The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Putin Thinks Trump is 'F***ing Awesome': Author

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Obama White House veteran David Litt joins Joanna Coles to talk about his new book about surviving the age of Trump—and what America's rivals really think about the current president. He explains what is going through Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping's head as they watch Trump from afar and what Trump saw in America that powered him to victory twice. Litt talks about his new book "It's Only Drowning" which he wrote after turning to surfing when the first Trump presidency plunged him into depression. He became hooked on the sport with his Joe Rogan-listening, Trump-voting, brother-in-law, finding a bond with someone he admits he has "nothing in common with." But it led to him realizing what had gone wrong for Democrats and why his party needs to engage with, not retreat from, platforms like Rogan’s. Litt explains how the MAGA coalition’s anti-authority ethos—rooted not just in politics but in personal psychology—has outpaced the left’s ability to tell its story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stephen Cheng, the White House spokesperson, recently described me in particular as a blithering idiot. And I was just curious, when you were coming up with insults for people, what was the most effective way of making people come to heal? If I was giving Stephen Chung advice, which I do frequently, weirdly, we should have talked about this sooner. But I would say, Stephen, my good friend, Stephen, blithering is really the problem. I'm Joanna Coles, Chief Content Officer of The Daily Beast. you're listening, ironing your clothes to or walking your dog to the Daily Beast podcast. Today's guest I'm extremely excited to talk to. He's very thoughtful.

He's very funny. He was a speechwriter for President Obama and put some of the funniest words into Obama's mouth. And during COVID, he became a surfer with his brother-in-law who he never thought he was going to be friendly with because his brother-in-law listened to Joe Rogan. What took place was an unlikely friendship which transformed David. and it also pulled him out of depression. So stay tuned for a surprising conversation with David Litt. Could not be more excited to have David Litt in the House. David and I first met when you were a speechwriter for President Obama in the White House.

I remember we had lunch in some kind of weird, was it called the ship's mess or something? The Navy mess. The Navy mess. That's right. And you struck me as very confident, very, very, good. And then you wrote a book called Thanks, Obama, where you described all the moments when you weren't that confident when you were supposed to be. Yeah, apparently I fooled you, which is great. I'm glad to hear that. You did fool me, although I remember one particular story you told me where

you were waiting very early on in your relationship with Obama. You were waiting for him, and you were so nervous waiting for him. And you had to have him listen to something. And you handed him a sort of tight little ball of iPhone, headphones with a long string attached to it. And he was like, nice advance work. Yes, this was the olden days when headphones had wires in them. Right. And so I had this pair of headphones. And I put it in my pocket waiting for the president so that I could hand him these headphones.

And somehow, you know, sitting outside the Oval Office was probably the best place I've ever found to reconsider all of your life choices that you have ever made. So I'm just sitting there worried, am I going to make a fool of myself? And I must be, without realizing it, worrying these headphones into a hopeless tangle. And so I walk into the Oval Office and I hand the President of the United States a hairball made of wires. And he looks at me and they used to say, when I worked in the White House, there is nothing more valuable than a president's time, which I thought was a cliche, until I watched Barack Obama untangle headphones for 30 seconds while looking directly at me. And then you start to think,

oh, a president's time is very valuable now that I'm wasting it. I am fully aware of that. Okay, well, he could have been bombing Iran. I want to immediately obviously talk about your book. It's only drowning, which I've started. I haven't finished. I will finish. It's very, very good. And Judd Apato says on the cover, it's hilarious. James Fallow says it's an instant classic. and it's a true story of you basically becoming friends with your Trumpy brother-in-law during COVID, right? Yeah, during COVID, I started surfing. I think a lot of us hit some version of a rut. I certainly did.

And I became really, frankly, depressed for the first time in my life. And I was basically willing to do anything to get out of that or try something new. And I decided, for me, I decided to take a surf lesson. and the only other surfer I knew is my brother-in-law Matt. And I decided very early that I wanted to get good enough to try to surf an overhead wave on Hawaii's North Shore. Wow. I know, Joanna, you're a huge surfer, so you know exactly what that means. I like to watch people surf.

I would never even get up on the board. And I have to say, I don't think of you as being the most sporting of my friends. Is that fair? Well, it's fair in that I wrote a book about this, so I'm inviting this type of insult. I do feel like when you write a book about athletics and you're not the most athletic, people suddenly feel very comfortable telling you that fact. So this book, it comes out today, but you know, you go around, you preview it to booksellers, people like that. And I was at a booksellers conference earlier this year. And someone came up to me and she said, you know, I'm so glad I got to meet you in person.

