The Daily Stoic - Journalist Edward-Isaac Dovere on the Soul of America

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

On today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to journalist and author Edward-Isaac Dovere about his new book Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump, being courageous and fighting for what’s right, how to ignore the noise and focus on the things that truly matter, and more. Edward-Isaac Dovere is an American journalist who serves as staff writer for The Atlantic and former Chief Washington Correspondent for Politico.LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today.KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Edward-Isaac Dovere: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke each weekday We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage Justice temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied

to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target,

the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I am fresh off the completion of

the audiobook for the next book, which I've teased a little bit. I won't tease too much more, but I was joking on Instagram today that I am now measuring the pandemic in how many audiobooks I've been forced to record at home. The number is two. I did lives of the Stoics here, not in a studio because last summer the surge is really bad. And this summer, just recorded courage is calling. I'm vaccinated, but my two young kids are not and I just didn't feel great going to a studio for three or four days. Plus, I'd like to be able to dip in and out of just walking the other room and do some recording, walk back to the other room and write. So it's much less disruptive. But it is an exhausting

experience. Let me tell you, it does not come quickly or easily, you know, you get, you can do maybe 20, 25 pages a day and then you start just sounding like a blubbering idiot. It's not that your voice gives out. It's that your brain gives out and all the words blur together. I think reading out loud must have been a skill that people had before, you know, in decades and centuries previous that's atrophied. You know, these days, the most all-elever read out loud. It's like one kid's book to my kids or two kids books or one of the episodes for the podcast or whatever,

the daily email, but rarely reading more than a few pages at a time. And so it was quite an ordeal, but the core of is done. Just waiting for the pickups, all the things that I got wrong, the things I mispronounced. I was patting myself on the back.

There was less words in this one that I had to look up the pronunciation. I think that's good. I mean, I'm stripping down my writing using fewer thesaurus words and just being blunter and more to the point. Lives of the stoves was such a pain because it just included so many different names. Anyways, that is done. It was incredibly hot in here, as I mentioned before, we need a new air conditioner here at the Painted Purch,

which the quotes came in at like 20 to $40,000. So that's fun. And even if it had been replaced, I probably would have had to turn it off because you can't have any background noise running. But that's done and now I can get back to work on the new book which I am working on. In the meantime, I wanted to bring you a guest today who's writing. I am a big fan of. I read it at the Atlantic. I don't know if I've ever talked about my reading habits. I try not to read a lot of news, but I do try to read news from people who are smart, who help aggregate things, who give you context on things, and who often have direct access to what's called the news makers, if you will.

Today's guest, Edward Isaac DeVare, over at the Atlantic, is a person who's writing I do that with. He is the author of a new book called Battle for the Soul. Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump, it's a fascinating book about the 2020 campaign. All the different candidates, the egos, the dysfunction, the urgency, the near misses of it all. It's a fascinating book. I had a bunch of questions to ask him. But sorry, I distracted myself.

What I was saying is my reading habits, I try not to read a lot of news. When I do read news, what I would do is I'll habits, I try not to read a lot of news when I do read news. What I would do is I'll see an article that I think is interesting and I save it to InstaPaper, which I then read on my phone. And what I like about InstaPaper is first of it gets rid of all the ads,

gets rid of all the distracting other articles that might suck you in like, oh, read this story or you're, look at this thing or you know whatever, it's just you're just reading it, no ads, just white text on a black background, stripped down, I find it a more conducive way to read. I used to do it when I was sort of on planes or something. That's when I would catch up on stuff. But anyways, I've read him on InstaPaper for a long time.

That's how I try to read the news. I try not to read breaking news. I've always tried to be sort of low social media, but I'm in the midst of a Twitter detox, not even checking my own stuff, which has been healthy. We talk about that a little bit in the interview. It's a great chat. We talk about the soul of America. We talk about being courageous.

We talk about fighting for what's right. We talk about discipline and patience, ignoring the noise, ignoring the chatter. And what's at stake here politically in America? And I do recommend the book. I enjoyed it. I read it from cover to cover battle for the soul. Inside the Democrats campaigns to defeat Trump, I've got a sense we're going to carry this in the painted porch. And in fact, I'm going to send an email to my manager right now to make sure we do and Enjoy this wonderful interview and you can follow I know I just said I'm in the middle of a Twitter detox, but you can follow Edward at Isaac Dover that's I S A A C D O V E R E

AACDOVRE. Well, you came very highly recommended. I've read your stuff for a long time in the Atlantic, but anytime Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests I have someone on, that's a suggestion to take. It's a weird thing with him. I mean, I met him originally because I did a podcast with him and we developed a pretty good rapport and he is a good person to know, which seems like ridiculous to say, but I enjoy talking

to him on a bright day. No, he is a great person to know. So I know his guy Daniel and I was, and I was doing a talk in Austria and I was like, Hey, I'm in Austria or something. And he's like, where are you in Austria? And I said, Oh, I'm in Gratz. That's where I was giving the talk. And I was like, Oh, that's where Arnold is from. And he was like, Arnold needs you to meet this guy. And I was like, okay. And so this guy came to my hotel. and it was like his best friend from elementary school who was the head of some Austrian newspaper.

And he was like, I'm taking art to dinner. He's like any friend of Arnold is a friend of mine. He took us all around. And then I had told him that my grandfather was from Slovenia and he was like, all right, that's it. We're going to Slovenia right now. And then he drove us to Slovenia and he was like, all right, that's it. We're going to Slovenia right now. And then he drove us to Slovenia. It was one of the most memorable

and also surreal moments of my life, actually. So again, when he suggested you. Yeah, my, I guess I've been to Grads too and with him because we did the podcast we recorded was like around this time July of 2017 and he really liked it and I wrote an article off of it and you really liked that too. And then Kenchal called me up and he was like Arnold says that you should come talk tober fast with him.

And I was like, what? And he said to me, yeah, and he's brought it up twice. So I think he actually means it. And I said, okay, well, why don't you like find out if that's real? And then also like, is this like he wants, like, I should write another article about it. Like, what's going on? like what, what work, what's the frame that we're going in with him? And he said, yeah, he said, you can, you know, he'll, he'll, he'll talk whatever you want. And he's serious about it. You should come. And so I met him in Spain and Sans Abastien where there was a film festival that he was promoting.

And the article ended up being like, you know, the weird, I think we would call it the strange political afterlife of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And like how he was staying involved in things, despite not being in office anymore and like the things he cared about. So it was this movie that he had narrated about under what are like under deep sea stuff that was about the environmental causes. And then we flew to Munich to go to Octoberfest, which was weird. I think Octoberfest is probably weird anyway, but my only experience of it is walking around

with him, including when he got up to conduct the band at one point and pulled me in so that I would conduct the band. And he put his hand, you know, his Arnold Schwarzenegger hand on my wrist and pulled me in. And of course like, even if I wasn't overwhelmed with surprise about what was happening, he's still quite strong. And then, like, and we just spent like a lot of time together and then the next, the two days afterwards of what was going to be my last full day in Munich, I got a text from Catchalini,

was like Arnold wants to take you to his museum. And I said, you know, I'd done enough of my own background research. I knew that that was in Gratz and we were in Munich. And I was like, I don't understand what that means. And he said, it means that he's got his assistant finding a charter plane for us and we're flying to Gratz. Wow. And I ended up getting a tour of the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum from Arnold Schwarzenegger. And it's in the house that he grew up in. So like he was like, oh yeah, this is where the bathroom was.

