The Problem With Jon Stewart - Tariff Ying Times With Pete Buttigieg

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

As the economy reels from Trump's sweeping tariffs, Jon is joined by former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to examine the fallout. Together, they explore what Trump's levies mean for everyday Americans, discuss how to bridge the divide between politicians and the people they serve, and consider how a new generation of leadership might rebuild in the years ahead. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. It is, I'm telling you this April 8th. I always tell you now the day that we're taping this because of the velocity by which change occurs in this nation, which is becoming great again. By leaps and bounds, you may say to yourself, okay, occasionally we take a step or two back, but clearly in the right direction. So this comes out Thursday. So by then, we could be at war. with China or more likely, I think President Trump will do the thing that he always does.

And I use this analogy with Rahm Emanuel on the show, but I think it's instructive to say it again here. I used to have a dog who would eat things on his own volition. This was not, he was not encouraged to do so. He would eat grass and sticks and whatever he could find outside. Inevitably, he had a delicate stomach. He is my dog, after all. that's how we knew we were each other's soulmates.

The way I processed lactose is the way he processed everything that he would eat from the outside. He would become nauseous. He would vomit. And then before I had a chance to get the towels, he would lap it up, clean it up. And then he would look at me like, hey, huh, buddy? I did your favor, right? Can I get a treat? And I would always think like, no, that was your, you made a mess.

And yes, you did clean it up, but I got to tell you something, you didn't clean it completely up. You left damage, residue, things like that. And that is what Trump will do. He will come out and be like, oh, the nuclear bomb I dropped on the economy. It worked. Vietnam has decided that they're going to make a deal like nobody's ever seen before. And that's going to be the way that this thing off ramps, you would imagine, because these guys are. I mean, between the signal chats and the trillions in the economy

and firing people at the FAA and nuclear commissions, they are forgetting the first rule of authoritarian regimes, which is you kind of have to get shit done right. I think that's the whole point, isn't it? We let them disappear people because they do shit right. Is that how things go? Then you get to wear, I'm whenever trying to come out and wear the jacket with the epaulets.

or whatever it is that those guys like to do, come up with the nickname, but you got to live up to that end of the bargain, from what I understand. But it's been a very interesting, and we've been spending a lot of time talking with some Democrats about where they see this thing going

and their frustrations, and there's someone that I really wanted to talk to about it because I find that he's so articulate and well-versed. He's been an executive as a mayor. He's been within administrations, He's well-versed in a lot of different aspects of it, and he's one of the few people who's able to articulate those experiences in such a great way.

So I'm just going to get to our guest for today's program. Here he is. Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today, very excited. Our former Secretary of Transportation, Mr. Pete Buttigieg is joining us now. Pete, look at you with the scruff. You're not working for a month or two, and you're growing out the beer? now? You started it. That is true.

Yeah, you know, it is very rare in my former life that I could go more than a day without shaving. So we just had a little family vacation. I took advantage and I don't know. We'll go with it for a little while. We'll see. What is, you know, I'm always curious, leaving the government in the way that you guys had, right? It's a incredibly intense experience to work with when you're in the government at that high a level and you're managing things at that high a level. And then that moment when you kind of pack up and leave, what is that feeling? Like I assume in some ways almost maybe like the experience you had leaving the military

or you know, you're sort of now you've been you've been running at 120 miles an hour. And then suddenly it's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny you mention it. I mean, redeployment's the only thing I could compare it to professionally that was so sudden and so total. I mean, this is a department with 55,000 people, anything happening anywhere in the country or sometimes everywhere in the world could be on your desk in a matter of minutes. And then one day, you know, it's 12 o'clock and you're done. And you just, like, I guess I should, you know, feed the dog now.

It's a strange feeling. You hadn't fed the dog while you were working? No, I was already feeding the dog. But suddenly all these things around the house start to loom larger, right? You realize all these things have been neglecting. Obviously, I was leaning a lot on my husband Chaston the whole time. And, you know, I had like a wonderful family that, as any time you're in a job like this supports you and makes it possible. Then you realize you're kind of making up for lost time.

Like suddenly it's like, you know, it's my turn to do the laundry for a very, very long time after the way the last four years went. But it's been great. I'm, you know, I'm spending a lot more time with the kids. They're three and a half right now. And it's a great time to be, but it's a very hands-on time. Like, it's, you know, it's demanding. So I'm living into that.

And at the same time, of course, you don't stop caring about everything you used to work on and everything you still care about as a citizen. Oh, that's got to be so hard. To have had your hands in that pie and to have had some control over it and then to watch things happen where you no longer have any agency in that must be very frustrating.

Yeah, I mean, it cuts both ways, though, right? I mean, the other thing is I no longer have to turn the ringer of my phone on, you know, off of vibrate so I can get the call in the middle of the night. You can silence those notifications now. Yeah, yeah, which, It took me a while to realize that I was actually allowed to do that as long as I knew where Chas and the kids were. But, yeah, of course, you still feel a huge ownership of things.

I mean, just after dropping off the kids, I saw a road project going on the year in Michigan and stopped to talk to the guys because it was one of the projects that we funded. I want to see how it was going. And, yeah, I'm very invested in it. But on the other hand, if something goes wrong with it, that's not on my desk anymore. I care about it. Which is nice. So, you know, but I think all of us are at the same time, obviously, just very very important. very, very alarmed about what's happening around the country. And I think the strange thing for those

of us who've left the cabinet or left government is being just as concerned as ever, but obviously having a very, very different role. Right. Now, in terms of the role in the house, I found, like after I left the show and was home for a bit, that apparently I was unaware of all the protocol in the house. So everything I did that I thought was incredibly helpful was like, actually, Yeah. That's not the way we do things around here. Oh, is that what you're going to do with the laundry? You're going to bring it down there and do it that way?

Because that's not the way we do things around here. Like in the same way that you get onboarded into the government, did you have to get onboarded back into the house where they're like, actually, that's not what we do at dinner. We do something different. Oh, yeah. There's a whole fight this morning because the kids were fighting over how many toys they were allowed to bring in the van with them while I was taking them to school.

And it turned out to like, dad, I'm pop. Chaston's dad, I was informed that dad had established a clear policy on this. And they were litigating it between each other. I was not helping with my intervention until I understood that there was a rule. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that turns out the standard operating procedures were not written down. But the kids will remember. They will never let you forget anything, any daylight between one parent and the other, right, on the teeniest policy thing about, I don't know, it could be anything. Toys, can't. Andy, yeah, they hold you accountable. You thought international diplomacy was difficult, but trying to figure out the toy situation

in the van, that can create. By the way, speaking of tantrums, how are you absorbing this new tariff regime in the world? Look, I would imagine you wouldn't argue the point that the idea of renegotiating certain trade barriers or those types of things wouldn't be a worthy pursuit. I imagine you would take issue with the table overturning tantrum way of doing it. So how are you absorbing this general shock? Yeah, of course. Look, I grew up in northern Indiana.

