A veteran; a Christian; a gay man; a Rhodes Scholar; a McKinsey consultant; a mayor; the only child of academics; a minivan-loving father of two toddlers; a beer-drinking, wood-splitting Midwesterner.

That is a partial profile of the man running transportation in America, transportation that defines every choice we have-- what school we can go to, what park we can play in, what factory, warehouse, or office building we can get to in time for the starting bell, not to mention how easy or hard it is to get to your ailing mother or that job interview that might change your life.

Social mobility depends on actual mobility.

Pete Buttigieg is trying to put more things in reach for more Americans because if you can get where you're going, you can put yourself right where you want to be.

I'm Kelly Corrigan.

This is "Tell Me More," and here's my conversation with infrastructure nerd, piano player, and the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

♪ It's so common that people believe in this ability to compartmentalize.

You have such an interesting profile, sort of original for us, and I wondered if you could talk about the ways that these 4 things affect your policymaking-- being a small-city mayor, two is being a veteran, 3 is being a Christian, and 4 is being a gay man, so can you go one by one and tell us how you think they help you make better policy or see different solutions or coordinate and collaborate?

I'll try.

OK.

When you're a mayor, especially in a smaller community where people come and find you-- you know, you go grocery shopping, and you get an earful about what's going on with trash pickup or the streets-- first of all, you're reminded every day the whole point of public service, which is to solve problems and make everyday life easier, and it helped me develop a philosophy of public service which is that the most basic things are connected to the meaning of life.

You're better able to have a meaningful life if you're not worried about whether there's a road to get to where you're going or whether your trash got picked up or whether your water's safe to drink, and I think that philosophy of public service is very important to bring with you into some of these heady spaces around Washington, where partisanship and ideology tend to take over if you let them.

How about being in Afghanistan?

Well, one thing I got out of being in Afghanistan was the ability to very quickly form very deep connections of trust with people that I barely knew at first and people who had radically different backgrounds than me in terms of where they were from or their political values, racial, regional, you name it.

A big part of my job, actually, was driving.

In order for my commander to go outside the wire, it was usually necessary for me to come along, and sometimes I would have to put together a little crew to take equipment or people on the road between Kabul and Bagram, and when we were all getting ready to get into the vehicle, nobody cared if I was going home to a girlfriend or a boyfriend or what party I belong to.

It was, "Do you know what you're doing?

"Can I trust you to keep your eyes on the road?

"Have you looked at the threat reporting from last night?"

and so--even though all we had in common was sometimes the flag on our shoulder, it felt like-- that was all it took for us to be able to trust and work together, and I try to bring that spirit to work in the civilian world.

I'd like to see more of that spirit prevail in Washington, Yeah.

and it affects everything that I do.

How about being a Christian?

Well, let me preface this by saying, when you're in public service, you make sure that any decision you make is appropriate to people who share your faith or don't, people of any faith or no faith, but of course it affects my understanding of what I was put on this earth to do and the idea that you're supposed to order your steps toward the service of others and making yourself useful to others and that what is particularly worthy is to be there to either support or defend those who have less-- those who have less means, those who have less power, those who have less social acceptance in the world.

Yeah, the least of my brother.

Exactly.

What about being gay?

You know, I would maybe append to that being a dad, a gay, married father of toddlers, a boy and a girl.

Penelope and Gus, good names.

Penelope and Gus, and they have taken over our world.

Chasten, my husband, and I still, in some ways, I think, don't know what hit us ever since we got the call.

How old are they now?

They're right in that two zone.

They're coming up on two... God bless you.

and it's a handful, and it's the best, hardest thing we've ever done... Yeah.

and, you know, we're mindful that our family is different than most, but also, it's like a lot of families, and every family is different in some way and just wants to be able to look after itself and be supported.

I think a lot about how policy can either get out of people's way or make it harder for people, and I think about my experience, and I know this hasn't been everyone's experience by far in that alphabet of LGBTQ that I'm part of, but my experience in some ways has validated the possibility of change and growth in American politics, too, because, you know, as recently as 10 or 15 years ago when I was thinking about public service in a serious way and entering the military, I was in a society where I could literally get fired from my job in the military for being who I was, and, you know, the other thing that was part of my career was, you know, public service in Indiana.

The idea that I could reach a higher level there, let alone do something like run for president or serve in a president's cabinet, was not only off, but would have been considered ridiculous, and now we're in a totally different place, so I've lived that growth in this country even while seeing how much further we have to go, but it's shown me what's possible.

♪ We're doing this 10-part series on what it takes to make it in America today, and I wondered if you could give us the long answer to this question.

What is the relationship between transportation and a person's ability to flourish?

Part of what I think most of us feel makes America America is the idea that you should be able to prosper, no matter where you come from.

