Pod Save America - "Live from DC, it’s January 6!"

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

The January 6th special committee sets expectations high for Thursday’s prime time hearing, tensions in the Biden White House spill into the press, and Chef Jose Andres talks to Tommy about World Central Kitchen and what they’ve learned helping people in Ukraine and serving refugees and people in need around the world.  For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Dan is filling in for Jon today. He's doing a focus group of undecided voters for the wilderness. Things are tough out there. One of the undecided voters is Doug Emhoff. I didn't know he lived in Pittsburgh. On today's show, the January 6th committee sets expectations very high or really very low for Thursday's primetime hearing. Tensions in the Biden White House spill out onto the streets.

And Chef Jose Andres talks to Tommy about World Central Kitchen and what they've learned helping people in Ukraine and serving people in need around the world. But first, you can now binge the entire first season of Stuck with Damon Young. This season, Damon explores the uncomfortable, hideous, and hilarious absurdity of being Black in America with some of the brightest minds and boldest voices of the black community. Listen to all episodes for free only on Spotify. And Crooked Coffee is coming June 21st. Why coffee, Tommy?

I love coffee. NPR sells coffee. They do? If they can do it, we can do it. I bet Ari Shapiro brews a mean cup of coffee. I bet he does too. I bet he does one of those ones. One of those ones that's not even brewing. It's like pour over. Yes. For sure. Yeah. Shapiro brews a mean cup of coffee. I bet he does too. I bet he does one of those ones that's not even brewing.

It's like pour over. For sure. Yeah. For sure he does. Somehow it's better than any coffee you've had before. One time, R.H. Shapiro is a friend of mine, and he showed me that he had grown pears inside of a jar to make some kind of a liqueur months later.

And it was like, I need laundry detergent. What can't you do? Amazing. Amazing. Enough about Hardy. The point is coffee drinkers at Crooked tested many beans. They found something they loved and a portion of the proceeds from every order will go to register her to register women to vote across the country. Go to crooked.com slash coffee to sign up. The bag also looks very cool, Dan. Oh, it does. It's a great design. Okay, let's get to the news. The January 6th committee's first primetime hearing is Thursday night. In the run

up to that hearing, members of the committee are signaling that there will be news. And we've seen indictments and damning reports about what was taking place in the hours before the attack on the Capitol. Then on Friday, the Department of Justice indicted former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress while not indicting Mark Meadows or Dan Scavino. Meadows turned over some documents before stopping his cooperation. It's how we enjoyed many of his texts. But it's also been reported that the committee has learned he burnt documents after a meeting with Pennsylvania Republican and big lie enthusiast Scott Perry. Dan, what does this tell us about how seriously the DOJ is taking their broader January 6th investigation.

I have to say, because I was sort of knocked out with COVID last week, I didn't follow the Peter Navarro story very closely. So I thought I'd Google it today. And I Googled Peter Navarro. And the first thing that comes up is in leg irons. So I was like, oh, Peter Navarro must be in jail. How cool is that? No, this is a misdemeanor contempt charge that he has. It's a slap on the wrist.

And so I don't know that it tells us anything about how seriously Merrick Garland, Department of Justice, may be pursuing charges against Trump and his allies related to this. But it does tell us that they're not super serious about enforcing congressional subpoenas. Because if you can negotiate for a little bit and burn some of your documents in the fireplace and not get charged with contempt, it pretty much means that these subpoenas aren't worth much more than the pieces of paper that Mark Meadows burned. Yeah, I mean, Tommy, can't we just enjoy this, Dan? He was arrested at the airport. That must have been funny. He was arrested at the airport.

He could get a year per count, 100 grand. He's representing himself, pro se. I love that he's representing himself. He's playing it full loon. Totally. It does seem like what this is mostly about is you can defy a congressional subpoena for as long as you want, so long as you do it with like a lawyer and like the proper words. Like Navarro seems to be just loose. Just deleted the emails.

Yeah, he just didn't follow. He just didn't treat it respectfully. I think if you're the president's trade advisor and then you get arrested for contempt of court for your involvement in an insurrection, that is like the strongest argument for staying in your lane. Yeah. He had just done trade.

He wouldn't have gone to jail briefly. Right. Think about the path that peter navarro has taken to those leg irons he was just a a a trade nut out in the world jared kushner looked for a book on trade on amazon googled him yeah amazon him and now he's now he's getting arrested at the airport on his way to a mike huckabee hit thanks bezos yeah i do i do like that the maga response is like uh how could you arrest him? He went to Harvard. That's basically where they're coming from on this. They're all shocked that the justice system treats suspects

horribly. Did you know he ran for Congress as a Democrat? Yeah, in like 96, right? Yeah, campaign with Hillary Clinton. So now also in the last week or so, we learned about what was taking place inside the White House and that Trump and those around him were aware of the potential for violence on January 6th. Tommy, Maggie Haberman has a story out that the day before the insurrection, Mike Pence's chief of staff, Mark Short, alerted the Secret Service that Donald Trump was going to turn publicly against Pence. And as a result, Pence might be in physical danger. might be in physical danger. Do you think that indicates that inside the White House, they were aware that Trump's incitement might lead to violence on January 6th? Yeah. Yeah.

Seems like it. I really do. I mean, certainly shows that Mark Short thought that. He was Mike Pence's chief of staff. I would love to know if Mark Short talked about this conversation with the Secret Service with Mike Pence and if he knew he was going to do it or if he was briefed on it afterwards. But we now have this conversation between Mark Short and the Secret Service, which the Secret Service denied on Twitter, by the way, which is whatever. That seems to suggest that Trump's officials were aware that his words and conduct could create violence before January 6th. And then we have all the texts of Mark Meadows that shows that they were aware as the violence was happening, that Trump was capable of stopping it by putting out some sort of statement. So it feels like there's a lot of

awareness of the power of his words now. Yeah, Dan. So we have the vice president's chief of staff warning the Secret Service that the president is going to put the vice president in danger. That's the day before the insurrection. We also learned recently in the Times, also by Maggie Haberman, that as the events on January 6th were unfolding, Mark Meadows told colleagues that Trump was complaining about Pence being brought to a safe location. And this is how it is actually described in the piece. Trump said something to the effect of maybe Mr. Pence should be hanged. Dan, what kind of evidence do you think the committee is holding back on this specific? How much more information do we need? Do we need to see a picture of Trump behind Pence with a pair of gloves, like holding

a piano? What is fucking left? Also, the other thing, Dan, if the president said he wanted the vice president to die, don't you think you remember the words? Don't you think you wouldn't have to fucking paraphrase it? Except these people are all so dumb. Right. But I read that and I laughed. And then I briefly felt guilty for laughing.