I live in Michigan. Like, I get what the wrong kind of trade has done to the industrial Midwest because I grew up surrounded by collapsing factories. And part of that was because of technology. Part of that was because of automation. You know, part of that was because of trade. And the way it was handled. And we spent the last, I think, 30 years coming to a new understanding as a country about what we need to do.

And sometimes that means tariffs. Look, the last administration there were tariffs. But tariffs are supposed to be a tool, a political and economic tool in order to get some kind of advantage for the people you serve. This is not that. Because in order for it to work, first of all, you have to know what you're doing. I mean, it was a conservative think tank. It just found out that there was just a basic math error in. how they came up with these numbers.

No, they divided the deficit and then the goods, and isn't that reciprocal tariffs? Isn't that how it's done? It's not, it turns out. Oh, oops. That actually matters when trillions of dollars depend on, first of all, what you do, and secondly, how you do it? Is it consistent, do people understand? People are making decisions right this minute.

Small businesses are deciding whether to go through with an order or not. Business of all sizes are deciding whether to make an investment or not, whether to hire somebody or not. You know, I already talk to a lot of people. I spend a day a week at the University of Chicago talking to students. A bunch of them, these seniors are graduating, got job offers. Then they got the job offers withdrawn. There was already tons of uncertainty about hiring. That was before the tariffs. And that's true whether you're a college graduate looking to get a job at a bank or something. It's true whether you're hoping as a construction worker that a project is going to go forward near you. Investments are not just numbers on a page.

These decisions very quickly go to our everyday lives. So the biggest things I'm watching is one, of course, how hard is this going to hit us in terms of prices? That's the immediate thing. I mean, you know, the tariff is a tax. The price we pay goes up. Will it be prices up? Because as you collapse the economy, nobody will purchase anything. So maybe the way this works is, sure, it raises the prices of certain things.

But what if we won't buy anything? If consumption goes down so drastically. That gets you to number two. The other thing I'm really watching is the jobs far, right? Like, what's this going to do to people's jobs? And, you know, it's hard enough to have those price increases if you continue to have a full employment economy, right? One where more or less it's true that if you want a job, you can get a job. It's a whole other thing to deal with that, that kind of elevated prices, inflation, at the same time as you're dealing with a recession.

And now a recession has gone from being viewed as pretty unlikely a year ago or even three months ago to being viewed as better than a coin flip by most of the people who have spent their lives figuring out whether we're likely to go into recession or not. It is a frightening cocktail, especially for people who are living close to the edge, who are paycheck to paycheck, who weren't sure whether they're going to be able to... Look, if you're a billionaire, if you're like most of the people in the president's cabinet right now or a multimillionaire like most members of the U.S. Congress, then, okay, this may not be your problem overnight. You can riot it out. If you're a billionaire, you can probably ride it out. You'll probably be okay, right? Yeah, maybe. But for so many people, this is not a game.

This is not just something that's of interest because you like watching the news. Like, this is people's lives. And obviously, with the stock market taking the turn that it has last. few days. That's people's retirements and that's not just, you know, people sitting on giant trust funds. That's ordinary people have been saving up all their lives. Do you find it interesting, you know, when you see certain interviews or things or the reporters go out into the world, the people that are oftentimes most vulnerable to it seem to be the ones that are most okay with it. So it's, you know, when they talk to people that are in, you know, the shrimp boats down in

Louisiana or the, like you say, certain factory towns in Indiana. I think that's, you know, there's a certain, a feeling amongst them that the system is so rigged and we've been screwed over for so long that fuck it, like burn it down. And I find that to be, it's almost faith-based. They have faith that, that, oh, he knows what he's doing and this is exactly how it's supposed to go. Now, someone else might look at it and think, you're not really giving us a coherent explanation as to how the manufacturing is going to come back. It's certainly not magic. People have to trust to reinvest that kind of money. And look, when manufacturing went from 30% of the economy to 10% of the economy, yeah, that's a problem.

What are we aiming to bring back? Do you have a sense of what the internal logic is? It is, are we fighting a war that was fought, you know, in the 50s and it's it's not the future, it's the past? In your mind, how is this calculation going? Well, I think the spirit of it is they want to turn back the clock, right? That's the motto, make America great again. I think the reality is it's never about again when you're talking about how to survive and thrive in an economy that's changing like it is right now, when you're facing the way China is right now,

when you're facing AI and things like this. But I think their spirit is about, yeah, let's just get things back to what they work. But the mechanics of it are all over the place. I think because you have a bunch of people in the same White House, same administration, same team, who ferociously disagree with each other, right? I mean, you see the latest thing is this fight between Peter Navarro and Elon Musk, but it's going to be some new version of this every day. Look, part of what you have is very old-fashioned Republican policy even now, right?

It is about tax cuts for the rich. And quietly, that is still probably the number one in dollar terms, the number one economic policy that they're working on right now is the trillions of dollars. Are they still going through? Totally. Yeah, it didn't get a lot of attention. The $5 trillion, that's still going through. And let's be clear, there's a relationship here, right?

And a few of them in moments of weakness have admitted it. Because you might think, okay, tax cuts for the rich, that's old-fashioned Republican policy. Sure, the dogma, that trickle down there, baby. And then tariffs, that's the populist Trumpism that's blowing it all up, right? And those two schools of thought are duking it out. But there is a certain connection here, which is tariffs are at tax. Taxes bring in revenue. And there are clearly some people in this White House who think that they can use the money

they're going to get from the stuff that we're buying at Target that costs more, that have that tax on it, right? Right. To substitute for some of the revenue we're not going to get out of, the taxes on the wealthy that they're moving to cut. Right? So I would not regard these things as totally... Oh my God.

It almost seems like they have a plan. Right. There is a relationship here. There's a reason why some conservative Republicans who never like tariffs might swallow them right now because if their number one priority is tax cuts for the rich and they can look to Trump to deliver that, they know he will because he did before. And you got another group who are saying, look, our priority is tariffs. They can get that through.

Maybe the grand bargain that's being made. here, and some of them again have talked in these terms, is, okay, basically, if you look at the tax burden of how the things they're still willing to have, and look, obviously they're cutting a lot of stuff, they're cutting the cancer research and the people who answer the phones at Social Security and, you know, VA staff, right? But the stuff they're not going to cut, like National Defense, has to get paid for somehow. Not only not going to cut, he just proposed a trillion dollar defense budget. Right.

Trillion! So how are you going to do that? Well, if less of that is being funded by taxes on the wealthiest and on corporate profits, then more of it, at least proportionally, will be funded by everybody going to the store and pay and mortgage the tariffs, which is happening literally this week. And then the rest is deficits. Now, as you watch this, as someone who has, look, McKinsey and you understand the consultant side of it, you understand the mechanics of it, are you seeing the matrix on this from them?

