Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has had, I think it's fair to say,
a difficult run of things.
He's in charge of transportation and across pretty much all
the different areas of transportation I can think of it's been rough.
Gas prices have made driving hard, the planes haven't worked in, like,
two years, and a train travel, especially freight travel, has faced some obstacles
in terms of the trains not being on the tracks where they should be be.
So, if you have an opportunity to talk to Pete Buttigieg,
I can't think of a more interesting member of the Biden cabinet to speak to.
And Wired actually just recently had an opportunity to talk to Pete Buttigieg.
There are any number of interesting questions to ask him, but you'll have to
wait for the next interview, I suppose, for that, because instead we got this.
And I love this article because there's nothing I enjoy more on
the Internet than really not being sure if something is satire or not.
Now, I come out of all of my research,
I have found no evidence that this is satirical.
It's being presented as 100% honest, and yet
there is something inside of me that does not want to accept that.
Let's see if you experience the same sensation.
First of all, the name of the article is, Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and
His Electric Mustang.
[LAUGH] Come on, you guys are a joke.
>> A hilarious joke.
I thought it was parody, John.
I really did.
>> Yeah, look, the sentence below it is maybe even more embarrassing,
which is why I think they made the font smaller.
Sure, the US Secretary of Transportation has thoughts on building bridges, but
infrastructure occupies just a sliver of his voluminous mind.
[LAUGH] You're not legally allowed to say that the person that you're interviewing,
it's a member of the government, has a voluminous mind.
Apparently you are, I guess, freedom of speech Elon Musk did bring it back.
Anyway, I wanna read the first two paragraphs of the article,
because if I don't read every word, there's no way that you're going
to believe that this is actually what it said.
And, again, could be satire, but I've seen no proof of it.
The curious mind of Pete Buttigieg,
my favorite movie, after all, holds much of its functionality and reserve.
Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointless data that
is his current stock-in-trade, the US Secretary of Transportation comes off like
a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or
a three-second Rubik's Cube solution or a knack for
supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404,
along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.
That can't be an actual paragraph that a person wrote that went through editors,
that was not intended to satirize modern media.
That has to be what's behind this.
Let's dig deeper, as Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner
office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job
requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers.
Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad,
Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard's spring,
though not in the original Norwegian slacker.
Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to
making his ideas about three mighty themes, neoliberalism, masculinity, and
Christianity, intelligible to me.
Thank God he was able to finally get through.
By the way, it could be satire,
because there's no doubt that this writer is obviously very intelligent.
I have always prided myself on my vocabulary, and there's ,like,
three or four words there I don't even know what they mean.
So clearly, the writer is an intelligent person.
I have written anniversary cards to my wife, I wrote my vows.
I have written things that are designed to demonstrate the deep connection I have
to another person, that is deeply complimentary and supportive.
And I have never written anything of my wife that is as supportive of a person as
this writer just did for
the person that they're supposed to be having a critical interview with.
>> No, guys, you got to be thinking at this point, no, really, it's 50-50, right?
Whether it's satire or not, swear to God, it is not at all satire.
You read the whole thing, it's super honest, and
they're actually calling Buttigieg's mind a cathedral mind, okay?
And guys, I went to the same schools as Buttigieg.
So, not the exact same schools, but here I'm gonna be forced to say it,
I went to Wharton, the top business school, Columbia Law School, etc.
And I know guys who literally we're in the same class as Buttigieg, okay?
These are party tricks that he's doing.
It's not actual intelligence.
I'm not saying Buttigieg is dumb, >> People say he's smart.
Everybody seems to agree he is smart.
>> No, he is perfectly intelligent.
But the idea that he's some sort of beautiful mind genius
that you can't understand because he's so busy reading Faustian whatever.
You kidding me, are you kidding me?
It's party tricks.
>> Noscord is acclaimed.
>> So look, here's what I used to do to give you a sense of what cheesy
guys like me did in school, okay?
That's why I can see his party tricks from a mile away,
coz this is the kind of crap I used to play when I was a kid, okay?
You read the first chapter of the book, you read the last chapter of the book,
then you read three very specific details in the middle, okay?
Then when you go to write an essay or talk to a reporter,
you mention three very specific detailed points.
And they go, he has such command of the material.
What a cathedral mind.
It works on teachers just as well as it works on reporters.
It's all a trick, okay?
And why are they doing this marketing job for Pete Buttigieg?
That's the more interesting question.
These stories come out when someone's about to run for office.
This story is out right now because they're worried about Joe Biden.
And they think they might have to send in Pete Buttigieg.
And that is why mainstream media has been unleashed to go back to Philadium.
That's what happened the last time in 2020,
everybody was all over, the greatest.
Did you know he once learned Norwegian just to read a book?
How do you not see that that's lie?
To be fair, I didn't see it in the beginning either, and
I've hated myself for not realizing that in day one, minute one.
You learned Norwegian just to read a book, you liar.
Norwegian reporter asked him something in Norwegian, he's like, what?
They don't know Norwegian, okay?
These guys, come on, guys.
In the middle of this article, they talk about masculinity.
And he's like, well, masculinity is a new definition, etc.
On the one hand I'm gay and I like rearing the children, etc.
And he says so that's part of the new masculinity, potentially.
I'm like, okay, great, I agree with that totally, right?
He's like, on the other hand, I've got the traditional things,
like I like drinking beers and working out with weights and splitting wood.
I was like, splitting wood?
Splitting wood.
You're going out with an axe in Washington, DC, and
splitting wood in the backyard, why?
You're the Transportation secretary.
This is such an obvious lie.
If I'm the reporter, he's like, I was out there,
I just thought of this afternoon splitting wood with my axe.
Really?
Can I see your axe?
Can I see the wood you split?
Coz I think you're monumentally full of crap.
Instead, Wired Magazine is like, a brilliant cathedral mind.
If Biden doesn't run, he should definitely be him and not a progressive.
Wait, did I say that out loud?
Okay, no, you didn't.
This is pure propaganda disguised as journalism.
Which, to be fair, is almost the entirety of mainstream media.
>> McKinsey's secret.
I can't believe you said that on the air.
You showed people how to read a book like a Harvard student, front cover,
back cover, and a couple of points in the middle.
And you're right.
I mean, the transportation secretary proving to have a little bit more
tough time managing this than he thought it would be at McKinsey.
And part of the reason that he gets this glowing press is because one
of the open secrets of DC is he spends a lot of his day working with press,
having lunch with reporters, managing his brand.
And I would love to talk to Pete Buttigieg and
explore his cathedral mind, but I can't.
Because the plane from LaGuardia keeps getting canceled because
the Transportation secretary isn't working.
>> Yeah, I'm going to read you guys one more example.
Because, look, the reporter, lengthy interview,
could have asked him about all of his failings.
Hey, Pete, the planes don't seem to work, you're the Transportation secretary.
Hey, Pete, there's like a mushroom cloud over Ohio,
you're the Transportation secretary, right?
Instead, super vague general questions which Buttigieg responded to with word
salad, as he always does, and then the reporter was like, so brilliant, okay?
So let me give you an example.
And every paragraph, every question has this.
But it's just a random one, not even a particularly good one.
Climate change, here's what Buttigieg said.
The lived reality of the younger generations is that they are experiencing
climate issues not as a theoretical possibility, but as a clear and
present danger.
These are generations that have experienced the reality, the disparities,
including racial disparities, left alone, will only compound.
They won't cure of their own gravitational tendency.
Yeah, but what did you just say?
Did you propose a policy?
No, there's not any policy in the whole interview.
No policy at all.
It's just these words,
the climate change with the gravitational tendency of the younger people.
And that's why we're gonna do nothing.
>> Yeah.
>> And you thought that was a cathedral mind.
>> Maybe like a small rural church, something like that.
>> Not to take away from the cathedral mind, but if you say something is a lived
reality, you don't also need to add that it's not theoretical.
That's what lived reality means.
>> Definitional.
Yeah, I agree with most of what he said there.
That does not mean that if he, God forbid, becomes president,
that he's gonna do literally anything about it.
Again, final point >> That's my point.
There was nothing wrong with what he said, it was just gobbledygook.
It didn't propose any policy,
it just made it sound like, a gravitational tendency has not been met.
Now I'm confused as to what we're gonna do.
>> Gravity is science.
>> I got news for you, you're gonna do nothing.
