The Bulwark Podcast - John Dickerson: When the Media Helps Rewrite Reality

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

The most powerful person in the world repeatedly creates his own narrative about a news event despite what we can see and hear with our own eyes and our own ears. Media organizations that don’t fight like hell in response are failing at doing their most basic job—and they’re failing the country and our democracy as well. That’s what CBS News did when it settled Trump’s frivolous “60 Minutes” lawsuit and when it tried to change the story of the Minneapolis protests to benefit Trump. Plus, Dems are on the cusp of a big fight, the Iran war is being fought on social media and on the weekend, aiming to live a life of value and meaning, Ossoff is deploying a clever strategy, and why isn’t the left talking about climate change? John Dickerson joins Tim Miller from the Aspen Ideas Festival.show notes John's Substack John's long-running pod, Slate's "Political Gabfest"

Welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We have one Monday without Bill Crystal because, well, I could not turn down this beautiful setting for those of you on YouTube. We're at the Aspen Ideas Festival. So I searched for a suitable replacement among the global elite, the thought leaders, the Illuminati. We needed someone wise and dry. And among all of the notables here, the only choice is, of course, the former host of CBS Nightly News and the politics podfather himself, John Dickerson. And I hear you have a substack. Oh, I do. I have a substack like everyone. Like all. Humans now must have a substack. I think you're born with them. I have one. That is nice. It's good to see you. It's great to see you, Tim. This is nice doing this in Aspen. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you were here last night, but what's gorgeous about the clear sky is that it's a clear sky because there's, there fires over in Utah that at the end of the day, everything looks, you know, is totally haze. Yeah, when we got in yesterday morning, it was a little spooky. Yeah, yeah. Rip-blood red sun. It's a little ominous. All right, we got a bunch to get to. We'll do

little media talk at the end. Is there any media news that you think what you might be worth asked about? There is huge mountainous media news. I am in the flatlands of my ability to weigh in on it, but I'll enjoy ducking your question. Well, I don't know about that. We'll see. My questions might be more fun than you think. Well, let's talk about Iran first. I'd write this down because since Friday's podcast, here's what happened. Can I run you through the events? Iran launched a drone offensive on ships in the straight. They were mad that Oman had opened an alternate lane for. ships. They said that that other route violates the MOU. The U.S. retaliated. We bombed Iran again. Iran then hit back against eight U.S. military targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. Those were countries that

you might remember were on Marcos all as well trip just last week. We retaliate again. Then Trump threatens Iran with annihilation again. Iran then says, now we're going to go ahead and get a nuke then. And then our friend at Axios, Brock Rivid reports, well, we've actually now agreed to stop escalating right before the market's open. And we plan to meet again this week. Talks Tuesday in Doha. pro the New York Times. Iran has not yet confirmed their sending reps, so we'll see. So that's the state of affairs

on our ceasefire. Yeah, it feels like this is the state of affairs every Friday, weekend, and Monday. The weekend war. One of the substatic things I do is a compilation of the week's news. And every Friday I end it, and I think, oh, there's a breakthrough

at the end of Friday. The president was often saying, like, we're ready to sign a deal. I think, oh, you know, I haven't really accounted for that. But then it washes away by the time you get to Monday. So this feels like a similar thing.

I mean, the fact is that all of the issues, the key issues are so up in the air, they can't even get to the other issues that are up in the air. Right. And that shipping lane, you know, if you look at the number of ships that are still able to get through, it's tiny compared to the 130 a day that we're going through. I think it's over a couple of days they had 78. And they've got to go through that narrow non-mined lane. Even in the best of terms, and we should talk about what that even looks like, this is just super slow going half a foot forward to, steps back. And the two things that just stand out on this, which you will note are not, we're not, neither of these things were part of the reason why we went into the war as particular holdups here

as Lebanon. Item number one of the MOU mentioned Lebanon three times. So I think Iran was pretty clear about what was important to them. So that makes things challenging when that's out of our hands. And then when it comes to the straight, you know, it seems that there's like maybe an intentional miscommunication, I don't know. What a miscommunication is about like what an open straight is, right? And I think that it seems like Trump is at least pretending like or acting like an open straight means chips can just go through. And Iran means no, an open street means that, you know, you can get our approval, you send in a TPS report. Like we let you know if you can come through and that's open. Right. And that's a precursor to Iran saying after 60 days in the MOU is over,

we're going to have tolls. We're going to charge people to go through this. This is, which is a new arrangement pre-war, this didn't exist. And so all this conversation about the straight, either what's going on now or what will happen after the MOU is over is all leverage points that Iran gained by the war. And so as we measure, was this worth it, which is the question we should always be asking about everything that happens, everything that's being debated, didn't exist as a point of leverage or complexity beforehand. So it's a new thing that's been created. Leaving aside, all the other thorny issues, Lebanon's another one, that was not originally a leverage point, but now is as a part of these negotiations on Iran's side.

JD, the vice president's have been a point man on this lately. I like this little fact that I read. During negotiations in Switzerland last week, one of the things that Vance thought was important that they agreed to is that there's a hotline between the U.S. military and Iran because, you know, we haven't been able to get a hold of them. They keep saying like, oh, the Iranians are in caves. And so we don't know. And then like Tasnam or whatever, they'll put out information on state news.

It's like it seems like we can get to them. But they keep acting like it's hard to get hold of them. So we're supposed to have a hotline that Iran starts bombing. on Friday, or starts droning the straight again on Friday, and J.D. like, sends out a tweet that's like, I wish they would have called me. And they should have just called. And as of, I guess, Saturday, I don't know if the hotlines become operational since then, but we still didn't have a hotline.

It feels like the hotline is like when people are in salary negotiations with a job and they can't give them more money so they give them a title. It felt like the hotline was a thing that could name as a piece of progress when there was no actual progress. On the other hand, it has been reported throughout these. negotiations that one of the challenges for the U.S. negotiators for J.D. Vance and others is like, who's in charge? Remember the first round of meetings. The Pakistanis spent more of their time trying to adjudicate the arguments among the Iranians, let alone then between the Americans,

the Iranians. And so getting a person on the other end of the line would be nice because it would mean there was one person on the other end of the line. On the other hand, the idea of a hotline is the reason I'm being a little bit glib about it is because this war has taken place by social media, essentially each side acting and then threatening in public for a variety of their different reasons. So a hotline is like it's a little late because it's all happening in real time on social media. You're here for your wisdom. Do you have any wisdom about where things go? Well, no, I have no wisdom about where they go, but I do have what I hope is wisdom about what we should always keep in mind.