We know that there have been a lot of obstacles between that American dream and the lived reality of a lot of people, but that's the dream.

That's the idea, and that's part of what I think we are responsible for helping to make possible when you work in public policy, and a big part of that is transportation.

There's an intimate connection between social mobility, economic mobility, and actual mobility, just the capacity to get to where you need to be.

I think about commutes as, like, the most obvious example of, like, you can only get the jobs that are in this radius from where you live.

Right.

I mean, your opportunities not only for jobs, but for education, participating in society, from being part of a faith community or a sports team to just a network of friends or extended family that supports you, all of that depends on your ability to get around, and for some people, your range of motion is infinite.

It's literally global.

For other people, it can be very difficult just to get where you need to be within the boundaries of your own community.

One of my first trips as secretary provided an example I think about a lot.

We're in Chicago, where we're helping to expand the Red Line to the South Side of Chicago.

One of the things that I learned about on the ground there was a neighborhood called Roseland.

That neighborhood within the city limits of Chicago on the far South Side, if you don't have a car, it can take you almost an hour and a half to get downtown where a lot of the jobs are.

I mean, I think there's an interesting relationship between transportation and imagination and inspiration...

Absolutely.

and to the extent that you never get to leave your tiny pocket, you're just gonna have a different quality of imagination.

Your exposure to the world, your exposure to opportunity, your exposure to other people and ideas, all of that depends on the access you have to transportation, and, by the way, so do some very basic questions of affordability.

One thing we're starting to do a better job of in the policy world is understanding how transportation and housing costs fit together.

They already have been well understood to fit together in any family's budget, so many people who either live in a place they can't really afford in order to be close to work or they live impossibly far away from work in order to be somewhere they can afford.

We can do things about that, and part of that's transportation policy, but part of it's being more thoughtful about how the way we build our communities and how the way we connect our communities ought to be related.

♪ What's a complete street?

I would define a complete street as a place where all of the different uses of a streetscape, from the sidewalk through the curb into the street, can co-exist, in other words, where you can have busses, cars, maybe trucks, and also pedestrians and bicycles and wheelchairs and small businesses and sidewalk cafes if you're in that part of a community, that they can all fit together.

There was a period when, I think, America got so excited about the extraordinary potential of highway engineering that we began to lapse into this idea that the only purpose of a road or a street is to zip traffic through it as quickly as you possibly can, and--while that might be appropriate on a freeway, although, even then, speed needs to be balanced against safety-- in the heart of a community, it can be devastating, so a complete street is safer.

It's more economically vibrant, and it's more appropriate to the context of the community it's in than a lot of the street and road designs that our generation has inherited.

So you brought up safety a few times, and it's more or less the same number of people dying on the roads as are dying through gun violence... That's right.

whereas with flights, there are years where we have 16 million flights and zero fatalities.

That's right.

What is the strategy?

Well, our strategy has 5 elements-- safer roads-- I should have known that you would have, like, a strategy with 5 elements.

Well, I mean, this is one of the most important things we work on, and it doesn't get enough attention.

As you pointed out, flight, a mode of travel that involves soaring through the air miles above the surface of the ground, most years, we have zero passenger fatalities on airlines.

We're actually up in arms when the number of close calls, sometimes defined as an aircraft coming within about a mile of another aircraft when it's not supposed to-- even that gets us up in arms, rightly.

Railroading, the number of accidental deaths in railroading, we're pushing that toward zero.

It's in the single digits, and yet every single day, more than 100 people lose their lives on America's roads.

I actually think it's because it happens so much that we're a little bit inured to it.

We think of it as just normal.

Not only is it as large a cause of death in the U.S., roughly, as gun violence.

It also is something where you see a lot of disparity between what happens in the U.S. and in other developed countries.

I wanted to ask you about that.

Like, do you have a go-to comp that's doing it so well that we could be learning from?

Well, no two places are alike, but you certainly see a lot of built-up cities, especially in Western Europe, that have lower fatality rates, and, importantly, you see that in the U.S., too.

Part of what I'm trying to do as we work toward a vision of zero is remind people that this has been achieved, obviously not nationwide, but there are communities, and not tiny ones-- we're talking places of 50,000 people or so: Hoboken, New Jersey; Jersey City, New Jersey; Edina, Minnesota; Evanston, Illinois, all very different in terms of their land use and their structure-- that have had at least one year of zero deaths, which brings me back to that strategy I was mentioning, so safer roads because the design of our roads matters, safer speeds, safer people, which includes drivers but everybody who interacts with the road system, those 3 elements are each things that we can and do a lot of investment on here at the department.

When you talk about people, do you mean people driving with cell phones or people driving after drinking or-- Yes.

We've come a long way in terms of people using seatbelts, still not 100%, but it's a huge difference maker.

We've come a long way.

We've come a long way in terms of impaired driving just culturally.

Drunk driving was so much more acceptable 10 or 20 or 40 years ago, but we've entered into this period where the way we relate to tech, I mean, all of us have seen it.

If you're driving, somebody's a little in and out of their lane, you look over, and they look like they're watching a movie or checking their email-- who knows?--but doing something you should not be doing when your vehicle is in motion, so distracted driving has become a huge concern.

There's also a lot of complexity in terms of how the onboard technology in cars works, so, for example, a lot of cars have technologies that nudge you back into your lane if you drift out of it.

That's a good thing.

Cruise control that actually notices if you're getting too close to the car in front of you, that's a good thing, but they're so helpful that that can actually lull you into not paying attention, but eventually, there is a lot of hope that these technologies will be part of the answer to how we cut, dramatically cut, roadway deaths in this country.

We have something at "Tell Me More" called "Plus One" where we give our guests a chance to honor somebody who's been instrumental to their well-being or to their thinking.

Who is your plus-one?

One person who really shaped my understanding of politics and service was Joe Kernan.

He passed away recently.

He was Mayor of South Bend and then eventually Governor of Indiana.

I approached him gingerly when I was thinking about running for mayor, and he was so generous with his advice but also very humble.

He talked about how so much is outside of your control when you decide to do this.

He was shot down over Vietnam and was a prisoner of war but never puffed himself up as a war hero even though he literally was, made a point every single day of picking up a piece of trash or litter that he saw on the street-- it was just part of his daily habit-- and doing something to help a veteran and just had a level of passion and, I think, a deep understanding of what service-- military, political, or otherwise-- is all about and, I think, left a great example for a young mayor like me and for a lot of people where I grew up.

Well, here's to Joe Kernan.

You touched on climate change.

How does that change the Department of Transportation's to-do list?

Well, in two ways.

One, it's part of the problem, and transportation actually represents the biggest sector in our economy if you count it up by greenhouse gas emissions.

Transportation puts in the most, so, to me, that means if you work in transportation, your aspiration should be to deliver the biggest parts of the solution, so there's transportation as an area that needs to change as part of the solution, and then there's transportation as an area that is vulnerable to the problem.

I mean, we've seen runways buckle in unprecedented heat.

We've seen some roads that just shouldn't be where they used to be because the climate has switched on them.

I've seen where in Colorado, a combination of a drought and then a flood along with a wildfire led to mudslides that took out a very important part of our supply chains.

These things shouldn't be happening, but they are, and, of course, that affects our transportation, so we have to both protect our transportation systems from the effects of climate change, and we have to modernize our transportation systems so that they're part of the solution.

There's one other layer across this that I think is actually very exciting, which is, I think transportation is perhaps the best area where we get to break the old false choice between doing the right thing on climate and growing the economy.

There used to be this idea of climate versus jobs.

Nowhere is it clearer than in transportation that climate jobs are a huge part of the future.

Climate represents a challenge in terms of decarbonizing transportation, a challenge in terms of protecting our transportation systems from what's already happening, but also an enormous opportunity that we are now very much seeing the early gains from when it comes to our economy.

How does AI factor into what's possible?

So I think the honest answer is, we don't know yet, but it means a lot for transportation.

It has the potential, if realized, to dramatically change the safety story of our roadways, radically change the rates of car crashes killing drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists in this country.

That, I think is the central challenge.

To me, everything else is important but extra compared to saving lives, but here's the other thing about AI or any other technology.

We'll never quite see all of the important effects that it'll have coming in advance.

If you think about the last decade, the most important transportation technology of the last decade was the smartphone.

Mm-hmm.

It's not even a vehicle, and yet it turned out to matter so much to everything from how you board a plane to how you get a ride, and it has cut both ways-- distracted driving but also a dramatic improvement and a lot of convenience.

I think similarly, AI will work in some areas that we're tracking right now, like automated driving, and some areas that we can't even guess.

We can think about some.

I think AI will probably play an important role in managing the air traffic control of drones, for example, because there's not enough air traffic controllers in the world to handle drones the way we handle airplanes, but that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's possible.

Right.

We can never see it all.

We can never see all the ways that things are gonna play out, of course.

So what we have to do is just create a framework for these changes to be absorbed in a way that is likely to help more than it hurts, and that's what we do all day here.

What's an example of something that happens through the DOT that the average person would never think of that really makes life better for people?

You know, as proud as I am of the infrastructure work where we get to do a ribbon cutting and maybe the president'll be there sometimes, the most important work we do is in the prevention of bad outcomes, and that's why we have the safety regulations that we do.

It's why we have the personnel that we do working on everything from air traffic control to hazardous material regulation.

What's, like, a hazardous material that people would ship?