Because one of the things that I think is, whether they're right or wrong, people make bets on, you know, every administration has their idea of how they're going to stimulate the economy, how they're going to raise the money. The one thing that I've been almost more shocked at by anything is an inability to coherently communicate what the idea is and what the plan is other than everything's unfair to the United States and we're not going to take it. We're not going to be the world's whipping boy, even though for the most part, this is the world we created post World War II and policed. But no longer will we be the patsy. But there's, I've heard very little in the way that you're describing now, consistent logic. Why bother with that? Right? I mean, for them.

I tell the people. It's not their problem. They don't view an honest conversation about the finer points of policy is something they need. to slow down and do. They're right. Move fast and break shit. Do it our way. And if some people get hurt along the way, okay, but it's all on the service of the bigger vision. But I don't think, honestly, I don't think they believe that they have to justify what they're doing to the American people, even to the people who voted for them. All right. We've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. We're back. Pete. They just don't think that that's their problem.

Why do you think they're so hostile to the media, right? The hostile to the press. Are you talking about the fake news, lame stream media? Yeah. Right? I mean, there's very little interest in working through, you know, one person admitted a mistake, right? Where they sent the wrong guy to El Salvador. Yes. And what did they do?

They fired the guy who admitted it. The lawyer who admitted it. I don't know if it's a man or woman, but that person got fired, right? So as they screw up along the way, they fire the wrong people at the national, the NNSA that keeps our nuclear weapons safe. And then they hire them back real quick. They... FAA, same thing. Accidentally send a buyout email.

all the air traffic controllers in the middle of an air traffic control shortage, right? They send the battle plans to the wrong guy on the wrong text app, right? And they randomly put a tariff on a country. It doesn't have anybody. It's not even a country. It's just an island with some penguins. Like, these screw-ups are not something that causes introspection. Like, to be clear, every time I've been in government, whether when I was mayor of my hometown

or when I was secretary of transportation, like, obviously, there were things that we did not get right. Always. There are things you don't get right. You're human beings doing their best. Sometimes you don't get it right. If you believe that the press will hold you accountable, then you know that when you don't get something right, you have to talk about it, think about it, learn from it, do better next time. If, on the other hand, you think you can just beat your chest and say it's all fake news, don't believe you're lying eyes, no problem, you know, the leader knows best, then why bother going through the finer points of, you know, making sure that all the places you're putting tariffs on are actually countries or like checking

your math once or twice before you throw the markets into total turmoil, right? Is it? I imagine it's got to be mind-blowingly frustrating to watch shit like that go down. You know, stock markets tanking $10 trillion going out. And the Democrats are like, we can't even wear a tan suit. If we wear a tan suit, the world goes bonkers. it's the lead story for a week. And these guys, like you say, my favorite was RFK,

he was talking about the huge cuts to health and human services and all the people and how they had to rehire people. And he goes, we always knew that 20% of those job cuts were going to be wrong. But we always knew the part of the plan was always, we were just going to rehire 20% of the people. And you're like, what if you took an extra two days?

Right. Like, that's what I can't figure out. What is the rush? It's been two months. What about trying to negotiate trade deals prior to killing the hostage and then asking for ransom? I don't get it. There's a logic here too, right? On the trade deals, especially, if you make it completely chaotic, then the only organizing principle is the man himself. And then all that matters is which country, which industry, which company, got to the man and convinced him or flattered him or whatever it took got him to give them some mercy. So the countries are all deciding, right? I mean, if you think about it, this is part of how consolidating power works. Like, there is a sort of logic to this, right? The more messy you make it, the more like they can't appeal to you saying, like, oh, this, you published this guidance on how the tariffs were going to work. And if you really interpret it the right way, you should give us a break. It's going to be, I'm going to find Trump. I'm going to

find him. I'm going to appeal it. I, whether it's a country, a company, or an industry, and think of a way to say, you ought to make an exception for us. And the more it works that way, the more it's total chaos, except you get to the man, you get to the king, right, the more power he personally has. But I've got to believe, first of all, obviously, that's a terrible way to make policy and it's terribly unfair, obviously. But also, like, I got to believe definitely most liberals. I think, most conservatives, thoughtful conservatives I've ever talked to, and any libertarian gets that literally the entire point of this country is that we don't have a king, that we don't have some guy

who, how he feels in the morning or what he decides to do or whether he got off the wrong side of the bed this morning is going to decide your fate. But actually, we have rules and we have things we all have to negotiate over and fight over and there's winners and losers, but when we come together in this process. Now, to your earlier point about people who looked at this in shrug, I think the process we inherited sucks. Let's be clear, this is not about going back to what we had before. When you destroy something, you destroy everything that was good and everything that was bad about it. And that's part of what I'm thinking about as I think about the giant federal bureaucracy that I operated in for four years trying to get stuff done as a secretary

of transportation, right? I'm not here to say that everything should be put back the way it was 2024 or 2015 or 20, you know, 2000 for that matter. It is maddeningly difficult to get something actually built in this country. It is difficult across the federal government to properly reward your best performers and to remove your worst performers. Like these things are real, right? I'm not saying they're not. And to incentivize progress. Totally, right? These are real problems. The challenge now becomes, especially for my party, which is transfixed in horror by what we see all around us, is to have an answer that's better than, this is terrible, let's just go back to where we were before. Better than noblesse oblige and the right of kings, you're saying.

We need a process that's not necessarily the whims of the individual. So have you thought about that process? And, you know, look, in transportation, you guys had this bill that was going to build, all these charging stations and by the time, you know, you guys left, 100 had been built and that's about it. Have you thought about the things that you would change within that process to make building more efficient and more productive? Totally. I mean, look, the amount of time that it has taken in this country to build a mile of subway, a stretch of road, a clean energy project. Rural broadband. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It's indefensible. Now, it got the way it is for lots of reasons,

many of which are reasons that I think are noble, but it's still the outcome is indefensible. And that's what we've got to rewire as a country. We've got to get back to basics. So what is it in those processes, because that's what I'm interested in. When I look at, for Democrats, it seems like if they want to solve a problem, that solution has to solve every problem. In other words, we need rural broadband, but the solution also has to solve inequality, racial inequality, climate change. We have to load it up with everything before we can start. Is that something that you've identified? Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's right to pay attention to those things because we know that how you build a road or where you put a train

could make those things better or it could make them worse. Of course, you're going to pay attention to fairness, you're going to pay attention to climate. That should be part of the picture. But we've reached a point now where any one piece, even a process that has thousands of steps and billions of dollars, any one piece can wreck the whole thing. This is why it's hard to get housing built. This is why it's hard to get transportation infrastructure built. And without getting into all the guts of things like the Administrative Procedures Act, right? There is a sort of Let's get into the guts, baby. Come on.

I mean, there was a paperwork machine, right? That, again, with the best of intentions. And look, the basic intention is to make sure everybody can be heard. So in order to build a complicated project, you have to go through a process where everybody can weigh in. And then you got to go through all of that before you can move. There are ways to work through that, though, where people get heard and it doesn't delay everything.