Was the war worth it? And I think there are three things, three ways you measure that. was it worth tearing up the Obama era JCPOA, which was negotiated by several countries, had a series of constraints on Iran, which President Trump tore up and thinks he's going to get a better deal. Let's talk about just one little thing, inspections. When JCPOA came out, Senator Tom Cotton and others said the inspection regime is too puny. It has to be inspections anytime, anywhere. J.D. Vance just announced before things fell apart that the Iranians were going to have inspections again. They were not anywhere, anytime inspections. So if you measure the inspections that they might

get out of this deal against what was the previous standard, this war has not been worth it. So you measure the war against the JCPOA. You measure it against where things were before the bombing started because there were negotiations. The straight-of-form moves was not a leverage point. And then you measured against what President Trump said this war was about. So keeping those three things in mind, every time there's a development, like the hotline, great. Okay, hotlines of development. But if you measure that against all the previous situations, like a hotline's a meaningless development. Yes.

So I just think you want to keep those three in mind because the problem is when there are some of these agreements like to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, it's treated by the White House as a great development. Okay, without thinking about the context, maybe it's a great development. But the context is it wasn't a point of contention before the war. It was open already. So just keeping those three things. things in mind every time there's development, I think is... I mean, given those three things, I don't see any path back to something that looks even remotely like success. Like, honestly, even if you think about what a best case outcome from

here could be, like, it's hard to see how it would be any better than the pre-war status quo or the JCPOA. I think that's right. And by the way, if you're really doing the math, you've got to then calculate all that was expended, not just the loss of lives, the damage to the international economy, all those missiles that you can't replace very easily. So that's another thing. thing worth keeping in mind because there's really nothing more important for a president than the decision to go to war. And so this isn't some decision about a reflecting pool. This is like at the center of the presidency. The only thing that would be worse in terms of a president using or misusing their power would be if they encouraged some sort of a kind of an attack on the free and fair elections

that are a part of the American Constitution. Back to J.D. Last week he was at the Nixon Foundation or something in libraries. And this was not an off-the-cuff comment. It was a prepared comment. He planned to go to this event and announce that he thinks that Richard Nixon's having a renaissance, actually. Actually, he says actually a couple times. Yes.

And that if Watergate happened today, it'd be a 12-hour story. I did just say on Friday's show, I said that that was not true. That's all that Nixon's having a renaissance. And I follow a lot of, you know, political, I'm a political watcher. I haven't seen any of this. My colleague Will Summer did correct me that there is like a niche subculture on right wing TikTok where they do Nixon edits to Charlie XXX songs. So it's a brave new world.

It is. It's hard to tell. It's like maybe a small, small renaissance happening there. Your mother, Nancy Dickerson, was there. She was covering all of it. She was there. She actually, she was covering the White House for NBC. And Nixon, during the period where there were protesters on the mall, he gave a press conference.

And she asked him, why don't you, you know, speak to? to the protesters. And his answer was, you know, a traditional press conference answer. But then he called her later that night. And he had been drinking a great deal. He also called Helen Thomas that night. And I, and he said, I love those kids. And I, and then he later, that was the night that he went down on the mall and met with the protesters. It was a very odd conversation. After he was drinking? Yeah. And Haldeman writes about this in his diaries, the drinking part. I mean, and this period, we're going down to talk to the, to the young protesters. And he ended up talking about like the Super Bowl. It was not a deep interaction. But that was one. And she knew Nixon going back

to when he was on the Hill in the 50s because she had been working on the Hill. And she also did a documentary about Watergate. So, yeah. So how do you think she'd process the notion that Watergate wasn't that big of a deal and that he's now many years later having a supposed renaissance going to the new vice president? Yeah, defining deviancy down essentially is what's happening. I, you know, there has been a line of thinking in Republican thought over the years since Nixon and among obviously his defenders that they all do it. Nixon just got caught. That was the, that that's been around for a while. That, that abuses of power happen in every White House, you know, Kennedy, blah, blah, blah. And the old Trump line about, oh, we're so great when Scarborough was asking him about, you know, yeah, what Putin had done. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like, who are we to talk about if Putin's throwing people out of windows? We're not. so great ourselves. I think what struck me about what J.D. Vance said is he said, well, this is the deep state. And Nixon,

certainly, if you read the tapes and you listen to him, he was obsessed with the deep state and the bureaucrats in it and the liberals in the media and everything. But the problem for that argument is that if there was a deep state, it was Nixon's mouth. I mean, the thing that got him

in trouble is the smoking gun tape. He's Nixon himself saying to have the CIA stop the FBI investigation into a break in a political party's headquarters, which is, you know, again, messing with elections. So you can't define that down. Also, we should just say also about the deep state at the time. This is kind of this amorphous word.

And I was trying to figure out like what he's talking about because, you know, when Trump was talking about the deep state, you know, he was going after him. He was talking a lot about like the intelligence services. And the intelligence services were working for Nixon. Yeah. It's like the CIA was part of the cover up. Trump also talking about the Justice Department as part of the deep state. the Justice Department was with Nixon. Like there were some lower level people,

but like the Attorney General had left by the time Watergate had happened, Mitchell, but was like part of the planning on the one in the front end while he was still Attorney General of the United States. Right. You know, the obvious benefit of this politically for J.D. Vance at the moment is to connect their sense of grievance about any questioning of presidential power with a big popular thing you know and to try to say essentially that it has a modern valence. which really has nothing to do with Nixon, but which has to do with basically like these ninnies who think that what Nixon did was bad, they're the same ninnies, you know, barking at our heels.

And the whole thing is just the product of elites and not actual lawbreaking caught on tape. I mean, think about what J.D. Vance is trying to do. This is literally the definition, smoking gun, right? Literally the definition of evidence that is so powerful it is unfalsifiable. Except think about one of the projects of this administration and J.D. Vance in particular. He said essentially, okay, maybe there aren't Haitians eating their dogs, but if I have to tell you something that's untrue to get attention to it, it's okay. You know, he called them domestic terrorists in Minnesota, which they weren't and which there was no evidence for Renee Good and Alex Preddy. And that project of taking things you can see and know with your own eyes and trying to cast it as something else is essentially what's happening in that Watergate Exchange.

Ninis or nattering nabobs. Nattering nabobs of negatism. Yes, that was the preview. That was the other vice president. I also think it's shady Van saying it's okay for us to do the crimes. Yeah. I mean, there's a certain group that we're tough on when it comes to the rule of law. But us in Washington, if you're on our side, you can do it.

It's fine. Well, right. When a president says it, it's law, which is a version of, or I'm paraphrasing what Nixon said. But I think that's right. You define down any previous crime, any previous abuse of power, any previous obstruction of justice. So then when you were accused of. the same. It's like, oh, this is the same. These are just, these are points of etiquette that we're being called on. And that's always, there's always been a sort of etiquette critique by elites in Washington.

It happened with Nixon. And now, you know, it's happening to us to, to downplay the severity of breaking essentially your constitutional oath. Here's another reason they want to downplay it. It's a New York Times story this morning. The government is actively doing critical minerals deals with, do you want to guess how many different companies that have financial ties to Trump? Lutnik? Oh, dozens. 14. I don't know. A dozen plus. A dozen plus. Yeah. 14 different companies. It's worth in total about $9 billion. 9 billion. How much was in the paper bag that Agnew was taking? It was like 20 grand or something. Hold on that. I just want to do one example of that. The meeting last September,

Trump, Lutnik, and the president of Kazakhstan. After the meeting, it resulted in an exclusive deal for an American company Kaz resources to mine tungsten in the country, both Trump and Lutnik family soon announced a highly lucrative business connections to the deal. Tungsten mining in Kazakhstan. That's some creative corruption. Yeah. Well, every time I hear about one of these deals, and, you know, there have been a lot of them or the business that comes the way of the Trump family.