But it's like somehow Mike Pence is the one person in all of American life whose murder is funny. The president. pence is the one person in all of american life whose murder is funny like the president it is the president was watching a mortal threat to the country and the vice president of the united states and he was like sitting there with popcorn being like they got him out of there that's a shame i want to see something happen uh so this brings us to thursday. Tommy, Congressman David Cicilline, who's on the committee, said, I think the American people are going to learn facts about the planning and execution of this. That will be very disturbing. Liz Cheney has signaled that we will learn a lot more about just how organized the conspiracy to overturn the election really was beyond incitement. Congressman Jamie Raskin said these hearings will, quote, blow the roof off the

house. Do you think blowing the roof off the house is setting expectations at the right level? Yeah, that does. That says more Miami Club promoter than the member of Congress. But look, let's be glass half full. We've learned a lot of information in the last few days. I also want to just point out one little note about the Mark Short going to the Secret Service. Apparently, he also went to Jared Kushner and tried to get help from Jared and sort of calming things down. Jared said he was too busy doing Middle East peace, which means lining up $2 billion from the Saudis. So this is like the new I'm doing the dishes.

I love that. I can get involved here. I'm trying to get paid. I'm trying to do a corrupt deal to make billions of dollars after I leave. I'm only in this job for another couple of weeks. Do you see this skinny suit? This doesn't pay for itself. Yeah, I think blow the roof off the house.

Look, we'll see. I mean, certainly it seems like Maggie Haberman had to publish this Pence Secret Service story because the committee learned about it. She was worried about them getting ahead of her. So maybe Pence's aides will testify. Everything does seem to be speeding up. DOJ is moving a little faster. I don't know.

I'm going to allow myself to feel hopeful and to be surprised to the upside. Cheney has described the ongoing threat to our democracy. Seems like she understands the importance of looking forward. We talked a little bit about this on Thursday night, but you were on COVID leave. What does a politically successful hearing look like to you? I think a politically successful hearing is one that drives the political conversation for a month, right? It won't be every day of that month, but they're holding these hearings in primetime, I think in part because they've learned the lessons of the failures of the two Trump impeachments, where most people, the overwhelming majority of people, particularly the people that you who are not already decided one way or another on the guilt or innocence of Trump, didn't see it. They just saw news coverage

of it from people they didn't necessarily trust or care about or believe. And so they're holding it in front of as many, with as many eyes as possible. I think that's good. I think the success here is if we raise the stakes and we explain the danger, not just of what happened on January 6, but that it could happen again and that the people who organized it, who pushed it, who fomented that big lie are still doing that with a grave existential threat to our democracy right now and to upcoming elections. Tommy, there's reports that they've hired a hotshot TV news producer to make this feel like an investigative special, to give it a Dateline vibe. Think that'll move the needle? I don't know. I mean, it's better than Chuck Schumer storyboarding the thing.

Did you guys know that Nightline, this is where the producer they hired came from, started as a four-day-per-week update on the Iran hostage crisis? I didn't know that. And it was so successful that they just sort of evolved it into Nightline. Wow. Thank you, Rick Perlstein.

But do you think we could have... Did you know that, Dan? I did know that because I read it and I read the same Rick Perlstein book that... Shout out, Reaganland. Dan, you got a book out too, right? What's it called? Battling the big lie.

We'll get it. We'll get to it. All right. All right. But I do want to say, Dan's battling the big daily. Do you think if the Republicans were doing this and they hired someone from TV, they would have hired the guy from nightline,

right? It would have been like Mark Burnett. Like, can we get, they hired bill shine, right? Yes. To do nothing in my old office in the white house.

That is correct. Look, we've, we've seen what happens when Republicans try to put on a primetime event. They've won despite their terrible, terrible convention productions for year after year. We need DJ Pauly D. We need someone to really pull the roof off. I think we need the guy behind Squid Game. Like, let's shoot for the moon here.

That's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Or Top Gun. Or Top Gun. That's right. He's probably not on our side. Right.

Anyway. You got questions, Lovett? Yeah, let's keep moving. Let's keep moving. All rightick. That's right. He's probably not on our side. Right. Anyway. You got questions, Lovett? Yeah, let's keep moving. Let's keep moving. All right, Tommy. All right, so Trump and his allies are planning to counter-program these hearings. According to CNN, the former president wants people vigorously defending him and pushing back on the select committee.

There's already a lot of damning evidence. What do you expect them to try to do to distract from the testimony as it's unfolding in prime time? do to distract from the testimony as it's unfolding in prime time? This is kind of fun because usually there would be a bunch of Republicans on the committee who would have access to all the information and could better plan for how they're going to respond. These geniuses decided not to be a part of the January 6th committee and therefore have no insight.

They're just reading the news like us. So it sounds like the Republicans are planning to release a report that basically blames all of January 6th on security failures. Like, yeah, no shit. We all saw that. But I think there's a bigger question here. Kevin McCarthy is running point on the response. That's a bad side for them on the hearings on the Hill. By the way, Politico had an amazing piece last week about how reporters are too scared to just call Kevin McCarthy stupid when they talk about him or write about him. They use euphemisms like, you know, I don't know. Kevin McCarthy dares to ask the question, what if Paul Ryan was just coming out of anesthesia?

