentioning this because we don't have to wait for Election Day for some of these things to play out. But in order for there to be changed, people have to really speak up. That's why it's so important, for example, that a lot of people – and by the way, not just liberals, right, but a lot of libertarians, Second Amendment folks. If you look at what's going on in Minneapolis where you've got federal agents shooting American citizens basically for protesting and saying this is insane and breaking ranks, I think that can begin to bear fruit in terms of political change before we even get to the midterms.

1:09:11And 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.

1:09:17Aiden: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, dude, nobody likes the Democratic Party right now. Like none of I'm pretty left leaning guy. Like I'm my very left friends like hate the Democratic Party. And, you know, people on the right hate the Democratic Party. And kind of it's it for many failures in the past, like a few years, especially.

1:09:54Aiden:So even though I think there's the momentum to get elected in the midterms or like the next presidential election, what substantial change do you think there needs to be for that for the party to actually be something that people are are happy to vote for i think that i guess the strongest message i could say here is like not a single person i talked to over the entire year was happy that it was biden trump they were like this is this is insane that these are my two options yeah and I think with that in mind, is it more of a... We've talked to young promising mayors. We've talked to Mayor Scott from Baltimore recently.

1:10:36Aiden:I think Mom Donnie is moving in a really promising direction right now. What is the future of that party that we can actually get behind look like? Well, I think in terms of message, we've 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, But that's not enough to substitute for a governing vision. So we got to make it clear the changes we would make, some of which I hope I've been able to convey in our time just now, to our political structure as well as our economic policy that would make your everyday life better off. Not just this team won 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 at like having kids and a family, if that's an outcome you want in your life, that that is more likely because we got elected and because you voted against these guys, right?

1:11:34So tangible, 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 percent 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 percent in an election, it raises the question of who is bearing the message and can we put forward more compelling leaders?

1:12:15and I would argue they're out there. There are a lot of people on the bench in the Democratic Party who deserve to be called off of the bench and be on the field. I think more of them are coming forward, stepping forward. You will see me, if you follow me online, you'll see me backing some of these candidates even this year who I think represent that. And they don't all have the same posture as each other. They have different ideas sometimes from each other. But the point is, each of them is exquisitely true to who they are and where they're from. And those are the kinds of candidates who I think are going to win.

1:12:45And they will collectively make up, I think, a new and different and better face for the Democratic Party.

1:12:54Atrioc:It's deck days at Lowe's, and the savings are stacked. Right now, pros get 15 % off all in-stock composite decking from top brands like Trex, TimberTech, and Decorators. Plus, get a free DeWalt 20-volt max 5-amp-hour battery when you buy a select DeWalt tool. The deck's stacked in your favor with Brands Pros Trust. Our best lineup is here in Lowe's. Valid through 422 while supplies last. Selection varies by location. Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning.

1:13:34Atrioc:It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. Is there a fear in your mind at all of a nightmare scenario for this midterms where, it feels crazy to say, but an attempt to subvert the election in any way, an attempt to, it feels like with some of the actions being taken, seizing voting records, suing all the different states, like, it feels like it's a real effort. Like it doesn't feel hidden to make a challenge.

1:14:13Is this something that's on your mind? How do you? Okay. Look, earlier I described the reasons I think Trump is getting weaker. I think as he gets weaker, he will also grow more dangerous. And when he says he's going to do some of these things, I believe him. I don't believe him that he's going to lower costs, but I believe him when he says he wants to nationalize elections. And we've seen so many cases where something that was just outside of the realm of imagination. In Greenland. Yeah, or even just January 6th, right? the idea of an armed attack on the United States Capitol by Trump supporters would have gotten you kind of laughed at in, I don't know, 2018.

1:14:44And 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 if the people won't tolerate it. And that's kind of more broadly true, I think, of the abuses that we're seeing, the authoritarian turn that we've seen. And if you talk to people in places that feel like they lost their democracy or where it got away from them. Like if you talk to somebody who was standing up to Putin back when it seemed like you could get somewhere by standing up to Putin 10 or 15 years ago, they'll say they wish they had spent even more time and energy on kind of old fashioned sounding stuff like taking to the streets, just to make it clear that most people were not on board with this.

1:15:33Remember, MAGA is a minority movement. The Republican Party legitimately got, you know, enough to win a majority or almost a majority in the presidential election, right? They won. I'm not saying they didn't. But MAGA, it was like 20%, 30%, depending what surveys you look at. So I don't want to do a rerun of my earlier stuff about our structure. It's a weakness in our country that we're the kind of country where you can have a 20 % movement, take over one of the two parties and then run the table as if they ran the whole country. But it doesn't have to be that way either. And we need, if it looks like that sort of thing is starting to happen, then our ordinary political and legal processes won't be enough to save us.

1:16:13There 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 was enough of those republicans yes and this time it does not feel like there's any limit so i it it sounds crazy when i first say and then the more we get closer it feels like it's less crazy so i guess yeah yeah now also if the the homework for my party is uh if it isn't even close then it's really hard to pull that kind of thing off true

1:16:49Aiden:yeah do you think there's room in kind of a national docket of stuff to be done because is there's so much for more election reform to happen? Totally. We have to. The money part feels like the most extreme, and I feel like it's the top of mind thing for a lot of people. And I think that feels, but there's little aspects like campaign timelines. Like in Singapore, I think they campaign for like nine days or something. And it's so you don't waste a bunch of time like having to call and raise money and campaign when you could be doing the job. Yeah. No, it's exhausting to have like a two year presidential cycle or a permanent congressional cycle.

