Was Biden’s Decline a Cover-Up? — with Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson

27:32So they thought of her as a fighter. I don't think so. I know that almost, I think that almost cost her the nomination because Jill Biden was so resentful of it. At the end of the day, he had promised he would pick a woman vice president. He never promised he would pick an African-American woman vice president. He said he'd pick an African-American woman Supreme Court justice, But it kind of became this thing after George Floyd and the protests there that he felt like he had to pick a black woman. It really, at the end of the day, truly came down to Kamala Harris, who had been in the view of the Biden team vetted on a national stage because she had been a candidate for president, even though, as you point out, she didn't even make it to 2020, much less Iowa.

28:17And even though they were publicly talking about people like Congresswoman Karen Bass, who's now the mayor of Los Angeles, and Congresswoman Val Demings from Florida, those two weren't really in the final two. It was Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Kamala Harris. Biden liked Whitmer more. He had more affection for her, saw her as more of a Biden Democrat type from a gritty, you know, Midwestern state. But at the end of the day, just the image of him with Kamala Harris, who was of the progressive left at that point, even though she really previously had been more of a moderate in California, African-American woman vetted, had gone after him in the debate.

29:08And so there were people on the staff who thought, well, this shows that he's like bigger than that sort of thing. But Jill Biden really, really resented her. And while President Biden and Kamala Harris, I think, developed a genuine warmth, theirs was not the partnership of a Bush and Cheney or a Clinton and Gore or an Obama and Biden. She was relegated to lesser tasks. The team never really thought of her as the heir apparent until the very end. In fact, they would use her as an excuse as to why Biden couldn't step down. You want Kamala to be the nominee? You know, she's less popular than Biden.

29:50Which enraged other Democrats because it was like, you picked her. Some people in the Biden world have quipped, you know, actually the original sin was picking her because, you know, they felt that she was not ready or was not electable. But at the end of the day, that was their choice. And it was, you know, picking a vice president is one of the most consequential choices, you know, a presidential candidate faces. What color insight can you provide on the relationship between President Biden and Vice President Harris so the public may not have that nuance? You know, there was a little bit of strain.

30:26Jake spoke to some of this, but the way that Biden would call her a kid, right? I think Kamala Harris, according to People Ranter, she thought of herself as a peer. And Biden saw her as a kid and someone that had been really good friends with his late son, Beau Biden, when they were both state attorneys general. and even on the staff level is where the tension really was where the biden team didn't think she was uh very good thought she was creating headaches for them all the time was not um and also didn't think she was like a very nice person and to jake's point they used that dim view of her to rationalize, you know, running for reelection.

31:18Which is twisted, because as you know, Scott, they could have made her a Supreme Court justice, right? They could have said at some point when that position came open, we're going to make you a Supreme Court justice. And, you know, if you want to resign from the court and run for president in the future, that's on you. But, you know, we got to put somebody who we think can actually be vice president and actually be president, if need be. And she probably, let's be honest, I mean, she's certainly not the legal mind that Ketanji Brown-Jackson is, but she would have been confirmed. She's a senator.

31:54She's a former attorney general of California. The U.S. Senate is a fairly, they love to sniff each other. I mean, you know, a senator is good enough for any position. So I think she would have been confirmed. This is all Earth-2 stuff, but if they really didn't think she was qualified, there was an out right there. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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34:44Try and put us in the room. Like, what was the moment that you said, OK, it's over? I mean, what was, to me, you said a threat of a chaotic election. I was under the impression that Speaker Pelosi or somebody had said, every day I'm going to have Democrats come out against you. and it's going to be humiliating for you. That didn't happen. No, so it's very complicated. So, I mean, there is this impression that it was this grand plan with Schumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, and Obama pulling strings and deciding things. But no, it was much more organic than that. Pelosi and Schumer both got members of their caucus to hold off on calling for him to step down at different times.

35:35And wielded those public, the threat of more public calls for him to step down as a threat to get things, to get, that's how Schumer got a meeting with the Biden White House and campaign leadership by saying, if you don't do this, I got six senators who are ready to come out right now. And so they did that meeting. But at the very end, after a drumbeat of House Democrats on their own coming out, and by the end, I think it was like something like 40, which is really kind of a small number when you think about how many of them actually wanted him to step down. And it was pretty organic. The Biden people were still in denial.

36:22But what I think changed the equation was you have Chuck Schumer goes to visit the president in Delaware. He has to threaten that he's going to call for the meeting if they don't give it to him publicly. So they say, if you don't give it to me, I'm going to call for it. You're going to have to give it to me. So let me come and visit him. He goes and visits him. This is after Pelosi and Jeffries have both made it clear to Biden the House Democratic caucus doesn't want him to be the nominee anymore. and they think they're going to lose, they're not going to be able to recapture the House and that they're worried that he's not getting the polling data that they're getting.

37:03Schumer goes there and he says, he tells Biden about the meeting that the Senate Democrats have had with the campaign leadership. What Schumer had told Biden's top aides, Mike Donilon and Steve Ruschetti, tell the president every detail of this. And then it got back to Schumer that they hadn't. So that's why he called for the private meeting. He went there and he basically said. Of the 51 member Senate Democratic caucus, there are five who want you to stay as the nominee. And that meant a lot to Joe Biden personally, because at that point, by the way, I think only one had publicly called for him to not be the nominee anymore.

37:49I think Senator Welsh from Vermont. They were all holding back, but a number of them were very worried, especially the ones up for reelection. So that was a deciding factor. also one week later when biden was very sick with covid and i can't imagine what it was like for an 81 year old man who's insisting on his health and vigor to have been laid up with covid in isolation rachetti and donilon meet with them and they tell him something that hasn't been reported until this book which is the woman running the democratic national convention which was about three weeks away was a woman named mignon moore long-time respected democratic operative when she got the job in 2023 she formed an ad hoc committee called the what if committee not on the books but it was just a group of maybe a dozen or so people involved in the convention and it was what if the can the protests in chicago turn out to be like the protests in the 68 convention.

38:54What if Joe Biden's no longer the nominee? What if this? What if that? After the debate, they started regularly reaching out to the delegates, and they were hearing from the delegates how much bleeding there was going on. And the what-if committee told Reschetti and Donilon, if you go to the convention, if the president takes this to the convention, He can still win, but it will be ugly and it will be close. So all of this data, you don't have the support of the senators. It's going to be an ugly battle. Schumer had also told Biden what Donnell and Ricchetti had not, which is your own pollsters don't think you can win.

39:37They think there's a 5 % chance that you can win. And that is not what Donilon had been telling the president. Donilon was the thing that pollsters never talked to Biden. They would talk to Donilon and Reschetti and Donilon would interpret the information. And he's still interpreting it out there. You hear him at Harvard, the Harvard Institute of Politics talking about it was only a two-point race, et cetera, et cetera. Just absolute nonsense. Anyway, I think at the end of the day, a very sick Biden saw the writing on the wall, saw that the only way he was going to win the nomination was with a hideous convention.

40:17None of the Democrats in the House, none of the Democrats in the Senate, I'm using none loosely, but few, few in the Democrats in the House, few in the Democrats in the Senate wanted him to be the nominee. And he just saw the writing on the wall. But it took three excruciating weeks. just from a spectator standpoint it sounds like it would have been such great theater if he'd said stuck up the middle finger and said no i'm going to the convention i'm going to be the nominee all hell breaks loose at the convention and let's assume he didn't get it i'm curious so at the two of you just speculating trying to game theory it out who do you think were the likely who would have emerged from a contested convention or a bloody convention, who do you think most likely would have emerged victorious if Biden had decided to go the distance but didn't end up the nominee?

41:08It's such an interesting question because how does Biden brawling, how does it affect Kamala Harris? And does Kamala Harris stick with him completely until the end? When does she break, if at all? And does that sour her chances? Now, you know, Black woman is the demographic, the most loyal voting bloc in the Democratic Party. And it was made very clear, we have some reporting that, you know, the many of the black leaders of the party were like, you are not going to step, you know, you're not going to pass over the first black woman vice president. So she had the inside track. But given the connection to Biden, if he went to the convention, it would have been that that could have actually sunk her.

41:48After that, you have to look, you know, there was already sort of what, like what I called in 2023, the just-in-case primary. You know, Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer were all very subtly, you know, laying track just in case. I think J.B. Pritzker, given the fact that the convention was in Chicago, the fact that he had, that he's a billionaire and has a ton of money and would have said, I'm going to spend a billion dollars to beat Trump. I guess in my inner Aaron Sorkin, I actually somehow think that that he could have pulled it off. Now, Newsom is like a great political athlete. You know, it'd been interesting to see if he could rally enough delegates.

42:32But I think the combination of it being Chicago and the fear of Trump would have made them go with a little bit of a less risky option. So your money would have been on Pritzker. Yes. That's really interesting. So this is a corpus that, you know, that through their machination and process and infrastructure decided to keep Biden, and that's the Democratic Party. What does this say about the shortcomings of the Democratic Party? And if they engage the two of you, and I'm sure they've asked you this question, what needs to change about the Democratic Party in terms of its ability to mature or gestate the best candidate to win the election?

43:16What changes, what does this reflect about the Democratic machinery and what needs to change? The last election that I can think of, the last primary election that I can think of where Democrats actually allowed the Democratic voters to pick the nominee was 2008 when they picked Barack Obama. And remember, the consensus, the Democratic leadership consensus was kind of Hillary Clinton. But there were a number of Democratic candidates that were strong. And ultimately, Iowa voters picked Obama. New Hampshire voters picked Hillary. And then South Carolina voters picked Obama. But it was a very competitive primary.

43:57And it was legit. It was a legitimate primary. It was contested. It was ugly. They had to have a meeting of the two candidates when it was over, et cetera, et cetera. 2012, obviously, the incumbent Democrat wins. 2016, the DNC is all in for Hillary. And they're not fair to Bernie Sanders. And in fact, Tulsi Gabbard resigns as a member of the Democratic National Committee because the DNC is being so unfair to Bernie. 2020, there are all these machinations because they wanted to stop Bernie again. Obama redeeming himself with Biden to a degree, perhaps, by helping to convince others to drop out of the race so Democrats could rally against Biden to stop Bernie.

44:44And then, of course, what happened in 2020, which is the Democratic Party leaning on state parties to not even permit primaries. I mean, the Dean Phillips campaign had to sue the Wisconsin Democratic Party all the way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to even put him on the ballot. And as you note, he wasn't like a real threat. So I would say, well, I've heard people like Ezra Klein talk about the weakness of the Democratic Party. This is about the weakness of the Democratic Party or the weakness of parties in general, that the Democratic Party is built around, was built around Biden and the Republican Party is built around Trump.

45:27And to a degree, I think that's fair. But I will say the Republicans had a primary and they had strong candidates and they were on the ballot and they had debates. Trump didn't participate, but they had debates. And Republican voters picked who they picked, probably aided by Alvin Bragg and Letitia James in ways. But I mean, I think one of the biggest problems, and Democrats have not asked my advice. I don't know about Alex. I don't think that I'm going to be getting any invitations to speak anytime soon. But letting voters decide, having open primaries. I mean, whatever you think of Robert F.

46:04Kennedy Jr., and I don't think much of him in terms of his views on vaccines, I mean, why was he not allowed to be a candidate, you know, or Marianne Williamson? Why was it such a transgression to allow them to be on a ballot or to have a debate? What's so crazy about that? Dean Phillips, as you know, Scott, he says the main reason he ran was he wanted to force Biden on a debate stage so people could see what he had been seeing behind the scenes. Would that really have been such an awful idea in retrospect? And I would just add, you know, the Democrats, the Democratic Party, I think, truly believe with a sincere conviction that Trump is an existential threat to democracy.

46:49And if you believe that, it's easy to rationalize anything, including, in some ways, doing things that are anti-democratic, which is what they did in basically rigging the 2024 primary to ensure that Biden would stay the nominee. It's so interesting because it's the opposite, isn't it? I remember in 1992, I was a second year in business school. And a friend of mine, her father was a wealthy developer in Sacramento. And she knew I was into politics and said, I had a big Dukakis for president sign in my window. Remember him? And she said, my father's hosting a fundraiser for this unknown governor from Arkansas.

47:30And he's got no shot whatsoever. No shot. But we're thinking about him for 96 or 2000. And I went and met this guy. And back then, it's reported he had a photographic memory. And he would get a cue card on everyone in the room. and I'm in a room, second year business school, bad suit, intimidated in a room of a hundred people. And he throws up his arm and he yells, Scott. And it comes over to me and the guy goes, I heard you like me were raised by a single mother. And he looks me in the eye and he takes my hand and he goes, it wasn't easy, was it? And I remember thinking, and I've gone on to raise money and canvas for the Clintons.

48:18Like at that moment, I was all in for any, Roger Clinton could have run for something and I was gonna support him. And the primary process in that, that it really is just such an incredible process when it's let loose of not only maturing the right person, but maturing the right man or woman for that moment. I mean, I think we underestimate just how powerful a process it is when we let it run. And anything we do to get in the way of that, it's just, it's not only not democratic, it's just stupid. It's an amazing means of vetting the right person at the right moment. It's been my great privilege to be a campaign reporter.

49:04And the two moments that mean the most to me just as a campaign reporter was, one, covering John McCain in 2000 and watching that. And one of the things that was so interesting about it is he went from being a very conservative guy except on campaign finance. He was a very experiential guy. Like what he experienced informed his life. And that campaign changed him. Not just the Bush machine bullying him and all that. But he just became much more open-minded about different things. And he started teaming up with Democrats on bipartisan legislation. It was just interesting watching a person mature, as you just noted, and seeing the same thing on the Obama side.

49:49In 2007, he was a shitty candidate. I'd see him in these, like, high school gymnasiums on a Friday night in, you know, armpit Iowa, and he was awful. He was listless. He was mad that he was there. He missed his wife. He missed his daughters. and like Axelrod and those guys, Plough, they would kick the shit out of him. Like, what are you doing? Do you want to be president or do you not? And he grew. He grew and became the Barack Obama that got elected president. And seeing that close up is an incredible thing. And I don't think that we've, I'm trying to think, I mean, there was a Republican primary this last election, but Donald Trump was essentially an incumbent running.

50:32But watching the process really is just great. And Democrats are so fearful. They're so terrified that the party's going to nominate Bernie Sanders or whatever. And it's just like, let the party nominate who they want. We'll be right back.

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53:00We're back with more from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. So just going back to this notion that we have a tendency or this narcissism gets in the way. I'll put forward a thesis and I want you guys to respond to it and I can't help I've got two great political minds so I want to talk about a little bit about our current situation I'm I'm upset that we have this emerging kleptocracy cacostocracy whateverocracy you want to call it and what I think is worse is I feel like we're feckless and neutered in terms of our resistance to it I feel there's a total lack of leadership on the democratic side Right.

53:40And arguably, arguably, you know, the leader of the Democratic Party, I don't know if you'd agree with this, is Senator Schumer. And I think some of that same narcissism and age is coming to fruition there. Do you think there needs to be a process for essentially saying, OK, are these the right people, distinct a tenure, to put up – to represent our party and put up a fight? If the election – my understanding is the election were held today, despite everything we know about this kind of mob family approach to governance, Donald Trump would be reelected again. And so Senator Schumer and some of the other people in the Democratic Party, do we still suffer from the same narcissism and inability to put the best people forward to put up the fight?

54:23I mean, I think Chuck Schumer – I mean, you talk to many, many Democrats. A lot of people believe Chuck Schumer has lost a few steps. That being said, there is a vacuum. And I think the party is going through a process of reckoning with what just happened. and sometimes those processes take a while. I mean, the Republican Party was in a complete state of catastrophe after 2008 and it wasn't clear if there was any sort of leader that was emerging and eventually you did have people come forward and I think that's what's happening with the Democratic Party. Now, amidst that vacuum, to your point, a lot of, there's a lot of things happening and there is not really an effective opposition.

55:09I mean, it's up to the Democratic senators and House members to pick their leaders. And, you know, I don't have advice for Democrats and I don't have advice for Republicans. I personally think that what Democrats, that all of Democrats right now are being blamed for the Biden fiasco. And by that, I mean his decision to run for reelection and his decision to hide his deterioration. because no one is coming out and saying, as our reporting suggests, this was the fault of President Biden, his wife, and his son, and like a number, a few top aides. But this isn't necessarily something that could be laid on the feet of every single elected Democrat in the country.

55:59People saw things, but ultimately they were being lied to by a small group of people. My personal view is that until the Democratic Party reckons with that, people are going to have a very difficult time trusting them on anything. And I think that in the same way the Republican Party had to reckon with the Iraq War until it became, I mean, it took years, years before, I guess it was 2016 when Donald Trump became a nominee who was willing to say that was a mistake. But until then, it was heresy for a Republican to acknowledge that. I don't know how long it's going to take. for a Gretchen Whitmer or a Josh Shapiro or a Gavin Newsom or whatever to say, yeah, we got lied to and I didn't do enough as a governor or as a Democratic leader to push on this, but we can't ever let this happen again.

56:54And this is my position on this, X, Y, Z. I think that this is the true cross they have to bear. Because, I mean, I just see it with family and friends who are Democrats. I'm, you know, I'm a member of the Bull Moose Party, But I have family and friends who are Democrats who are furious with the Democratic Party. And it can be triggered just by, you know, they get they see Chris Van Hollen going down to El Salvador to meet with an undocumented immigrant who's a wife beater. And yes, he should be afforded due process as anybody in this country should be afforded due process. It's set. And yes, the Trump administration should should abide by the law and all that.

57:34but they see energy being directed towards things that are not helpful to them that they don't understand and on a hair trigger they can get mad about it and when i poke and prod with these friends and family members and i'm using a not a hypothetical this is an example that happened with somebody ultimately they're still mad about biden they just think democrats are liars and And they don't even like it. I mean, it is, I think, to a lot of people and a lot of Democrats. Like finding out that the wizard is behind the curtain or your entire religion is based on, you know, a lie that somebody concocted.

58:17I mean, I think it is a very debilitating thing. A lot of people are raised. You're a Democrat, you're a Republican. And then you find out that, let's say that you're a never Trump Republican, you find out that it actually isn't about strong international relations and free trade and respect for authority and, you know, that it's just actually about Donald Trump. And in this case, it's just like you were raised as a Democrat and it turns out that it wasn't about anything other than preserving this old man's ego and his desperate cling to power. I mean, I think that that is just severely traumatic.

58:54So I want to put forward a thesis, something we think about a lot here in the Prof. G. Universe podcast, and that is, and granted, you know, I'm a hammer, so everything I see is a nail. But my thesis around how we elected a Fallon and an insurrectionist is that if you look at the groups that pivoted hardest from blue to red 2020 to 2024, Latinos, and my thesis there is they don't even want to be identified as a group, to people under the age of 40 who for the first time aren't doing as well as his or her parents were at 40 or 30. So the country's not working for them. They want to change. And then women, 45 to 64.

