‘You’re Kind Of A Nerd Aren’t You?’ Chris Wallace Roasts Pete Buttigieg For Geeking Out Over Traffic Jams

CNN anchor Chris Wallace roasted Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for very energetically geeking out about traffic jams, asking “You’re kind of a nerd aren’t you?”

The latest interviews from Wallace’s series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace on HBO Max feature Buttigieg, Sopranos actor Michael Imperioli, and media entrepreneur Byron Allen.

In a lighter moment from his interview with Buttigieg, Wallace asked Secretary Pete if he has “studied traffic,” then lampooned the detail and enthusiasm of the answer:

CHRIS WALLACE: Have you studied traffic? i The reason I ask this is how many times have you driven along a road and there’s suddenly a backup, and you know, you’re crawl along for 10 or 15 minutes, and then it starts to move, and then it moves faster? And there’s no obvious thing that was no accident. That was whatever. And I think to myself, why was that backup there? I assume there’s got to be a science to traffic.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Oh, yeah, there’s an entire science to this. And we have a lot of research partners, we have our own research institution, the Volpe Institute, which is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it’s really interesting, I could geek out on this for a couple of hours, if we had time.

CHRIS WALLACE: (laughs) Please don’t, that would be a bad traffic jam…

PETE BUTTIGIEG: But but a lot of it is is just human nature, human psychology, the fact that if, if even one of us gets distracted, that can kind of cascade through us the fact that we pause and look at something odd or or, or an accident or something. When when we pass it by the the ways that we behave behind the wheel, as in general, as human beings are not exactly orderly and predictable. And part of what we try to do is make at least traffic more orderly and predict that’s what traffic lights do. That’s what speed limits do. But one of the challenges we have right now is you have more and more people in the country more and more people on the road. That’s how to be smarter about that, for example, it turns out that sometimes when you just when you got a lot of traffic on a roadway, and you just add a lane or two, all you get is more traffic, because it actually makes more people want to drive on that road. And then you’re right back where you were. And so we’re trying to be smarter as a country about when do you add to the capacity do you have that you have? or what have you in a situation where you can’t pave your way out of the problem? And the real answer is better transit or more alternatives, or a better design grid. These are the kinds of things that I love sinking my teeth into because we have the tools to do something about it with and, frankly, even the existing infrastructure we have, we’re not using it as intelligently as we could be.

CHRIS WALLACE: You’re kind of a nerd aren’t you?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: I love this stuff. I am yeah. I mean, look so many kids, I think for a reason that I can’t quite explain from early childhood get just fascinated with anything related to transportation, right? Trucks, cars, planes, trains, boats, all of that. I mean, you know, half the kids books we have at home are about these kinds of things. So there’s something I think very human about, about taking an interest in this. And then professionally, I’m fascinated by it also, because I see how much of a difference it makes in people’s lives the jobs associated with construction, transportation, but also just the fact that the less time you spend worrying about transportation, the more time you get to spend on other things in your life that matter to you. The more you get to be with your kids, the more you get to be productive at work.

Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace drops three full episodes each Friday morning, and CNN airs a version recapping highlights of the episodes every Sunday at 7 p.m.

Watch the full exchange above via HBO Max and CNN.