Apparently, Elise Stefanik is going to be like sort of the main tack dog. But I don't know what like they can try. I'm sure they'll be all over Fox News and they'll find little points of grievance and they'll try to like, you know, remember like Adam Schiff did something that pissed them all off in the impeachment hearings. And, you know, they made that their focus for three days. We'll probably see something like that. But yeah, I don't they're not very well set up here. Yeah, I've seen a bunch of different threads. There's like process arguments that this is not a legitimate committee and that they've kind of overstepped their authority. I saw intellectual Zamboni Hugh Hewitt saying nothing to see here, probably going to be pretty

boring. Nobody's going to watch. Dan, what are you expecting? And do you think Democrats are doing enough to kind of preview some of the Republican attacks on the committee? Before Trump's first impeachment, Steve Bannon described their strategy to Michael Lewis as flood the zone with shit. He said, Democrats are not the enemy. The media is the enemy. And they did that in that impeachment. So they just threw everything they possibly had at the wall. The egregious offense that Tommy referred to was Adam Schiff meeting with the whistleblower, which is because Adam Schiff was the person you blow the whistle to, right? That that was somehow an offense. Do you remember that for a long period of time in that hearing, it became the Republican talking point that Trump's extortion of Ukraine

was legitimate because it was Ukraine who interfered in the 2016 election, not Russia. And what Ukraine did to interfere in the election was two things, arrest Paul Manafort for crimes, Ukraine did to interfere in the election was two things. Arrest Paul Manafort for crimes. And two, to hide the DNC server, which is not a thing that actually exists. Yeah, into the cloud. And that is what they're going to do. They're going to throw everything they possibly have out there so that people who are paying less attention, who are inherently cynical of politicians, the political process, and the press,

will just throw up their arms and give up and say they're all corrupt. Who cares? And not really pay attention to them. What Democrats have to do here, I think, the first step is the right one, which is do it in prime time, get as many people to see it as possible, not rely on the press to carry that message for you. Because when you rely on the press for that, you are sending a discredited messenger to deliver the message to a lot of people who we need to reach. But the second thing is I think they have to keep two very clear threads and keep them separate, which I think keeps getting mixed up. There is the criminal conspiracy to overturn the election

that involves the legal memos, what they wanted Mike Pence to do, the fake electors in Arizona, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. And then there is the violence at the Capitol. And those are two very, very serious things, but they get all mixed up. And the violence at the Capitol is one that is, you know, absent the very specific, you know, some sort of like map in Trump's handwriting of how to get to Nancy Pelosi's office or something that Mark Meadows failed to burn. That becomes something you can blame on the Proud Boys and others. But that is a product of the larger criminal conspiracy. And the larger criminal conspiracy, I think, is where they should put as much of their

focus as possible. Because then you can't blame Nancy Pelosi completely incorrectly for security in the Capitol, right? What it is is there are people who decided that what the voters wanted and what the Electoral College decided was not what they wanted. So they were going to overturn the will of the American people. And keeping the focus on that in a very clear way, I think, is essential to sort of staying above the fray and what a lot of the bullshit the Republicans are going to do.

And again, just back to Peter Navarro. I mean, he wrote about the conspiracy to overturn the election in his book, and he branded it the Green Bay Sweep. So there's considerable evidence for us to point to here. It's the wire meme of don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy, right? Incredible. I just, it is too hard to beat these dumb, dumb people. My God, it is such hard work, and they are so stupid. It does seem like there has been this, I think, challenge from the beginning. It continues to this day, which is to talk both about the insurrection and the violence that took place at the Capitol, the larger conspiracy to overturn the election and to

continue to overturn elections into the future, and how to connect those things together, how to make an argument that points out the ways in which the incitement that took place outside the Capitol was a kind of outside game to create pressure inside the Capitol to move forward the plans they had to get Pence to question the electors, to get Grassley to take over for Mike Pence. Somebody tell Chuck Grassley where he was. You have to schedule the right interaction around his naps. Everything is speeding up. I mean, four Proud Boys were indicted today for conspiring to create violence outside the Capitol.

Those guys provide Roger Stone with security and I think did so on January 6th. So like there's a lot of connective tissue here that hopefully will make it easy to tell the story. We just need to see all the emails and documents and phone calls that these guys have figured out over the last, what, year plus? So those hearings are about to start. They'll be in primetime. They'll be taking place over the month of June. There are reports that there's a disagreement within the January 6th committee about what policy recommendations should emerge from these hearings to defeat the next insurrection, an effort to overturn a presidential election, a sequel that the GOP is

already plotting as we speak. Jamie Raskin wants big changes on voting rights, even potentially abolishing the Electoral College, while Cheney is calling for a more targeted set of reforms around the Electoral Count Act directed not at voting rights, but specifically at the efforts to dispute valid election results. Dan, who's right? I mean, is it Liz Cheney? Come on, say it. Say it. You want to say it? Say it on the record. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Ch say it i've said it before i'll say it again cheney's right i mean look at all seriously can we just add a mix to it that should be the start of like that's like this and then the beat drops raise the roof with that thing dan so why do you think so so so dan pfeiffer uh as you've always said cheney is right why do do you think Cheney is right? I'm not even saying

Liz. I'm not even giving you the satisfaction of a Liz. Why do you think Liz Cheney is right in this case? Because if we make this about something that is not achievable, right? It's not even like, Jamie Raskin, according to this report, is not just pushing for the For the People Act or the Voting Rights Act that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema support but won't break the filibuster for. He is supporting a constitutional amendment that we have no capacity to pass. And I think that is a distraction. I think the whole idea about recommendations is a lot of Congress brain happening here. You know what the recommendation is? Defeat Republicans because they are dangerous. That is what really matters. If you want to,

like, I think there's probably some pretty serious recommendations around how to protect the Capitol, how to ensure that they can call for help in situations faster. All of that's very important. If there is a good idea on the Electoral Counts Act, that is fine. But the point of the hearings is to, and this is why they're holding them in prime time, is to persuade the country about a very dangerous thing that happened, to explain who was responsible and help ensure it doesn't happen again. And you don't need a white paper to come out of that to have it be effective. Yeah. I mean, I don't even think it's a matter of like what's politically possible. We know what happened when we pushed, tried to get an expansive voting rights bill through,

but it's not like a targeted bill has much of a chance, given that the only two Republicans that are willing to acknowledge the existence of this committee are probably two of the only yes votes you'll get from Republicans, and it'll kind of be stymied in the Senate. But I do think the goal out of this, to your point, yes, is about defeating Republicans, but let's drive a message about the specific threat to our democracy. I want expanded voting rights. We all want expanded voting rights. We all want to make this, we all make our democracy work better. But I do think that even in the first year of this administration, we kind of combine these two things, right? The effort to undermine voting rights, to prevent people from voting,

which is a very, very serious threat. And then the much darker turn that took place at the Capitol representing an abandonment of democratic legitimacy generally. Basically, just there's only one kind of election that's legitimate, an election that Republicans can win. And if what we're hearing from the committee is basically a focus on that, then the recommendations should be a focus on that. Right, Tommy? Yeah. Or maybe some more DOJ referrals. I mean, what I guess let's fix this discrete problem of people trying to overturn the results of the election in a variety of ways. I cannot deal with another pivot from this massively important hearing to a show vote on getting rid of the electoral college that we know is dead in the water.

Like there are times when you should, you know, the House will take votes that they know will never get through the Senate. There's times to put elected officials on the record about big issues. In this instance, we have tried that. I think that we really risk wasting crucial time between now and the election when they could do more discreet things like, I don't know, fix premiums going up in Obamacare or do something on prescription drugs or just create some big effort where we all charge up a hill and Joe Manchin kills that effort in before it even starts and everyone feels demoralized again. Like that to me is the worst case scenario coming out of a hearing where, you know, for once we might learn a bunch of new things and get people kind of concerned about what happened again.

Yeah, Dan, it just seems like on a range of issues, there's like kind of like a basic thing that's not happening, which is, hey, let's have some votes that are good and unifying for Democrats and hard votes for Republicans. Like there was some talk after, you know, the vote to enshrine Roe went down that we'd see some votes enshrining a right to contraception, protecting the right to marriage equality. Those don't seem to have happened. And on this, we have an opportunity to put Republicans on the record on a set of discrete proposals just to protect our democracy. It seems like a good idea to have a unified message coming out of this and force Republicans to take some

hard votes. But that just doesn't seem to happen. The House has been doing more of that recently. On gas prices, they did a vote on baby formula. There's been a couple other things like that. And I suspect if they can, if we can solve this great feud between Jamie Raskin and Liz Cheney, that they will do something like that in the House. The Senate is a lost cause in this. It takes too long to get the votes. They get lost in procedural filibuster nonsense. You have mansion and cinema. And so, and also the thing we have to remember is in the Senate, we're only really running primarily against one incumbent senator in Ron Johnson. In the House, there are Republican incumbents that we are trying to defeat who are now in different districts. And so House votes that put people on the record are much more valuable for telling a story and for

persuasion than Senate votes, which are really about one knucklehead from Wisconsin. Meanwhile, President Biden will be in Los Angeles this week for the Summit of the Americas, causing traffic around our live show at the Ace Hotel Thursday night, part of a broader push to have the president out and about more after what we can safely call a challenging period for the administration, with legislative setbacks and hard problems roiling the country from access to baby formula to the price of gas. There's been a drumbeat of stories looking at tension and infighting inside the White House over efforts to manage these crises as President Biden's approval rating has fallen and we head into midterms that are taking a wood chipper-like shape. Midterms form of wood chipper. Dan, how much are these kinds of stories typical of a

White House in the barrel or is there more to it in this case? What do you think? When I read the Politico version of the story, which is like the third or first story in the barrel or is there more to it in this case? What do you think? When I read the Politico version of the story, which is like the third or first story in the last week about this, it actually made my stomach hurt because it basically 10, 12 years ago, my God, we're so old, 12 years ago, it's this exact story about the Obama White House, right? There's a hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, oil spilling out. Why can't they get in charge of it? They just can't get their message out. What happened to the Obama hope magic? And so when bad things happen, your polls go down. When your polls go down, the press write stories about how you are failing. And they tend to focus a lot of these stories on internal process stuff and not

on the big structural factors that are causing that to happen. Could the White House do better on a lot of things? Absolutely. Does the president need to get out more? Yes. Is he starting to do that? Yes, yes, he did his prime minister speech on guns. He's going to be on Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday night. But the big problem is that gas prices are high. Grocery prices are high. People can't find baby formula. These are huge problems. And most of the solutions are outside of the president's grasp, at least the immediate grasp. Yeah, Tommy, I had the same thought too. The Politico story was like a classic in the genre and not a criticism of the story. It just

was like a good archetype of that kind of piece. Classic. Classic. It was classic. But the piece, as these pieces do, it lays out the positive change, right? What's happening. There's going to be a course correction. There's going to be out on the road. Here are the changes on gas prices, refocusing on a message calling out Republicans. But then it said the following. First, aides need to quell the finger pointing that's been erupting internally and increasing concern over staff shakeups, according to five White House officials and Democrats close to the administration not authorized to publicly discuss internal conversations. What I love about that is, first, aides need to quell the finger pointing contained in this very paragraph, which represents the kind of anonymous sniping and leaking that

needs to be contained to prevent stories like this one about anonymous sniping and leaking. Tommy, you were young in the White House once. This is a classic of the genre. Dan and I have had to deal with a million of these. One, I mean, staff shakeups, rumored, infighting, White House battered by events, people saying, let Biden be Biden. The best. I guarantee you there was like a Peoria publication that like let Lincoln be Lincoln back in the day. And the problem with these stories is like I've been a spokesperson, Dan, you've been a spokesperson who takes this call.

You have to send the big email around to everyone on staff, alerting them that this, you know, brutal infighting bullshit is going to be in the paper. 90% of whom have already talked to the reporter. Oh, John Lemire is writing a story. Who knew? Yeah, who knew?

I don't even email reporters back. What are you talking about? I don't even talk to Politico. What's Politico? It's so time consuming. People take it so personally because like inevitably there's some, you know, there's some staffer that is being rumored to being, you know, pushed out or whatever. These are your friends.

You feel immense loyalty to these people. And like it's always background sourcing. It's impossible to pin down what the truth is. You deny it, but you really have no idea what the president is saying to members of Congress, old friends, family. Right. So my advice to the Biden press team would be maybe fight the narrative a little less, maybe lean into the skit a little more because you're never going to convince reporters that the fourth version of the story isn't right. I would just be like, yeah, Biden was rip shit pissed that mothers had to worry about getting formula and that we hadn't briefed him on it. And that's why he sent the military to Europe to get shipments back here. Yes, we staffers are mad that events on big issues don't get covered. There's also questions about tactics. And it does seem like

they need to kind of lean in a little harder, take some more digital swings. You can do the op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and stuff, but that should count for zero minutes of Joe Biden's day, right? Like hopefully he's not editing the op-eds. I mean, I'm sure he found out when it was published. Yeah, hopefully. I mean, that's how it should work. But like, yes, get out in the country more, do more town halls. Like, yes, the Republicans will clip it, you know, misstatements and things and try to make him look old and blah, blah, blah. But like, that's OK. That's the price of doing business. Like, keep picking fights with Rick Scott.