And we, you know, there was no plumbing. And like all the stuff, it's just so crazy and weird. And maybe like even the weirdest part of walking around in there, is there was someone who was visiting the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum who didn't recognize him when he walked by. If you've made the trek to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum who didn't recognize him when he walked by. I'm like, if you've made the trek to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum, wouldn't you realize that that was him? Of course.

And then we went around Grads a little bit and then flew back to Munich and trying to explain both to like my editor and to my wife and like what had happened was really hard. No, as a writer you do have this sort of weird, because you're adjacent to sort of powerful, interesting people who are doing things on a whim that seem very self-indulgent, that you kind of have to follow or attend as part of your job, but it's fun for you, but I remember a couple of years ago,

I went into my wife and I'm like, yeah, this NBA team wants me to go to Las Vegas for the summer league, and she's like, and it's like, I don't wanna go, but I also wanna go, right? It's not something I would have asked to do, but it feels bad not going, you know, and so yeah, you end up being like, no, no, sorry, I need you to take care of the kids

for a couple of days because I need to go to October Fest with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah. But my wife is, she, someone, I remember someone, a politician said to me on the campaign trial at one point, like two years ago, she's then elected a fishlorist out front and she was like, so is your wife's appreciative of all the work you're doing being away this much. And I was like, appreciative is not, I would say supportive.

Oh, no. No, she's supportive. Like she thinks it's good. And I'm doing good work, whatever. And she's knew what I was doing this work when we met each other. And I'm like, but I don't think appreciative is exactly the right. Well, I had a moment in Gratz that sort of reminded me of your book and the title of the book, of course. So my grandfather was from Sylvania, but he actually ended up in Gratz during the war

as a displaced person. So basically a refugee wasn't Jewish, but just the destruction of the war he ends up doing this refugee camp. And I went and visited it. It's like an apartment complex now or something. But, but so when I saw that, that speech that Arnold gave after the election about the sort of Nazi collaborators and, and the sort of, the people that had gotten caught up in this whole thing and the wreckage of that, it really hit me because it was like, oh yeah, he would have been around after this happened. They never would have touched paths, but he would have seen the wreckage of this whole thing. Yeah.

And this idea of sort of battling for the soul of a country or a culture or a continent, it's not really an understatement. I mean, that kind of, that is the stakes of what we're talking about. I know every politician makes their campaign a sort of a moral crusade, but there was something different about this cycle that you covered here. When I was sitting on to write this book and I signed the contract in July of 2018,

the proposal says, this is going to contract in July of 2018, like the proposal says, like this is going to be the craziest election ever, and a really definitive one for the history of this country, maybe the most important one. And I didn't know, obviously, all the things that would end up stacking up, but like this is something that is deeper than the basics of politics that's going on. It's about, it's not about Republicans, where it's Democrats, or like what kind of tax policy do you favor? It's like, this is bigger.

This is what kind of country are we? What kind of spirit do we have of the country? And you can be someone who buys into the Trump vision, or you can be someone who buys into the Biden vision of it, or some of the other visions that are out there. Obviously, those are the two most prominent. But we're figuring it out. And it's like, is this the adolescence of America? Is it the midlife crisis of America? Is it the the midlife crisis of America? Is it the slow decline into dementia of America? I don't know.

But it seems like it's one of those, right? And I remember right before Trump was inaugurated, having a conversation with an editor then who said to me, is this election, is this presidency going to be, he said like a sign odds to this, that this is the beginning of the fall of the empire, the end of Rome, or is it like you go to the doctor and you get a checkup and you realize

you have to have like a real correction to how you do things. And that's not necessarily to say the Trump inherently was a bad thing, but what but Trump being elected was definitely a check on how everything was running. And people say like we don't like what's coming. We don't like how this has been operated. You go back to the first debate that Clinton and Trump had, and she was going at him and saying, like, you got a sweet deal on your taxes, you used Chinese steel, and how can you say all those things and do all those things and say that now you want to improve the country. And Trump said, well, I was playing by the rules that were there. And you were the one who was there in power for all that

time. If you wanted to change the rules, then why didn't you change them? Why should we believe that you're going to change them now? And that was sort of the fundamental thing. They're Clinton as the way that things were and saying, we can tweak it and improve it and refurbish it and go forward, or Trump saying, like, blow it all up, change again, in a bigger way than you've ever changed. And some of the reporting that I have in my book is of these focus groups that were done

that Obama actually asked to have conducted of the fabled Obama Trump voters, these people who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then for Trump in 2016, and people say, how could these people exist? And they go to Iowa, and the people say to them to the focus group organizers, they say, listen, what we voted for Obama,

because we thought everything needed to change, and then Washington wouldn't let him change and they stopped him at every turn. And so now we need something that's much more aggressive and explosive in making the change because we really want that change to come. Yeah, before we get to the 2020 election, it was what I kept feeling in your book, what struck me is like, how people who are ostensibly like world class at what they do, like running campaigns, being politicians, are not really that good at it, right? They're sort of a bumbling, deep quality to a lot of a lot of the different campaigns you profile.

And in retrospect, it seems so amazing that Hillary's campaign with all its consultants and all of its data and all of its money, essentially boiled, like, she obviously knew that she's not particularly well liked, right? And then she ran a campaign that basically was, I'm Hillary Clinton vote for me, right? Like, she took the, her main detriment as a person and made that the forefront of

her campaign and then was surprised at the referendum that people would pick such another, that some people would pick anyone but her when pretty much they'd been quite loud and vocal about the fact that they wanted anyone but her when pretty much they'd been quite loud and vocal about the fact that they wanted anyone but her. Yeah, there's a moment that I describe in the book early out of a couple days before the election in 2016. I was sitting in a diner in Brooklyn

and a couple blocks from campaign headquarters with a few of the top Clinton aides. And one of them said to me, we realized this was going to be a change election and she could never be the change candidate. So we decided to change the question. And I was like, I remember thinking, put this in the book, like, it's great.

Did you win the meeting when you, like, said that was a good, you played yourself, right? Like, great. I'm sure everybody thought that was really smart, but it clearly didn't work, right? And, I mean, to your point, I think the mistake that gets made somewhat inadvertently often

and writing about politics and a lot of campaign books is you drum up these people as the campaign managers and press here as these great geniuses who've got it all figured out and I thought it through. And you know, some of them are really good at what they do and some of them get lucky in good ways or bad ways for them and some of them are not so good at what they do.

And you don't have often these like movie moments where like the decision real like you in that moment and that meeting it was the that conversation which changed everything. And which led to the the downfall of the candidate or led to the amazing victory of it. And I try in this book to give you a real look at and how this works and how the candidates are sometimes very good at what they're doing and sometimes just very bad at what they're doing and sometimes are just like fools and make mistakes

and say something stupid that gets them in trouble and leads to other things going wrong or there is someone who works on them does and say something stupid that gets them in trouble and leads to other things going wrong, or there is someone who works for them does, or something that's blown out of proportion and takes on a life of its own that the candidate can't ever quite get away from. And that can be anything from Hillary Clinton and saying that basket of deplorables line, which was just sort of like a throwaway comment that she'd said a bunch of times, but caught in that moment and made it.

And in retrospect, entirely correct. I mean, she was saying something that, again, she'd said it a lot and that a lot of people agreed with then and certainly when you look at folks who storm the Capitol, supporting Donald Trump, and this is not about Trump supporters overall, but I would say anybody who tried to invade the Capitol of the United States, knocking over police officers saying that they were going to hang Pence and I kill Nancy Pelosi and chasing others around the Capitol.

Those are deplorable people. They are. And I think as a country we should condemn them and we should condemn anybody who's engaged in any kind of violence like that, but you don't want to get into this complete equivocation of things. That's those people, those however many thousands of people was, those are people who are particularly troublesome because no matter what else has whatever other protests

and have it, nobody else has done that. And that really was, and I know we're jumping ahead not just past 2020, but to the aftermath of 2020, but that's like the moment that I think should make us all realize that this isn't just something that's happening on Facebook, or it's just like the political conversation.

This is real things that are blowing up and making people, and should make people think differently about how we've gotten to this path. You know, I'll just throw in one story from before we come off this, but there's a woman, her name is Lisa Blunt Rochester. She's the Congresswoman from Delaware, a black woman, a friend of Joe Biden, because everybody in Delaware is a friend of Joe Biden.

And she is in the gallery of the House chamber when the rioters get there. They never get in the chamber, but she thinks they're going to get in. She starts praying, thinking she's going to die. And as she's being escorted out of the chamber, she takes that pin that all members of Congress have that identify them and the members off of her jacket because she thinks they're going to come and kill me as a member of Congress maybe. Sure. I don't want it. But she doesn't want to put it away in her pocket because she thinks, well, like, if I'm

just a black woman walking around the Capitol, will I get protected? I might have to show this to get protected. And so she decides to keep it in her clenched fist so that she can show it quickly if anybody asks. That's like a really crazy thing to think about. That was an act that a woman walking around in 2021 in America had to think about. Seven months ago. Right. Either I'm going to be killed because I'm identified as a member of the government, or I might not be protected because I'm just a black woman walking around. That's bad.

That's really bad. And we have to reckon with what that all means. No, I think that's right. And actually, weirdly, it's more related to the sort of win-the-meeting thing that you are just talking about, because the other moment that struck me in 2016 that was related to that was in a sort of Hillary's response to Make America Great Again, which is an incorrect slogan, but let's say a sort of rhetorically brilliant one, you know, she responds, America is great because it is good.

And it's like, as a writer, I get the play on words there. But as a human being, I'm also, any four-year-old would tell you that great is better than good, right? And so, there's this element of sort of like fencing in the mirror arguing over these ridiculous little things, winning the meeting, winning the cycle on Twitter and And you can trust that with the stakes, you know, sort of people storming the Capitol or or what have you It does feel like as

Urgent as the election was and you talk about in the book. There was also just this like was, and you talk about in the book, there was also just this like delusional sense of priorities and unlimited time and that all the candidates seem to have. I was just sort of struck by like fiddling as the, as Rome burned kind of thing as some of these candidates were battling it out over this nonsense. Yeah, and there were a lot of moments of nonsense in the campaign. I think the weird thing about our current situation is that we have this larger battle for the soul, this existential crisis that America is going through. And the only way to sort it out is like, through presidential primaries and house elections. That's how we play it out through our political process. And it feels sort of lacking to have

that be the only way that we can do it. And that like I had to spend cumulatively, probably six weeks plus of my life in Iowa running around to these events where I'm no offense to the people in Iowa, but what I would hear all the time from Iowa voters and sort of famous is like, yeah, I would say like, what do you think of that, Ken?

I'd say, well, yeah, it's interesting. I've met him three or four times. I gotta see him a couple more times and see somebody else just and I was just like, how is it this hard to make a decision? But it's sort of like going into the serial aisle and having 40 different varieties of serial, and you can stand there for a long time,

I think like, oh, should I get the checks of the life? The one where, or the Honeycrisse, or the Lucky Charms, right? Like, people, when they're given too many choices, and there were, I think you can fairly say there were too many choices. There were 26 candidates in the primaries for the Democrats in 2020. They get frozen and not being able to figure out

which ones to take. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Is this thing on? Check one, two, one, two. There y'all. I'm Kiki Palmer.

I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo. Just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Kiba Bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host.

I'm proud to introduce you to the Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it.

These are the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This is Skicky Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Skicky Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. Yeah, and when you think about 26 candidates,

that was something else that struck me in the book. You had this line, I forget who you were quoting, but they said something like, you know, the campaigns a bitch, and then you have to be president, meaning that it's super hard, and then it's actually not like a fun job, right? Like especially now. And what struck me was how many people kept throwing their hats in the ring for a job that one, they probably didn't want, two, that they had no real possibility of actually getting.

But three, if they had any shred of self-awareness, we're woefully unqualified for. So what is it? What is it that attracts these people on both ends of the party? Is it that they don't actually want to win? And they just want the indirect benefits of coming close? Is it that they don't actually want to win and they just want the indirect benefits of coming close? Is it that they actually have no self-awareness? Is it ego? What is drawn? Like when I look at the candidates on both sides, I am reminded of Trump's line about how they're not sending

their best. Like this is not the best of anyone, anyone on any side of the ideological spectrum. We are not, these are not the best Americans. So what is attracting 26 candidates to this? I mean, I think it's all of those things. I think it's also some people see it as a way to advance their political careers.

If you're a low level, not well regarded, not well known politician, it's a good way to get people to write more about you or get on TV more. It's sometimes there is a financial pull to it. I remember I wrote something in 2012, I believe, about, yeah, it would have been then, about the Republican primaries and how many people seem to be getting in it and then signing book deals. Yeah. And then it becomes the book tour is the presidential campaign for some folks. It's a weird thing and we have only, I think, in America and I'm not an expert on politics all over the world,

is it this thing where people start becoming prominent and then we start to say, oh, you should run for president, right? I think that doesn't happen in a lot of other countries. And obviously that's what led to Donald Trump running for president. He was well known and people say, oh, you should run. You say, okay, you should run. He said, OK, I should run. And I've written in my life a story about whether Oprah will run for president.

Why would we think that someone who has a talk show and is a successful, one of the most successful, obviously, in the history of the world, entrepreneurs and changing communications and all that. Why is the next step to run for president? And it's just there in our psyche is that that's somehow like the pinnacle of achievement. Even though it's a tough job and it's not a job that I think a lot of people

would actually enjoy. Obama had this line where he would say that every decision that would come to him was like an impossible decision because if somebody else could have solved it, it wouldn't have gotten to him. And so, you're every day presented as president with things where it's like,

none of these are good options, but you have to pick which bowl of shit you feel like eating. Yeah, and I think that's always been the problem of leadership. And so there is this weird paradox And so there is this weird paradox where the person who is so egotistical as to think, oh, I could do a great job at that

or I was destined for that, is ironically, often the person who lacks the humility and dedication and work ethic to actually do the job. I think the Wall Street Journal had a great piece about like the Eisenhower paradox or whatever. The idea that actually you want the leaders who don't really want to be the leader, you know, you want the reluctant president. Right. And there was, I think when you look at the Democratic candidates in the 2020 election, there was a thirstiness to all of them that was pretty unbecoming and one might say inherently

unqualifying for the vast majority of them, you know, Beto Roark being someone in Texas being the sort of prime example of that to me, Someone who not only isn't qualified to be president, but does untold damage to himself, his state, and the field in running for president. But, and of course, like he's a good example of like, why was he qualified to run? Because people were really excited about this. Did he lost another race? Well, but, and people were really excited

about his Santa can, and so people thought, oh, you could get people excited. Hmm, that's interesting. That's something different. And look, one of the people who thought that that was an intriguing possibility was Barack Obama, right? So a lot of people were into it. I think the flip side of what you're saying is everybody runs for president these days,

no matter who they are, what they believe in, is an ego maniac. Because now you have to be putting yourself over and say, like, yeah, I think I should be the most powerful person in the world, right? That is inherently an ego maniacal decision. You have to find the balance, it seems, between the person who is an egomaniac, but isn't overblown with being an egomaniac, because you want someone as president who is going to be ready to make hard decisions

and say, yeah, this is what we're doing, and feel strong about it. And you do see that voters respond to folks who have that feeling. When George W. Bush said, I'm the decider, he got made fun of a lot for it. But that is the job. That's the job, right?