And also, obviously, this is shot through all of the Middle Eastern negotiations going on. It's hard to keep up with. I mean, it's hard to keep up with what's in the MOU and what's not getting dealt with just in the MOU, but then all the relationships in the Trump family to the various countries that are involved, it's very hard to track. That's just one thing. What I keep thinking about is, is President Trump's first inaugural address, and which he said, this period where the elites in Washington protect themselves and ignore the forgotten men and women of this country, that ends right now. That there will be no more of this using the system to— Lutnik and Whitkoff kids were the forgotten end of the country. What we didn't know is that what we didn't know is that they were the forgotten.

And so every time you see a perfection of the use of or the benefit of people with ties to the Trump family in a way that he directly built his entire presidency around in that inaugural address. It's crazy to think back. I was kind of young, but like some of the other ones like Roger Clinton. Trying to think of the other family members who are in on the take. Right. I don't recall Marvin or Neil Bush getting in on anything. Oh, yeah, no. Not Marvin, but Neil, there was a lot of Neil.

Neil got in on some stuff. Well, was anything? I don't want to be wrong or more wrong than normal, but there was a lot of speculation in the S&L crisis about Neil Bush, as I recall. I don't know where that ended up. I'm not trying to impugn Neil's character. Yeah, yeah. And the point of it is just like how small ball of that stuff was. Yeah.

Yes. And for me, one of the tip-offs was when President Trump made. those first feints about giving up control and access and connection to his family business. He had his lawyer go out there and say, you know, when Nelson Rockefeller was vice president, nobody cared about this. In other words, again, like with Watergate, nobody cared about it in the Rockefeller case, therefore you shouldn't care about this now. So it's using the past to try to frame the present, except that the past was totally wrong.

Rockefeller had to go testify on Capitol Hill about his private fortunes, right? So when they were preparing the way like that, just at the beginning of the first term, you kind of got the sense. And Haberman and Swann's book has a passage where Trump, and I'm paraphrasing essentially, he says, you know, I did some of that stuff and nobody cared about it. So I'm not going to bother with it anymore. That stuff being caring about the appearance of a wall within the business and I, you know, pretended. And they stopped doing some of their hotel deals overseas. Not all of them. But it's like not now.

All that shit's supercharged. I should do this. actually this would be a fun podcast game with guests is like create like a fake Trump business deal and a real one and try to get people to guess which one is which because some of them are so preposterous that you could not possibly believe that it was true. You all know I love souls out of office sparkling beverages for an easy way to unwind without drinking. And if you haven't tried them by now, you need to get yourself some of those or some of their new mood gummies as well. If you're anything like me, your day and night routines are not really routine, whether it's doom scrolling, keeping you up, something I'm still doing, or whether you went to the geese concert last night like I did. And so you're a little bit sluggish the next morning. Bad habits can throw you off your rhythm.

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think you've been coming to this thing for a while so there's something that's new it's out of fashion. Why, you think I'll talk. I have some theories on this. I feel like there is a, you know, kind of Europe stepping up is a very popular topic right now. Like whether they, whether they're capable of that. Yes, certainly not in the UK. Well, the UK is a big countervailing point to that. Yes. The UK Prime Minister is the spinal tap drummer of world leaders. I mean, they just keep, as Ian Bremer. You can't, UK and Peru are competing. Yeah, right. Ian Bremer said, you know, in the future, everyone will have 15 minutes as a UK prime minister. The UK thing is pretty worrying because we did kind of follow their footsteps in Brexit.

And some of the problems that they're having budget-wise, immigration-wise, do feel like things that are coming down the pike for us. You're exactly right. And this is incredibly important. So we just had the 10th anniversary of Brexit. You now have a majority of Britain saying, hey, can we get rid of that? Like, let's go back to one analysis that it's between 4 and 8 percent of GDP. has been hurt over the 10 years of Brexit for a variety of reasons. The trade didn't take place as easily with the EU. Labor was restricted. But your more important point is the right one, which is when you look at Medicare, Medicaid,

Social Security, interest on the debt, we are facing the same fiscal problems, challenges that they are in the UK. And why did Starmor, among other things, get bounced? Because he tried to do some, you know, restrict the payments that went to pensioners, restrict the disability payments and like got screamed by his own party. Yeah. Same in the States. If we try to tinker with some of those programs or tinker with the other parts of the budget, which are tiny by comparison, politically it's too painful.

Yeah. Another one I'm noticing. And I guess I'm trying to put this the right way because obviously at Aspen and here, there's a lot still of talk about climate happening. I almost felt like a little bit of a time machine, you know, coming here and looking at the panels and saying all the climate talk because that is like so absent from the political discourse now. Like that's another kind of trend I've noticing, even like the DSA types, right? You have this kind of big moment with all these DSA left candidates. In 2018, like Green New Deal would have been their thing. Right.

If it was 2018. And, you know, some of the trends have gotten slightly better on climate. But like things, we haven't solved it in the intervening eight years. And now it's, you know, health care, it's medical care for all. It's Israel. It's costs. Right. It's not even really on the agenda.

I mean, sometimes it gets mentioned, but it's like not on the agenda. Yeah. Well, I think when you have a 40% increase in the price of gas as a result of the war in Iran, you have a difficulty selling an argument that has always had embedded in it some upfront costs to make a better future, which is often the case with a lot of climate conversations. Also, though, I think it's just, this is distinct from Aspen for the moment, but when you think about housing, education, health care, those are like, you've got to get to those three first. We now have a situation where wages are for the last two months behind inflation. So, you know, in the order of operations, talking about long-term threats is tricky now. It's not a long-term threat when you look at the fires in California and the wave. But still, what I'm seeing at the gas pump or seeing it month by month in my bills are always, as you know so well from politics, are going to get in front.

One of the wonderful things about the Ideas Festival is those ideas are still important. And they are what, you know, they are important. But if you don't tend to them at a place like this, then by the time they're, you know, make it into the political conversation is too late. Yeah. Because you haven't done any of the work. Okay. This is a half-baked idea, so we're just doing this live.

Because it's another thing that I'm noticing that's different is, um, did all my previous ideas have to be fully baked? Because I'd like to restate enough baked. This one's particularly half-baked. This one's a quarter-baked. But, you know, I mean, all at these sorts of things, you always have corporate sponsorships and stuff. Like the corporate America shift, you know, particularly, like, somewhat on climate, on

DEI, on tech, you know, it's, it's pretty noticeable. Again, this is another thing. We come here in 2018. I think that there would have been a lot of the big tech companies, you know, either sponsoring or doing panels that are like, you know, we've got to think about trust and safety.

