The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - Tariff-ying Times with Pete Buttigieg

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

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 Jon Stewart. It is 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 process 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 you a 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 gonna 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 waiting for Trump to come out and wear the jacket with the epaulettes or whatever it is that those guys like to do. Come up with a nickname, but you gotta live up to that end of the bargain

from what I understand. But it's been 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 gonna 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 beard 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 think we're going to go with it for a little while. We'll see. What is, I'm always curious, leaving the government in the way that you guys had, right? It's an incredibly intense experience to work with when you're in the government at that higher level and you're managing things at that higher 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're sort of now, you've been running at 120 miles an hour and then suddenly it's, doot. 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 anywhere 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 I guess I should feed the dog now. It's a strange feeling.

You hadn't fed the dog while you were working. I was already feeding the dog. But suddenly, all these things around the house start to loom larger. You realize all these things have been neglecting. Obviously, I was leaning a lot on my husband, Chastain, the whole time. And I had a wonderful family that,

as anytime you're in a job like this, supports you and makes it possible. Then you realize you're kinda making up for lost time. Suddenly it's like, 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 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 you don't have,

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 Chast 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 here 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 of the projects that we funded. I want to see how it was going. And 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. But I think all of us are, at the same time, obviously just 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, 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.

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 papa, Chastain'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. 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 on the teeniest policy thing about, I don't know, it could be anything, toys, candy. 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. 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. Part of that was because of trade and the way it was handled. And we spent the last 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 just

found out that there was just a basic math error in how they came up with these numbers. Oh, 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. Businesses of all sizes are deciding whether to make an investment or not, whether to hire somebody or not.

I already talked to a lot of people. I spend a day a week at the University of Chicago talking to students. 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, a tariff is a tax. The price we pay goes up. Will it be priced so? 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 part. What's this going to do to people's jobs? And it's hard enough to have those price increases if you continue to have a full employment economy, 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 gonna be able to move. 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 US Congress, then okay, this may not be your problem overnight. You could ride it out. If you're a billionaire, you could probably ride it out.

You'll probably be OK, 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. This is people's lives. And obviously, with the stock market taking the turn that it has the last few days,

that's people's retirements. And that's not just people sitting on giant trust funds. That's ordinary people have been saving up all their lives. Do you find it interesting 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 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 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, 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? Are we fighting a war that was fought in the 50s and 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. 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 where they were. 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 things is 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, but- The five trillion dollars, 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, the 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 a 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 liked 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, OK, 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 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 paying more because of 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 gonna stimulate the economy, how they're gonna 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 it now, consistent logic. Why bother with that? I mean, for them, it's not their problem. They don't view an honest conversation about the finer points of policy as 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 in the service of the bigger vision. But

yeah, 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 like 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 this is 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 to all the air traffic controllers in the middle of an air traffic control shortage, right? They- Insane. 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. These screw-ups are not something that causes introspection. 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, 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 your lying eyes, no problem, you problem, the leader knows best, then why bother going through the finer points of making sure that all the places you're putting tariffs on are actually countries or checking your math once or twice before you throw the markets into total turmoil, right?

I imagine it's got to be mind-blowingly frustrating to watch shit like that go down. Stock market's 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 said, 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. What if you took an extra two days? 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, 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. I, whether it's a country, a company, or an industry, and think of a way to say, you want 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. Really? 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 gonna 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 Frog, 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.

I'm not here to say that everything should be put back the way it was in 2024 or 2015 or 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. These things are real. I'm not saying they're not.

And to incentivize progress. Totally. 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 no bless oblige in 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 in, you know, 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 I mean, without getting into all the guts of things like the Administrative Procedures Act, right?

There is a sort of a- Oh, let's get into the guts, baby. Come on! I mean, there is 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 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.

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. 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? Cause 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 in 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 going to weed out waste, fraud, and abuse, those protocols create waste, fraud, and abuse. Those protocols create waste, fraud, and abuse. In other words, you treat whatever 2% to 3% of fraudulent or wasteful or abusive practices

are going to occur, you're going to make the other 97% of the people go through an incredibly inefficient, not commonsensical process. Maybe'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 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 will 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 that's, 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. 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.

So 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 War II transatlantic security framework, the assumptions around how alliances work and how the US fits in with them, and obviously,

assumptions around trade, as we've known it for my entire adult life, is gone, or will be gone by the time these guys are done with it. So it's time to take a breath and say, OK, 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 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, 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, if you're so libertarian or conservative, that you thought the Clean Air Act was tyranny. Right? I got to think whether you're saying it out loud or not, that you thought the Clean Air Act was tyranny, right? Right. Then I've 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 whatever, 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 him 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 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 anything after the tornado. It's where's the money? Quick break. We'll be right back. ["The Liberty"]

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? 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 it 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 expect out of their taxpayer dollar, that the roads are getting built, that the power stations are getting built. It's just like stuff works. I mean, to me, even some really nerdy stuff about digital citizenship. The fact that 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. I mean, we got some 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 onto a better track in the last few years. Because we had a government that was standing up for people. You had Rohit Chopra over at 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. 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. These kinds of things click to cancel. This rule out of the FTC, which I think the Trump administration

is trying to get rid of. But this is one that says, you ever sign up for gym membership or a newsletter or something? And they make it physically, like you've got to go into the guts of the email to then. Yeah, you have to get there on a Tuesday and pay in quarters only. 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. You've got to drive there and do it in person. So that got addressed. And now they're trying to take it back. Trump folks are trying to take it back to where you're vulnerable. 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. Mmm-hmm. We are here because the system we inherited is at best showing its flaws

and at worst is just no longer up to the task of what it takes to help people live free and thriving lives in the middle of the 21st century. Right. And to have that coherent, we were talking to Michael Lewis last week, and he said something I thought was really a great nugget about this, which was 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, 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. I've always said, I think the biggest limit to American freedom and liberty is poverty and struggle 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, right? And again, look, the folks in charge right now, they're not sitting up at 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 no margin of error. Your parents are getting older as your kids are getting ready to go to college and the childcare isn't there. I always found it interesting if you look at the tranches of where your taxes go. 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 the 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 it's 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 national child care. Or health care. Yeah, at least healthcare, we've at least gotten to where most people are insured. There's a lot more, there's a lot that's messed up about our healthcare system.

But when I look at where we're at on childcare, 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, we ought to do next year We got to get rid of our parental leave, right? You know, that was a big mistake. We shouldn't do that anymore I I love that Denmark has parental leave and has national health care and we looked at their country and thought, you know We got to take from them Greenland like the one thing 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 there will work here. 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, end of 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 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 DC. 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 100 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 what 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. 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, but let me- Oh, right. Let me point to a couple of really interesting examples, right? Yeah. One, Nancy Pelosi. She excused herself. 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 Europe. 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. Your equivalent from another country comes in. You have a bilateral meeting. You discuss areas of cooperation, any issues that you need to 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 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. So- 55? Yeah. He's not even old enough to be in the Senate yet. Wow. 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. Another person I got to know, the Australian ambassador to the US, fascinating guy. He was the premier, he was the prime minister, the US, 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 before he was in charge. 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 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 difficulty 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 hypothesis 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 experienced 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 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 hear. 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 than 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 smaller city like I led in Northern Indiana, you eat what you cook. Whatever decisions you make, good or bad, you're making them for yourself and for your neighbor.

And your neighbor is going to come find you and tell you what they think. And somebody is going to catch you at the grocery store and tell you what they think. And you gonna catch you at the grocery store and tell you what they think. And like you're getting a lot of feedback all the time from friends, frenemies, 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 activists gets in their face. And look, that can 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're 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 Yeah, it's your job to be responsive. Literally, you are a representative of the people. 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.

I mean, we know 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, not to sound pious, but the answer to that is supposed to be democracy. 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. 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. And they stop doing them. They went into the lion's den and you're like, of your voters, of your constituents.

They stopped doing them. Look, I've... They just stopped. I've had my ass handed to me in public meetings. It's not fun, but 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 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 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. I mean, even TV 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 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,

I can remember reviews of things I've made, like a movie or something, where it's just ripping me to shit, and I gotta get through it, but there's one nugget in there that I'll read and go like, oh, God, that's right. Why didn't I do that? Have you had that experience? Yeah, sure. All the time. I mean, there are times you see things, you just... Look, there's a bias toward being defensive of everything

you've done. That's human. That's not just politics. That's human. But you want to encounter people. One thing I did a lot is I sat down with 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 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. It's making sure that out in these rural areas where there's not a lot of private sectors not going to do it, we're making sure that there's charging. 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, it would maybe be very interesting to an elk that comes by from time to time. Could rub his antlers on it. But it's not going to do much 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 you think you go in with an idea. You hope you're right. But you've got to be open to finding out that that's maybe not how you thought it was. And that's OK. That's how it's supposed to work. Right.

