Pete Buttigieg, 38-year-old presidential candidate and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has been many things: a Rhodes Scholar. A Navy intelligence officer, deployed—during his mayoral tenure—to Afghanistan. The husband of a man, making him one of few openly gay politicians in America. An author, of the best-selling memoir Shortest Way Home.

And now, a 2020 presidential candidate, who got a boost on Monday during the Iowa caucus.

In 2019, The Citizen hosted an intimate conversation between “Mayor Pete”—it’s “boot-edge-edge,” by the way—and Drexel’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab Director Bruce Katz, about how the work being done in cities can translate to national policy; what it means to truly be a country that works for all its residents; and how our politics has to become about making democracy do its best work—not about the power that goes along with, well, being in power.

As Katz put it in a recent column: “Cities have emerged as the vanguard of problem solving in the United States and beyond … cities are networks, not governments, and mayors possess a form of soft power that enables them to convene local stakeholders around pressing issues.”

Listen to Buttigieg talk about his experience in South Bend here: