Q: There are people on the internet who think you are not gay enough to run for president, that you should be a brown person, that you should be a trans person, what's your response to that?

Pete: I am who I am, the whole process of coming out was realizing that I only got to be one person. One of the things I think that we need to have a conversation about, frankly within the LGBTQ+ world is whether we're gonna police the boundaries of our own identity or whether we're going to accept people for who they are.

Q: I want to ask about internet culture, twitter, these things have a huge impact on, not just the political conversation generally, but inside the democratic primary. Do you think outrage culture, call out culture, cancel culture - whatever you want to say - is going a bit too far?

Pete: I certainly think it's the case that we need to remember twitter is not real life. Now, twitter is where people express opinions, strong opinions, I've got strong opinions, but this is also a country full of human beings and we can't keep going on like it's just divided between the good and the evil. We wouldn't be here if each of us weren't capable of good and bad things, and to me what really matters in leadership is the ability to call out what is best in us. What we have right now is a president who has gotten to where he's gotten by calling out what is worst in us, by bringing out what is smallest and meanest in each of us.

Q: I agree with you that Trump is extremely divisive in those respects. I will say, on the left, you do have people that get upset with stupid things on Twitter. Like you have Chrissy Teigen saying "let's boycott Soul-cycle because the owner had a fundraiser with Donald Trump." Meanwhile Turkey is trying to go into turkey and eradicate the Kurds. Don't these silly twitter fights distract from real issues? I feel like the left is all twisted up by that right now.

Pete: I think America can be twisted up by some of these fights but we gotta keep our focus on every day life. To me, this is why politics exists, it's why I'm involved in politics, is that our actual lives go differently because of the decisions that are made in Washington. It's not about who insulted who, who sounded good on TV, it's about stuff like the fact that my marriage exists by a one vote margin on the supreme court. The fact that our wages are being held back, not by some unstoppable mysterious economic force, but by policy decisions that have failed to support our wages growing - this is about our lives. I think the job of a candidate and certainly the job of a president is to focus the American people on what matters most.

Q: Todd Phillips, who directed a lot of comedy films in the early 2000s, came out a few weeks ago and said "I don't want to make comedy anymore because everyone gets triggered everyone's offended. There's also kind of a sub genre of comedy with Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr who are deliberately trying to be provocative because they are sick of what they think is a culture that is too politically correct.

Pete: Look, two things are true, one is that part of how comedy works is that it challenges our conventions, it challenges our sensitivities, and that’s part of what it can contribute.

Another thing that’s also true is hurtful things, and hateful things often come at us in the form of humor. And we just have to learn how to handle both of those things. When a piece of art that is out there to challenge conventions does something that’s really harmful then I think it’s time to turn it off, but we get to have those debates.

Q: Part of Dave Chappelle’s schtick, in the last couple comedy specials he did, was deliberately making fun of transgender people [clip of the special: “I don’t wanna write these jokes but I just can’t stop.”], so should that just be turned off, should he not have a netfix deal...?

Pete: I haven’t seen the special, I will say there comes a point where you’re just straight up hurting people, and I don’t know what goal you’re hoping to achieve. As much as there’s been a lot of political correctness, there’s also this weird way in which it’s become fashionable to attack political correctness that I think that it’s become its own weird correctness out there.

At the end of the day, maybe at risk of sounding simplistic, I’m just coming at this from the perspective of helping and hurting, is what we’re doing every day whether you’re a politician or a comedian or an artist or a businessperson or whatever, are you doing more good than harm out there? And if you’re not, time for some reflection and time for some adjustment.

Q: Have you seen the joker?

Pete: No, I’m excited about the casting decision.

Q: There’s a lot of commentary around the Joker that it glorifies violence, there are worries that it’s going to inspire mass shootings.

Pete: There’s a lot of countries that are exposed to the same video games and movies that we are and most of them don’t have the kind of violence that we do. So I think it’s a cop out to blame pop culture for violence. What I will say is that the culture we produce reflects us. And if you see a dark, dystopian film doing well it might be because the American people are feeling unsettled and bothered and maybe dark at a time like this.