Because usually when someone writes a book about something like surfing, they say, I wasn't a natural surfer, you know, just like. look at me and you think, okay, sure, you would say that. But when I met you, I was like, no, he's really serious. He's really, he really has no business doing this. And I was like, okay, thank you. I'm so glad you let that come out of your head and you got to share it with me. All right. So, your Trumpy brother-in-law, I'm very curious as to know what he thinks, because Trump had two tenants of his campaign, I guess, immigration and no-stubrish. And no-stress. stupid wars, and yet he unleashed holy hell on Iran's nuclear capabilities. What do you think your brother-in-law is thinking about this? Well, I want to just back up to explain who Matt is a little

bit. So the two of us have, and have never, we have nothing in common, never had anything in common, still kind of have nothing in common, right? Matt drives a pickup truck for work. I use two computer monitors for work. Matt's an electrician. I am a writer, you know, staring at screens. Matt wants throughout his back training to become an amateur ultimate fighter, and I once throughout my back lifting a bag of cat litter. So we are not similar people. And we started surfing together. And one of the things I found very quickly when we started spending time together outside of the water is, you know, you called him Trumpy. And if he were here, I bet he would say, well, not really.

He's Joe Rogan, right, which is a very specific part of the Trump coalition. The Joe Rogan fans until recently were not actually really part of MAGA at all. They were third-party people. They didn't vote. And I think what Matt would feel is that he has a deep affiliation. He's a huge fan of Joe Rogan in the way that I feel personally connected to Stephen Sondheim. If Sondheim told me to vote for someone, which would be difficult today because he's dead. But even if he were alive and he told me to vote for someone, I would probably do it.

And I think that for Matt, it's the sort of almost neoliberarian part of the world. He wouldn't describe it that way, but that's how I think about it. And I think the most important thing and the thing that so many people don't fully get about that part of the MAGA coalition is people say it's the Manosphere. They must be really into bombing stuff. I actually think the fundamental tenet of the Manosphere is individualism. It's this idea that no one pushes you around and no one tells you what to do. And that was true during the pandemic when it came to health, still true to some extent. It's true when it comes to finance, you know, and saying, okay, I'm not going to be part of the system.

I'm going with crypto. It's true when it comes to how you're going to keep yourself safe, right, where a lot of people say, oh, okay, I'm going to learn martial arts or get a gun. And nothing is as deep a reminder that you don't have full control over your own life as your government starting a war. And that, I think, is why Iran in particular, it's not just a foreign policy issue, but for people in the kind of Joe Rogan's cinematic universe, this is, gets at the heart of how they see the world. And so I think that most of MAGA, their guiding principle is whatever Trump says goes. Most people will say, I was anti-war. When Trump was anti-war, now he's into war. Great. But I think the Joe Rogan fandom, the Manosphere, that I, that's a part that I think is actually going to break off or could break

off because of this war, especially if we get entangled in it. And I think that's one of the kinds of things where, yes, technically this is a surfing book, but weirdly, I've learned so much more about our country and about politics by surfing with someone who has views that are totally different than mine than I ever would have in the rest of my life where I'm sort of reading or watching a focus group. But doesn't that tell you more about the rest of your life that you live in a very limited sphere? We all live in limited spheres. But don't you have any other friends that listen to Joe Rogan? I mean, just a brother-in-law? So I have, I, I, I mean, let me ask this. Do you have friends who listen to Joe Rogan?

I definitely have friends who listen to Joe Rogan because I have two sons who are in their 20s. So there is, so the manosphere I get, and I also don't want to be pushed around. I found COVID incredibly irritating when they were telling us all sorts of nonsense that clearly scientifically made no sense at all. They would say, oh, the science says you must do this. And I had friends who were spraying Amazon boxes. And I would think this is madness. Did you do no basic science at school? So I was furious at the idea that I would have to, well, all I'm saying is I understand the individualism and the idea of not being part of something.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because you're not American originally, obviously, but I think that so much of American culture is that idea of we don't like to be pushed around. Right. Well, and they're the people that came, right? They left behind their countries. They wanted to start out somewhere new. they wanted to find where they were going to live, and especially those in California, who just kept pushing west.

Well, and even people who arrived much later, right? My family was all Jewish immigrants, refugees, basically, who were being, you know, murdered or almost murdered in what's now, you know, what at the time was the Soviet Union, actually at the time was Russia, and they came here, but there's this sense of we're leaving because we were bullied someplace else, to put it mildly. And so we don't want people telling us what to do. we want to control our own lives. And I do think that is what you're talking about during the pandemic, you know, there's a,

there's what to me is going way too far with that, which is saying, don't tell me what to do. I'm going to take Ivermectin, even though there's absolutely no evidence that it works. Right. But there's also the part that says, just fundamentally, I don't like being told what to do. And I think, I do think as a party, the Democratic Party did not pick up on that nearly enough. And we didn't say, hey, we can't be the party of telling you what to do all the time. we have to figure out how to be the party that says, no, we're going to help you take control of your own life, right? Which, by the way, is what government, when it works well, ought to do.