Right. And then he said it in a way that was kind of weird and that's part of why he was mocked for it. But the president is the decider and you don't want someone who is not going to be able to make a decision and feel ready to stick by it. Because these are hard decisions, and often they are literally life and death decisions, and when they're not literally

life decisions, then they are figuratively life and death decisions. Yeah, you could argue that I'm the decider, it's just a less eloquent way of expressing Harry Truman's idea of the buck stops here. Yeah, exactly. expressing Harry Truman's idea of the buck stops here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's interesting when you think about like sort of why someone's running for president and my experience with some of the politicians that I've gotten to meet through writing my books and stuff

and what I found so discouraging about Washington is you have all these people sort of running with, and then they get the office, you end of your book, you talk about the dog that catches the bus and And which I think is a great expression actually for a lot of these people who went office It's actually weirdly not probably apt for Biden It's so it's ironic that he would say that because he was well preparing for it his entire life like

It's true But the context of what happens there is that I he saying to... I said to him that we were... It's an interview that we did at the beginning of February and he has been president for about 10, 12 days at that point. And I said to him, so, you know, this sort of chitchat at the beginning, and I had a set field to be in the Oval Office every day and to be waking up upstairs. And he says, well, you know, the Oval, I was here a lot over the years, I was here almost every day when I was vice-president. So that's familiar to me, but waking up upstairs, you know, like sometimes I can't find my clothes man and he was sort of joking around and I

being a smart ass said, well you're the one who wanted this job. And you know, it sort of does capture a lot of what's in the book. Like why did anybody want this job exactly? And he says to me, yeah, a friend of mine said to me, you're the dog that caught the car, and I said, no, I'm the dog that caught the bus. And like, and what that was getting at, I think is also sketch out in the book of how he, this presidency that he has,

the huge pile of problems that he asked to deal with, is so different from what he thought he was getting into when he jumped into the race. He saw himself as that after Charlottesville, the kind of challenge to the fabric of America was so deep that he, that you just needed to get Trump out of the way and that he was running basically as the safest, surest bet to get Trump out of the way. And certainly a lot of voters respond to that. What he did not anticipate was that he would have all of these crises of the public health,

of the economy, of race relations, of democracy that are there and that he would have both the obligation and the opportunity to do something about it. You know, I think in the middle of the interview, he pointed out the portrait of FDR that he has hanging over the fireplace in the Oval Office and that prime spot. That's how he sees himself now.

I think that if he had been honest with himself in 2019, when he got into the race, he probably would have put like Harry Truman up there as the continuation of something, right? And instead, now he's seeing himself as not just a function of Obama or a function of Trump, but no, he's going to be a big transformative president. Now whether he actually gets to be that person

where he are going to see over the next couple of weeks and months. Yeah, I mean, and that was sort of my point is that, so you meet these people who have they've caught the car, they've caught the bus, and then they're like surprised that the job involves hard, unpleasant decisions or that they would have to risk what they just earned to, in order to enact this legislation or to stop this bad thing from happening.

You know, it's sort of like, it's like, look, guys, there's, and women, so I'm just saying to all of them, but it's like, there was like a million ways you could have made money. There was like a million ways you could have become famous. There's a million things you could do that are more fun and easier than this. You chose politics and then you're like, surprise that politics is requiring you to do something other than pursue your self interest at any moment. You know, like, I got this sense when I would talk to these different politicians that they're like, well, why should I put my ass on the line? You know, to, to, if I, I remember them saying something to me, like, I was like, well, why don't you do this, right?

Some, you know, about some Trump thing they were telling me they disagreed with. And they were like, well, I don't want to be Bob Quarker, you know, and, and, or, or, or, or Jeff Flake. And it's like, then you pick the wrong line of work. I don't know, I don't know what to tell you. You know what I mean? You didn't decide to become a regional business executive or a social media influencer. You're one of a hundred people in the Senate.

How is this hard for you to wrap your head around, but it really does feel like there is a misunderstanding about what the job of a politician is. Yeah. So it would be like, if you woke up one morning and you're like, I mean, do I really have to talk to people for this podcast? I think that's hot. Yeah. You don't have to do a podcast. I don't think you're like legally required to.

But it's the job you signed up for. And the way that unfortunately too many politicians and I think one of the frustrations that I have had over the course of Trump's rise is hearing Republican politicians, Republican elected officials who say to me like off the record or privately like, I don't agree with anything that we're doing, but I can't say it or I'm not going to say it. And that, I think if you agree with what Trump is doing, that's great. You know, like, fine. Go and say that you agree with it.

There are a lot of Republicans who do, right? But if you don't and you say like, I can't really say it, what are you doing? What's the point of having this job? You were elected to take positions, not always comfortable positions. And, you know, politicians always wanna avoid having an unpopular opinion or an unpopular position. Sure, but, you know, when we're in this big moment

for the country and no one who's paying attention would deny that we are, then this is your call to have a big opinion on things. And that goes not just for Republicans, it goes for Democrats too, but I will tell you that it is much more rare to hear Democrats say off the record, well, I can't stand anything Biden is doing, but I can't say anything about it. And some of that is just like the Democratic mentality because Democrats just sound off

all the time whenever they have frustrated about anything. But it's a confusing thing to cover. And I, to watch people who have, yes, I'm a reporter who's based in Washington, which means that I do have like private dinners with politicians sometimes, and that I guess makes me part of whatever the insiders of the swammer. But sometimes you watch people who say something over a dinner table to you and then say the exact opposite thing in public. And how, and then they, you know, sometimes those same people will complain like, oh, you reporters are so cynical. And we say, you make us cynical when you do things like that.