You know, we're a little bit worried about disinformation on the platform. Not really a ton of that anymore. And like there has been, and I think one of like the big cultural shifts of Trump, and obviously this is paying with a broad bunch, they're good CEOs. But like is,

kind of in Trump 2.0, there's been kind of like we're unleashed for having to do some of the stuff. Well, I mean, you see it explicitly from the CEOs who went to the White House and visited with him. You see it in Haberman and Swan's book about how, and this is one of the, you know, particularities of President Trump's felicity with power and the enjoyment he takes when Jeff Bezos or Zuckerberg sucks up to him, it's a thrill. I mean, those companies trying to stay alive under the. tariff regime. Like, it was existential for some of them. I mean, Apple in particular. So there were, there was both a diminution of the virtue signaling that you got from talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then there was an increase in the things you had to do to stay on the right side of the administration. And now with the AI companies, there is this new sort of emerging

White House policy that you have to run your new models by me. Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of great leverage. Yeah, Mark Andreessen basically said he supported Trump because he was worried what the Biden, or then Harris administration would do to do oversight of AI. And like now, I guess as long as they feel like as long as they're inside the house, it's fine. Yes, although, I mean, so Anthropics in a two-front war with the administration. Chad GBTBT just wrote on Friday that their new model has to go through the administration before it can be released. ChatGBT has a better relationship with the administration than Anthropic did. But even a good relationship doesn't mean that you can get, you can just do what you want,

which was the original promise of the Trump policy on AI, which was like, let a thousand flowers bloom. there is now a gatekeeping function, which I'm fascinated to watch, because if you can control the spigot on what gets to go forward or not go forward on what might be the most powerful technology in our modern age, that's a lot of leverage over activity. This is kind of one of those, be careful what you wish for lessons. Like there's myself included, there's a lot of mockery of like, you know, the Chevron pride float and like, you know, these sort of performative, you call it Virgins thing, and these like corporate performative efforts to show the, you know,

that the companies care, you know, about the, you know, society and the environment and equity. And now that that's gone, it's kind of like, well, you know, there was something to be said for virtue signaling, maybe. Maybe better than the alternative. Oh, totally. Well, because virtue signaling, I mean, this is always true, you know, okay, let's strip, let's strip away the virtue signaling, which might have been a kind of cynical thing for me to say. We know this from. Oh, no, there was, there was some fucking virtue signaling.

It's fine. And that's fine. They deserve some teasing. What you don't want to lose is the scholarship that shows the benefits of diversity, right? That this is both decisions are better. Your workforce is more robust when people can see models of others like them who've risen up. I mean, as the son of the first woman correspondent for CBS News, the number of people in my life who've said, who would never got in the news business,

who said that their eyes were lifted up on the horizon by seeing a person like them doing a job in public where there were no other women. Like, that is super powerful. And so to deny the power of that, to deny the power of human example for basically everything other than white men is ridiculous because it is powerful. It's some of the most powerful stories in American history are the power of what diversity can do. And then there are the studies that show the powers of what diversity can do. So I don't want the mocking, which is justified in some cases, behind it there is a reality, which is that diversity equity and inclusion was a part of a real. an important thing for government and for corporations.

Was your mom torn at all about being recognized in that way? Like, would rather have not been, you know, always cited as the first, or did she have just a pure pride about it? Yeah, she had a pure pride because it was a bitch of a climb to get there. I mean, told for years that audiences didn't care about women. And then also you can imagine in the 50s and 60s how an attractive woman was treated by men in power. if you would like to advance in your career, we have some ideas for you.

Yeah, right. And so if you have to crawl across all that glass, like she would also recognize that she maybe was a little too proud of herself, which caused her some trouble later in her career. But, you know. Excessive pride in the media? I know, exactly.

Exactly. I think there's been plenty of men that went down that. Right, exactly. She has a good example of that. In all the men that came before her. That's very cool, though. to have a mom like that. All right, I want to do open-ended 2028 on you for you.

Yeah, okay. Because I think we first met. I mean, this is not true. Do you know what we first met? I think we first had dinner in Oklahoma City at a Midwestern governor's conference or something that all the candidates were supposed to come to. I don't know if Jeb actually went. We might have met before that, but I remember having dinner.

There you go. I met you one time before that, but I can remember, right? It was 2011. Okay. That's 15 years ago. All right. To the Iowa Strawpole, which doesn't exist anymore. Yeah.

Daniel Straphole, which would have been the Romney year? The Romney year? Yeah. I don't even remember who won the straw poll that year, Santorum, I think. Didn't Romney win, but because he'd finally decided to participate, and he just dropped money in on it? Yeah, that's right. He busts all the people in. Damn it.

I'm going to Google it. We should now. Okay. But in the meantime, I brought that up because, you know, you've been covering these things a long time. And, I mean, I don't care if you want to talk about Republicans, Democrats. Just what's catching your eye? Oh, well, you know, I, oh, man, I'm, I love those days. The, you know.

Oh, my God, we're both wrong. Oh, no. Michelle Bachman won the 2012. Oh, my gosh. Sound guys laughing at that. That's what, who came in second. Michelle Bachman. Mr. Bachman.

What's he up to, Marcus? I don't know. I should invite him on the pod. Oh, my gosh. He was a hoot. I have a particular fondness for Iowa because I spent. so much time there covering both Republicans and Democrats. And also I started my career, well, first covering Arlen Specter. Can you imagine a pro-choice Republican candidate? He never got like

0.01% in any poll, but even just saying like I think I'm going to run, that just would be unheard of now. But then Lamar Alexander, who, you know, essentially tried to, he visited all 99. The explanation point before Job. Jeff stole the exclamation point from Lamar. Exactly. Went to all 99 counties. I traveled with. with Lamar all through this state. Anyway, huh, well, you know my boring feeling about 28, which is the same boring feeling I had about 24 and 20, which is that the horse race, fine.

But what we're learning in the Trump administration is we learn with all presidencies, but particularly in the Trump administration, is this person you're picking has the ability to go to war unchallenged, basically, because Congress is supine for the moment. We'll see if that changes when there's a Democratic president and the Democratic Congress, if that's the case.

but they can like launch a war. Right. Keep that front of mind, right? Keep in mind all of the power that a president has and that it's not just about the single president, it's about the team they put around, build around them. You know, Stephen Miller has extraordinary power. And there is a lot of reclamation that needs to happen.

The Department of Justice needs to be moved from the personal grievance factory of the president into something that actually deals with the challenges that we face from crime and terrorism and the rest. Like, there's a serious bunch of issues, and the parlor game is like I spent my whole career, as you said. I like you resisting.

You're resisting doing the horse race parlor game. I am. We're going to do it, though. Okay. Okay. Because I only allow myself 15 to 20 minutes a week on 2028. I have a cap. Some weeks I don't even use the cap.