And if I were, for example, again, going back to, you know, technically this is a surf memoir, but I learned so much about politics. If I were speaking to so many of the voters that Democrats have lost without trying to change who we are, our policies, or values, the big thing I would say is when you do government right, when you're competent, when you're smart, when you listen to people, government isn't. controlling your life, government is putting you in control of your life, right? That we want, government is protecting you from bullies. Government is giving you, you know, if you want to start a business, government's giving you the infrastructure to make your business flourish, make your business work. It's so different than saying government is saying, you know, telling you, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to do that, and in ways that feel almost arbitrary. And so I think it's really, really important, not so much in what the policy agenda

looks like. But in how we talk about this, that to go back to your original question, yeah, we should hang out with more people from more different backgrounds, including, you know, as you're saying, with two sons, right, like people who think, hey, Joe Rogan's pretty great, even if you don't agree with everyone who he has on or everything that he says. Well, and also you can listen to Joe Rogan and you can listen to Scott Galloway, for example, another person that really appeals to young men because he's very sort of straightforward about here's what you need to be successful. When you first started listening to Joe Rogan, what did you think? So it's really interesting to me because in a way, listening to Joe Rogan is part of the story.

My journey toward becoming, I would not say a fan, but an appreciator of Rogan. And perhaps not a dismisser. That's a really important point. That's a really important point. That's kind of crazy that Kamala Harris didn't go on his podcast. Well, let's talk about that for a second. Because it's funny when there was all this back and forth, right, you know, everybody in Democratic politics who worked in politics was drawn in because of such a short campaign in some volunteer capacity. And you volunteered for Carmel Harris.

Yeah. So I was there, you know, texting people or on a signal chat basically saying, I hear she might go on Rogan. Let me know if you need somebody who is like Rogan fluent. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Great line.

Right. Like, I'm not a super fan, but I have surfed with Matt for a long time. I'd spend time with other surfers. It's a very Rogan-y place. And so I, and it was really interesting to me that some of the reporting that came out was that they offered an hour with Joe Rogan. Right. Like that, to be fair, in most media context, right, we're not going to talk for an hour. That's pretty normal. But with Joe Rogan and his fans, it's like, whoa, what is going on? Because for Rogan, the length of the interview, view is part of the point, right? The idea is he's sitting there for three hours. You can't run. You can't hide. You may agree or disagree with that. But just that offer suggests you're not as plugged into this world. You don't speak the language. And when you don't speak that language, when you don't speak that dialect, people don't want to listen to what you have to say, even if it was, it would be helpful to that. You mean that you wouldn't have let her do her now because normally he talks for two and a half or three hours, or you thought it was a good idea for her to go and talk for an hour? Oh, I'm sorry.

What I mean is, I don't think, I think going and saying, could we get just an hour with Joe Rogan is a little bit like saying, could we tape all of Saturday Night Live? I see what you mean. It's just they don't understand what this is. Right. And I think it's reflective of a broader problem, right? It's not so much should Harris have done this, what I think she should have. But more than that, she shouldn't, the question shouldn't have come up in the very last weeks of a campaign.

Right. Right. That I think Democrats should have been going on Rogan. They should have been, and not just Rogan, right, to Andrew Schultz and Flagrant, Theo Von. All of these places that Trump and Mago were going to. And they didn't hear from Democrats. And I do think it's a good thing that Democrats have now started to go back into some of those places and say, hey, it turns out, if you're not hearing from us, you're hearing about us from someone else. And they're not going to be very flattering about it. So instead of trying to say, we're going to deny you a platform, which, whether you want to,

that's a good or bad thing morally. It's impossible. You can't deny Joe Rogan a platform. And so I think that's the question that I think that the Democrats failed to answer, but I'm glad we're finally starting to. I'm also, I'm going to, sorry, I got to do my author thing and just make sure that the, there we go. Okay. It's only drowning. I'm just going to hold it up here. There's no quote on here from Jay Reagan. But are you going on the show to promote it? I would love to. We've certainly pitched him. I don't know. She's not very meta guy, but I, you know, I would love to do that. But I, and I think that's the thing that when I started writing this book, I was like,

I would never want to listen to Joe Rogan, let alone go on his show. But I actually think, and again, I think he has done a lot to spread misinformation, really. And I think that's very corrosive. Especially over COVID in the back. Especially over COVID. And I think some of the stuff he, he, he, he, when Trump said, you know, I'm an election denier. And Rogan said, well, that's like they call you a COVID denier. Well, no, right?

Trump tried to overturn an election. So I'm not saying we should be fungible about what the truth is. What I'm saying is I do think that Rogan, first of all, is a great interviewer. Just his interviewing talent is fantastic. And second of all, I think he is a genuinely curious person. I don't agree with the judgment that he makes based on what the inputs he gets from his curiosity. But it's so different than a lot of the MAGA universe. Charlie Kirk is a good example, right?

