President Joe Biden

0:02My name is Joe Biden. I'm lucky to be Conan O 'Brien's friend.

0:09And then again, I guess it's because I'm Irish. Yes, you've got the luck of the Irish.

0:37Hey there, Conan O 'Brien here. And we have a very special episode today of Conan O 'Brien Needs a Friend. I was given the opportunity to fly to Washington, D.C., sit in the White House, and have a one-on-one conversation with the 46th President of the United States, President Joe Biden. When I got the call initially, I thought I was being audited. Turns out that is not the case. This is an incredible honor for me. As you know, I'm a history buff. If you've listened to this podcast at all, this was a huge deal for me. I've never been able to interview a sitting president, so it was a thrill. At the same time, I'd like to point out I am not a journalist.

1:12I am a comedian, former late-night host. But my mission today was the same mission I've had with everyone I've talked to on this podcast in the last five years, which is to connect on a human level with somebody I admire. President Biden has a very busy schedule, so I wasn't able to get to everything I wanted to speak to the president about. But that's what happens when you're sitting with someone who's running the free world while you're wasting his time. I'm very grateful for this opportunity and enough said. Let's get to it. Here I am chatting with President Joe Biden.

1:50President Biden, welcome.

1:55When I do this podcast, I'm always looking for points of commonality. being Irish is such a part of who I am. There are phrases that have lived on in my family. My mother always called me a bold stump. Conan, you're a bold stump. But I think there's so much of that that's just in who I am, and it's got to be a huge part of who you are being Irish. It really is, but I think it's because, think about it, the Irish, even once they got here and made it, they were still viewed as lesser because they were Catholic. My mother used to say remember joey the best drop of blood in you is irish remember you're a biden i'm thinking who the hell's a biden you know yeah yeah and that's not irish right biden's not irish right it's quite all about principle and pride yes it was instilled in us by my mother that we are proper irish we are lace curtain irish now my mother's father had been a policeman worcester massachusetts directed traffic made, I think,$55 a week.

2:55But my mother was able to go to Vassar College and then Yale Law School. So it was all about moving upward in our world. And it was very important for our mother that we were proper. Then I get into this business where I professionally make a fool of myself. She had to figure that out. But it's a lot about pride. It's kind of expected, you think i mean look for years before our ancestors came mine came in 1848 my mom is 100 percent irish my dad is a quarter irish yeah but you know they got in those coffin ships in the 1850s and they came leaving a sense of being always ridiculed and and looked down on and there was an enormous pride in in our literature yeah well whether you were a farmer or a poet there There was always, it's just something about, look, we know who we are.

3:49Yeah. We know who we are. My mother said, Joey, never bow, never bend, never yield, never. She sounds tough. My mother was five foot one. Five foot one? Five foot one, almost five foot two. And she was everybody's mother confessor. I show a picture of my mom. You got to come over to the Oval after this is over if you have a minute. It's funny. You're offering that and your staff is all saying no, absolutely not. Well. Because you know what? They've looked into my record. Well, they looked into mine too, so we're okay. But there's a picture of my mom by my desk, and my mom is holding Barack's hand on the night we get announced out in Chicago, meeting people, et cetera.

4:28And my mother was everybody's mother confessor. Everybody would go to my mom for advice. Or they had trouble. And so my mom, she was hearing somebody's confession, figuratively speaking. She'd sit so you could see her profile when you came in the door, and she'd go like this, like, keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving. I called her and I said, the president asked me to be considered to be a vice president. I don't want to do that. I said, Brock, I don't want to be vice president. Right. Finally, he said, well, damn, it's only you. There are no other choices. No, that's what he said to me. And so he said, go home and talk it over with your family.

5:01I was on a train. It was when he became the de facto nominee in August. So I go home, sit everybody down. Everybody wants me to do it. I didn't want to do it. I looked at my mom, who was living with him because my dad had passed. And she said, Joey, remember I called you and I asked you about what kind of guy he was. And you said he was honest and smart. I said, yeah, let me get this straight, honey. The first black man has a chance to be president. He says he needs you. And you told him no. Wow. I said, whoa. Anyway, there's a picture of my mom. She wasn't even supposed to be out with a million people out in Chicago when we got announced.