Well, that's your fault. I was at a dinner and I probably one of those sort of half private, half public dinners a few months ago. And, and Nikki Haley was there. She was like the sort of guest or whatever and she was talking. And I'm saying this so my listeners don't think I'm just some sort of extreme leftist because I'm not. I was perfectly inclined to like Nikki Haley and certainly like her better than many other people. But she was talking about that it's inappropriate that these social networking platforms are banning people and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I remember saying something like, look, why do you? I was like, do you think Facebook wants to be in the business of censoring politicians? The reason they're doing it is because their employees are making them do it. And the reason their employees are making Mark Zuckerberg do it is because the employees feel impotent to make their politicians that is you, Nicky Haley, or anyone else in Washington or within the party infrastructure do what needs to be done. Like the reason this escalated and escalated and escalated to the point where there was an attempted coup and insurrection is because at every step of the way, exactly the long lines of what you're talking about, people thought one thing

in private, but another thing in public refused to put there but on the line in even the smallest way, which created the monster that we dealt with. So it's this weird thing where you see these politicians who again will give everything and try so hard to get elected, but then don't actually seem to want to do the job once they have it. It's the strain. As if it's somebody else's job, like somebody one position higher than them, it's like you were the ambassador to the United Nations. You had no ability were the ambassador to the United Nations. You had no ability to influence the behavior of this person

in any way. What are you talking about? So it's very strange the sort of complete derolliction of duty coupled with the sort of like hand-ringing about where things are going. the sort of like hand-ringing about where things are going. Yeah, it's, and this is not just about politics. I think the probably clearest parallel is in the media world where you have media executives who say like, well, what do you want us to do? People want more coverage of the Kardashians or whatever. And we all have a role to, if you're taking a position,

a public position, right? I mean, I think anybody in journalism takes a somewhat public position. Anybody in politics is obviously taking a public position where it's part of like the implicit trust that consumers and voters have and all of us to say like, we want you to be a little responsible

about what you're doing and to think through it a little bit more. And we trust basically that you will. And you have to take that and be responsive to what people want. I don't think that like if I thought that the most interesting thing to write about was, I'm trying to think of something like really boring,

like dry cleaner prices or something, right? Like it's not, if I say to you like, this is really what's changing the world is whether you can get your shirts done for under $3. How many articles should I write about that if nobody is reading them? Probably not another, right? But in the other hand, you don't want it to just be like, oh, we're chasing the lowest

common denominator all the time, right? And politicians, it's the same thing. You want there to be this balance between being responsive, but also being responsible and having a sense of the trust that the public is putting you. Yeah, I think there's a solution, it's in quote, where he says, let evil into the world, but not through me. I think that we do have this tendency. It's a good, rushing quote.

We have this tendency to be like, why aren't these politicians standing up doing what's not in their interest, but in the larger interest. And then yeah, you have a journalist chasing clicks or like, I do think the imperative when you look at what these people do is to go, okay, obviously as a voter, I have a minuscule impact. I have to make sure I use that impact. But also the lesson is, well, like, how am I being courageous or working for the collective common good in my own industry. I have a friend who is sort of like a gastet, like Jeff Bezos and this space thing, you

know, is like posting about it all the time. And it's like, but you work as a salesperson for a different tech billionaire, you know, and you have a very nice life, you know. So, so there is this tendency where we want tendency where we want to question the morals and the purity of other people and then see ourselves exempt from having to live up to our own ideals in any way in our own lives. Yeah, and I think that whatever one's own opinion is of Donald Trump and his politics, what his election and his presidency did, or should have done for more people,

but I think did for a lot of people, is make us all feel like the stuff matters, like politics matters, and that we should have a role in it. Even if your role is just to be a voter, but to be engaged enough to care about what's happening and in a somewhat poetic way, the pandemic reinforces it, that we are connected to each other, that like getting vaccinated or whatever is not just about you, is about how we all have a role in things anything about climate change You know if you stop driving your

SUV does that make much of an impact yourself? No, but if we all stop doing you know if we all think about these things There does need to be an investment that each of us has in what's going on And I do think that that's much more alive now than it was pre-2016. The question now becomes, what do we all do with that? Because I wrote this whole book about these four years for the Democrats and the Trump years. It's not like the book is like, okay,

that's the end of the story. We all sorted it out. It's clear what happens now. It is a continuing story that, and it is a continuing struggle that we are all going through to figure out what we're going to be on the other side of however long a period this is. We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show, StayTune.

Well, speaking of these tech platforms, I have this theory that one of the most toxic forces in our culture, it's not social media per se, but it's how social media influence other forms of culture. So, I think when you look at like journalists as a class or as a profession, that was long a profession that prized sort of thinking in long form, you know, the sort of artificial idea of objectivity, you know, the idea of sort of getting the whole story, putting it out there,

the sort of definitive take on it, right? Serving the customer, speaking truth to power, so on and so forth. Now you can trust that with the incentives of Twitter, of 240 characters, the hotter, the faster to take the better, it has this compounding effect of like, if journalists are how the public comes to understand the world, and how journalists are understanding

the world is being affected by this technological uh, you know innovation you sort of get this weird magnified change in society, you know um You know, postman talks about how the dominant cultural medium sort of determines the culture itself I was just amazed at how often in the book, like, Twitter's coming up over and over again, either as people trying to take a viewpoint from Twitter and form a candidate around it, or, you know, conversely, often,

the people in Biden's campaign being like, guys, this is not reality. Nobody cares what these people think. I, that tension struck me, and I just wondered what you thought both as a reporter during the election, but then also a reporter who has to operate on this platform and watches it affect your colleagues. Like, how do you think about that?

It's really hard, and part of the thing that is going on is that it's not like, no, anybody has experience in what to do here. Yeah. Or that there have been rules that have been so. So we're like figuring out, figuring it out in real time as we screw it up and maybe do it well at certain points. But most of the time, screw it up. I think that part of what came from 2016 for a lot of people was this question of like, are we

living in bubbles, right? And there was that famous SNL, like commercial of being in a bubble that ran like a week or two after the election in 2016. Twitter is a bubble in itself and a way where like reporters are talking to each other only, right? A lot of the time. in itself and a way where like reporters are talking to each other. Yeah. Only, right? A lot of the time. And I've covered a lot of things as a reporter and a lot of different places.

And the reporters are often, there's like the area for the reporters. The tables or the computers can be set up or the little pen where they can stand. And they end up talking to each other and making little jokes about what's going on or sharing some insight back. And now most of that that you would see not at all public is happening in public view. But with, as you say, this weird incentive structure where if you can say something that's particularly snarky or particularly sharp and how you said

or really slam someone, then you can get a lot of likes, retweets, whatever. The revelation that I had over the course of a couple of years was that it is performance art that doesn't actually go that far, right? That it's, you can shape what other reporters are thinking about or have a conversation back and forth. And that can sometimes lead to things. There are times where I've tweeted something about an event and used it a little bit as an immediate test to see whether that idea has mileage or what kind of responses come to it and then translate that into an article. But usually you can spend a lot of time on Twitter and I think that one tweet I did got like 60,000 likes or retweet center, remember what you're saying?

And that is by far the most successful thing that I've ever tweeted. And most of the time, it's like, oh, you got like 40 people retweeted it like great. You know, like what's the actual advantage of this? Not all that much. And the downside of screwing something up and it's seeming like you've gone too far is pretty high.

