We just talked with Pete Buttigieg, the former secretary of transportation and once (and future?) presidential candidate, (and 8,400 of you). We got into EVERYTHING.
I asked him what’s going on with air travel, why Democrats are more unpopular than Trump, whether he now favors a bolder policy approach than the one he campaigned on in 2020, whether he can imagine himself in a political partnership with AOC, if there is anything he admires about Trump, whether voters are right to feel ghosted by Democrats, how he is deciding about running for president, whether he thinks being gay is still a hindrance to his chances, and what he hopes to be able to tell his grandkids about what he did at this moment in history.
He spoke in the end about the future that could be if Americans meet this right — seriously address the challenges of the crisis of democracy, of rising inequality, and the transformation of labor and society by artificial intelligence, and more.
“We don’t run the risk of living in a time that doesn’t matter,” Buttigeig told us. “We want to look back from the perspective of ‘Here’s how we made it right’ rather than ‘that’s when it all went wrong forever.’”
More Live conversations this week!
Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 14, at 12:15 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. And after that, at 1:00 p.m., we’ll have the second meeting of The Ink Book Club, where we’ll be diving deeper into Abundance. Then on Thursday, May 15, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll welcome the return of messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio; then following that at 1:15 p.m., we will be joined by Amanda Litman of Run for Something. You won’t want to miss any of these!
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