We did it. We started doing things like, again, I don't want to get super weedsy here, but pre-award authority. Ways to, you know, if you're trying to build a high-speed rail or something, start getting things built and getting the dollars moving even while we're working out the finer points of the contract, as long as we can agree on a certain amount of risk between, let's say, the State Department of Transportation is building something and the federal government that's providing the money, right? And there are ways to do that, agreements within agreements or other arrangements. But look, some of it's going to take, it is going to take some

introspection in my party and in our country to come back to what are the priorities? Because it can't be, I mean, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, I think has cost us in the extreme, in many ways as a country. Right. If I were to sum it up and sort of the only experience I've had in working down there is mostly kind of VA stuff and watching how that goes, it seems as though the government has a bit of an adversarial relationship to its clients. which is the people in that it basically,

in setting up protocols that are gonna weed out waste, fraud, and abuse, those protocols create waste, fraud, and abuse. In other words, you treat whatever two to three percent of fraudulent or wasteful or abusive practices are gonna occur, you're gonna make the other 97% of the people go through an incredibly inefficient, not commonsensical process, wouldn't the, maybe the main thing is to just flip that and say,

this will no longer be adversarial. And what we'll do is we'll bolster on the back end the look for waste, fraud, and abuse so that we don't delay everything by two and a half years to set up all these ridiculous obstacles. Would that be a simplistic version of that? Yeah, I agree with that. I think the challenge there is it does take some political will. because the more risk you take, the more there will be some mistakes. That's right. One of the first things I said to my staff when I came in, when we're trying to move a trillion

dollars, about half of that is the Department of Transportation. So half a trillion dollars through the economy. We've got 55,000 people working on every facet of transportation. Everything you do is important, which means when you make mistakes, which you will, because we're people, some of those mistakes will matter. And the most important thing will be to make sure that that mistake is not repeated. It won't be beating everybody up. It won't be a blame game.

It won't be finger pointing. But you have to be ready to spot those mistakes and be very transparent about them right away so that we can figure out what happened, learn from it and move on. That does take political well because the moment there is some fuck up somewhere, there will be. press stories and grandstanding politicians. Wait, what? A whole, I don't know, perish the thought, right? I don't understand. But there's a real cost to that, right?

But as you watch this administration bulldoze through all of that. And I watched, by the way, George W. Bush do the same thing. It always was shocking to me. You know, the Democrats would have a super majority in the Senate, and they'd have a majority in the House, and they still would have trouble getting some things done, whereas George Bush could get whatever the fuck he wanted without having any.

As you watch them bulldoze that, do you find that there is a ground that you can take that isn't so risk adverse that you paralyze the entire workings of the government? I think there might be, and that's what I'm getting at when I say that this is not about going back to what we had. Right. So look, the FDR-era kind of New Deal, Federal, government, as we have known it our whole lives, is gone. Or at least it will be gone by the time

these guys are done with it. The international order economically and security-wise, the post-World World War II transatlantic security framework, the assumptions around how alliances work and how the U.S. fits in with them. And obviously, assumptions around trade, as we've known it for my entire adult life, is gone. Or it will be gone by the time these guys are done with it. So it's time to take a breath and say, okay, are we really, if and when we get a chance to put it back together, are we just going to scramble back to create the closest copy we can to the thing they just smashed? Or are we going to design something a little bit better? And to me, what that looks like is starting with an understanding of what government is for. And for me, government is for

making you more free. And it does that in three ways. One, it provides services from national defense to sewage. Two, it gets in the way of anybody who might make you unfree. Let's say a bank, a cable company, a railroad, your neighbor, anybody who, if there wasn't... A segregator. Yeah. If there wasn't, you know, somebody to stand up to them, they would harm you. Okay. So that's number two. And then three, really important, is to constrain itself. So if government does those three things, it provides basic services. It constrains people who, can hurt you or harm your freedom, and it constrains itself from hurting you or hurting your freedom, then you have a government that actually works for people. And around that, you can build

an economy that works for people. Which one of those do you think would be the most challenging? Because I think right now, you know, people would say government can't regulate itself. It can't constrain itself. Well, I actually think that's where the common ground starts. Because, again, whether you're a, if you're so libertarian or conservative that you thought, the Clean Air Act was tyranny. I got to think whether you're saying it out loud or not, you know, if you're in Congress and you're afraid of being primary to whoever. On some level you get that when a White House official suggests that TV reporters be imprisoned

because they covered the administration unfavorably, or when some student gets stuffed into a van because she wrote an op-ed, may or may not agree with that op-ed, but she gets stuffed into a van because when government agents pick up the wrong guy and send them to El Salvador, right? That is the kind of thing that is the behavior of a government that is not constraining itself. Correct. And that should horrify liberals, conservatives, and libertarians in equal measure. Principled. Principled ones. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that's obviously when you look to Capitol Hill, that's a problem right now. Operating and good. I always said, you know, libertarians are just Republicans whose towns haven't been hit by a tornado yet.

You know, it's always, oh, we don't need any. Then after the tornado, it's, where's the money? Quick break. We'll be right back. We are back. Yeah. So to me, it's like, where's the liberty? Right.

Let's start with that. Right. Where's the freedom? And of course you're going to start with a disfavored group that it's okay to, you know, and often, not always, but usually it's immigrants. But over history, it's been gays, it's been Jews. I mean, you know. The hits.

All the hits. It never stops there. Anyway, I think that you start with some common ground there. But then let's be real. And let's have some introspection in my party about where we could be doing a better job on the services part. The people are actually getting what they expect out of their taxpayer dollar. That the roads are getting built, that the power is, state. are getting built. It's just like stuff works, right? I mean, to me, even some really nerdy stuff

about digital citizenship. The fact in the 2020s, the way that you prove who you say you are is to send a letter to get something out of a file cabinet in a drawer in a county office where they keep your birth certificate, right? I mean, we got some just basic work to do there. And then there's the other one, which is constraining other parties that can make you unfree. In my view, this is the part where we're actually largely getting on to a better track in the last few years, because we had a government that was standing up for people. You had Rohit Chopro over at the CFPB making sure that if a bank screwed you on overdraft fees, that they would actually be held accountable. I worked on this in the airline regulation, right? We said that if an airline gets you stuck, they have to

cover your costs. And at the very least, they need to be telling you what they're charging, right? These kinds of things, click to cancel, you know, this rule out of the FTC, which I think the Trump administration is trying to get rid of. But this is one that says, like, you ever sign up for gym membership? or like a newsletter or something. And they make it physically like you've got to go into the guts of the email to them. Yeah, you have to get there on a Tuesday and pay in quarters only. Right, right. Even though all you had to do to sign up was an email,

but you have to find somebody on the phone or go somewhere in order to cancel, right? You've got to drive there and do it in person. So that got addressed and now they're trying to take it back. The Trump folks are trying to take it back to where you're vulnerable there. So the sticking up for people part, I think, is really important because that's another way to show people that government can be in their corner. Look, the bottom line is if the economy and the government were working the way they should for most Americans, a guy like Donald Trump and a movement like Trumpism would not have been possible. We are here because the system we inherited is at best showing its flaws. And at worst, it's just no longer up to the task of what it takes to help people live free and

thriving lives in the middle of 21st century. Right. And to have that coherent, you know, we were talking to Michael Lewis last week, and he said something I thought was really a great nugget about this, which was, you know, the government is there to fill in the gaps where the private sector won't. And I think that's something that is not well articulated in that the private sector is not a freedom machine. It is not something that takes care of all the needs.