5:32And we walked down. She walks off the stage. And there's a picture of her grabbing Roxanne. She says, come on, honey. It's going to be OK. She walks around. That's fantastic. That was my mom. But I mean, that's the, you know, it doesn't matter what you achieve in this life. I mean, this is a big moment for me. I have, I'm a huge history buff. I am a amateur presidential historian and I've interviewed presidents in my day, but never a sitting U.S. president. So I want to get it on the record that this is a huge honor for me. It's a big, it's a big deal. But I love that whoever you're talking to, and one of the reasons that I love this, doing this podcast so much, so much of us are the same.

6:0792 years old. My mother tells me to do something. I'll do it. to this day. She may not like the way I do it, but no matter what I've achieved in this life, it's fascinating to me that you were waffling on the vice presidency and your mother said, you're doing it. Yeah. Well, she said, this guy says he wants your help and you told him no. Yeah. But my mother and my father, my father was a really honorable guy. His phrase was, you're a man of your word without your word. You're not a man. Remember that. Remember that. That was my dad. Everything with him was about the notion of just being honorable and straight, never lectured it just did it it's funny how we keep these people with us i have on my desk i did a performance at the kennedy museum uh kennedy library i'm sorry in massachusetts and my parents were in the audience and someone snapped a picture of the both of them laughing they sent it to me and i have that on my desk because i think that's the only reason i do what i do it really did start when i was a kid in the 60s in a high chair making them laugh that was my first audience and those are the people i'm trying to impress and i'm still trying to impress them you know well you know it's interesting how many kids in the family there's six of us when my dad died everybody thought that i should be the one to do the eulogy we all sat and wrote it to four kids what stunned me was my dad was a man who came up in the 30s in high school and was you know you didn't tell your daughter how much you loved her and always hugging her you're just oh that's yeah it's generational It didn't happen.

7:35But so what amazed me is the different relationship we had with each one of us. My sister Valerie was, he loved her and adored her, thought she was beautiful, and she is. But he never say it. He didn't say it out loud. So when I'm writing the eulogy together, all of us, my brother Jimmy, who was more like my dad than any of us, he said, well, talk about the time dad took me flying as a pilot. Took you flying. Yeah. But he said, now don't tell anybody. He went down to Newcastle County Airport, rented an airplane. None of us ever knew it. You all saw different versions of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really wasn't my dad.

8:10He didn't preach it. He just did it. It was about integrity. You had to be honest. I have a topic I wanted to bring up with you, which is near and dear to my heart, because it's been the root of this podcast I've been doing for about five years. I get to talk to a lot of, quote, important people, people that have achieved amazing things. And what I try to get them to talk about, which is the things that they thought of as maybe a disability or a problem when they were younger that helped fuel them. That when they were younger, they desperately wished it would go away. They thought of it as a weakness.

8:40But when they look at the span of their life now, they see that that actually helped forge them. And I know you've talked about this, but when you were growing up, stuttered. and it must have been the fuel in some ways to have pushed you forward. Well, when I was a kid. You've got this problem licked, by the way. For me, I was really lucky. I had a mother and a father that my mother would say, don't let this define you. Look at me, Joey. You're handsome. You're smart. You're a decent young man. Don't let this define you. Taught me how to fight. There used to be a joke when I was growing up in grade school and high school that, you know, you could beat up Biden, but he'd hurt you going down.

9:28The point was that it made me realize in our family, this is a God's truth, Conan, the four of us, we're never allowed to make fun of anyone, no matter how mean they were to us, if they had something they couldn't overcome. Right. Swear to God, if you did, you'd get your rear end kick when you went home. Right. Not a joke. And so it taught me that there's a lot of people dealing with dilemmas that take away their pride, their dignity. I don't know whether it's the thing that pushed me about, like, for example, even though I was a stutterer, I ended up being elected the class president kind of thing.

10:01But it wasn't, I didn't run for that reason. But there's something about your dignity and your pride. It doesn't just manifest itself in terms of an impediment. For example, when we were kids, there were a couple of hard times financially for my dad. I remember being invited to, I was talking to this about my sister last night, my best friend. And we were going to a cotillion at Mount Pleasant High School, which was rated the best high school in Delaware, in an area that was an affluent area. And we lived in, not a bad area, but a less affluent area. And I was invited to the cotillion. I went to the Catholic school, St.

10:36Helena's in that district. and it was, you know, it's a little different. I remember being invited and I was anxious to go. And my mom, I had an uncle who lived with us at the time. He was 5 '7", and my mom couldn't find a white shirt for me. And so we got one of his shirts and with French cuffs on it and my mother, and it fit loosely, but it fit. My dad had always wore cufflinks to work and my dad had the cufflinks. We couldn't find any. I didn't know what to do. So my mom goes downstairs over the washing machine in the basement in the garage level and gets two nuts and bolts and brings them up and puts them on me and i said no swear to god my today that's a fashion statement and i said mom i can't go if they're gonna make fun of me if anyone makes fun of you you turn around and say you don't have a pair i swear to god true on the health of my children so i go to the punch bowl and this guy frank grabs me says hey look at biden nuts and bolts everybody started laughing i said Frank you don't have a pair of these?

11:39I swear to God. I swear to God. He turned and said yeah I have them. I have them. I have them. Not a joke. My theory is that if you stay connected to these things that embarrassed you when you were a kid whatever it was speech impediment or anxiety or feeling awkward or not being a good athlete my list goes on and on and on having weird hair having a weird name. I wish I had your hair. I'd trade right now if you will. You want this hair? It comes off. It's Velcro's on the back. Yeah. If I could do it, I would do it. I will mail you this wig tomorrow. Do some polling first on how people are going to think about that.

12:20But I think what it does is that it gives you empathy. I think empathy comes from a sense, if you've felt that pain, if you see someone else and you sense that maybe they're feeling that pain, you're awakened to it that's i think the superpower that comes from it is you have i'm certain you're right when i got elected i was using senator kennedy's office over in the capitol to interview staff and uh i got a phone call from my fire department they put a young woman on the phone and she said there's been an accident you got to come home december 18th i wasn't sworn in yet and uh he said there's been your wife's christmas shop with your kids My kids were then 13 months old, almost three and almost four.

13:01And she was just so nervous. She said, they're dead. And I was enraged by it. I remember going out of the cap and looking up in the dome. I swear to God, I'm embarrassed about it. But I just screamed and didn't know when my boys were alive. They were badly injured, skull fracture, and bow at every bone was body broken. and virtually he was in a body cast, arms, legs, anyway. What I learned, though, is that after that, when I'd show up at a friend's viewing, a family viewing, and they'd stop everything. The family would stop. He didn't know. And they'd come to me, just come to me. And I realized what they're really saying is he lost what we lost, and he made it.

13:49He's still walking. People have to know. That you can persevere, you know. Yeah. And if you made it through, they think, well, maybe I can't. Maybe I will. I spend a lot of time with families that are going through tough times. Because you know it gives them some solace. And look, I want to be clear. I was really lucky. I had enormous help. By the time I came home, my sister and her husband had given up their apartment and already moved in to help me raise the kids. My brother did. We have an expression in our family for real. If you have to ask, it's too late. If you have to ask, it's too late.

14:26Never had to ask. And think of the people gone through the stuff that we're talking about. They're heroes. They get up every day, put one foot in front of the other, and do it by themselves. So I had an enormous advantage dealing with my things I went through. I try to impart that to my kids, that whatever you're going through, even if you're miserable right now, it's going to yield something later on. Of course, what you're describing is the worst thing anybody can describe. and what they're going through usually is something extremely minor. The scale of it, it's the same principle. Absolutely.

15:00The scale varies, but the help needed. You clearly have a strong moral compass. You do things that you think are right. You take positions sometimes that you think are right that maybe aren't always immediately popular or popular with everyone, but that's part of the job. Well, it is part of the job, I think, but it's also part of how we were raised. I used to kid Barack. We'd sit down every morning at 9 o 'clock together for the first 10 minutes to half hour. I used to say to him, all politics is personal. Yeah. That's what I say to him all the time. We used to know one another better. Things have changed so much in public life that it was like an old bad joke.

15:39Some of my best friends are Republicans, but they were senators. They were my friends. I mean, close friends. When I ran the first time, I'm 29 years old. I'm running against a man who fought in World War II, who was a judge, who became a lieutenant governor, then senator for three terms. A really fine man named Caleb Box. He helped write the Clean Water Act. And the last debate we were having, he stood up and he was asked a question. And he didn't know the answer. And he said, well, I'd have to get back to you. I knew the answer, but my dad would have been angry with me if I gave the answer because it would have embarrassed him.