And so the incentive becomes like making sure that you're on the radar for other people in journalism politics, which is a pretty small, insular group. And that in itself is not always, in fact, I would say, it's most of the time not very helpful. And I say that as somebody who tweets multiple times a day, nonetheless. Yeah, you'd almost have thought there'd be some empathy between the media and Trump in the sense of like,

it was like, why is he always tweeting, says person who is always tweeting? You know, like there, there does seem to be this compulsion and it's really the week, it's really the most, the worst way to do it, right? Let's know it's talk about sort of taking every impression, putting it to the test, really thinking about it, but with Twitter and Facebook and all these social platforms

are they're like, give me your opinion and then think about it. You know, like, give me your opinion and then let's think, let's see what other people think about it. As opposed to, I'm gonna go off for a minute and work through this, right? And so it's like, if journalists are supposed to be the filter, the people who sort of separate fact from fiction,

emotion from, you know, reality, it's really not good to have them be in constant sort of provoke, react, provoke, react mode all the time. I mean, I'd prefer that you guys go off really think about something or be reading a book from a hundred years ago about presidential campaigns and then being able to contextualize what's happening as opposed to Yeah, monitoring how many retweet something gets. Yeah, look, I was an English and a philosophy major in college I don't think that many philosophers and certainly any stoic wouldn't do well on Twitter

It's not it's not the way that things on Twitter. It's not the way that things usually get processed when there's a lot of thinking to go on. On the other hand, I'm remembering, as I say, when I was taking a class on the critique of pure reason, and my professor was trying to explain a section to us, and he said, this section is really badly written. And this is where you see that if content had graduate students who were working with him, that they would have said, Professor Kant, we need to clear this up. And he said, don't struggle about, I don't remember exactly which section it was,

but he was trying to explain to us, like there's not like deeper meaning to be gleaned from this, who's to who say it's badly written. When you read Kierkegaard, you think it's this philosopher like any of the others. This guy was writing angry letters under a pseudonym to the local newspaper for daring to gossip about him. You're like, it is the same personality just you know, like for thousands of years, just like the in the same way that egotistical people are attracted to politics, like it would be very unself aware to imply that those of us who become writers or public, you know, intellectuals or whatever are not

also driven by the desire to be seen and recognized and have a large validated, validating following. Well, that's, like, I think journalism, in particular in terms of writing, is about writing things not just for the sake of writing them, but for having an impact and an influence in the conversation and in what happened in political journalism and what happens in politics. I don't come at writing about politics as a Republican or Democrat or having a slant one way or the other. I don't myself believe that there's such a thing

exactly as objective journalism. I think that there's fair journalism. We all have some viewpoint that we come at this with. And we should all spend a lot of time in journalism striving to be fair, but you want, when you write things for it, to manner in the world and for people to read it, and for there to be an effect of people reading it. Otherwise, it just ends up being like, I'll go to the G-Six. I love letter two. Well, I was going to say a masturbatory experience. So you went for the cleaner, more poetic version than Ryan.

No, and that was another theme that I picked up on in the book, which I think is worth everyone thinking about. What I found remarkable about Biden for a person who was routinely criticized as being sort of gaff prone or, you know, sloppy. He really ran a campaign of pretty remarkable discipline. I was sort of thinking about it via the Rams, New England Super Bowl, where Bella checks like, I'm going to run the most, I'm going to run the most boring offense in the history of football because I'm playing against one of the most exciting offenses in the history of football and we're just playing against one of the most exciting offenses in the history of football and we're just going to, you know, this is going to be a game

of contrast. That just at every step of the way, he was provoked, baited, set up for, you know, a potential campaign ending mistake. Any remarkably didn't, didn't make one. And I was, I was a president. Well, he made a bunch of mistakes. I mean, no, not to do to make, but he didn't make any mistakes that cost him the election

by definition, when we talk. That's true. Yeah. And look, I ran into somebody last weekend whom I haven't seen. I, it's somebody who, I don't know that well, but because of the pandemic, I hadn't seen in a year and a half.

This is not somebody in journalism politics. He said to me, it's a very proud Democrat. He said to me, I remember you saying to me in the summer of 2019, the end of 2019, Biden looks tired and he's screwing up a lot and look, he's the president now. And I said and was sort of like rubbing my face in it. And I was like, well no, I mean like he was tired and screwing up a lot in those days. And that doesn't mean obviously that he's not the president now. But there are a lot of things that fit together in this way to make him the nominee and the president that I don't think anybody would have been able to predict, right?

To go back, when I turned in that proposal for this book in 2018, the proposal said, like, Joe Biden's probably going to run, and he's probably going to be one of the leading candidates, we'll see whether it works out for him. So it wasn't like shocking to me that he would do well. I did think that there was a reasonably good chance that someone else would come out ahead of him. And in fact, when you see the way it went down where he was struggling, and if not for Trump doing all the things that led to the first impeachment, would that end up benefiting Biden because everybody kind of rallied around him?

Would Biden have been the nominee without that? I don't know. Would Biden have been the nominee if there wasn't a real recoil from Bernie Sanders at the end, which would not have happened probably with any of the other candidates in the race? I don't know. There are things there that really fit together

in this intricate puzzle, and that's what the book tries to get at. Like, why it worked out this way? fit together in this intricate puzzle. And that's what the book tries to get at, like why it worked out this way. And it was not as obvious as like, hey, he was the two term vice president, well known, older white guy. Of course, he was gonna be the nominee.

Like, yes. And it can seem like it was like the obvious conclusion and almost written in the stars. But it really wasn't at any point. And you think, like, this is a guy who came in fourth place in Iowa and then followed it up by coming in fifth place in New Hampshire, right? It's not a story that usually leads

to anything good happening in politics. Well, and that's kind of what I mean about discipline is that you could, I think, if I was in that position, you know, your response would be to overreact or to abandon the plan. And there was a remarkable amount of discipline. You know, it's kind of a tortoise in the hair story. It's kind of a, you know, I have a hypothesis about the American electorate that runs counter to kind of what the polling says that definitely runs counter to what Twitter says that runs counter to the, you know, what's getting coverage in the media. But if I can just stick with this, you know, I think it's going to work. And there's the, there's an element of that sort of plotting, and bet. It's like he had a vision for the Soul of America and he made a big bet on it.

And for most of the campaign, it did not look like a good bet. And then it started kind of paying dividends. So I was just struck by the, in sports, we call it like, oh, they stuck with the game plan. And it seems like of all the candidates, he was kind of the only one that did it. Yeah, and like he started saying that the expression battle for the soul comes from him.

And he started saying it after Charlottesville because there was that Nazi march. And it did hit for so many people as like what is happening, right? And he puts this, he's thinking about this book that John Meacham wrote called The Soul of America. And then he says, okay, the battle for the soul. And he writes an article about it,

and he's reading the article to people in draft form. And he's like starting a shout as he's reading it. And then again, to this whole process that he's going through in the book. And then he comes to the point of deciding to run. And he says, it's a battle for the soul at the beginning. And his campaign is doing polling and focus groups about this. And they are saying, like, people aren't really into this phrase, sir.

Like, maybe you use something else. And he refuses to. And, you know, I think it's important. Like, because he won, this does seem like the right strategy. If he had lost, he would have seemed like he was being stubborn, right? Sure. And by doing this, right?

So it's important to think about the history, not just in the end result, right? But he keeps going at it and keeps going at it. And it could go back to that interview we did in the beginning of February. When I said to him, so by the way, like there were a bunch of different titles that we had played around with for this book. And only maybe three days before the interview that I did with him at the end of January, we decided, okay, we're going to call it battle for the soul. It does really feel like that because of the riot, because I had just gone and covered the inauguration and how weird it was to have

that behind these fences with the National Guard there. And so I said to him, so we're going to call this book battle for the soul. We just decided that a couple days ago. So I guess I have, and should just thank you for coming up with that phrase, and instead of a little joke, and he said to me, yeah, the difference between you and me pal is, I actually believe it. I love that.

