Pete Buttigieg: The Left's Identity Crisis, Wealth Tax, 2024 Mistakes, Plans for 2028

**Pete Buttigieg** (0:00)
There are certain trillion-dollar ideas that the private sector just won't do because it doesn't pencil or because of whatever market failure is there. That's where you need government. First of all, the debt path we're on is not sustainable. That I think identity has become too central to how my party thinks. My big worry is that if we're already at a level of concentration of wealth and power that no republic has ever survived, is this going to be a development that just makes wealth and power even more concentrated in even fewer hands?

**Jason** (0:31)
All right, besties, I think that was another epic discussion.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:36)
I could hear them talk for hours. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion.

**Pete Buttigieg** (0:44)
That was fun.

**Jason** (0:47)
All right, everybody, welcome back to the AllIn Podcast Interview Series. Last week, we had Joe Manchin on this week. Pete Buttigieg is here. Everybody knows Mayor Pete. Born in South Bend, Harvard, Rhodes Scholar, McKinsey, US Navy, and of course, ran for president and was the Transportation Secretary under Biden. Welcome to the program, Pete Buttigieg. How are you?

**Pete Buttigieg** (1:13)
Good. Thanks for having me.

**Jason** (1:15)
Pleasure. Meet Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Democrat who re-underwrite his support of your party and now is a Republican. Really, the spirit of this program is to just have a candid discussion. We like to get into the details. And so I thought I wanted to start with your perception of entrepreneurs, technologists, et cetera. I was watching a clip of you on Bill Maher and you said, hey, you know, these libertarian science based folks in Silicon Valley, they made a very practical decision. These are rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for rich men. And these rich men include Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. These are people who have been part of the Democratic Party for a very long time, huge donors to the Democratic Party. And they all made this sort of flip. Do you think it was just pragmatically based upon the desire to have less regulations, a better business environment to personally make more money? Or do you think there were other things that work with the loss in 2024?

**Pete Buttigieg** (2:25)
Well, I don't think you can reduce it to any one thing, but I certainly think that's part of the story. Look, it's no secret that Republican policies tend to favor people who are wealthier. And a lot of the people who drifted away from the Democratic Party, at least the ones who were getting a lot of attention, like how could these business figures, investors, billionaires, have gotten away from Democrats and gone to Republicans, might be kind of a dog bites man story, like not something that's wildly complicated. If you look at the fact that Democrats have been extremely concerned about wealth and income inequality, and you got a lot of very, very wealthy people. I don't think it was just that. I mean, I think there are a lot of things that kind of combined at once. But for a lot of my friends who are scratching their heads saying, wait a minute, these are folks who are from the tech and science world. How could they back a president or administration that's been deleting references to science and kind of censoring science, at least anytime that climate is concerned? A lot of these guys are libertarian. How could they be on board with the administration that is sending troops into streets and has really let a crack down on freedom? That's kind of something out of the fever dreams of my conservative and libertarian friends back when we were arguing about politics over beers. That I never thought I would see happen. These folks, some of these folks are gay and how can they be backing an administration that's really assaulted LGBT rights? If you just go down the list, there's a lot of things that are counterintuitive about some of these Silicon Valley leaders who flipped, in many cases flipped from being very, very active Democrats to backing Trump.
Maybe there's an intuitive answer to that counterintuitive thing, which is that many of them feel their short-term business interests or personal financial interests are better served by Republicans. I get that. I would counter, as I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley who were still Democrats would, that, look, a healthy business environment, you don't want to be over-regulated, but you also want to make sure your environment with rule of law. You want to be in a place where it's safe to say scientific truths out loud. You want to be in a place where somebody can't impose their interpretation of their religion on other people. I have a whole counter to that. But I think that's the kind of swirl that we got into, definitely just in those short years between 2020 and 2024