16:14You would have shamed him. Yes. But you can't do that. No. Anyway. This might be an Irish trait or it just might be a trait that we both share, but it is hanging on to old cars. My father would drive a car until it had 300 ,000 miles on it and the paint would fall off. And then he once hired a house painter to repaint the car because it was cheaper. And this car looked like it had cystic acne. It was a bad, you know, terrible. And he just kept it going, but it was a point of pride. You keep a car going. My first car was a 1992 Ford Taurus. I still have it. It's not worth anything, but I still hang on to it because in my lineage, you hang on to a car forever.

16:53You have a 67 Corvette. Goodwood green 327, 350, can flat shift, it can move. Now, do they let you drive it? Not anymore. But no, seriously. I think I saw a tear in your eye right here. By the way, they take me out to the Secret Service test track. which is an old runway. I've got my Corvette up to 132 miles an hour. It's only 327. The reason I had the Corvette in 1967, when I was marrying my deceased wife, who came from her dad was a Navy guy, owned some restaurant, wonderful, wonderful man. But they're of greater means than we were. And my dad, he wanted to give us a wedding gift and he couldn't afford anything of consequence.

17:34He said, Joey, give me your car. Then I had a 62 Chevy Belair and she had a Pontiac Tempest, a 64, I guess it was. I'm not sure they're here. And he said, I'll fix them all up and that'll be my gift to you guys. You can come pick them up. She was down in Delaware 10 days before the wedding, before she went home. So we went to pick up the car at the dealership. He was a manager of the dealership. Anyway, we pull up and all, everybody, from the mechanics to the salespersons, everybody's outside and waiting for us. And so we get out of the car and walk up and dad said, I'm going to give you your wedding gift early, guys.

18:11And everybody separates a brand new 67 Goodwood Green Chevy Corvette hardtop. And he was so proud because he could afford the payments. Right. And so I'm talking with Jay Leno going out the second time to race these cars. And he said, you want to sell your car? And I said, he's probably listening. So I hope I get it right, Jay. No, he's not listening to this. Don't worry about it. Well, he may learn something. He should. He should learn. But at any rate. I said, you know, I noticed you have in a glove box, you have the original sticker. Yeah. I said, yeah, I didn't realize I have all that. And he said, you want to sell it?

18:47And I said, I don't think so. My son would come down from heaven because they rebuilt the engine, all original parts. And he said, you get$144 ,000 for it. And I said, no, can't do it. Yeah. For 36 years, I was also the poorest guy in Congress, but I couldn't separate for that car. By the way, the new Corvette coming out, this one, electric, 0 to 60, 2.9 seconds. Are you going to drive that one? I'm going to give it a shot. I drove the other one. I can distract the Secret Service. You can make a run for the car. By the way, I drove one of those big Ford Broncos. Yeah. Electric. Yeah. 4.9 seconds.

19:24Oh, it's unbelievable. Mine is 5.2. Right. And that's flat shifting. But all kidding aside, I mean, I just love cars. I don't know a damn thing about the engines. I don't know anything about it. I just know how to drive them, and I love it. I just know there's a big wheel in the front, and I put on the gas, and I move forward. That's all I know. I know nothing else. Well, by the way, you know the new ones? They have a launch switch. Like, I got a portion up to 171 miles an hour. And what you do is, you put your foot on the gas and the brake. and on the button where the gear shift is, you hit launch.

20:02And you watch the launch symbol inside the speedometer. And it counts down. And when it gets down to zero, you just take your foot off the brake and you move. It is like, boom. It is incredible. When you talk about cars, it's the most excited. Oh, yeah.

20:29You brought up something that I've been thinking about. You have more experience than most people in public life. You came to Washington 1973, and you've worked pretty much, or you've known, every president since Richard Nixon, and you've known every world leader since Golda Meir. You've met so many of these different people. Who pops for you after all this time? Are there people that come to mind where you think now that person really stands out as an incredible leader well there are a number of people who fit that role i remember spent a lot of time in her first term with golda meir in israel i had great working relationships with i didn't agree but with the bush family they were both yeah decent honorable men uh i think one of the smartest guys ever worked with and knowledgeable but also facile was bill clinton yeah look at barack obama he has a backbone like a ramrod yeah and the guy that i recently saw was a guy who was just really totally decent and it was as good a former president as a president and that was jimmy carter unbelievable yeah yeah i went down to his wife's funeral and saw him that he was in tough shape and as i went over to get him a kiss and all he said was i love you yeah and you know republicans i became close friends just like chuck hagel man i mean there's a guy talk about courage uh decent honorable guy you were good friends with john mccain real close i never voted for john mccain but i respected him and i admired him and i didn't vote for mitt romney i admire him too he's an honorable man I respect him, and I think he's an honorable man, and I think those are both men that have a strong moral compass.