59:38And my thesis is that's the mothers of young men. And at the Democratic National Convention, I saw a parade of special interest groups addressing the very real concerns and issues still facing a lot of these groups. But I didn't see one person talk about or even acknowledge the struggle of the group I believe has fallen furthest fastest in America, and that's young men. Four times likely to kill themselves, three times likely to be addicted, 12 times likely to be incarcerated. I believe that the Democratic Party may have lost the election because they refuse to acknowledge because of a purity test or not meeting a purity test addressing the issues facing young men in this country.

1:00:16And that we drastically need to move away from identity politics and focus on the folks that are really facing the most headwinds in our society right now. And I'm just curious, the Democratic Party's ability to even acknowledge the struggles that young men are facing in this country and if it played a role in the election. Absolutely. The party has a big problem with young men who feel that the party doesn't care about them or sees their struggles as lesser than other people's struggles. Now, I would also say one of the things that's very hard about this last election is it's very difficult to draw hard and fast lessons from it because Democratic Party sort of like, you know, sort of forfeited.

1:01:04You know, they dropped their nominee with 107 days to go and then ran. And then only, you know, she had a lot of money, but she only had 107 days. So I think that's, in Democrats I talk to, it's like the single hardest thing for them to reckon with is drawing lessons because it was such a chaotic process. us. So I think your point is well taken. But I also think what's making a lot of Democrats struggle to figure out why they lost is because you had such a weird process and didn't have like a full a nominee with a full runway to make their case. Jake. So we talked about this last time we talked, and I actually love talking to you about this because it's a conversation that I've only had with you and Peter Hamby from Puck, who covers a lot of this stuff.

1:02:00My son is now 15 years old, and he's a gamer, he's a football fan, starting linebacker on his varsity football team. The Democratic Party has no way of communicating with him. They have no entree into his world. and in fact it's interesting i went on a left-leaning podcast that shall remain nameless and we were talking about my kids because i think they were both people without kids and they asked me about my son and i said he was you know he's he's a football player and he wants to be a policeman and their joke was about my 15 year old son oh how does he feel about minorities like the idea that he wants to be a policeman.

1:02:45Therefore, he's racist, my son. And like, you know, that was the big laugh. And then I got dragged in the comments and all that stuff. And I thought to myself, this is why you fuckers are losing elections. Like my football playing son,

1:03:03who has no political views, he's 15. He thinks about World War II and gaming and playing linebacker. That's his world. You're deciding he's a racist because he wants to be a cop. And why does he want to be a cop? He wants to be a cop because he wants to help people, you know, and he thinks that's the best way he can help people. And that's how the Democratic Party talks to men, not just white men, but men. And I mean, I get the idea that they thought Tim Walz could. What's the term he used? Code switch or something? He thought that he could translate the Democratic Party values because he hunts and fishes and owns a gun and was in the army and drinks a beer.

1:03:53I mean, at least there was an attempt. But I find it just insane that, you know, the party, I mean, look, I'm 56 now. So, you know, but I remember when, I mean, I grew up in a Queen village, which is on the border of South Philadelphia. And like, those were all Democrats, these beer drinking union guys. And probably a lot of them still are, just because Philadelphia is such a one party town. but if you made if there was this thriving republican party in philadelphia they they'd lose a lot of elections so i i don't i don't get what they're doing but i think it's a lot of what you're saying like toxic masculinity uh and white privilege and these are the things that my son hears when people are talking to him he's 15 you know he doesn't of course he has privilege.

1:04:52He has privilege because he's white, because he's male, because he's my son, all that. But like, that's not how he sees the world. He's 15. So we got to wrap up here because I know you guys are busy, but I'm going to use this as a segue to talk about media and its impact on elections moving forward. Just a quick stat with respect to Rogan, the 40 million views on YouTube and the 15 million audio downloads for Harris to have gotten the same number of impressions. she would have had to have gone on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox every night for three hours for two weeks. And that's a lead into my question.