Young guy. But he's like a classic conservative Rush Limbaugh type. he's not really curious about the world. He wants to impose his view of the world. Rogan is much more open. And so if you go on his show, and I think that, you know, you have an ability to get your message across and also have him say, oh, yeah, that's kind of interesting. In fact, if anything, I think he's a little bit too credulous. I mean, one of the things I heard was that the reason Carmelah didn't go on the Joe Rogan show was because some of her younger, much more left members of the kids.

campaign team, we're like, absolutely not. You can't do that. If you do that, we will leave. I don't know if that's true or not, but I will tell you this, that reflects of you that I had before I started spending time with Matt. My view was very much that you draw a line and you say, if somebody is spreading misinformation, you can't platform them. And I think two things changed, right? To me, any good story, any good, certainly a memoir, You have to ask yourself, this is a story about me changing. How did I change? I changed in at least two ways. So one is the idea of platforming. The more time I spent with people who get news from places and information places that are nothing like where I get my news and information from, the more I realized the platforms are there. You can't de-platform what is essentially at this point the internet and social media and phones.

deep platforming is not possible. It doesn't mean you need to go everywhere, but it means your inclination should be to go everywhere and only as a last resort you say, no. Because it's not a betrayal of your values to show up. So that's one thing I would say that I learned. And then another thing that I think I learned through this is that, yes, I think Joe Rogan's impact on the country during the pandemic was harmful. But it wasn't because he was a MAGA guy. And the pushing people away pushed people toward MAGA. I saw this happen with Matt, too. We were never like super close before the pandemic, but during the pandemic, I felt like a real

need to be a little standoffish when I saw him because I felt like that was kind of living my values because I knew he wasn't vaccinated and I was. And I could see that just as I retreated even more into my information bubble, he also was in his bubble and he wasn't hearing from people like me. And so when I started surfing with him, which was about a year or two into the pandemic, I could see that he had spent this time kind of marinating in a world that was moving toward the right, in part because everybody who was in the center or the left of center said, we don't want anything to do with you.

Has he read the book? He has. Originally he didn't want to read it until it came out and it comes out tomorrow. So obviously, or I guess it comes out today. So he wouldn't have read it. But then as people start to read early, you know, early, reviews, copies. He said, actually, I would like to take a look. So by far the scariest part, we'll see what happens with the rest of the book tour. The scariest part of the book was, he was doing

an electrical job in Asbury Park where my wife, Jackie and I live. And so I drove over. And it felt exactly like a sort of metaphor for the book, right? I'm pulling my car up to his truck. What is your car? Tesla. It's a used Mercedes. I make the point of saying used, but it's a Mercedes. And so, you know, I'm in my used Mercedes and he's in his truck. And I pull up behind him and I get out and I bring him the copy of the book. And I'm kind of sitting there like very more scared than I've ever gotten for a review. But the first thing he saw, so the very first line of the book is Matthew Kapler is my brother-in-law. And we're very different.

And one of the biggest differences between us is that if I lived like him, I would die. And he read that and just started laughing. And I was like, okay, we're good. The one thing that we disputed, he believes that I dinged up one of the minivans that we rented during one of our our surf trips. And I would like to say for the record that according to the book, that definitely never happened. I feel for Jackie, your wife here, because she squeezed between the two of them. What was her review of the book? I think she really liked the book, but she was probably the person who was the most surprised by it, right? Both surprised because it was very personal to me.

So I was writing, you know, she knew that I wasn't in a great place during COVID, but I, I, I wouldn't say I was suicidal, but I was as close to suicidal as you can get without becoming suicidal. How close is that? Well, what does that actually mean? I'm sure there are lots of people listening who might relate to that. And it's one of the reasons I felt it was so important to write about, that I really didn't want to. I mean, you know me pretty well. I'm not an oversharer by nature. And I felt like it was important to share this. I mean, I remember there was a day in the winter of 2022 when I walked out the door of our house in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I turned right away from the ocean, which is toward the train tracks. And I was walking.

across the tracks and I saw a train coming and I turned and I stopped and I thought, okay, it's not for me, but I get the appeal. And then I kept going, thankfully. But that was a moment when I was really scared. I never had that thought before. What did you do after that? Was that an alarm call to you? David, hold that thought. We're just going to take some messages. I love those messages, but we're coming back to our conversation with David Lit. The hard thing I think about depression is alarm bells can go off and you just sit there and listen. You don't do anything. And you want to do something.

I mean, this is something I didn't fully understand before. And I certainly have so much more empathy for anyone who's going through that. And I will say, if anyone is going through that, you should do what I did not do, which is immediately, you know, talk to someone about it. Don't be afraid to tell them about it. You know, call a helpline and talk to a stranger. There's so much stigma around it. Yeah. And I mean, I felt that.

even where I didn't want to admit it to myself, just how scary things had gotten, how bad things had gotten. And also part of the catch-22 of depression is if you could get yourself off the couch to fix it, you wouldn't be depressed. And I think, you know, it wasn't until June of that year that I tried surfing, but that was in a way, that was, I had gotten to a place where I could at least take a first step, which was doing something. And I had never fully appreciated how hard doing something is until that moment. Perhaps the first line of your book should have been my brother-in-law Matt saved my life because he helps get you off the couch and surfing. Yes. First of all, I feel like this is the most Joanne Nicole's thing of saying your book is out today. Let me rewrite your first line for you. I'm so sorry. You can take the editor out of there or maybe you can't. No, you know, I love the cover, but if you'd like to redesign it.