22:17And so it begs the question, we're living in this time now where having those kind of relationships, you think about Ronald Reagan working with Tip O 'Neill. You were there for that. You saw that. That used to be how it worked. And I don't know, do you think we can get back to that? Well, you know, it's interesting. in a, I guess it was my sixth year as vice president, toward the end of the vice presidency. And you recall my responsibilities would deal with the House and Senate Congress. And I realized there were new senators that I didn't know that well, like I knew most of them. So I went over to the private Senate dining room to meet the new ones.

22:55It's gone. And right after I got elected, I didn't want to be here because my wife and daughter were killed. Anyway, but a group of five senators came to me and saved my sanity, starting with Mike Mansfield, Teddy Kennedy, a guy from South Carolina, Fritz Hollings, anyway, Eagleton, others. Right. To convince me, just stay six months so we can help us organize. Well, we already had 58 Democratic senators. And I elected a Democratic governor, so we would have been a Democrat. But I stayed, and I used to spend a lot of time trying to avoid being with people. And finally, one day, Teddy came in and said, you're going to lunch with me, and just come and sit and listen.

23:34And I'd go over and sit down and you get to know people and then you travel when we travel together. And it's kind of hard to really feel the vitriol for a man if you learn his wife has breast cancer or if he has a child with an alcohol problem or if he has, I mean, it humanizes people. And you get to know people. It's what Michelle Obama, I think, says you can't, it's hard to hate up close. Well, that's a great line. And I think I can tell, and this relates a little bit to earlier when we were talking about this Irish quality, but I know that I like to be in a room with people. When COVID was happening and I was talking to people on Zoom, I felt like I wasn't quite coming across the way that I wanted to.

24:16I like to be in a room with people and let them take the measure of me and I take the measure of them. And I get the feeling that what really helped us in a bipartisan era, the Washington you came to, was that people were in physical proximity. They were. The dining room that you were in. That doesn't happen anymore. Yeah. And so it's a lot easier to hate when you don't know. And so, as I said, I went over and found out there was nothing there. Nobody to talk to. Right. By the way, John McCain became one of, we were like brothers. Yeah. He asked me to do his eulogy when I was dying. Yeah, to speak at his, to do the eulogy at his funeral.

24:49But interesting thing, he had been released as a prisoner of war, came back to the Senate to be part of the military cadre that sits down in the Senate to travels with senators when they go abroad. And John ended up traveling with me well over 300 ,000 miles. And we became friends. As a matter of fact, I introduced him to his wife. We were going to Japan, and we stopped in Hawaii. And the admiral's daughter was this beautiful woman who now works with me. and he talked about it. I said, go up and meet her. And he wouldn't do it. So I went up and I introduced them. They ended up getting married.

25:24We were friends. Have you done a lot of matchmaking in your life? No, no. But John would have done it for me. Yeah, he'd have done it for you. He wanted to, but he didn't want to be. He was still in the military. We were in a military base. Sure. And I'm the one that talked, one of the ones that talked him into running for office. I knew he wasn't going to run as a Democrat. And he ended up running. And we would argue like, I mean, hammer and tong like two brothers. But then that was it. That's a good way to put it because I have that relationship with one of my brothers in particular, my brother Neil.

25:57We're very close. We love each other. We argue. We just really go at it. And then we put that aside and we have these great conversations and laugh. And I say, okay, I'll talk to you tomorrow. And he says, all right, we'll see you tomorrow. Love you. You know, that's the conversation. But there's a safety. There feels like there's a safety in these relationships. Maybe that's what we're getting away from a little bit is, I don't know if it's social media. I don't know if it's the politics has changed. So I think it's trans. I think it's beyond social media. I think it's the media generally. And I'm not blaming the media, but things have changed.