Yeah. And I last a little bit and I said, now I think you actually made it on to something. And part of that is Biden, he is very much the guy that you see in public is gregarious and warm, but he also does have this very sarcastic sense of humor and a sense of like, no, I was right. You know, I was right about this

and he wanted to make sure that I felt that. And through the conversation, he ended up saying to me, yeah, when I was talking about the battle for the soul, a lot of my, a lot of people working on the campaign said to me, stop talking about that stuff, nobody really connects with that anymore. And I wanted to keep talking about it that way. And I think that this goes to what I was saying earlier,

that the presidency that he has is pretty different from the one that he imagined for himself. And now, it does feel like we're in this battle for the soul in a big, deep way on many, many different levels. But that's not something that any of us could have anticipated. And so he ends up rising to a moment that wasn't there, but that really is this moment that we're in. And now we see whether he can actually do anything with that moment. Yeah, you could argue that what great leaders do is they make the moment. And

then to a certain extent, the moment wasn't there. And he was kind of skating to where the puck would be, which is what great leaders do. I have a line from General Mattis that I have on my wall. He says, you know, cynicism is cowardice. And there is kind of an earnestness to Biden that I think does make him stand out in a world of a lot of cynicism, even nihilism these days. Yeah, and I wrote an article in the Atlantic that published this week where it gets into how he's handling talking about Trump as Trump continues to try to force himself much more onto the scene.

And Biden's approach, the White House's overall approach, is to be a little bit dismissive of Trump to say he's not on the same level as the President of the United States. And he's like this crazy guy who's scared to do this. Same with the self discipline. Same with the self discipline. Same with the self discipline. Right. And what that leads to sometimes, and I can verify this even with the reaction that I got

to this article from reporters and politicians alike, is people saying like, does he not get it? Is he totally oblivious to what's going on? It doesn't, you know, then he needs to get into this big fight. And Biden has this sense of the best way to deescalate a fight is to not be in it. And he pulls himself out of the fight.

And so, and that seems to have, I think to his credit at this point, kept the temperature lower than it might have been otherwise. The question though is, does this end up repeating in a mostly parallel way what happened in 2015 and 2016, where people were for a long time pretty dismissive of Trump and what Trump was tapping into and not see that it is very compelling to a lot of Americans and to underplay this and not be ready for the fight that's really come. There's a great book you may have read if you haven't, you should, and anyone listening should, called the Hidden Hand Presidency that's mostly about Eisenhower and McCarthy. And basically, it sort of falls in line

with what you're talking about in your article, which is that the president has to be above things. So Eisenhower never mentions McCarthy, refuses to give him any oxygen, refuses to attack him directly. But, and we only find this out years later, when the archives are started to be revealed. But worked quite Machiavellianly to destroy him in secret through intermediaries. So, I would

agree that as long as the self-discipline and the outward control is matched by a sort of inner pragmatism and awareness of the urgency of the problem, the strategy can work well. If it's delusional or naive, I'm going to ignore it and it will go away, then it's probably only going to get worse. I have not read that book, but that sounds like it should be on my reading list pretty quickly. I will say that when I was reporting this story about Biden, I said to someone who is one of his top advisors, I said, but like he's like reading the clips and watching what's happening

on TV, right? Yeah, he's reading the clips. He does not watch as much TV by any measure as Donald Trump did or dies. But he is aware of what's going on and what Biden would say to people is, you know, that was his son that Donald Trump went after when he was trying to drum up the Ukraine conspiracy stuff. You know, that's cutting pretty close to him. That's his son whose emails about being in recovery

and that were hacked and put out in public, that that was his own presidency, that the riot and the Capitol was meant to overturn. He feels it pretty directly about himself, but there is this, and even sometimes in talking with him and getting deep into it with him, this place where it's not clear whether it is like a relentless optimism or a naivete, or just in some ways I think it really draws from his experience with grief through his life, and knowing that there is a way to handle this when things go terribly wrong and that doesn't always involve screaming back at it.

He talks about one of the really, I've heard him say it so many times that it's a complete, every time he says it, I start to be like, oh, he's doing this thing again. As a jaded reporter. But he will always say to people, when they're in, whether it's a one-on-one conversation or talking to a group of mass shooting survivors, he says, it's hard to believe it right now, but there will come a time where the memory of the person who was killed will bring a smile to your face

and not just the tears that you're feeling now. of the person who was killed will bring a smile to your face and not just the tears that you're feeling now. And he said, you'll get there, right? And you just have to believe me that that's coming. And that grief is so driven through him that from the experience of his wife and baby daughter being killed in 1972 and his son dying in 2015. One of his best friends, Ted Kaufman, says to me in the book that Biden is both the luckiest

and un luckiest person that he's ever known, that he goes back and forth between this and this, I guess, really plugs into stoicism here. Yeah. That car crash that kills his wife and baby daughter and puts his two sons in the hospital happens when he's in Washington as the youngest senator ever elected. And in this great high, and it gets pulled down, that he goes up to running for president in 1988 and it seems like things are going great and then he gets himself into a plagiarism scandal because he's talking off the cuff so much that he talks himself into trouble. And he has to pull out and then he has brain aneurysm to and the last rite search delivered to him, That's how bad things were. That it's just constant back and forth with him.

And then, so I think that part of what he's facing now, when he looks at what's ahead for the country, is thinking like, how do we keep this on an even keel? And how do I use my own personal experience of thinking about that to inform how I lead the country? Yeah, in my book, The Ops goes Away, I've used this great book called Lincoln's Melancholy as a source, which everyone should read.

But it's about Lincoln's crippling battle with depression for most of his life and how this sets him up for this unique moment that he ends up occupying in history. And I do think there is an element to that of Biden and his story, which is that it forges a temperament that is both uniquely suited to the times, but also very much needed to the times.

Because you could argue that, you know, we're all addicted to social media. We are all trapped in this outrage cycle. Having a president, as Trump was, politics aside, who was very much the apotheosis of that, you know, escalated it and took us to a much worse place culturally. Again, policies aside, I am somewhat hopeful that the next four years can perhaps, you know, break us from our, you know,

politics as the dominant cultural medium of entertainment mentality that we're in and the sort of always following, always responding cycle. We do have a president who's temperament, we would all be happier if we had a bit more of that temperament as opposed to the watch five hours of Fox News in the evening and then tweet about it mentality. Yeah, Michael Bennett is one of the senators from Colorado and who ran for president as he himself will say in a way that almost no one was aware of. I remember when he was getting into the race, I was in New Hampshire with one of his fellow candidates and I said, oh, so I'm going over to see Michael Bennett and I won't tell you which one this was, but this candidate

said to me, oh, is he running too? But Bennett in the summer of 2019 tweeted this line that said something like, you know, if I'm president, I promise you'll be able to go two weeks without ever thinking about me. And his campaign didn't do very well, but that sensibility, I do think connected with a lot of people. And especially during the pandemic, where inevitably, we were all, especially last fall, thinking every day about what we were all going through

and how the government and politics was failing us. And that we couldn't ever escape it because we couldn't have escaped our homes. And Biden was essentially saying to people like, I'll just take care of it. That was his pitch. I'm not going to be that exciting. You're not going to get any soap opera level palis intrigue stories out of me. I'm telling you right now, I've tried to report on some of the stuff that the conversations are never that interesting when Joe Biden is involved in them as compared to the Donald