You need, in the same way that the legislative has to check the executive, has to check the judicial, which has to check, you need some balance between public and private so that the excesses of the operating system we use, which is capitalism, don't create the kind of collateral damage that it often creates. Government has to be that mitigating factor. there's nothing else of the size of multinational capitalism that can provide exactly as you say. You know, I've always said I think the biggest limit to American freedom and liberty is poverty and struggle. Yes.

Almost entirely. Absolutely. I mean, talk about the biggest thing that can make you unfree, right? It's when you don't have resources. And what's happening to or what's about to happen to poor and low wealth people in this. country is horrific. The threats to Medicaid, the threats to snap, the food aid being cut, to say nothing of what could be happening with VA Social Security, that, of course, the less income you've already got, the more that matters to you. And again, look, the folks

in charge right now, they're not to end up a night worrying about this kind of thing. This is not their problem. Right. How do we get people more margin of error? Because it's not just, you know, even in the low income, but middle income is, it's that squeeze where you have the, no margin of error. Your parents are getting older as your kids are getting ready to go to college and the child care isn't there. I always found that interesting if you look at the tranches of where your taxes go, right? The first five of them, I think, are like defense, service of the debt, Social Security, Medicare, it's things that don't impact, don't give people really margin of error until they're either really old or really poor. Yeah. But if people aren't confident that

government can competently provide those things. It's sort of a chicken in the egg now. Now we're in this terrible cycle. Yeah, and look, sometimes this is provided literally, right? The government provides a service like air traffic control or national defense or wastewater. Sometimes the government just needs to make sure certain things can happen. So we continue to live in pretty much the only country, not even the only rich country, which is the only country period, that doesn't have some system for knowledge.

national health care. Not that the... Or health care. Or, yeah, at least health care, we at least gotten to where most people are insured. There's a lot more, there's a lot that's messed up about our health care system. But when I look at where we're at on child care, where we're at on even just parental leave, right? And again, it doesn't have to be provided by the government.

There has to be a policy by the government to make sure that you can get it. One of the handful of things the Trump administration did that I actually thought was good last time was they made sure that at least for federal workers, there was parental leave. But everybody ought to have parental leave. And that's one of those things. It shouldn't be just like something you get a voucher for if you're poor. It should be something that is a basic part of a functioning economy. And we know that it works because literally everybody else has done it at some level in the world. There's no country that's like, you know what we ought to do next year. We ought to get rid of our parental leave. Right. You know, that was a big mistake. We shouldn't

do that anymore. I love that Denmark has parental leave and has national health care and we looked at their country and thought, you know what we got to take from them, Greenland. Like the one thing that doesn't, that's got nothing to do with what makes that country. That's true. Maybe we need more of a fact-finding mission over there. Right. And look, we're not Denmark and not everything that works here will there will occur. Harder to do in a heterogeneous country with this many people. No question. But look, the really frightening thing is that in statistical terms, the American dream, as in born poor, wind up rich, you're more likely to live out the American dream right now in Denmark than in America. And as long as that is true,

we've got profound, profound problems as a country. Look, the year my mom was born and to World War II, you had a 90% chance of finishing off economically better than your parents. 90%. By the time I was born in the early 80s, it was a coin flip. And that kind of uncertainty is only growing because, again, we have not been taking care of the basics. Just basic things are. around affordability, around protection, around what it's like to get through everyday life in this country, obviously have been leaving a lot of people out or we would not be here. And that's where I think my party needs to be very realistic about what our project is. Obviously, part of our project is to stop the cruelty and the chaos and the horror show that's emanating from D.C.

But if all we have is an account of what it is we're stopping or what we're against, it's still going to be pretty hard for people to hear us. Maybe we can win the midterms. Maybe we can even win the White House. But when I think about it once, but when I think about a generational project of really transforming the country and transforming the country for the better

versus transforming the country into whatever it has been plunged into in the last hundred days, that's going to require a deeper level of vision and a greater readiness to walk away ruthlessly from what hasn't worked. And to stand up relentlessly for it has worked, even if it's unpopular. And to be honest about it with yourselves, it's still a reckoning that, you know,

I think there's still a generational churn that has to occur within the Democratic Party. The government probably writ large, although I think a lot of the younger energy is probably on the other side. But there seems to be a real reluctance and fear to walk away from those legacy structures and incumbent structures and embrace, you know, I thought it was so interesting, you know, even something as small as AOC, not getting the senior position on the committee she wanted, and they gave it to a 74-year-old guy. Nothing against him, but it just speaks to this idea that I don't know if what you're speaking about,

I don't know if it has registered yet writ large within the leadership. Well, it's a really hard thing to absorb when it could mean you need to move along. But let me point to a couple really interesting examples, right. One, Nancy Pelosi. She excused her. I mean, I worked with her after she was speaker, and she was still a formidable leader and member of Congress delivering for her district, doing things for the party.

But then when she was weighing in on questions around generational change, she had a lot of moral authority because she could say, hey, I stepped away. Another example I think of, we keep talking about your. This wasn't Denmark, this was the Netherlands. My counterpart came over for a meeting. This is something you do a lot as Secretary of Transportation, right? Your equivalent from another country comes in. You have a bilateral meeting.

You discuss areas of cooperation, any issues that you need to kind of resolve or negotiate. And I have this counterpart who I had met and dealt with on a number of things. Came in, we had a nice conversation and meeting. And toward the end, he said, by the way, this is the last time that you'll see me. And I thought, like, I don't remember, I don't think they had like an election. Like he's, you know, about to lose his job or anything. He said, yeah, I've decided it's time for me to move on.

It's time for a newer generation to take over and I'm going to try new things. But we really need to kind of give it up to the newer generation. And then I went back and I looked him up. He's like 55. 55? Yeah. He's not even old enough to be in the Senate yet. There's just a different attitude there.

And I do think we can learn something from that, right? Like there are a lot of countries and cultures where you have your time and service and then you go do something else. Or maybe you even do something in government. You know, another person I got to know, the Australian ambassador to the U.S., fascinating guy. He was the premier. He was the prime minister, I think it's called.

He was in charge of Australia. Then he wasn't. Then he went and got a degree, a PhD. Wait, he didn't have a degree. He had lots of degrees. But he went and got a doctorate and then he became, and then he got elected again and he was in charge. I think in between he was foreign minister.

And then he became an ambassador and he's got another job. And he doesn't feel the need to, you know, have his grip on the entire country. You know, it used to be that way. There were presidents that would end up on the Supreme Court and then they would move up. There was an ethos that it wasn't, I think seeding power wasn't the difficult. that it is today, that it wasn't, boy, you see it with wealth, you see it with power. There's an incumbency to all of it. And it's very difficult to get any churn. And I think the interesting part is people don't begrudge, I think, power or they don't begrudge wealth or those

things. I think what they begrudge is if once that power and wealth is accumulated, you begin to use it to insulate and isolate the system, to rig it in a way that makes it nearly impossible for others to then permeate those hallowed halls of money and power. Yeah, but think it's the rigging. Think about it. I mean, what is one thing that even today, most Republican incumbents and most Democratic incumbents have in common? It's going to be a desire to remain incumbent, Right? I thought you were going to say prostate cancer.

That's a terrible term. I apologize for that. It's a bias that is built into our system, but your system's supposed to have checks to stop that from happening. And look, I think some of the things get thrown around like term limits are too easy. That doesn't get at the bigger issue, which is an institutional and cultural readiness to do your part and then let somebody else. And for the incumbents to have a sense, I think when you're down in Washington and you probably experience, this as Transportation Secretary, the access to those individuals is so much greater for industry lobbyists or those with power and money that the other voices really are, are never heard,

that they're not heard at the very least at anywhere near the same volume. And so it's very easy as the daily churn goes on in Washington to lose sight of what those voices would be telling you as opposed to the voices that you do. here? You know, one thing I felt right away when I went to Washington was how inward looking it can be. And I don't mean to, look, a lot of people, especially in the other party, kind of constantly run against Washington.

I don't mean to paint a negative brush on the incredibly dedicated, talented people and public servants who go there to do good work. But I did notice at the political layer. That's what I meant. More the political layer. That's right. It's really true. It was really striking to me.

I think because when you're a mayor, even in a big city, and certainly in a a smaller city like I led in northern Indiana, you eat what you cook, right? Like, whatever decisions you make, like, good or bad, like, you're making them for yourself and for your neighbor, and your neighbor's going to come find you and tell you what they think, and somebody's going to catch you at the grocery store and tell you what they think. And, like, you're just getting, you're getting a lot of feedback all the time from friends, friendomies, political and non-political people, right?

But they have access to you. Yeah, by design, right? And I think one of the reasons why you often see, like sometimes you'll see footage of a senator getting confronted in an elevator. And they're just, they look like a deer in headlights, right? Some constituents, some activist gets in their face. And look, that could be like, look, sometimes that's a shitty thing to do to somebody who's like not quite ready. But as a senator, it's your job. I've done it to them.

Yeah, it's your job to like be responsive. Like literally, you were a representative of the people, right? And I think about, I've never met a mayor who wouldn't know what to do in that situation because it literally happens to them all the time. But I do think Washington creates these bubbles around people. And by the way, I suspect I haven't spent that much time in corporate America. I spent a couple of years as a consultant. But I imagine that happens a lot around very wealthy people too, right? I mean, we know that happens a lot around very wealthy people, right?

Part of what's frightening to me about this moment is you've got a lot of creatures of Washington who haven't had to be responsive to people in a while. being coupled with creatures of enormous wealth who haven't heard no in a long time. And now they're just feeding off each other, right? Like a hubristic, perfect storm of entitlement and arrogance. Yeah, and the answer to that, you know, not to sound pious, but like the answer to that is supposed to be democracy. Like the answer to that is supposed to be the fact that all those people making decisions have to come check in with their boss, the American people,

every couple of years, every four years. Look at the panic that occurs with the simple town hall, that, you know, this idea of the town hall, the kind of Capra-esque vision of, you know, a John Doe to stand up and ask a question to their, they're treated like, oh my God. Did they stop doing them? They went into the lion's den and you're like, of your voters of your constituents. They stopped. They just stopped. I've had my ass handed to me in public meetings. Like, it's not fun.

But like, it makes you better because. Either you have a good answer and you get a chance to convince somebody or you don't have a good answer about why you're doing the right thing and you have to think of a better way to explain it or most importantly of all you might be wrong about something and you find out, right? Like that's how the process is supposed to work. But by by virtue of these cocoons that we have around people and of course the other thing is the algorithm. Like the thing about those town halls or about, you know, local processes is they're offline. like you're actually in a room with other people. And yeah, maybe it's contrived, maybe it's lopsided, all of that could be going on, especially in a town hall that happens right now.

But you're offline looking people in the eye talking to them. And we don't have a lot of that in terms of how most of us get most of our information. It's just the feed, right? I mean, even TV, like used to give us some sense you would see a news story about some controversy and you'd hear from the one person on the one side and you'd hear from the one side and you'd hear from the other person on the other side. And maybe you'd be moved by it. Maybe you'd be, it would further entrench you in what you already believe, but you would think about it. You would think about it for a minute because you had to hear those sides, right? So very little of that

is now part of how most of us get most information. Does Washington discourage that to some extent for people? And can you remember a time that you can recall hearing something and you went, oh, I think I might be looking at this wrong where you were open-minded enough to hear something constructive. And the only thing I can liken it to is in some ways, like, I can remember reviews of things I've made, like a movie or something where like it's just ripping me to shit. And I got to like get through it. But there's like one nugget in there that I'll read and go like, oh, God, that's right. Why didn't I do that? Like, have you had that experience? Yeah, sure, all the time.

I mean, you know, there are times you see things. Look, you are, there's a bias toward being defensive of everything you've done. That's human. That's human. Sure. But you want to encounter people. One thing I did, Eliza, I sat down a lot of Republican governors. And often kind of going back and forth with them would, sometimes it would really make

me dig in my heels because I would think what they had to say was not convincing. Other times it was the reverse. I mean, I had a governor from a Western state came in and said, look, you have this EVU rule that there's got to be a, you know, every 50 miles has got to be a charging station in order to get the federal money. And I said, yeah, you guys should love this. Like, it's making sure that out in these rural areas where there's not a lot of, like, private sector's not going to do it. Like, we're making sure that there's charging station. And then he starts walking me through how his road network works. He's like, look, here's a place where

literally nobody would, if you made us put a charger here, like, it would maybe be like very interesting to an elk that comes by from time and time could like, you know, rub his antlers on it, but it's not going to do much for, for EV users, even if you make us put it in. And we talked about some flexibility we could have there, which was actually something we worked on together. So, yeah, there's so many times, like, you think you go in with an idea, you hope you're right, but you've got to, like, be open to finding out that that's maybe not how you thought it was. And that's okay. That's how it's supposed to work. Right. And, and, and, and, you, as you move forward, because right now, the Democratic Party, you would hope, is in a period of

reflection, but also of laying groundwork for what that new vision or a convincing argument to be given the responsibility of creating that new vision would be. I've seen it done with individuals. I've not seen much of a concerted effort top down, even, you know, the new guy they got at the DNC, you know, his first comment was like, their billionaires are terrible, but our billionaires are great. Like, you know, it was just like, oh, shit, we're screwed.