That's what you're going to do.
>> Yeah. >> But let's go to the Levers reporting.
So real quick, what I wanted to say is, if you cared about actual reporting,
the independent progressive analysts like the Lever are doing amazing work, okay?
Because they did an article about Buttigieg, and
not because it's about Buttigieg, but because, my God, they're about to
approve this rail that goes through land right next to the Colorado River.
If there's a spill, which there almost certainly will be,
could infect that water that serves millions of Americans.
There's absolutely no reason to approve it.
And Biden and Buttigieg are going to approve it.
Why? Coz it's a private equity company that has
bought this rail, and they're demanding $80 million in public money.
Why?
Why would I give you money to make my profit?
>> Well, obviously cuts compensation for
their great experience in building these sorts of railroads, as you will find out.
So here's the details from the Lever.
You can look at the lever for their full reporting.
But they say, in the parched Southwest,
one in eight Americans rely on a single drought-stressed river that carries
snowmelt from Rocky Mountain peaks down to desert communities.
But instead of strengthening protections for that crucial water supply,
the Biden administration has quietly laid the groundwork for
a financial firm full of former government officials to use it as a route for
oil trains amid heightened concerns about derailments.
The Utah project, which already received federal permitting approval, is audacious.
It aims to run trains full of petroleum from Northeast Utah's Uinta Basin along
the banks of the Colorado River as it winds through treacherous canyons prone to
rock slides and mudslides.
So, difficult route, basically, is what they're sketching out.
This would be tough for anyone, any firm.
Unfortunately for us, this is not just any firm.
This is a firm that has never successfully developed a major infrastructure project,
though it says it has, quote, leveraged a proprietary set of relationships that its
executives built during their time in government.
Which is good, because if I had time for a follow up question, it would have been,
have you leveraged a proprietary set of relationships?
So check that off, they have.
And so the project's developers are planning to ask Buttigieg to approve
private activity bonds subsidized by $80 million per year in federal tax breaks
to finance the railroad's construction.
The center for Biological Diversity has calculated that the bonds, which would
be offered at a 6% interest rate, compared to the typical corporate bond rate of 10%,
would cost US taxpayers $80 million annually for the 40-year term of the bond.
Look, I can't calculate how much that is.
I don't have a cathedral mind, but it's a lot of money.
>> Yeah.
So they're gonna give a gift, an $80 million gift paid for
by us, the taxpayers, to their donors.
Their donors are filled to the room with private equity, guys.
Pete Buttigieg's entire career is based on serving private equity and his donors.
Has mainstream media mentioned Pete Buttigieg's donors once?
Not to my knowledge.
Okay, they're too busy complimenting him on his wood splitting and
his Mustang that he drives around, but not for political purposes, okay?
He just happened to get a Mustang that happens to be American made and
look kinda cool and tough.
>> It's electric.
>> And it's electric.
>> It is cool.
>> Perfect combination.
But not for political purposes.
Julia Rock who wrote the Lever piece, an actual journalist.
Hey, they're gonna approve that thing.
It's going to spill into the water and they're gonna make us pay for it.
And Buttigieg is totally in favor,
he's actually making things worse and not better.
That's real journalism, not ,oh my God,
have you taken time out from reading all of the work of Camus to do
just 10% of your time for the Department of Transportation?
Because that's all you need, that's all you need.
Jesus, mainstream media reporters humiliate themselves on a daily basis.
>> And quite frankly, I think the description of the project undersells it.
This is the most American project of all time, really.
You have an existing railroad that just needs some repair to be less dangerous,
but they're not gonna do that.
What they're gonna do is build a whole new separate track next to it through
perilous ground at huge expense.
And the only real beneficiaries here are some of the companies Pete Buttigieg just
work for.
>> Yeah.
And look, I'll close with this.
If you were going to have a firm that was going to do this sort of project,
you'd want one with a lot of experience.
But since we don't, I'd like to offer a tip.
If it is gonna go through an area with really thick forest,
I know someone who could help you get through there.
[LAUGH] >> Yeah, we got a wood-splitting expert.
The secretary of Transportation is a tough guy.
And remember, everybody,
when he runs much better than every progressive who cannot win.
>> How do you say timber in Norwegian?
I don't know and neither does he.