Trump ones, they don't go in crazy ways. And Biden made that pitch to the country. And I don't know if without the pandemic, he would have been as successful making that kind of a pitch. But with the pandemic, people did seem to feel like, okay, that seems reasonable to me. That's the kind of government, that's the kind of politics that I want more of. And there were a lot of votes that Joe Biden got that were for him, but there were were a lot of votes that Joe Biden got

that were for him, but there were also a lot of votes that Biden got that were against Trump. And people saying we don't want the Trump way of doing things anymore. So last question, and I'll let you go. And I'll just go back to reading your writing. But what do you feel like having followed four years of a campaign,

and then now we're about to watch another one starts? Unfortunately, it was so early, but what have you seen as far as how the sausage gets made that perhaps your average person doesn't, that knowing might save them time, save them anxiety, save them outrage. Like what do you feel like as a reporter, you understand about how media, particularly about politics gets made, that perhaps impacts how you read, see the news,

your perception of whether the world's, teetering on the edge of destruction or if we're just getting a bit more worked up than we need to be. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think it's sort of two questions. I think we should be pretty worked up about what's going on in politics in this country, but the main insight that I try to bring to every article that I write and this book, I think you see it throughout, is that these are human beings. They're not characters in a play or in a movie. And when you start to think of them in that way,

as people, you get such a different understanding of how they do things well, how they screw things up, what their intentions are. A lot of this book, in writing it, felt to me like I was writing a novel, though it's all true. Yeah. But that's because I got to know these people really well and cover them a lot and talk to a lot of people about them. And when you see the way that

they struggle with decisions or the way that when something goes really well, what it is it's driving it and it's not this like big mythical clashes like out of a Marvel movie or something that it gives you an understanding of what's going on, right? Like there's a lot in there's a chapter in the book about that first famous debate between Biden and Harris when she hit him over busing and blew up and then she ended up having her own problems because of it.

But part of what's sketched out in there is why she needed to do that, why she felt she needed to do that because she needed to raise money and she needed to raise her profile. But also how they talked through the specific ways of making the attack how she was uncomfortable about different parts of it, why Biden react in the way that he did, and you have to understand that, and then you understand that these people are all fallible, and they are all fallible, not just in like the big way, but like maybe something goes wrong in a way that reverberates and ripples through government and politics because someone didn't really sleep well one day. That's possible.

That stuff happens sometimes. We were talking about the Hillary Clinton basket of deplorable slime. I don't know whether she had had a bad day that day or it was particularly exhausted, but it could be that, and that ends up haunting her own campaign. And so when I look at this, what's ahead of us now, and think about the people who want to be part of the,

the political leadership of what that'll be, whether the Republicans are going to start running for president or the Democrats who are in office now, it's saying like, how do you deal with this stuff? How do you, and they're, to feel like, I said to one of the members of the House leadership, a guy named Hakim Jeffries, who I'll have a story about shortly, a guy who's probably going to be the next speaker of the house, once Nancy Pelosi retires whenever that day comes.

And I said to him, do you feel the burden of like thinking if you guys screw up the midterm elections, like that's a big problem for a long time for the Democratic Party, and in your minds, a big problem for a long time for the Democratic Party, and in your minds, a big problem for democracy itself. And that question isn't just about getting the big speechification from him about ideals, but really how that hits this guy who is a human being and goes home and has to talk to his kids about what's going on and that.

Right, the kicker the blue the field goal. Right, it's real. And when you put these people at a reserve, then I think you both don't give them enough credit and also kind of give them too much credit because you let them get away with things that were like there as if it's not real in affecting people's lives. But stuff affects people's lives. What happens with the bills that are going

on in Congress? The sort of bounce around these enormous numbers, trillions of dollars in an infrastructure bill. Will it be three and a half trillion or four and a half trillion, but you know, that's money, that the difference of a million dollars in one project could be enormous for a specific community or for somebody's lives. And think about it in that way and how they're all processing it. It's really, I think that the failure of politics and the failure of political journalism often is to let things get too divorced from how it actually affects all of our lives,

because it doesn't weigh as big and small. Yeah, maybe that's Biden wearing off on you, the idea of semifpity and thinking about what people are going through because everyone is going through something. Yeah. I guess, Ryan, you think I was like a bad person before. I spent some time around politicians, but it's not just by, and I think it is the politicians who think about things in that way are the ones that we should all want to have leading things. It doesn't mean that they're all going to agree on the solution to get there.

But the politicians who only think like, wow, how do we keep the Democrats in the majority in 2022 or how do we win the Senate back for the Republicans? That is not a good way of going about things. No, it's a shitty way to be a person, but I think it's also historically not been a particularly great strategy. Yeah, and you look at the last, I would say, 20-ish years in American politics, and it has been this just sort of like tug and war, or tug of war back and forth of who's going to be in power without thinking about like, what about all these things that are rotting under the surface?

And again, I think Donald Trump is, is the manifestation in voters' minds of people saying like, we want you to do something. Yeah. You know, and I was sketched in the book. I write about how a lot of what was going on in 2016, and I think continued to go on through his presidency and in 2020 is people saying, like, I'm getting fucked. I can't pay my mortgage. I can't, I'm working harder. I can't pay my mortgage.

I'm working harder than I ever worked. I'm working harder than my parents worked. I can't pay for my kids to go to college. It seems like other people are doing well. It seems like we had a Wall Street crash and yet still, the big bonuses for all the big banks. I'm getting fucked. And why won't anyone do something

for me. And Donald Trump's strength was saying, I know you're getting fucked and I'm angry about it too. And the irony that that was coming from a guy who was born into wealth and lives in literally a gold-covered sour, not very much about anyone other than himself. But he was speaking to that anger. And I think that then what was important again in 2020 is that Biden figured out a way to speak to people's anger that they were getting fucked in the pandemic and that they had turned to Trump to try to change things and they were still kind of getting fucked. It didn't change their lives. And Biden saying, look, I can, I think we can try to get government to work again,

and I can do something for you. And people say, okay, maybe we do that. Maybe we go to this guy who has more experience than, like, literally anyone else who's ever been president, right? And Americans, if you go in the history of American politics, it is almost impossible to find an example of somebody who had more experience winning over somebody who had less experience. The exceptions are like George H. W. Bush

and Thomas Jefferson, right? Yeah. And so Biden coming and making that argument in a way that really worked is a reflection of just how harried people were by what they were going through and thinking like, okay, maybe we need something calmer and more experienced and maybe that's the way to do something. But Biden now, you see what he's talking about all the time where he says democracy is dependent on us showing that government can work.

This is not a small thing. This is not just about whether people's like taxes go up or down or whatever, this is something much bigger that we should all hopefully be able to have faith that our government does something, whatever it may be. And I'm not sure that that message has translated so well to a lot of members of Congress at least so far. No, I love it.

I loved the book and I'm so glad we got connected and I can't wait to... Actually, I would say I can't wait for the next book, but I hope that the upcoming election is so boring that it does not warrant another book. So that's just my view as a citizen, but as a fan, I do hope it comes along. I don't think that we're heading into a super boring period in American politics. And that being said, I don't have,

I'm not yet at work on another book, but who knows what will come at, I think that there will. The joke is that what's good for journalism is often what's not good for the country and vice versa. Yeah, may you live an interesting time. Yeah. And I think that there will be still a lot of journalism to do, so you can read into

that what you will. I will. I appreciate it, and we'll talk soon. All right, thank you. Thanks for listening. We just crossed more than 50 million downloads with the Daily Stoke podcast. Thanks to you. Please leave a review on Apple

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