And 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 the new guy they got at the DNC, his first comment was like, their billionaires are terrible, but our billionaires are great. It was just like, oh shit, we're screwed. Are you seeing a nascent effort in the way that the Republicans, they had all their ducks in a row when they got in the door. It doesn't seem like Democrats have any ducks. They're all free range. They're all flying around.

Yeah, we're not really top down kind of people, right? Even bottom up. The sooner we can accept 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, 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 saluting and marching forward, that's just, 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, it's 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 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 spaces we are in. I did a couple appearances, 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 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 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 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 it almost feels novel to them.

Exactly. To hear it laid out in that way. Exactly. 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. 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 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 right has a very sophisticated infrastructure to amplify some of those voices. No question. And it feels organic, it looks organic. They have these things, 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 30, 50, 70 years ago, a DNC operative would need to be smart about how to buy radio ads in the new radio era, or 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 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 like Leonard Leo would admit to it. I saw an 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 universities. They didn't pay millions of dollars to 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. 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 something doesn't just show up in your feed just because. The algorithm is all knowing it 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 probably got 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, friend, you need some work filling in a couple of gaps. Yeah, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. All right. Very nice. 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 the, to shift metaphors, I'd say the- From primordial? Or buds.

Buds, all right. The pieces are there. The pieces are emerging. I see it everywhere. I see conversations, I see folks iterating trying, 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 remake, oh, all right, help. All right, fair enough. Well, I'm hearing this correctly, and I think I am. I said help. Is going to lead the remake. Oh, all right. Help. All right. Fair enough. Well, from your mouth to God's ear, 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. Buddha judge. 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 and 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 his 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. 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, now I'll just devour your face. It turns on you. I wonder what someone like Kim does with so much free time. He's got to find something to do, right?

It's a shame he's not running for anything. Oh, I think he's- Yet. Oh, Gillian. Sweet, sweet Gillian. Or do you think he's taking pottery classes? Where do you think this thing is going? Both.

Yeah, he's somewhere in the middle. Maybe that's the way to go, but hopefully they'll begin to work on this new plan. I was like at the end, I was like, so you'll do that, right? Like I was definitely like, guilting 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 the listeners saying, viewers? What's this week's? 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 in 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 was 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 very volatile, mercurial, tragic, catastrophic error. So, and by the way, I think I said error and not era, 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. That it's not a rite of passage. It's not exceptionalism is not a birthright.

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, a 9-11, I think was the moment.

Feels pretty tumultuous. Yeah. 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 the first time that 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, but yeah, I mean, I would say that that was, you had a big impact on kind of me getting,

or paying attention politically. Brittany, if I had known 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, 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 and- Wow. And like the financial crisis as well. So a lot of people lost their jobs, friends, parents, and it was, yeah, like very obviously impactful on your teenage years. I think like just branching off Jillian's point, 9-11 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. Isn't it interesting though that 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 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. That 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. 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 1st Avenue. Don't do it towards the center. No. You'll fuck everything up.

This isn't the green mile, this is a sidewalk. Very nice. All right, we got another one. 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 sweet, sweet 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 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. 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. That 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.

Should Ted Cruz be allowed to? And you're like, boy, I do want to say free speech and I do want people to have, but Ted Cruz, that is mmm. Brittany, how can they keep in touch with us? Twitter, we are weekly show pod, Instagram threads, TikTok, blue sky. We are weekly show podcasts and you can like subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly show with Jon Stewart. As always, great job guys.

Lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer of Brittany Mametovic video editor and engineer, Rob Vitolo audio editor and engineer, Nicolece, researcher and associate producer, Gillian Spear, and our executive producers, including just back from eternity leave, the great Katie Gray and Mr. Chris McShane. We're delighted to see you back and delighted with little baby Nora. She's so cute. All right. We're starting a whole, we're starting like a weekly show commune. We're getting all kinds of things. We'll see you next week. And that's it. Bye.

The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions. ["The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"]