I mean, it's just it sucks to be in the barrel like this. It'll work itself out in a couple of weeks. And one of the like there's like a ritual for whenever you're in in the barrel, as we used to call it. Now, I've never seen anyone be in the barrel as long as Joe Biden's been in it. I mean, it'll be one year in the barrel come august right he's making little hash marks in there he's marking the days in the barrel and a lot of it's not his fault it's like you start to make a turn and then russia invades ukraine you start to make a turn and then baby for there's a baby formula crisis but one of the last things you have to do before you ever get

out of the barrel is you have to eat a bunch of ceremonial shit for the press. And that's what these stories are. And that's to your point. I mean, you've got to kind of lean in the narrative, do the pivot where you kind of say it wasn't going well. We acknowledge it. The president's pissed about it, and we're switching. And I think they need luck on their side to make a real change here. But you do sense, I think, the opportunity to make the turn if they

can just catch a couple of breaks in the news cycle. Yeah. Yeah, there is also, I do think, the like White House under siege kind of stories and the fact that it has seemed as though Biden hasn't been on the road as much as he could be. Yes, the nature of there, it's just this unfortunate turn of events. but there is a there is a quality of like seeming as though you are kind of not being an observer to those events but out on the road kind of being a participant being in front of people that like being buffeted by crises is one thing but then kind of seeming as though those crises have kind of overwhelmed the system is i think the most important reason to have him be out on the road. Because just by seeing him out there,

just by being kind of more proactive, you dispute that just by making news, just by being kind of more forward-looking. There are two parts to political messaging. The first part is, what do you say? And I think Biden's actually been very good about finding popular arguments, right? American Rescue Plan was popular. We talked about bipartisan infrastructure. The Build Back Better Plan was incredibly popular. The second part is how do you get people to pay attention to what you're saying? And that, I think, is where the diminished bully pulp of the White House really hurts. The unrelenting news cycle really hurts, but also is a requirement for Biden to do. I think what is not natural to him, right? He is because he's a senator. He is like a do the work behind the

scenes sort of guy. But you have to be out there. You have to work. He is going to have to work harder than Barack Obama to get his message out because the media environment is so much worse now than it was then. Yeah. And I do think you see some Republicans have kind of figured this out a little bit better. Like Ron DeSantis is excellent at like staying in the news about just being at a podium and making news on a set of issues to just keep himself in front. He just picks fights all day long. I mean, that's why the Biden's gun speech was good, because I think he did a pretty good job there picking a fight sort of preemptively with Republicans for potentially voting down any common sense gun reform.

I mean, if they could have BTS at the White House every day, I think that would be, you know, good. Should consider that one. Love its allies. Throwing that out there. Yeah. Look, you be careful. I made one offhand stupid bad joke.

I love you guys. Forgive me. Forgive me, BTS people. Dan, I love that they gave you a red keg cup, a solo cup there in the studio. What do you think's in here? I don't know. Keystone light. Chug and flip it. You're doing Rogan after this?

That's right, yes. So Dan, all right, they're going to let Biden be Biden. He's going to tour the country. Maybe there'll be more op-eds. There's going to be a plug so subtle people won't even notice it. They're just going to buy the book. They just bought it right there. I see them shooting up the Amazon list as we speak. In your new book, Battling the Big Lie, which is on sale today, right? Today? Today, yes.

Today. You had an excerpt in Vanity Fair and it says this, in the context of political communications, this is the message versus megaphone problem. Democrats spend 99% of their time worrying about what they should say and only 1% figuring out how to get people to hear what they are saying. Kind of the point you were just making. We have a long-term structural challenge due to the imbalances we have in sort of partisan media and mainstream media. But right now, what advice would you give kind of understanding that we may have a message problem, but we have an even bigger megaphone problem. I think you can see the power of the right-wing megaphone in the January 6 hearings that we're going to have, right? You have 70% of Republicans believing this easily disproven lie about the election. And it is my contention, as I write about in the book, that that is the product of a decades-long effort from right-wing Republican political operatives like Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon, funded by billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and the Mercers, to create this, I call it the mega-megaphone.

It is Fox News, Breitbart, Daily Wire, digital outlets that dominate the political conversation. I think it's the most powerful weapon in politics. It's not the only reason that Democrats have underperformed in recent elections, but it's a major reason. Our message is getting drowned out. The ultimate problem for Joe Biden is right now, because of the power of this right-wing disinformation propaganda operation, the Democratic message is getting drowned out. We are on defense. We are responding to Republicans constantly. And so there is not a short-term solution to this. Tommy laid out a bunch of sort of short-term tactical things that Biden could do to get more of his message out. I'm

sure they're working on a lot of those. But we have to have a long-term plan where I think Democrats have to radically rethink how we communicate. Right now, Republicans view communications as information warfare, and Democrats view it as press management, public relations. We have to think about what is a holistic, big picture approach. How do we build up the progressive megaphone? How do we take the millions and millions of people who will text and call strangers at a whim in election time or donate $5 or $10 a year and turn them into messengers for our party? And so in this book, I lay out how the right wing built up this megaphone, how it works. I think most Democrats do not understand. They sort of think Fox is bad.

They don't understand how powerful Facebook is and just how prevalent MAGA extremist messaging is on it. And I lay out a series of ideas for what all of us can do, right? Democrats, people who just simply care about democracy, how the press could change some of how they cover things to reflect this new era in communications and messaging. And so everything, this is the very subtle part of the plug, which is whether we're talking about January 6th and the hearings or the challenges that Biden and Democrats are facing in this political environment is ties, goes right back to the power of right-wing propaganda disinformation. And so I think this is the singular challenge for our party over the next couple of years, or we were despite having

a growing majority with more popular ideas, more popular politicians, we're going to keep coming out on the short end of the stick. I like come election time. Dan, what I like about your book is I haven't read it yet, but I know it's accurate. Well, I know it's accurate because you've been talking about this broader challenge of the sort of right-wing disinformation ecosystem and how much it does or how far it goes on Facebook. And you seem to have pissed off like every MAGA grifter, the Dan Bonginos, the Daily Wire, the Ben Shapiros, David Wall, father of Jacob Wall, the guy- Father of the year over there.