1:05:25Jake, I think you're the king of all media. You know, you're a pilot for Pan Am Airlines, but it's Pan Am in the 70s. Traditional media is, I mean, enjoy it, date a lot of stewardesses, you know, give kids wings. But that industry, I think the sun is passing midday. I think the average age of cable news viewers is 70. And I think one of the big errors of the Democratic Party not figuring out a way to speak to people via podcast, the average age of a podcast listener is 34. And a 70-year-old woman watching MSNBC, she knows who she's voting for. Whereas 34-year-old males tend to focus on economics.

1:06:03And that is a swing issue because no party owns it. sometimes Democrats are seen as better for the economy and Republicans are seen as better for the economy, which makes no fucking sense given Democrats have created 40 million jobs in the last 40 years and Republicans 1 million. But be that as it may, it's a swing issue. I'm curious how you guys see as CNN and Axios, how you personally are responding or trying to meet the moment around transitioning media or your platforms. How are you guys personally thinking about your message. Are you trying to get into podcasting? What do you think traditional media?

1:06:40Just thoughts on the media ecosystem moving forward. Obviously, we're in a tremendous time of disruption. Sir Mark Thompson, the head of CNN right now, is the guy who helped bring the New York Times from a newspaper with a website to a website with a newspaper, making it profitable and making it sustainable. So hopefully he will figure out what to do. And obviously we know that it's not just cable news that's going through this. It's everything. Movies, entertainment on TV, books. I've now written seven books. And the first few, all they cared about was hardback sales. And now there's an acknowledgement that Kindle and audiobook are thriving ways that people are consuming information.

1:07:30So all of which is to say, I don't know where this ends up, but CNN and every media organization needs to figure out a way to get to where people are on their phones or on their streaming services. And, I mean, I agree with everything you're saying. I do not have a podcast. the notion that I would have. Oh, you will. This is the easiest prediction in history. Jake Tapper will have a podcast. Yeah, I don't doubt it. I don't doubt that someday I will have a podcast. I mean, right now, every day, I make sure that I put something on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Substack, everything. I have no idea what's going to live and what's going to die, but I want to make sure that I'm part of it.

1:08:18And I do – I have to believe that there will always be an audience and a desire for people who can just give the news and give analysis without being part of a team, without being a Democrat, without being a Republican, who are willing to write a book critical of Joe Biden while also going on air and providing critical analysis of Donald Trump. I got to believe that that's sustainable. But how do we get there? I don't know. Alex? I'm the one thing that makes me optimistic is people are always going to want to get new information that they can trust. But to your point, how they get that is changing so rapidly.

1:09:04and even with the you know we're bringing in ai so like commodity news can just be written up by a program which obviously is going to change our jobs too in huge ways by 2028 but i just think you have to meet the audience where they are because i think people will always want new information that they can trust and so that's the one thing that makes me optimistic because As long as you sort of keep that North Star and just figure out the different ways to get them the information, I think things will be OK. Yeah, well, this is the easiest. I've been in business my whole life and an operator. Some rip off the rest is politics with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

1:09:44Boom, I got a 10 percent royalty. Gentlemen, Jake Tapper anchors a lead on CNN and serves as the network's chief Washington correspondent. Alex Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios and a CNN contributor. You're both great at what you do, but I know enough about media. Whenever I read or watch you guys, the thing I appreciate and people don't – I know enough about this business to be dangerous. You guys do the work. Jake doesn't just show up and read off a teleprompter. He does the work off camera. And, Alex, I love – some of the analysis you do, it's – I can tell every time you write something, you're like asking yourself, what is the inside here?

1:10:24And you spend real time. So you guys do the work and I'm very I'm I'm fans of you both and and really appreciate your time and your good work in this important moment. Thank you. And thank you for doing what you do. And thank you. Thank you for focusing on on young men in this country, because it is so important. It's in a conversation that we as a society just don't have enough. Thanks very much, Jake. Thanks, gentlemen. Thank you.

1:11:17Thank you.

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