I love the cover too. No, you're right. If someone had told me, because you seem very buttoned up, you're not. incredibly accomplished. You seem to knock books out like, you know, nobody's business. This is your third book since you've left the Obama White House. You're incredibly erudite and you seem incredibly in control. If someone had called me and said, hey, David's not feeling great. He walked across the train track today and he saw a train coming towards him and he kept going, but there was a moment where he didn't. I would have been very surprised and shocked. Even though

I understand how depressing COVID was. And the... frankly, democratic overreach trying to keep everybody in their homes and the kids out of school. There's a lot of people who I know today are going to read that and say, wait a second, I always thought of David as someone who had it really together. And actually, it turns out he didn't at all. And I am scared about how people are going to read that. And it might change the way that people I know well. Think of me.

But one of the things... Well, hopefully it will make them think more sympathetically. I would hope so. Unless put you on a pedestal. I mean, once you've worked for a president and written speeches for him and putting words in, put him, where did that come from? Once you've put words in someone like Barack Obama's mouth, there is a degree of respect that comes with the job that you did. And I think it becomes so easy to hide who you are behind that. And I didn't even realize the extent to which I did that, right?

I mean, it's also funny because we met when I was, you know, when we met, I'm not going to take this personally, I would assume the first thing you noticed about me was my job, right? I mean, that's just the way that that... Well, that's because I met you at the whiteness. Right, exactly. I'm not, I'm not, you know, like, I'm sure later you came to appreciate my charming good looks and sparkling personality, but that you have to define yourself in part by what you do, especially when you're in your 20s, so you don't have that many other things to define you.

Right. And it was, so I do, I mean, obviously, I hope that friends and family who read this feel sympathetic or that they know me better. But it was, you know, you talked about this idea, the alternate first line of the book for the next edition, which is, you know, my brother-in-law saved my life. Maybe that's the voiceover for the movie. That could be.

This has such movie potential. If anybody's listening, this has a lot of movie potential. In fact, Judd Apatow should do it. There we go. God, make it into a movie. Judd, if you're listening to this right now. But I think that this idea of Matt and what he did for me, and this is something else I would say about the movie version of this book, but the book version two. The thing I learned from this is that the people who help you the most in life, the people who you learn the most from might be the people you least expect to learn something from.

Might be the people who have nothing in common with you. And that's exactly why they can step in and help you see the world differently. They can save you at a moment when you need saving. And I will tell you, I hope kind of that Matt doesn't listen to this podcast because we're two guys, so we don't talk about things like this, this way. But the thing I learned from him, above everything else, was courage. That I am a chronic overthinker, still am to a large extent. But I think that was at the heart of so much of what I was going through personally. We were living at this moment in crisis, which I think will be familiar to anyone who's alive right now.

And it just felt like, especially for millennials, right, the world we were. promised was not the world we got. And it felt like everything had hit its peak and was going downhill. And I almost felt obligated to join that downward spiral. And Matt is a very thoughtful guy, but he tends to do first and think second. And that's not a way of saying that he doesn't think. It's a way of saying he sequences things a little differently. And what I would have originally thought of as recklessness on his part, actually, I think, is a type of fearlessness. And it really helped me build courage. And I will say in this moment of crisis that we're living through, you know, this is hard on everybody and we're going to see what happens in the world. I am so much more

capable of dealing with what it means to be a person in the world in the late early 21st century than I was five years ago. And that's because of what I learned through this surfing journey that I'm describing. Okay. So how good a surfer are you now? Did you get to do the overhead wave thing? I did make it to the north shore and I surfed overhead sunset beach, which is like a legit wave. It's not, you know, there's pipeline, which is not Nazare. It's not Nazare. That's the place in Portugal where people surf 60 foot waves. Yeah, well, and I think, you know, that is something I definitely know I will never even come close to wanting to do, let alone doing, because I would just die.

But I think it's astonishing that you can do this, that you could surf an overhead wave. I find it astonishing, too, to be frank. And part of it is the hardest thing about it, the physical stuff was really hard. The hardest thing about it was the commitment. What I learned is if you take off on a wave and you think to yourself, I could see why this might not work out. Like, I'm a white collar guy. Right. What am I doing here?

It might work, but it might not. I'll be realistic. You're doomed. Right? You're never going to make that wave and you're just going to get absolutely destroyed. If you think, I'm totally going to make this wave, you might not make it, but you at least have a chance. And I've really tried to apply that in other parts of my life where you say, you know, this is what I learned about confidence. That to me, confidence doesn't solve everything, but at least it gives you a shot.

And sometimes, especially with the real world being the way it is these days, realism can hold you back. And I did not realize that before I applied some of these principles in a slightly lower stakes, but still very physically frightening world of surfing. Did you get injured at all? I didn't get injured so much that I had to stop surfing and writing, which was good. I did wonder what was going to happen if I, like, broke something and then said, I have a book to do. And, you know, I'm in a cast. The worst thing that happened to me, or at least among the worst things, I was in Asbury Park. And one of the most dangerous parts of surfing is your own surfboard.

I should just be very clear about that. So I took off on a wave, missed the wave, but was feeling really good, so good that I wasn't really thinking about the moment I was in. And I looked up and I just see my own surfboard headed straight to my face and hit me right on the bridge of the nose. And, you know, I immediately, I remembered that in summer camp, they said, I went to boys summer camp. And it was a rumor that the bone in your nose can go into your brain and kill you. So my first thought is, like, does my brain have bones in it? And then it didn't seem like it did, but I could start to taste blood. And it was the winter, so I'm in like full, five, four, like thick, thick neoprene gloves, boots.

I put a glove to my nose and just, you know, red just gushes out into the ocean. And then I'm thinking about sharks, obviously. And I remember thinking I don't really, and I'm alone in the winter ocean. You're literally alone. Yeah, I was alone at the time. There was one other guy, but the way surfing works is whenever you're in trouble, everyone else leaves. Not because they know you're in trouble. It's just fate.

Like, every time. I thought you were going to say that when you're in trouble, everybody comes swimming towards you. They will if they notice you. But it's just the way the universe works, right? It's like, I don't know why this is, but I'm not the first surfer to point this out. It seems like when everything's fine, there's too many people around and it's crowded. And then the moment you could really use someone to help you, somehow everybody's gone. I don't know why it's just the way the universe works.

And I ended up paddling and sort of washing in eventually. and there was this kind of guy dressed sort of like I am now in a button-down shirt, and he was playing with his poodle mix on the beach. And so I just kind of walk up out of the water like some kind of sea monster. And I just say to him, excuse me, sir, yeah, just a quick question. How much am I bleeding? He just gave me that look. And he was like, oh, no, you're fine.

And then he sort of gave me this look of like, I think I just dispensed medical advice. This isn't good. But, you know, that one took, they patched that up. And then the doctor was like, well, you have to stay out of the water for two weeks. And I was like, all right, sure, doc, you know, because that's my new surfer. Surfer approach is like, yeah, right. Straight back in there. Yeah, exactly.

It goes back to what we're talking about. I'm like, yeah, you know, I'm not going to trust the establishment on this one. Like, you know, I'm still vaccinated. But when it comes to the butterfly bandage and going back in the water, I'm going to do my own research. Okay. So one of the things I remember, when I was the editor of Cosmopolitan, I had you write for us an essay on how to write a great speech, especially for people who may be having to make best men speeches or just speeches where it's important. And these days it's likely to be videotaped. And you gave incredibly

good advice. For people who are listening, who find it intimidating and don't entirely want to give it over to chat GPT, which I'm sure is many people's first call now, what are the sort of three things that you would advise people to do? Well, for a wedding speech in particular, I would say don't use chat GPT, right? Not morally about AI or the environment or something, but just because the whole point of a wedding speech is that it feels personal. And that's exactly what AI is not very good at, at least yet. I think the most important thing, actually, let me say two. Number one, keep it short, right? Nobody, I mean, just if you're listening to this, think about this. Have you ever, ever, sat through a speech and gone, that was great, but I really wish it was longer. Right. Nobody has ever

thought that. Right. No. He's not going to be the first person to make people think that. Shorter is better. The second thing is make it about the person who is getting married and not about you. And that, I think, it seems so obvious. But again, if you're listening, think about the bad wedding toasts you've listened to or heard. Most of them are all about the person giving the toast. Right. Somebody says, oh, we met, you know, we were kids and I remember I used to go to the playground. And then this person. And you're like, this is nice for you, but it's not about the person getting married. And then if you want to level up one more level, don't just make it about the person getting married. Make it about a relationship. And it's funny because when you asked me this, I originally was like, okay, I'll stop plugging the book for a second.

But these are actually related concepts. I think the best stories are always not about one person. They're about relationships between people. Two interesting people. And with this book, I started writing a surfing book about me. that was just about my own journey surfing. And then I realized, actually, this is a book about a relationship. This is about me and Matt.

And the same thing, if you're giving a wedding toast, you will start saying, this is a story about me or this is a great story about the bride or the groom. And then eventually you will realize, no, this is a story about us. And the story about us is going to be the interesting story to people who are listening. And then keep it short. Okay, that's a very good, very good things to remember. Keep it short. make it about a relationship. And I also remember you saying, start with the story and come back to the story at the end,

because people often get to the end of a speech and they don't know how to end it. So if you tie it back to the first anecdote or the first story, it has a nice round feel to it. Yeah, this is a speechwriter complete hack that, you know, like. But it's so successful. Hacks work. No, they work, but you sometimes want to save them for yourself so that other people think you're really brilliant. Uh-huh. This one I am giving away, which is if you are stuck at how to end something, just look at how you started.

Because we're always, as human beings, we love something that comes full circle. And often, I mean, even if it doesn't relate at all, you can sometimes just sneak it in, right? Like you just sort of end by using the same line you used at the beginning and people say, wow, that's so true. Even better if you can do it in a way that's actually meaningful, right? And you say, where did we start? And what does it mean at the end? Another way I think about speeches is like a really good show tune or country song where usually there's an idea that's introduced very early. And then you find out things that change the nature of the idea.

And then when you end, you're back at the same idea, but it's a new, but it's a new thing, right? That same, like, it's the same but different. Exactly. It's the same but different. It's a story about change. That's all, they're all stories about change. You spent many years in the Obama administration, and during that time we saw the increasing rise of China. What do you think the Chinese leadership and the Russian leadership think when they look at what's happening to America now?

David, hold that thought. We're just going to take some messages. We love our sponsors, but we're getting straight back to David Litt and his book, It's Only Drowning. I don't know the Chinese or Russian words for like, This is so fucking awesome, but that's what I would imagine they're thinking. Because what we're seeing more than anything else is President Trump has total control of his party and so little control over the rest of American policy. Everything is feeling more and more out of control at home and around the world. And so you have China and Russia saying, hey, if you're going to do autocracy, go with the people who can do it right. Have people who can, you know, especially China, right? China is going to other countries essentially in saying if the United States doesn't provide you anything in terms of respecting human rights, you know, democracy, self-determination, if we're all just equal bullies, might as well go with China. We'll give you a better deal because we don't have to get stuff through Congress because we're, you know, sort of unashamedly authoritarian. So take our deal.

And the United States, we used to be able to say, sure, that seems better in the short term, but in the long term, do you really want to be under China's thumb? And now we're basically saying, do you want to be under an incompetent, sorry, incompetent? Do you want to be under the thumb of an incompetent authoritarian or a competent authoritarian? And people choose the competent one. So it's all this whole, the last six months have just been gift after gift after gift to China at a moment when even a really smart competent president would have struggled to figure out. that relationship and how we compete. And sadly, we do not have that president even remotely at the moment. Okay, so a final question.

One of the things that I always appreciated about you was you pulled together and were the sort of editor of Barack Obama's speeches at the White House Correspondence Dinner, where he excelled in being able to tell jokes. Obviously, one of those dinners has been blamed for. alighting the flame in Donald Trump to make him want to be president. When you look back on that evening, do you think that's a fair analysis? Well, I should say to answer the implied second question, no, it's not my fault. No, I had just started at the White House at the time.

So I had pitched jokes for that dinner, but I wasn't like holding the pen on it. And I wasn't in the room with the Trump stuff. So frankly, I wish that I could say I had written those jokes because they were very good. but I did not write them. But I did sit in the cheap seats in the Hilton ballroom that evening, and I had a direct view of Trump, and it was amazing to just watch him turn beat red. And it wasn't just that he was upset that Obama was making fun of him. Everybody in that room, including Republicans who went on to serve in the Trump administration and who today will tell you Trump is the best president since George Washington,

we're so happy to see someone take him down a pig. They were laughing harder than the Democrats. I don't think that's why he ran. I think that if you have a giant ego and you think you can become president, you run for president. And his ego is titanic. And so he saw an opening. He thought he could win. And so he ran.

What I actually think that moment reflects is that he did see something in the American public and an American culture that everyone else in that room, Hollywood, journalism, Democrats, professional Republicans, also, we missed. And that, I think, is very interesting. And I do think, you know, I always feel like the right deals with fear through conspiracy theories and the left deals with fear through self-recrimination. Right. So we act as though if we had only done something differently, we could have prevented this. The closest we would come to that is saying, I do think that something was happening in the country and we dismissed it and said, this can't be true. Right. I mean, Matt in 2016 said, if you were to vote, he, would vote for either Bernie or Trump. And I asked why. And he said, because they're the most entertaining. And I thought, okay, well, he was in 25, I think at the time. I was like, hey, he's in his 20s. There's got to be like, what, five of these people in the world.

It's not going to be a big deal. And I was totally wrong. That was, I just assumed that he was expressing a view that was very, very, you know, only a few people felt that way. And it turns out he was expressing something lots and lots and lots of people felt. And in a democracy, you have to pay attention to what lots of people felt. and lots and lots of people feel, even if you don't agree with them. You don't have to agree with them, but you have to know what they're thinking and feeling. And ideally, you need to at least hear them out.

You need to listen. Because when people don't feel listened to, it's not surprising when they no longer want to be part of your coalition. And what Bernie and Donald Trump had in common was that they were both anti the status quo. Yes. I think there is this sense. And again, we're talking about an out of control world. And now we look back on 2016 and we're like, we thought that was out of control. you know, I would love to have a time machine and go back there and say, nope, this is as in control as it's going to be for a decade.

But that was around the time when partly because of social media, partly because ISIS had emerged Ebola, you name it, there was this sense that the world was spiraling out of control. And there was really the sort of ramping up of social media, too, the voice of Twitter in particular. Yeah, exactly. That you could see. Which amplified it. We're not really meant as a species to witness all of the terrible things happening across the globe every single day, nonstop. Everything everywhere all at once. Yeah, but it's not every good thing.

It's all the bad stuff, right? So I think we have this sense that the world is substantially worse, in part because there are some things that are substantially worse. But also, on a visceral personal level, we are bearing witness to so much more than, you know, than my parents did or than I did when I was growing up. Conflict drives the algorithm. Exactly. Social media, right? Right. I mean, it is, we have these sort of devices that we are carrying around that we're addicted to.