Yes, the guy I think got arrested with his kid, the kid who always talks about being at a hipster coffee shop, called you a low-T dweeb. It seems like you really hit the mark here with this thesis. Look, if Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Clay Travis hate the book, people who listen to Positive America will probably love it. And I'm actually going to try to convince my publisher to put their quotes as the blurbs on the paperback version. That's a great idea. That's great. You know, in one of the many stories looking at infighting in the Biden White House,

there was some press they talked about how they're on the road, they're doing these events on the road and nobody's covering them. They're not on television. Why are we doing this? And I do, there's a kind of, the mainstream media and Republicans have a kind of a truly abusive relationship. You know, it is it is a deeply unhealthy, broken relationship. We have a kind of codependency with the mainstream media that's like tense and very toxic. But I sometimes wonder if if we really want like mainstream political press to kind of respect the critique that we offer, I do think we need to stop waiting for them to be the ones to carry our message for us. If we still are using them as this intermediary to try to get information out to the public, they'll never be able to abandon their kind of fear that they're going to be seen as a democratic megaphone and

therefore have to be more kind of pretend non-bias or give Republicans more of the time of day? I think it would be better for us and them if we stopped viewing them as our primary interlocutor with the public. It is insane that for the vast majority of Democrats, we think what we're going to do is we're going to take our message that we have tested it. We know how it sounds. We know it'll persuade voters. We're going to hand it to these other people who do not share our interest in any way,

shape or form, are distrusted by huge swaths of the country and ask them to deliver it to them. And who themselves have a vested interest in seeming as though they're not our friends. Yes. Yes. And on the right wing, I mean, the Republican Party has done a great job of bringing their sort of, their right wing voices into the fold,

the podcasters, the YouTubers, the Twitch streamers, no matter how unserious they are. Like, Clay Travis, who Dan just mentioned, is attacking him today, went viral last week for telling a story about how he berated the umpire at his 11-year-old son's Little League game and got tossed, Clay got tossed, out of his son's game by the ump in front of his family and his own parents. These are the right-wing thought leaders. Cancel culture.

The point is, hey, we need to build up our own ecosystem on the left here. Let's empower some of our own folks who are a little more thoughtful than Clay. It's one of the things I write about in the book is that is a huge, like, you don't want to imitate Donald Trump in any way, shape, or form, except one of the things he did that was incredibly smart and strategic was he nurtured the right-wing media ecosystem. He did almost all of his interviews. I'm not saying that Joe Biden should do this, but he did almost all of his interviews on right-wing platforms. When right-wing outlets wrote stories that he thought advanced his message, he shared those stories to his tens of millions of Twitter followers. When books were written that advanced his narrative, he tried to get those

books on the bestsellers. And Republicans have been doing this for decades. Richard Nixon once actually found a book about liberal bias in the press that was written by a Reader's Digest writer, and he had all of his aides all across the country go to all the bookstores and buy them and get on the bestseller list so that that narrative would do it. Democrats are afraid to do that because we're so afraid of this idea of propaganda. It's like, oh, they're going to call us propagandists. When propaganda is just persuasive messaging, right? That is what we have to do. Our job is to persuade. When you like it, when you think it's good. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that is why we got to get in the game. And no, I think it's better. I think we should keep doing what we're doing, which is we should

lay out a huge policy agenda for a major news outlet. And then the headline will really help because it'll be something like for president Biden, a reckoning. Well, but also like Republicans have so conditioned the mainstream media, uh, to be scared of being called biased or liberal that they are totally happy like being friends with people like Pat Buchanan, who famously wrote a speech for Spiro Agnew that was so intense that Richard Nixon wouldn't give it. Just like destroying the press back in the 70s and that had an MSNBC show for years. Like they they treat these right wing nuts as serious and bring them into the club. But if you're on the left, you don't get that same, uh,

you don't get the same courtesy. No, no. I mean, there are so many people that were not seen as serious because they oppose the stupidest foreign policies in human history. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, Dan, is there anything else we need to know about this fucking book? Where do they buy it? They can buy it on anywhere. You get your books, Amazon, uh, Indie bounds, your your local bookstore anywhere you can do it if you can support an independent bookstore that's great but go out and buy the book please everybody everybody buy the book all right we need this thing to scream up the charts the right wing

has a whole machine to get their books on the bestseller list it's part of their it's part of their nightmare factory who's our enemy here, Dan? Is it Kellyanne? Who's above you? Well, I tried to run this competition with Kellyanne Conway, and then she rocketed to number two on the list. Couldn't beat out Bill O'Reilly.

Not dead. Maybe you should have thought about writing that you hate your fucking wife. That'd help. I would say Kellyanne Conway got the dreaded bulk purchase dagger. So there were some people out there who were buying bulk purchases. Someone who's obviously not George Conway buying large quantities of Obama.

All right, that's it. When we come back, Jose Andres. My guest today is a chef, a humanitarian, the founder of the incredible nonprofit organization, The World Central Kitchen, and the subject of a new documentary called We Feed People from director Ron Howard. It's available now on Disney Plus, Chef Jose Andres. Welcome to the pod. Welcome back to the pod, I should say. Thank you for having me again. It's lovely to see you. Jon Favreau and I were lucky enough to work or do a project with Jose a million years ago. And the best part was we got paid in food. And I just remember sitting

in your office and you were just feeding us and feeding us and feeding us. And I thought, this is the greatest thing I've ever done in my life. But your generosity of spirit came through then. And it's so great to see you doing this on the global stage. Let's just start with, I mean, the beginning, I guess, which is Haiti in 2010. Because I believe that World Central Kitchen was born out of some of the work you did in the wake of that horrific earthquake that struck Haiti that year. Is that right? Can you talk a little bit about that origin. Yeah, totally. Haiti was very important

in why World Central Kitchen exists today. But if anything, the most important for me was other moments before. One very important, 1993 to Washington DC. I was 23 years old. I came as a chef, a young chef, to open Jaleo, the Spanish tapas restaurant on 7th and 8th. Great restaurant. It's the place I met Senator Patrick Moynihan. in the first weekend I was open. Maybe my love for policy just began right there. But then I went to an organization called DEC Central Kitchen. It's one of the best, what we would call, soup kitchens.

But this was like nothing else I've seen. It was an organization feeding people in need in Washington, 10,000 meals a day, but was not just throwing money at the problem was bringing people from out of the streets, people just coming out of jail, and training them to be cooks in the process of training those men and women to be cooks and giving them an opportunity, feeding the people in need in DC. Every dollar all of a sudden multiplied, not only by two, because we were training them, but then those men and women will find jobs in restaurants like me. In the process, we were fighting food waste. In the the process we were empowering the city the founder

robert erger told me that philanthropy always it seems is about the redemption of the giver when philanthropy must be about the liberation of the receiver okay you put this moment and then what happened in katrina new orleans with the Superdome, where we had thousands of men and women, some of them, many of them, coming from the low nine without food for days. And you think, what is an arena? Everybody is wrong about an arena. Everybody thinks it's about the place for music and sports. Well, no, it's a gigantic restaurant that entertains with music and sports. Why we didn't feed people in this moment,

in one of the best cities in the world for food, with the best chefs in the world. Those moments of inaction in New Orleans, me watching from the comfort of my home, and the learning in Washington, DC.C. during years in 1993 is what gave me this moment of saying, if we send nurses and doctors after emergency to take care of the wounded, if we send firefighters and first responders to help rescue people from out of buildings and who do you think is the best people to feed people in an emergency right cooks like me that's how world central kitchen came to be

it's amazing i mean in the organization i mean it's been so fun watching you uh build this organization from afar i mean i feel like another key inflection point was 2017. Hurricane Maria destroys a huge portion of Puerto Rico. You get down there just days later, all of a sudden you're making beef stew for thousands of people. Fast forward a couple months, the World Central Kitchen is feeding more people than the Red Cross. You're doing millions of meals. I mean, I know the full answer to my question will take like hours, but what's your general approach to getting to a place and scaling up operations so quickly? Because it is truly remarkable to me how quick and how nimble your organization is. Are you already implying that my first answer was way too long? No, no.

Just remember, I am an immigrant. My English is weaker than yours. Your English is perfect. I require more words than you to explain myself. Recuerda que soy inmigrante, mi inglés es más débil que tu y necesito más palabras que tú para explicarme, pero estaré en mi respuesta. Puerto Rico fue un momento en el que Waltz and the Drag Hitchcock tuvo un gran boom, pero tal vez una de las razones por las que fui con la audiencia de now to Puerto Rico is because only a couple of weeks before I was in Houston responding to the previous hurricane, was back to back hurricane four and five. Was almost the beginning of non-stop hurricanes of four or five magnitude every single year. In Houston, I was in the convention center downtown. And somebody in charge of feeding the people in the convention center decided to close the biggest kitchen in Texas.

Crazy. It didn't make any sense. And we were feeding the convention center 10,000 men and women out of the parking lot. It makes any sense? It doesn't make any sense. I'm telling you that we are putting people in charge to feed people that

have no clue on feeding people. Why Puerto Rico? Because I saw that if what happened in Houston was repeating itself, not in a convention center, but in an entire island, they were going to be in trouble. And we show up there three, four days later, Nate Mook, who now has become the CEO of World Central Kitchen for his own merits. He came to give me a hand. It was two people of World Central Kitchen, him and I. And he was not part of the organization and me not either because I was the founder. What we did, first day, 1,000 meals. Ten friends, all of them cooks, downtown.

We saw that everybody was requesting meals. We went from 1000 meals a day to 150,000 meals a day, from one kitchen to more than 37 kitchens across the island, including the islands of Vieques and Culebra. At one moment, we had 26 operating at the same time. We were doing 150, meals a day we very quickly and without realizing we reached 4 million meals but we were able to influence many more meals that's that's the in essence how was andro kitchen began everybody thinks that the emergencies big problems actually have very simple solutions we We cook, but we do more than

cooking. We get in a car, we get in a helicopter, we get on a track, we get on a boat, and we reach the people. We don't wait for the people to call us. It's no phones. We don't wait for the people to come to us. It's no roads, so it's no cars. We search for the people. The best of Wall Street Drug Kitchen is not like we cook. We are cooks. We're cooking all the time. The best of Walls and Drag Kitchen is not like we cook. We are cooks. We are cooking all the time. The best part of Walls and Drag Kitchen is that we find the people with any logistics may need to achieve that. Yeah, I mean, okay, dumb question.

I feel like I often see you making paella. Is that because you can make really big batches or is this because you love it? Well, because I think paella is the one pot that one day will feed the world it's a great way to cook rice but then you can cook anything and i'm very proud that i was able to get the emoji by a few years ago i was in the heart of putting the emoji in your iphone and also i was very happy that less than two months ago, I was able to send paella to the space station.

So yeah, paella very much is in my veins. That's incredible. You've taken paella galactic, I guess. I know you have a team that's been doing amazing work in Ukraine feeding people. I heard somewhere, and maybe this is old news now, that you guys have prepared over 17 million meals in Ukraine so far. Is that accurate? Yeah, it's old news. I just came back from Ukraine myself.

I've been there more than 50 days, I think, probably 55. I arrived there 24 hours after the war began. Let me give you numbers very quickly because those are all numbers. 35 million meals, hand meals, over 350,000 meals a day. On top of that, we are doing over 600,000 meals in the form of more than 30,000 bags. Like if you went to the supermarket it's uh around um 15 kilos bags every bag more or less makes over 20 mils each so this is like 600 000 meals on top of the three 350 000 meals we are some days going above 1 million meals a day across ukraine we have um one million meals a day across ukraine we have 490 restaurants in our system we are in eight countries not only in ukraine but the surrounding countries plus germany and spain we are distributing in

3 800 points every day we are in 1 350 shelters um i've been to many of them, know all of them. We're in seven border crossings and transit hubs, train stations, bus stations, 24 hours a day in those hubs. Why? Because mothers and children are living 24 hours. We have to be there next to them. And in total, we are in more than 290 cities, including the one I was, Mykolaou, in Krematorsk, in Chernihiv, in Kharkiv. Many of these cities are right at the front of the war. And we are there not only obviously fitting in the easy places, which will be the refugee places, the places where people go home now, away from home. But I'm so proud that we have more than 8,000 people working with us in our network of amazing Ukrainians that every day they risk their life to bring food to those people that they cannot leave sometimes their homes

because they are too sick, because they are elderly, because they have no money, because they are afraid to move away from their home. Even there is a war. So I'm so proud that we are doing so many, so many meals per week, so many million meals per week next to the Ukrainian people that are fighting for freedom and democracy, not only for them, but for all of us. And we need to be there next to them.