Yeah, that's why. I have a ceiling for myself. And I was looking at the guests this week, and you're really the only one that I want to talk about 2028 with. So we're going to use some of the cap. Let's just do the Democrats for a second. Well, I have a particular Democrat I want to ask you about, but do you have any thoughts just about the field broadly right now? Well, the field broadly, the Democrats are about to have a big,

I like these fights in parties. I love these fights. They're going to have a huge fight between, if you look at the Pew political typology survey of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and you look at, it's about 14% of the Democratic Socialists inside the Democratic Party. They, however, are the noisy end of the room right now. Right.

You know, and so what's going to happen when the Democratic socialists and the energy behind that movement clashes not only with the establishment, but with the political scientists and the political hacks who will say, we love your energy, what you're talking about and the distribution and the wealth in America and the diminution of the American dream. Love it. We'll get back to you, you know, because we're going to go run our race. Well, this takes us back to Bachman, actually. So 2010 was the Tea Party. Yeah, yeah.

And 2012, the Republicans nominated Mitt Romney. But what's funny about that is, so you have the Democratic Socialists representing about 14% of the Democratic coalition. On the Republican side, the Tea Party represented a much bigger part of the coalition. As you know, sent 70 people to Washington and sent 70 to Congress as opposed to, you know, maybe we'll have a handful. So it had a much bigger part of the party. And yet Mitt Romney, nevertheless, is the Mitt Romney won CPAC. It's talking about straw holes. Mitt Romney won the CPAC straw poll, which is hard to imagine.

But he won it as an unethical. unexpected fusionist. And so this is where the DSA can end up having power, even if they don't have a nominee, and this is where the Tea Party had power. Romney, you know, I never believed it. I love Willard Mitt Romney. But the idea that Mitt Romney was like a tough border deportation wall guy. Sure.

Well, he was the first one to put self-deportation into the lights. Yeah, exactly. Self-deportation. Yeah. I think that, you know, that was, to me, it seemed like him trying to appeal to the Tea Party guys and find a lane and realizing that, like, just. doing the belt tightening economic stuff wasn't going to be enough. You needed to do part of the culture war.

And I think you'll see some of this from the Democrats. And you look around and it's like, well, who can do that? And I think that the key Democrat, like that my little rule of thumb I'm trying to use is, I feel like Kamala, who I like personally, was in the sour spot where like the DSA types or broader progressives thought that she was a corporate chill and the moderate thought that she was a California progressive, right? And the challenge will be to find, I admit Romney doesn't end up winning. so this person, ideally for the Democrats, would be more talented.

The mid-round is more appealing to a general election audience. But the principle of winning the primary is you have someone who's more from the middle, but who has an appeal to both sides. So the progressives feel like, oh, they're pandering to be enough to make me feel like they believe it. And I can get on board with them because I don't know if I really trust Rick Santorum, right? I don't know who the Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachman is in this analogy. But anyway, and I wonder if that person is John Ossoff. Well, one thing I want to grab in what you said, which is like the thing about, as you know well, about both the conservative, the most conservative wing of the Republican Party and I think is also very true of the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party, being handled, being like managed is infuriating.

So a candidate who tries to do that can in fact cause more problems. Backlash. Yes. And there will also be a candidate who decides, hey, I'm going to grab the, the, the, core part of the left-wing part of the party and be their spokesman. And so now when you try to hondle the very progressive part of the ring, you've now got a person who's going to come at you at every debate. So you're going to spend all this time on that territory. Sure. Well, Warren was basically in this situation where she ends up having the burning people go after

her very aggressively last time. Let me pitch you on something else, though, then. Maybe it's just grabbing an issue that they care about. I mean, the immigration stand-in is either Medicare for all or maybe a foreign policy things such as our relationship with Israel, and you have someone that kind of really captures a mantle of that while also, you know, not maybe checking all of the boxes. Right. The issue rather than being, you know, we need a wall with a moat with alligators in it to appeal to the T-part. It's something, you know, something that appeal more to the DSA type.

And that issue has to be both one that appeals to the actual voters and then one that is a or sends a message about your entire, you know, it becomes the proxy for all your positions on everything else. Does that exist? Well, they used to think in the Democratic Party in 2020, that was Medicare for all. Remember how much they debated that? And it was never going to happen. But they spent a lot of time in the debates talking about it because it was a way to send a signal to voters about where you were in the party. I don't know if that, I don't know if that's possible or whether the more powerful prospect may be that a candidate comes forward, maybe it's Ossov, maybe it's somebody else who has the athleticism of the political skills where basically everybody

decides at some level he's just good at this and we're going to we're going to just kind of shilly shally around the real fights inside our party the thing is democrats like to have the real fights inside of their party and i find that hard to believe it's an immigrant to the coalition i notice that there's a lot of a lot of nitpicking a lot of fighting about white papers and also a lot of discussion about like hey we need the fight we got to figure out who we are because Like all this trying to kind of maneuver around our differences is a disaster. And it's part of what happened in 2024, some would argue. In other words, there should have been a robust fight.

It should have just been an an anointment of Kamala Harris. Whether you agree with that or not, there is a significant number of Democrats who want to have this big open debate. They want to have it too early for my taste. I'm like, sometimes I want to say to some of my Democratic friends, I'm like, you're aware Donald Trump's still president for two and a half years? Like, there's a lot of time ahead. Like, why are we doing Twitter fight? to the death right now in the summer of 2026. You know, there's a lot of prepositioning as if as if Trump's already gone, is that the future's

already here and I need to win for my faction. And there's like a big fight going on right now on Twitter where there's like a group started like we're representing the center and they're fighting the and they're nastier to each other than they aren't at Trump. Yeah, this is right. This is all church basement fights over. But I think as you know, though, when two. members of Congress, incumbents, are bounced within their own party in New York,

there's like political gold there. And somebody wants to grab that energy to, as you said, define where the debate is. You can really never start too early defining where the territory is. Because if you define the territory, then, oh, look, I've defined the territory of the future around all the things my candidate is good at, right? So they're trying to say, this is what the fight's going to be about, and it should be about this. and then they'll come up and they'll say,

well, this is why so-and-so should be president. So you've got to start that all early, but it's all completely detached from the actual job itself, which is what I always constantly keep coming back to. Yeah, just one man's opinion, but I have some disagreements to Zoran, I have some disagreements with Josh Gothheimer.

I've had both of them on the show. We've argued if you're madder at them, then you are at Stephen Miller, I do think that maybe your eyes and on the ball, one man's opinion. Yes, and also you need to be able to articulate the arguments against Stephen Miller more than just bad Trump. Right.

Because obviously there's some people in the country who are not where you are on whatever issues you want to be against Stephen Miller and the White House. And the inability to articulate the set of values underneath your disappointment with the Trump administration or whatever has been damaging for those kind of candidates. They need to be able to talk about why Trump is bad, not just say Trump is bad. You're good. You keep getting the off horse race, but we're going to do the payoff on us. But I feel like you, I feel like this is useful, 2028 conversation.

So I think you've only expended a little bit of your quota. Okay, great. This is all quota. All right. So Asov has been doing the strategy, which is working for him. He gives these speeches on the weekend. He's very good at them. The clips from the speeches go out on social media.