And most of the most powerful companies in the country are, they're powerful because they're good at making you even more addicted. And if you just sat, if you just like stopped for a second and said that, people would be like, oh, yeah, that seems really bad. Right. We might end up electing a crazy president if that happened. Well, yeah. So it's not, some of this stuff is like so much in life, kind of easy to identify the problem and the solution is so much harder, which kind of brings us back to some of the populism, right? Which is that I think there was this sense of the world is out of control and there's a bunch of people who don't care about you and they're trying to control you. They could fix it, but they won't.

And unfortunately, I think that to a far too great extent, Democrats responded by saying, no, you don't understand the world's out of control and there's nothing anyone. can do about it. And if that's your view and you basically just keep saying it's complicated, it's complicated, it is true, it's complicated. It is complicated. But you have to figure out a better way to talk about it than saying that. And if you're the party of, we really wish we could do more, then I'm not surprised that especially people who are not super plugged into politics say, no, we think you're just not trying hard enough. I actually don't think that's true. I think Democrats are trying really hard, but I don't think that they always message the way that they're trying as effectively as they need to. Well, and one of the things Donald Trump frequently says is,

look, it's just simple. It's simple, okay, and he just sort of breaks it down. And of course, it's not actually simple in reality. But if someone says it's simple, it's very appealing. Stephen Cheng, the White House spokesperson, recently described me in particular as a blithering idiot and a piece of shit. And one of our frequent guests on this podcast, Michael Wolf, he's described as a lying sack of shit. What people have responded to when they've asked me about it is, can you believe that the White House has coarsened the language so much as to say this? There were many times when we were told off by the Obama White House when I was editing cosmopolitan and we didn't agree on things, but it was never that sort of visceral level of insult. And I was just curious,

when you were coming up with insults for people, what was the most effective way of making people come to heal. Because that's only energized us. I will say Stephen Chung has only been the energizer bunny for what we do here, which is independent media. Right. Well, I was going to say if I was giving Stephen Chung advice, which I do frequently, weirdly, we should have talked about this sooner, but I would say, Stephen, my good friend, Stephen, that blithering is really the problem, right? That's an elitist word. It's got too many syllables. Most people, you know, most people don't use the word blithering. I'd never walked around saying, oh, this is, you know, what a blithering television program. It does sound very 1930s, doesn't it? I say, now listen here at my blizzard man.

Absolutely. So I would say, come join the people and just call, you know, Joanna, call her an idiot. Like the rest of us would if we decided to call you an idiot. You drop the blithering. And, you know, but I do think we're living in this crazy world where disrespect is in. And so, and the coarsening of the language, as you call it, is in. At the same time, I think, think, and this is one of the things that I keep seeing, we've talked a lot about bubbles in this interview. And what that does basically is it just reinforces your bubble and also the other person's bubble. And MAGA is all about counting on their bubble being slightly larger, which is what happened in the election. It was ever so slightly larger. That was enough to win. I think it's a

really bad gamble when you combine it with all the mismanagement and incompetence and cruelty. And so I do think that while I'm sure it gives my buddy Stephen a great sense of kind of momentary satisfaction to be like oh Joanna's a piece of shit right I think that's that bullying doesn't work

when people realize the emperor has no clothes and we're reaching that moment so I would say maybe there's a moment to walk it back a little bit or you you well this just says more about me than it does about anyone else my first question when you said they called you a piece of shit and Michael Wolf a sack of shit is I'm like how many pieces fit in a sack.

And I think that is an important question that the American people need to know from their elected representatives and those speaking on their behalf. Excellent. We are going to end how we began with your book. It's only drowning. It's got fantastic reviews. And it's one of a two memoir deal. So you now have to do something else. You have to learn something else. You have to find some other. likely person to become your best friend. And I say unlikely with no judgment, unlikely in your own life. What's next? What's the next book? I have not figured it out yet, but I'm really excited that I get to.

Like in memoir, you don't usually say, okay, I'll write two of them. You usually have one. But I love the fact that I am professionally obligated to live a more interesting, frightening, unexpected life than I would otherwise. So you need to take up another dramatic. sport or you need to find another member of your family with whom you violently disagree? Well, maybe both. Or maybe I go totally the opposite direction and take up a truly zero dangerous sport. I'm going to get really into shuffleboard and, you know.

I don't see it. You don't see a shuffleboard book? I don't see a shuffleboard, but who knows? Who knows? Well, that was a conversation. I wasn't entirely expecting to have with David. I had no idea he'd been that depressed, so much so that he actually stood. looking at an oncoming train on a train track, happily kept going, but it stayed in the back of his head. This is a fantastic book for people who have friends or relatives with whom they don't agree. It's about bridging the divide, which we all want to do. There's no reason why our friends should have to vote the same way as we do or think the same way as we do. It's really fun.

And David is very thoughtful, and I'm so glad he came to join us today. So if you have been, Thank you for watching or listening. Feel free to subscribe to The Daily Beast podcast. Please leave us a comment. We love to hear from you. I personally try and respond as much as I can. Often there are just too many comments to do it to, but please know that we do read them all.

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