I mean, the scale of the work and the way you're giving is just incredible. I mean, what I also love about what you do is you go to these places that are often experiencing tragedy, disasters, and you release videos from the ground that show what it's like. You don't hold back on the emotions you're feeling, but the messages are incredibly hopeful and optimistic.

And I'm kind of wondering where that hope and optimism comes from, because you're going to some bleak places sometimes. I think the way nonprofits, we've done the work in the past of trying to raise money on showing the worst moments of the people versus trying to show people that they are hopeful. I mean, even after in America, after a hurricane, after an earthquake, after a fire, those are very hard moments. I don't think we are in the business of showing the worst of people. I think we are in the business of showing the best of people. We all know they're going through hardships, but people don't want our pity. People want dignity and our respect. The videos we try to show is not used to upbeat for the sake of, it's like people are fighting. We got one kitchen destroyed a few weeks ago in Kharkiv uh the big missile hit this uh neighborhood a very

big building and the explosion was so huge that even our kitchen was across the street uh the kitchen was destroyed uh we only got them some people died in that explosion of our teams for wounded these people decided on their own that they were not going to stop. They moved the equipment to another location nearby. They moved all whatever food was safe. They began cooking two days later. They were making a thousand meals a day the third day. The four wounded went out of the hospital. They went back to the kitchen. And even some of them, they could only use one hand. They began doing whatever they could to keep feeding their people. This is the spirit of Ukraine.

But in these emergencies overall, unfortunately, you see in the worst moments of humanity is when you see the best side of humans. And that is the messages we are trying always to share with everybody that follow us. That's amazing. It seems like the work is infectious because I was watching an interview with Ron Howard where he said that at one point you commandeered his film crew and had them unloading trucks instead of filming. How did that go over with him and the folks at Disney Plus? Well, we need to remember one thing. We I had I love Ron.

I'm so blessed that he's the one that really kept pushing. We say, let's do this. And I'm like, really? This looks like a reality show. But Ron Howard is a very special person. But this I remember telling him, he's like, I understand you are doing this movie about us, but the most important is not the movie.

The most important, we are feeding people. And this was very clear. And when there were some moments that we needed extra hands because it was a true emergency, because it was rain or whatever was happening, we had to move quick because we have to feed people quick. For me, it was very simple to understand that they will understand that.

And the amazing thing is like they did it, not because we told them to, but because within them, their empathy, like every human is full of empathy. The first actions they try to help. The only thing what Sandra Gitchen doing is use and tap the amazing human potential we all have within us. And used to make people not think that they want to help or do something, but gives them

that push behind to say do it. And that's what's maybe making was a religion very so successful is because we are untapping that potential, and everybody is ready to serve everybody is ready to go and that's what you see moments like what happened in puerto rico what happened in bahamas right now we are in mexico after a hurricane we are in bangladesh after the big rains uh in a isolated community had a huge destruction you see we show up and we do whatever we can to bring hope,

sometimes only through one plate of food at a time. Amazing. Again, We Feed People is available now on Disney+. So in that spirit of your last answer and in the way World Central Kitchen helps people kind of find the empathy

and tap it within themselves, how can listeners help the organization if they hear what you're saying and they think, I want to get involved? That feels like something for me. Well, obviously, Wall Central Kitchen, right now we've got a lot of Americans that came to Poland where we have one of the Wall Central Kitchen kitchens. That's a big one in Chimish that we've been able to help from there to serve um every many of the different entry points into poland from ukraine and i'm so proud so many

americans came but the truth is that we have people from so many nationalities so there's many ways to help not everybody can come especially in our zone um but uh unfortunately, I always tell everybody that World Central Kitchen is the biggest organization in the history of mankind. We are bigger than Amazon. And with all due respect to my good friend, Jeff Bezos, we are bigger than UN. And people say, come on, Jose,

what are you talking about? Let me tell you, every restaurant in planet Earth is already part of World Central Kitchen. Every food warehouse on planet Earth is already part of World Central Kitchen. Every farmer, every fisherman is already part of the network of World Central Kitchen. The only thing that happens is they don't know it yet. But the day something happens, usually we go and we activate them immediately. And this is proven every day to be right.

Hope people will be able to help. Obviously, you send $1. We appreciate it because we use money better, quicker, and faster than anybody you know. If you don't have that $1, just doing a retweet on social media while we do, this goes a long way. And maybe one day unfortunately we will be in your community the only thing you have to do is use uh show up uh um because we will need you you don't know how to cook don't worry you'll deliver through your car you don't know how to drive don't worry we'll put you how to make sandwiches you don't even know how to do that

we'll put you uh cleaning or washing you don't even know how to do that we'll put you uh cleaning or washing or moving boxes from one place to another it'll be always a way that we will find your talents to be put at the service of feeding people and remember when we go like in ukraine every single dollar we've been putting into the operation is going to help Ukrainians. While we have so many restaurants, we are able to support those restaurants financially. We pay them per meal. But don't misunderstand me. It's not like we are hiring.

This is people that they want to do it. But that money helps the restaurant be active, helps the farmer to receive their payment, helps the economy locally because the guys are paying rent and the guys keep paying their taxes and the guys keep moving the economy in a circular way. At the end, we are not throwing money at the problem, which is feeding the people in need, but we are investing in the solution,

making sure that every dollar helps the different areas of the economy in the places, in the cities, in the countries that we are going to help. Well, I mean, it's an incredible documentary, an incredible organization. Thank you for all the work you're doing. And also, I know you would rather have spent the last 30 minutes chopping onions than talking about yourself. So I appreciate you doing this show because I know you actually hate this stuff and you hate promoting yourself and you'd much rather shove like literally every line cook forward. But I think people need a little dose of inspiration and hope. So I appreciate that. Thank you for joining. Thank you for having me.

And that's our show. Thanks to Dan Pfeiffer for filling in today. Order his book right now. And thanks to Jose Andres for joining us. We'll be back Friday morning with a new episode live from L.A. with the whole gang, plus Travelle Anderson, Guy Branum, and Dianne Feinstein will be joining us. That's not true. Hot Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Andy Gardner Bernstein. Our producer is Haley Muse, and Olivia Martinez is our associate producer. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineer the show.

Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Sandy Gerrard, Hallie Kiefer, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montu. Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com slash crooked media.