So, for example, there's a phenomenon of Kraft nail polish, believe it or not.

Ha ha ha!

These are the things that-- I knew we'd get here.

Right.

Yeah.

That can be an important small business, people on Etsy doing things like this.

If you don't know what you're doing or if you're not aware of this, you could inadvertently be involved without ever thinking of yourself as the sort of person-- You think shipping hazardous materials, you think big chemical company, right?

We're talking about someone on Etsy who maybe doesn't realize something they put in the mail could be dangerous, things like that, so in many ways-- and I remind our staff of this all the time-- in many ways, we earn our paycheck through things that people don't hear about, don't suffer through, don't read about in the paper, and then when those other ones do happen, our job is to learn from them to make sure they're even more rare.

Through all the conversations this fall, we've had a really interesting thread which is about the relationship between agency, like your personality or your gumption; and circumstance, dumb luck; and intervention, policy or legislation that personally changed your life.

When you look at your own story, like, what is a bit of personal agency that you can point to that makes you right for the work you do, what is some dumb luck you've had, and what is a bit of intervention that you've benefited from, some public policy or legislation that changed your potential?

Well, there's no shortage of dumb luck in my life, for sure, you know, starting with just being fortunate to grow up in a loving, great family in a middle-class neighborhood in Northern Indiana, where, even though there were times growing up I felt out of place, it also made it possible for me to thrive.

What about personal agency?

Like, what about you-- Probably the biggest thing would be coming home.

That was not an easy or obvious choice.

I'd grown up in Northern Indiana.

It had created a great upbringing for me, but I also kind of got the message in a place that had lost a lot of population and lost a lot of its economic strength that if you want to make something out of yourself, you had to go.

You had to get out, which is exactly what I did, got the chance to study at Harvard.

Then I got a scholarship to go to Oxford for two years and kept getting further and further from home, and when I came back, it seemed like all the opportunity would be far away, too, but I found a job in Chicago that got me kind of back into the Midwest, and at a certain point, while so many of my classmates and peers were getting great jobs with exciting opportunities in alluring world cities, I realized that the place I needed to go was where I came from, and that probably was the most important choice in terms of setting the path for everything that that came next.

And what about a piece of legislation or public policy that makes your life possible?

Well, look.

The most important thing in my life-- my family, my marriage, my household-- exists because of a stroke of policy that is less than a decade old.

a Supreme Court decision in 2015 reinforced, thankfully, by recent legislation President Biden signed, which was the act that protected our marriage, one which, by the way, was not exactly a slam-dunk vote in Congress.

We had Neal Katyal on the show.

He argued that case in front of the Supreme Court that made gay marriage possible.

I mean, I think this is part of what animates my work in policy.

It's never-- I don't have to use a lot of imagination to believe that decisions that are made by courts and by politicians affect our everyday lives.

The most basic fact of my life, the fact of my family, not even the opportunities for my family or the things that make it easier or harder for a family, this existence was not possible, at least legally speaking, a decade ago where I lived, and now it's the most important thing in my life.

Are you ready for the "Tell Me More" speed round?

I'll do my best.

What's the last book that blew you away?

"The Song of Achilles."

It's a novel, and you'd think, like, nobody could say anything new about the "Iliad" or the plot of the "Iliad."

And that's your thing, right?

Aren't you, like, kind of an "Iliad" guy?

Yeah.

Well, you know, my father emigrated from Malta.

I'm a creature of the Mediterranean.

I have been to Malta.

Have you really?

Yeah.

It's incredible, Yeah.

underrated, and, yeah, so "The Song of Achilles" retells the story of Achilles from the perspective of his lover, and it is so beautifully rendered.

Everything just-- I can't explain it, but it...

I'm there.

blew me away.

I'm there.

What's your go-to mantra for hard times?

One of my colleagues often says, "The only way out is through," and that's always worth remembering.

What's something big you've been wrong about?

Well, I was wrong about the pace of the adoption of automation in transportation.

When I was a mayor in the middle of the last decade, I was chairing a task force that worked on the assumption that-- or was kind of advised that we would have widespread use of automated vehicles, well, by now, Uh-huh.

Yeah.

and we don't.

If your mother wrote a book about you, what would it be called?

Oh, probably something like, "I love you.

Now go clean your room."

Ha ha ha!

If you could say 4 words to anyone, who would you address, and what would you say?

Probably younger me, who might need to hear, "It's gonna be OK." Wow.

That's great.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Good to be with you.

Corrigan: Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Pete Buttigieg.

Number one, small things, daily, unpredictable indignities quickly build to exhausting barriers.

Number two, the most important recent advancement in transportation is the smartphone.

Number 3, may we all find ways to be useful to one another, particularly those with less, and number 4, once-in-a-generation plans require once-in-a-generation ambition.

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