You know, are you seeing a nascent effort in the way that, you know, the Republicans, they had all their ducks in a row when they got in the door. Doesn't seem like Democrats have any ducks. They're all free range. They're all flying around. Yeah, we're not really, We're not really top-down kind of people, right?

Even bottom up. The sooner we can accept kind of what we are and what we aren't, I think the better. I don't think we're going to have the equivalent of project 2025 where, you know, I mean, don't get me wrong, there's lots of policy work going on. But the idea of us generating some thousand-page document and everybody kind of saluting and marching forward, that's just, you know, that's not really what we're about. I think what we do need to do is lay out a real reckoning of three things we need to rethink. What we have to say, the policies, the ideas, hold absolutely true to the ones where our values are at stake,

but reconsider any ones that just aren't quite right. That's what we have to say. How we say it. A lot of that's the tone. It's the messenger. Especially the way we talk to Trump voters we're trying to win over. Because I told you so is not a great way. Like, anybody who's, like, ever been married knows that, like, right?

That's, like, not a smart way. Like, even if you think you're being vindicated on something. And obviously, we're going to have lots of moments. You're saying carry yourself with some humility. I mean, even when you're right. Especially when you're right. And be open to the possibility. Maybe you weren't right about some things.

Don't be a sore winner. Yeah. Right. So there's what we have to say. There's how we say it. And then the other big thing that my party is terribly behind on is where we say it. And by this, I mean, what media says. spaces we are in. You know, I did a couple appearances, kind of almost last minute ideas where

during the campaign last year as I was working to help my party. I did some things on online YouTube-based media outlets I had never even heard of. Right. And had more people coming up to me, but different people than came up to me if I'd been on CNN. More likely to be a high school student or a server at a place where I was grabbing somebody who had not gotten to know me through some of the other media that I was doing every day, but did get to know me through some of these other media. That's the podcast thing, right? My party's all up in arms about who's our Joe Rogan.

We're not going to have a Joe Rogan to the left. That's not how it works. It's also not something you can conjure in the way that, you know, they just think, oh, let's inorganically build this thing. Those positions have been built over time and they've earned their credibility and they've earned their authenticity and they've earned all those things that they have. You can't just poof them into existence. But we also, where they are there and where they are willing to give us a hearing, we should show up. Same as I made a habit of showing up on Fox News, right?

I think we're really struggling to find people where they are. And by the way, very impactful when you show up in spaces and articulate something that they, It almost feels novel to them. Exactly. To hear it laid out in that way. I could say something, I could be the 10th person to say roughly the same thing on a liberal show. Or I could literally be the first time somebody heard a certain idea if I'm in a more conservative space, which is why right-wing spaces like X and like Fox News I think continue to be important for people

like me to be in. But we've also got to be finding folks who are not always looking for politics. Right. people who have other shit to do. Yeah. Yeah. No, I find that a lot of the media now is it really has become a kind of self-sustaining legacy kind of complex.

And I always tell people, you know, like even with shows like mine, I run like a tower records. Like we are in many respects, dinosaurs, dinosaurs of infrastructure. Like I'm out there like, hey, kids, come on in and see the new CDs on the rack. And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't go into brick and, mortar stores, I don't listen. You know, and these things naturally evolve and there is a churn and new voices arise and those voices can be really exciting and valuable and it creates, you know,

new avenues to express these ideas. And that should be exciting and empowering, but only if we know what we're doing and we can't be naive about it, right? So on one hand, things are, you know, ideas are spreading and compelling voices are emerging and are spreading in this space, but also, let's be clear, the Wright has a very sophisticated infrastructure to amplify some of those voices. No question. And it feels organic, it looks organic. They have these things, you know, many of them propagating through spaces that I barely

understand like Discord, but that reach people and feel real. And so we need to be as savvy about the mechanics of that. kind of stuff. In the same way that, you know, 30, 50, 70 years ago, a DNC operative would need to be smart about, I don't know, how to buy radio ads in the new radio era or, you know, a bunch of stuff they probably hadn't thought about a generation sooner. But there is a lot more Trojan horsing going on nowadays than I think I can ever recall things that are, you know, they keep exposing, oh, there was a Russian oligarch who bought $8 million worth of podcast shows. and didn't, nobody ever said anything,

and they just went through it. And, you know, they are incentivizing. And there's, I guess they used to call it payola. But there's a great deal of that. And even somebody like, you know, Leonard Leo would admit to it. I saw in interview with him where he said, oh, I did what the left did with universities. And you're like, the left didn't do that with university.

They didn't pay millions of dollars to, you know, infiltrate universities with left-wing activism. But that is what he did with the court. And he would say as much. Yes, I'm capturing our court system through the use of money. Like, he'll just say it. No, they think that's fair game. And we have some decisions to make on my side of the aisle about how to maintain our integrity

and also not get outgunned in these spaces where you have that kind of money flying around. Because, you know, something doesn't just show up in your feed just because. Hey, the algorithm is all knowing and all. It's a radicalizing machine. And that's why I always say these things are not the town square. The town square doesn't have suggestions. It doesn't make anti-Semitic remarks at you every time you log into the town square. Like, that's just not how it works.

But I think you're right. Do you feel confident? And I'm cognizant of your time because I know you're probably going to go pick up the kids at a certain point. Or maybe grow that beard out a little more because I got to tell you, you need some work filling in a couple of gaps yeah i'm working on it i'm working on all right very nice uh in your travels are you confident that you've identified at least some of the players that you think will be valuable in creating those three protocols that you talk about have you run across the areas where you think these are the people because it does need macro leadership

You can't wait for life to bubble up from the primordial ooze of the damage of the election. It has to be led and it has to be nurtured. Have you seen the buds of that? I would say to shift metaphors. I'd say the... From primordial ooze? Or buds. Buds.

All right. The pieces are there. The pieces are emerging. I see it everywhere. I see conversations. I see folks iterating, which is part of how this has to work. Again, we talked about risk aversion earlier. Like, we got to try lots of things, some of which will fail and be okay with that.

I see that happening. I don't think that it's been consolidated in any meaningful way. But I think it will, and I will do my part to help. Well, that done. Pete Buttigieg has just volunteered to lead the, if I'm hearing this correctly, and I think I am. I said help. Is going to lead the remade? Help.

Help. The remake. Oh, right. Help. All right. Fair enough. Well, from your mouth to God's ears, sir. Thank you so much, Pete Buttigieg for joining us. And I'm so glad you've been able to take a breather to disconnect, but also have not unconnected. And I look forward to seeing the fruits of all those things in the future. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. Enjoy it. No, man. My pleasure.