1:17:29Now, the challenge there, obviously, is we've decided, you know, I disagree 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.

1:18:04It doesn't have to be this way. And if everybody, if the one thing everybody agrees is that the system sucks, then we can't keep acting as if the system was fine. Yeah, we can't be done. Change it, right?

1:18:14Atrioc:What can you do? Yeah. Is term limits a part of this? do you feel like it's certainly they've had the same folks he's talking about going younger what if we go older what if we start putting up 90 year olds 95 year olds have you even considered

1:18:27Aiden:that the people in charge might not be experienced enough that's the problem lack of wisdom i think maybe i mean i think this the best way we can deal with that is to make races more competitive uh the the actual record of term limits has been mixed this is one thing where i've actually changed my mind a little bit. I used to be really drawn to this as a policy. I still think it's appropriate in certain contexts. And I think we should really think about it for the Supreme Court. But what I've noticed is in some states that do this, what winds up happening is the politicians come and go. And so just when they've built enough expertise to really take command of a policy issue, there's somebody new there, which sounds like a nice refreshing thing.

1:19:09And it can be, but But often what that means is the people who are there for 15 years, 20 years, 25 years around the statehouse are the lobbyists. And they wind up legitimately knowing more about the policy issues than the committee chair of whatever part in 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 legislators. So I would want to know that there is a way to solve for that before I felt comfortable seeing that model I've seen in some of the states get bigger. But what I am a big fan of is changing more frequently, finding a way, I would argue, through more competitive elections to change who's in office more often.

1:19:46Atrioc:This brings up a question I want to ask you. So after the Biden administration, after Department of Transportation secretary, you have still been speaking on these issues, coming to places like this. A lot of former secretaries just go become lobbyists. So how much were you offered to be a lobbyist? How much did you give up? And could we have that job instead? Because it sounds awesome. Can we fill in for you on the lobbying trail? Yeah. Weirdly, I didn't get really approached. Probably because of what I did when I was in office. Right. You weren't quite as friendly. I was like a pretty tough regulator on airlines.

1:20:18So they weren't like rushing to hire a guy. It's funny. Actually, ironically, my successor, the current secretary of transportation, is a former airline lobbyist. So he was a lobbyist. And then they put him in charge of the department. Kind of flipped the. That solves that tournament thing. Yeah, there you go. Go back and forth. That's cool. You know, because we were really tough on the airlines and we made them take better care of their passengers. We upped the fines. We held them accountable for some of these meltdowns that happened. We, in some cases, added a zero or two to the level of enforcement action and refunds and settlements that they had to offer.

1:20:52But 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 made me super popular in the industry lobbying world. So shockingly, those offers didn't come flying in when I left office. I think you're underplaying it.

1:21:10Atrioc:They're quite good. I'm a big fan of those changes you made, and I can see why they would not be itching. Pete, we're running up on time. I want to thank you so much for coming on this show. I sincerely appreciate it. Talking to you. Enjoyed it. Thanks so much, Pete. My parents are fans of yours, surprisingly, because they were the lean Republican for most of their life, but the Trump has really thrown 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 % done, but I read it. Thank you. It's interesting that that was written in 2020.

1:21:40It feels like in the past six years, trust, which was low then, has gotten astronomically well. I wonder if I could ask you a final question. Is everything you're saying today in service of that goal of kind of, I think it doesn't, the thing I'm seeing from our audience is a complete lack of trust in government on either side. Yeah. I wonder if you could frame that in a. Yeah. 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.

1:22:25and 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 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 people in my unit outside the wire and getting into a vehicle together we didn't necessarily know each other very well. Sometimes all we had was a handshake and we had the same flag on our shoulder and that was about it.

1:23:01And yet we were trusting each other with our lives. And I think that's kind of a metaphor for where we're at as a country, where all of us actually, part of living in the same country as somebody is you're trusting everybody else with your life. And that gets played out through our political processes again and again. The good news is under pressure and our country's under pressure, there are ways to earn trust and build trust quickly. And if we can get that done through results, through actually making problems better, then you get more where that came from. Trust can build. It can compound. And when you have a society with more trust, again, whether it's the government being viewed as more trustworthy or just us more ready to trust each other in our society, then our capacity to do big things gets much, much better.

1:23:45And 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, Pete. Thank you.

1:23:55Atrioc:This conversation made me a little more hopeful and I appreciate that a lot. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks. Thanks, everybody. Thanks guys for watching.

1:24:03Aiden:Woo! Thank God we got rid of that guy. Who was that guy? I had been improv-ing the whole time. He just walked in. He just walked in. Was his name Peter? I don't know. I did not know. Is it short for Peter? I don't know. That was fun. That was fun. we're a little pressed for time and I think we had some more things we wanted to chat about or talk about in that episode but if you're interested in us talking about that a little more you can come check out our not with bees you're gonna be us not just us just us we do an extra episode every week on the patreon it's patreon.com slash lemonade stand but otherwise we will see you back for a normal episode next week thanks everybody