They start to go viral. There's another one this weekend talking about corruption. That was excellent. Just a couple of tweets I saw about it. Asoff just has the sauce, man. It's a guy Jeremiah Johnson I follow. Tommy Vitor. I want to roll this speech up and smoke it.

Sarah Longwell on the secret podcast, she was thinking about how much she likes optimistic guys with nice young man energy. Rogan and Tim Dillon were having a Manosphere podcast I was listening to on the flight out here. They were talking about Osloff. Rogan actually didn't know who Assoff was, which shows you how much attention he's actually paying to the news.

But then they played some clips, and they're like, yeah, this guy could be the right guy. Yeah. So, you know, he's got a Senate race to do first. But I don't know. It does feel like there is some... There's a lot of all soft energy. But now, you know, and we'll just trade the cliches of the business that we've trafficked

in the peak too early, right? Peak too early? We're peaking too early. Here we go. Here's another one. His best day was the day he announced for president, you know? That was Jeff, actually. Yes.

We had a great announcement day. I was there. A great announcement day. I was at your announcement day. It was a really nice day. It was either the day before or after the Trump came down the day before. That's why we had one good day. Yes, exactly.

Yes. No, I remember that quite well. So this isn't to take it anyway. It's just, it's early and you never, but I think the secret sauce for, for a Democratic candidate is being able to tie. So corruption, right? So that corruption is a thing people get angry at it. But once you get outside your coalition, what does corruption mean? Corruption means that the attention of the person who has the powerful job in the world is always centered on himself, which means he doesn't care about your housing costs, he doesn't care about your education costs, he doesn't care about your health care.

And guess what makes up a life? Those three things. The American dream is not possible if housing has gone up 40% in the last 10 years, if education and health care are beyond what a middle class family can afford. So the corruption on its own terms is a powerful issue, but as a signal of the president's attention and the attention of his administration, which has not been on what is the concerns of the American family, that's a way in which a subtle politician can weave those things together,

and somebody's like starts nodding. Yeah. Now, if they're good looking and they can do it with certain align, then that is the, that's the short guns. Yeah. That's the beginnings of what is a candidate who could bring a whole coalition. He wouldn't tell me what his workout routine was on the pod. You told me before he started that you listened to the pod sometimes while working out. I do, yeah. So you tell me what your workout routine is?

Well, I'm 57, so it includes a lot of mobility. You know, a lot of mobility work, a lot of like body weight work, you know, because. Because there's a point in where where sleeping starts to hurt. Okay. You know, you went through your whole life. You know, a teenager, you slept for 16 hours. Maybe in college you didn't sleep for several days. But the act of sleeping didn't used to be a possible source of pain.

Now sometimes I get up, I got like my shoulders all messed up. So what's a mobility thing? Like some bands? No, it's a lot of like rolling around. We had these gorilla mats, which you put on the floor of the garage, mostly because there's a lot of oil and gasoline so you try to cover that smell, but also you just do a lot of like rolling around. And it's like yoga slash stretching.

The IT band thing. Sure, there's a lot of, like now that we've said it out loud, your Instagram account is going to be full of people doing the windshield wipers with their hips and all that and all that stuff. And then, you know, I'm hurling around some steel, you know. I bet. I bet you are. I know that you've called in some loggers, called in a band, a symphony. To try to play me off so that before we start asking about CBS, but you were unsuccessful.

Exactly. It's time. It's time to talk about. Any second airborne is coming. Time to talk about the media. We're going to start with this. I noticed when I said it that it was wrong, but it's kind of apt. When I introduced you, I called it the CBS Nightmen News.

I know. It's the CBS Evening News. I didn't want to correct you. Okay. I think it's out because it's kind of like, who cares? Does it matter? Like, who is on the evening news anymore? Does the evening news programming matter, do you think?

You know, I know that this was your job, and so I hate to kind of diminish your life's work. Here's what we believed when we tried to create a different kind of evening news, which is that at the end of a busy day, a thousand things going on. What is important and what can you tell people about that respects their attention, treats it not as something you want to freak them out about so you can hold on to it, but respects their attention and puts the day's events in context and does it with storytelling, because you remember stories more than facts often, and tells the story in the tradition of CBS News. That's what we tried to do.

And we felt like at the end of the day, that is useful. I still think that's useful. Yeah. I still think that's useful. Can you? Were you talking to anybody that was under 60 and getable for Donald Trump? And were you really just talking to Boomer and Elder Gen X liberals, liberals, though, on the evening news? Or is that wrong?

No, no, no. Well, CBS has a good, strong, solid, and God love them, audience in rural America, which are not, these are not big city liberals. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's one of the joys of working for CBS is that it forces you to practice the kind of journalism I was trained in at time, which is not to present the final product as like, you know, this person believes drunk driving is good. This person says it's not. Who's to say? No, but you go and talk to everybody and then you draw, you use the evidence to marshal your claim about what you think is actually happening. And CBS always had a good relationship when I would be out in in Red State in America. You know, there are lots of good people who, when you say, you know, said CBS, they weren't angry. Having said that, CBS, you know, there's a long history of things that conservatives and Republicans have not liked about CBS. You may remember the George W. Bush. Dan Rather had a mess. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'm not, I don't want to create a false. Sure. But I do think at the end of the day, if you could deliver to people, here are the top 15 stories in your world ordered in order of importance with context, facts, color, attaching people to the wonder of the world.

Like, we're not supposed to just keep people freaked out about politics all the time. The news is supposed to attach humans to knowledge. And knowledge is happening in science, in sport, in fashion. Like, that's also a part of the mandate.

If you could do that at the end of the day, if you could get that at the end of the day and a half an hour, Bob's your uncle. You'd be so happy. Okay. You have some early 20s children. Yeah.

Did they watch you when you were on the evening? Oh, my gosh. They've never watched anything. Did any of you? Did any of their friends watch you? Yeah, actually they did because I'm, and I've taught at the Institute of Politics at University of Chicago and spent a lot of time with college students.

And they care a lot about CBS, the New York Times, mainstream media, in part not necessarily because they watch it. They do read the Times, but because they think it's shaping worldview. They also cared about the Ellison family because of their relationship with TikTok, CBS. And as I said, when I worked at CBS, I basically don't want to talk about, CBS now that I'm gone because I have a lot of dear friends who work there who are fighting the good fight and whatever my opinion is, positive or negative, when you're in

the middle of it, like some dude kibbitzing on the outside, like, it's, I don't, I think it's kind of dickish. I hear that. The TikTok thing, though, does tie it to like a bigger thing. I guess part of why I'm, I'm being cheeky, of course. Obviously, like, whatever, four million people are watching the CBS evening news, maybe a little bit less now with Tony Deep. You know, so that's something. Obviously, it has a big audience. still. But like the Ellison thing as it ties to TikTok, I guess my just concerns going forward when it comes to these questions about media consolidation is what's happening on the platforms, like where people are really consuming stuff and where there are no editors and where the algorithm

is the editor and it's feeding them the nonsense. And if you have the Ellison family who's close to Trump owning TikTok, Elon, close to Trump, big Trump's big his donor owning Twitter, you know, Zuckerberg. Can you have a democracy when the billionaires own the way that we learn things? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a fundamental question for our democracy and also for our ability to think critically because when you're being whipped around by the algorithm,

even if you told the algorithm like, just give me political news, you know, because there are now some ways you can train the algorithm, it's not working. When the algorithm is whipping you around, it's pickling you and diminishing your ability, to actually evaluate questions of the day. So it's not only keeping you addicted and stealing your attention, but it's creating habits of mind that are not healthy.