Buttigieg. That must be such a weird. You know, we're all in a business where and you guys, we all experienced it working at the problem, where one day you're in the hive of the office and everything is bustling and all those things, and the next day you're crying at a karaoke bar with nothing to fucking do. I wasn't expecting to revisit this today. Yeah.

Right? Oh, God. That was a dark time. I loved his story, though, about going to visit the projects that he had been involved in when he was in charge. I love that. Imagine pulling up to a construction site

being like, hey, how you guys? You know, I, the money. He's undercover bossing it. How's the trenches? Puts on the helmet and a little orange jacket and walks this way through. But have you, you've all had that experience of like one day you're in it and the next day it's just out. And I've always found for me, the way my mind works, that's a really hard adjustment

because the brain is going like this. And when it stops, it turns and it looks at you and like, well, now I'll just devour your face. Like it turns on you. Yeah, I wonder what someone like Kim does with so much free time. Yeah, he's got to find something to do, right? The shame he's not running for anything. Oh, I think he's. Yeah.

Oh, Jillian. Sweet, sweet Jillian. Do you think, or do you think he's like taking pottery classes? Where do you think this thing is doing? Both. Yeah, he's somewhere in the middle. Maybe that's the way to go. But hopefully they'll begin the work on this new plan.

I was like at the end I was like so you'll do that right like it was definitely like gilting him a little bit like so that sounds like a very smart plan you'll do that right you'll get on that what are what are the listeners saying viewers what's this week's uh we got two juicy ones juicy bring them bring them bring them what was the cause of the moment you first found yourself politically engaged? Oh, I mean, I grew up in the late, like I was born at 62, so like one of my first memories was like Martin Luther King being assassinated. Like I was in a kindergarten class in the middle of Trenton and there was unrest and like we had to hide under our desks and we got to eat lunch under our desk and I was like, this is the greatest day ever. Meanwhile, it was, you know, Martin Luther

King of killed. And then Robert Kennedy was killed. And then Vietnam. And I, you know, we knew people in Vietnam and then Watergate. So you can imagine that roiled, you know, for anybody that was, that was supposed to feel like our country was stable and we were on a path to greatness. Like, that was a very volatile, mercurial, tragic, catastrophic error. So, and by the way, I think I said, error and not error, but both are applicable in that. So I think that informed a certain level of skepticism, a certain expectation that things are not inevitable, that things are not solid, and that greatness can be lost, and that it's not a right of passage.

It's not, you know, exceptionalism is not a birthright. right. It's, you know, it's that it's work and shit happens that shocks the conscience and system. And that was that, that's your sort of formative years. And then of course, Reagan came and fixed all of it. So, um, morning in America. Yeah, yeah. But do you now for you guys, you know, we've all grown up in in slightly different eras. Does that resonate with you guys for the way you grew up or not as tumultuous. I mean, 9-11, I think, was the moment. It feels pretty tumultuous. Yeah. That was a biggie for me. Yeah. I remember I went to school in Long Island and I was sitting in my art class and I just saw fire engines going past like all day. And I definitely was curious like what is happening. And they

didn't tell us at the time because there were kids in the school whose parents were in the building. Oh, Jesus. Right. They all got out. They were okay. But that was a, the first time that I was I was inquisitive. But I would say personally, really, like, you kind of had that impact on me, not to make this about you, but. That's a terrible, terrible thing. I apologize. No. No. But yeah, I mean, I would say that that was, you had a big impact on kind of me paying attention politically. Brittany, if I know that, I would have tried much harder if I had gone out on there. Jillian, what about you? Same? Yeah, I mean, I don't, I, you know, obviously it was.

I don't really remember 9-11 as like a very political moment of me being sort of turned on to that. But I would say like Prop 8 in California was a moment where me and my friends got pretty political. Wow. And like the financial crisis as well. So a lot of, you know, people lost their jobs, friends, parents, things. And it was, yeah, like very obviously impactful on. your teenagers. I think like just branching off Jillian's point nine 11 I think became political for me because it wasn't explained in the same way Brittany is describing like we were maybe too young and so

I was watching the news with my family every night and then that was the switch that was like I need to know what this was yeah so isn't it interesting though that for for all of us and maybe it's just the way that that I started framing it but that the awakening is based on chaos and disorder and not on hope. And like, I think if you talk to other people, they might say, oh, mine was Martin Luther King organizing marches or Obama's election or, you know, something else that was gravitational, but to the positive.

And I wonder if that changes your perspective. Because when you do ask me, like, it's not, I was not raised into politics through operative. optimism. It was through chaos. That's such a good point. And I wonder what that does to your, I don't know, to your mentality. It's a good question though. But you expect chaos maybe. Yeah. Or that you carry yourself like, it's sort of like when you live in New York. You carry yourself like you're braced. You don't, nobody like strolls through New York. Yeah. And if you do, we're trying to get around you. Exactly. By the way. Move to the side. Excellent point by Jillian. If you are

strolling through New York. Do it around 10th Avenue or the 1st Avenue. Don't do it towards the center. No. You'll fuck everything. You'll fuck everything. This isn't the green mile. This is a sidewalk. Very nice.

All right. We got another one. All right. Should elected officials like Ted Cruz, for example, be allowed to have podcasts? Sure. The more Ted Cruz, the better. As you always say. As I have always said, I can't get enough of that sweets.

Texas man. Of course they should be allowed to have podcasts. I don't know why they would want them, but I do think they should be. I think they think this format is the new media. And so, but oftentimes I think familiarity breeds contempt to a large extent.

And those things are not as intentional and directional. And you're seeing it now, like everybody that wants to run for president is like, I know how I'll do it. I'll start a podcast and you're like, the first week, everybody's like, oh, this shit. Wow, was that an hour and a half?

That was fucking long. Like it's, I don't know that it's necessarily the best way for those folks to communicate. I think obviously transparency, but, you know, certainly they should be allowed to. And as a matter of fact, I think in this country, podcasts may become mandatory for everybody, for everybody over 14. But certainly, I love the fact that Ted Cruz is the person that they brought up. Yeah. So Ted Cruz be allowed to? like, boy, I do want to say free speech and I do want people to have, but Ted Cruz, that is

mm. Brittany, how can they keep in touch with us? Twitter, we are weekly show pod, Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast. And you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with John Stewart. As always, great job, guys. Lee producer, Lauren Walker, producer of Brittany Mehmedevic, video editor and engineer Rob Vatolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer Jillian Spare.

our executive producers, including just back from maternity leave, the great Katie Gray and Mr. Crispic Shane. We're delighted to see you back and, uh, and, and delighted with little baby Nora. She's so cute. Um, all right. We're starting a whole, we're starting like a weekly show commune. All kinds of things. Uh, we'll see you next week.

Mm-hmm. And, uh, and that's it. Wait. The weekly show with John Stewart is a comedy central podcast. is produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.