And it's basically in the hands of like a few people. Yeah. Not good. No. And so I guess like when you assess the landscape broadly, like where is your alarm the highest, I guess? Like when it comes to the media and social media companies.

My alarm is the highest when you have a kind of an alley-up that happens where you have an administration that, tries to rewrite what's happening literally in front of our eyes. I mean, Secretary Nome, when she talked to Jake Tapper right after the deaths in Minneapolis, and there was video. And she was arguing for something that human eyes could tell was not true on the actual video. That's the furthest example of what is a thoroughgoing effort to reshape the very, very notion of verifiable information. Yeah.

If you have the most powerful person in the world and his administration, administration, trying to teach the country that verifiable information is totally up for grabs and there is no such thing. My narrative is my narrative and everybody else's is treason. That's incredibly corrosive and dangerous. And then if you have news organizations who are supposed to fight like hell against that idea, allowing it to go forward, not fighting like hell, or as I said when I worked at CBS and I make that distinction, because again, Kibitzing, now that I'm not I don't, I find sort of, I don't agree with, but when I was there, maybe it's why I'm not there anymore. The idea of paying off a president in a meritless lawsuit completely undermines your ability to hold that administration account.

And it's not just holding people in power account, it is holding people in power who are trying to rewrite things like an attack on free and fair elections on January 6th. Like the stakes are extremely high. So the effort to rewrite misinformation plus the, at the very least, supine response, to that effort to rewrite misinformation, that's what worries me. This is where, so the meritless lawsuit point, this is like what I care about more than I care about the characters and the drama and the personalities of what's happening in CBS. Like, it was a corrupt game. Like, it was a rigged game from the start.

So, like, everything that happens underneath that is the fruits of a rigged game, right? So even, I believe you, that you have former colleagues that are working there. I have friends that are CBS that are good reporters that are doing their job. And yet, like, the whole structure now is a structure that was started because the president bullied the network. Like, that's bad. And it's bad because it undermines, again, as I said at the time, it undermines the ability of people to trust. Trust is a big problem. Trust those of us who are in the job of saying, you know, you can't ask the president a question, but we can on your behalf.

And so we're going to ask him a question that's going to directly affect your. life. And we're going to try and do it with you in mind. Well, can you do that when you've shown that you're going to pay off this lawsuit, which is basically keeping him in mind? And that is just directly contradictory to the job that a news network does. And again, I, you know, I said that all while I work there. So CNN thing, were you? I don't know. TBD. I don't know. I've spent a lot of my time since I left in December thinking about other things. No CNN people have called you. I find that hard to believe. They've called you to me like, what should I do? Dickerson, you've already been through this. Yeah, yeah. No. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't believe you. Well, I know. I don't. No, I don't. And this is swear to God, nobody calls me. I think because like I'm not useful. Like, which is to say, like, I don't, there are people who have called me and many of them who were fired or let go at CBS who I talked to about what you want to do with your future. All of those things. I really care for a lot of people who work to.

there, but I don't, I got no advice, because I got no knowledge. And, and I mean, despite all the hot takes I've had here, I usually try to base what I say in some reporting or some analysis or some, and I haven't, I've spent my thinking. I have some knowledge. You don't have to comment on this, but I have some knowledge because I've watched Tony D. So I've got a little out of knowledge because my eyes can see and my ears can hear. Okay, this is my last question for you on this. I just want know how it makes you feel, like on the inside, like the everything that happened at CBS. Like how are your emotions as you relate to all this? I mean, Pelly said that the dismantling of 60 minutes was similar to the death of a spouse. That's some pretty harsh stuff.

Well, you know, Scott, I worked very closely with Scott when I was political director and then when I was faced the nation. I mean, I was on two or three times a week when he was anchor the evening news. And one of the great things about Scott, which is, I think, important in any organization was that he not only worked, you know, incredibly hard, but he was a model for everybody else. And one of the things that I'm saddest about is being in touch with Guy Campaniel, who was the EP of the Evening News one for most of the time I was there,

was, you know, modeled what being a leader was. And being in the company of people who do work where you're like, oh, I want my game to be that good, that's thrilling. When Colbert's show was ending, you know, I spent some time there and you look at his staff. Like, everybody wanted to be better because of the leader. And that is a cool thing to be under. When you're a part of a tradition where people are like, wherever you are in the ratings,

I want to be good because of this sort of thing inside that we all believe in. That's a great thing to be a part of. So I miss being a part of that. So I miss being a part of that. You don't seem that's out. Oh, I've been hanging out. Mel and Kyle, you don't seem that sad. I'm incredibly lucky.

I get to, you know, moderate pain. channels here. I've been, you know, one of the great things about substack, which you have lived and breathed is you have a barn, you can put on a show. And so I spent a lot of time, you know, writing and thinking about things that I might get an audience of four people who really, you know, want my perfect... We're going to give more than that after the podcast. My perfectly thought through about why Alan Greenspan changed the way we think about the chairman of the Federal Reserve. And nobody may care about it. But I do, and that's really fun to work on. So I'm I'm having a...

Finding internal fulfillment is important. I learned about this in therapy. You know, not requiring the praise of others, but finding fulfillment within yourself. Very challenging for people in our business. Sure. Yes, exactly. That's an important thing to continue to work on. It is. It is. And one of the ways you can do it is to try to develop a value system

where you think, seeking to achieve these goals within my value system is important to me and fulfilling for me. and I can spend my day doing it. We all still seek validation of extra people, but it's not driving the bus. I'm hoping that you validate my interview skills at the end of this. I'm trying to get validation right now. It's already been validated by the enthusiasm with which I'm responding to your questions. All right.

Well, that's good. I'm happy you're not sad. And there's just a little bit of melancholy about everything. But, you know, things move forward. Well, this is life. I mean, I'm really lucky. I can go on sub-stack and write and come to places like this. There are people who were at the beginning of their careers

who don't have a job now. And who bought into the idea of meaning and the mission. And the mission can sound super elite. It's basically just trying to tell stories on behalf of the people in the country. It's a basic job of journalism. There were people who bought into that who died of jobs now. I'm super sad for them. I'm sad about one other thing.

We're going to close this one thing that we're here. So I was one of the neat things about being here. I honor and respect you doing six panels up here. And I love the people of Asper. Yeah. And the ideas fast. So I appreciate them having us. I just don't really like rich people panel stuff.

Like it's tough for me sometimes. Like I just. Because it feels detached from. Yeah. And I don't. City Hall. Yeah. A little bit.

I like being. I'm a man of the people. You know? I like being at the bar, chatting with people. I like people, but it's something about the panel culture is something I need to work on to find value from. But there is one element that I do like, which is for all of like some of the nonsense that you get and some of the fart sniffing at, you know, at a place like this, you also have people that did real interesting things. And like, I just, I just, I just do give you one.

And then you can chime. I had a guy last night that came up after the show, old guy. And, you know, they're just excited to see the bulwark thing. And we were just chatting about the news. And his wife was like, well, you know, he was an ambassador for 35 years. And I was like, I didn't know that. Thank you for bringing it up. So we started talking about that.

And he was talking about how he was in an ambassador from Reagan all the way through Obama. Right. Different administrations. Yeah. And like the thing that I gave, I'm going to get emotional talk about it. The thing I gave him the most pride about that job was like we had values that we cared about. And like there are different disagreements with every president at time. But there were like basic values.

of human rights, free people, open markets that like we argued for in those jobs. And he's like, I couldn't do that anymore. We couldn't, like that, the person in that job as an investor doesn't, we don't have any values anymore. He'll we argue for. And even if the, someone who does have values, it gets back in in 2029, I kind of feel like in some ways it's over in the same way that the CBS experience is over because it's like, if you're worried that in 2032 someone's going to come back in and we're going to be back to this mercantilism, then it's kind of like, well, then your values have no weight.

And you needed it to be both parties. And that makes me melancholy that that's kind of over. Well, let's hope it's not. But having a space where you can talk about that is useful. So that's what something like this and any big idea panel type thing is. But I think that in a world where our attention is so shredded, where there are. the best minds of Silicon Valley and the best minds of Wall Street trying to keep our attention atomized, that if you can get out and meet with people, this is just modeling.

You can meet with somebody who went off and had an idea and sat down for weeks, thinking through that idea, why it was important. How do we restore the values you're talking about? Not in a sense of like hot takes. Oh, you know, they used to do deals on a handshake in my grandfather's day. No. What do we do at like the personal level, at the city level, the state level, the national level, to build trust? What do we do to, you know, make a better workforce when you have so much of the

country unable to afford college and so many businesses needing people with technical skills that they're not going to get at Harvard? Answering those questions can't be done in the cut and thrust of politics and in the cut and thrust of the atomized algorithm-driven public conversation. So if you can get people together either to talk about those ideas or to be adjacent to them to go, hey, you know what, there's a set of values. Like, what are my sets of values? What animates my day? And that takes respect to the point you just made.

A life of fulfillment and meaning is driven by values. So if you don't have values, you're in a tough shape. So it's pretty good for everyone to go somewhere, whether it's here or just, you know, a weekend away to go like, what are my values? What do I want to leave behind? Why do I, who would I sacrifice for? And so I think the more we are forced into those kinds of conversations, the better. Yeah.

Not all the time, but as at least a counterbalance as a counterbalance to, because here's what happens. You think through your values, the interaction you had with that ambassador, you will then bring that to every future podcast. Now, of course, you already cared about those values and it's the death of those that have animated your work. But if you've gone off and thought about those things, then you bring them into the cut and thrust. And now you're leaning forward a little bit more. You're asking different kinds of questions. Seems like you have a little optimism about our trajectory. We're in this. We have 250, and it's kind of a bleak 250, I will say. Well, except it doesn't need to be.

So here's a, there's a Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick who wrote a book during World War II and said, how lucky this generation is to be alive, because he basically said, there are all these challenges to freedom and humanity, but you are being called on to fight for them. And so you're lucky to be in that fight. At 250, a lot of people are, for very good reason, worrying about the American experiment. But it also, forces people to say, this is the American experiment I want to fight for. You recognize and kind of distill what is really important in a country when it's threatened. What I take hope in is if you look at Frederick Douglass's writing, including after the Dred Scott decision, when he's basically said, you can't, you are not a person because you are a formerly enslaved person. You are not a citizen.

And he nevertheless could talk about his hope in America. His sense of hope in the face of absolute cruelty and an entire system that wanted to make him a non-person, not a human. His ability to talk about hope and that the declaration and the and the constitution were glorious liberty documents. Like if you can stand up and do that, inspired by these slave-owning white men and their ideas, like, we can take nourishment from that. And we can like stand up a little straighter and like keep the fight because those values, which are the same ones that ambassador was talking about,

They've lived for 250 years. Like, there is strong stuff in the cupboard. We just have to, like, grab it and bring it out into a podcast. I had some strong stuff last night. John Dickerson, man, I need more Dickerson in my life. That is great. I need that's important. You're getting your, I don't know, you're free man, you know, the weight is off your shoulders.

Frederick Douglass inspiration, you know, you're drinking the old whiskey. That's nice. That's great. Well, you bring it out in me. Okay, great. This is a testament again to your questioning. I don't think that's true. the pod. So I said, the Pondfather, you'll be great on Substack because you, you were doing all this Four Naviors listening to Podcasts.

Yeah, the Gap Fest. It was the OG, right? Basically. Started more than 20 years ago. We had to burn wood to get the podcast machine to start. And yeah. And it was also when you talked about doing a podcast back then, you know, it's like Jiminy Glick says in one of his interviews, he said, I've never been that desperate to start a podcast. I mean, people thought you would join some sort of cult, you know. I do a podcast. They thought you were sort of alone in a small broom closet, you know, telling your stories. And here we are. And here we are in the sweep of the world talking big ideas. By the way, I'm not going to let you off the hook on the big ideas thing, too, because what you do when you question people is like you challenge them with what are essentially big ideas.

That's what I say. I like that. I'd love, I mean, I'd like listening to and hearing from smart people. That is the good part of these things. It's like the happy hour. It's not the ideas that I'm pro-ideas, John. I'm a fucking podcast host. I'm bringing on experts.

I don't, the small talk. The social, oh. The small talk. As an incredible introvert and misanthrope, I can't do small talk. Yeah, it's like with the necklace. I don't want to do the small talk with the necklace. Yeah. But isn't the necklace helpful because if you can't remember your own name, you're like talking to somebody and you're like, yeah.

Self. All right. There it is. That's John Dickerson. we'll be back tomorrow. Who do we have on tomorrow? Who knows, Katie? We've got somebody good, though. Yeah. I think we've got somebody good coming on tomorrow. You always do. Oh, we got a bunch of Supreme Court decisions. So we're going to do legal stuff. And by the way, it's not just the decisions to come, but last week, all the decisions on temporary protected status on asylum. Assailum, ask whoever your guest is, asylum, done.

Yeah, it's horrible. Right? And Stephen Miller boasting about it being over. It's horrible. Okay. We do another hour if you get to me start talking about the Haitians. It gets me so mad. So we're just going to leave it there. I like the optimism end. We're going to end on that. That's John Dickerson. We'll be back tomorrow. I'll be back in my hole in New Orleans. So I appreciate you guys sticking with us on the outdoor podcasting. We'll see you all soon. Thanks, buddy. Thank you, too. It was great. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper,

associate producer, Anzley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.