Joe Manchin Exposes The Chaos Inside Biden’s White House

We are super pleased to have Senator Joe Manchin joining us today for an All-In interview. Chamath and I will be interviewing him on his new book, Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense. A great book. Welcome to the program, Joe Manchin. I know you like to be called Joe, so welcome.

Jason, thank you. It’s great to be with you and Chamath. I’ve followed you all, and you’ve been unbelievable with what you’ve put out and some of the people you’ve had on. It’s been very entertaining, very interesting, and very thoughtful. I’m anxious to be here.

Thanks. We have a tradition here. I don’t know how often you watch the interview show, but we always try to get a personalized gift for each of our guests. In the book, you talked about your first car, your 19.

If you could find that thing for me, it was a Buick with a bullet back. I can’t find the car.

Well, there it is, with the white interior. Oh my God. Where can we buy it? No, no, we got it. It’s in your driveway right now. When you get out of your office, it’ll be waiting for you by your yacht.

Oh, by my yacht. Yeah, I got a big—

Oh my God. It has a $200,000 trawler.

It’s a fishing trawler. Correct. It’s a trawler.

Joe, listen. What Jason has just proved is that he has not read the book, but he looked at the pictures in the middle. That’s all he’s done.

No, I did the audiobook.

He’s ripping off the pictures in the middle.

No, I don’t have the physical book. I did the audiobook. But Joe, you did the right thing. You read it yourself, which a lot of authors try to get talked out of doing. It makes it so much more personal.

Hey, Jason, I didn’t know I was supposed to do that. All of a sudden, my daughter Heather says, “Dad, you have to show up at the studio and start reading your book.” I said, “How? Why do I have to do that?” She says, “It’s in the contract.” I said, “I didn’t see that.” She says, “I didn’t show it to you.”

It’s part of the contract.

It’s like 6 or 7 hours of reading.

It took 20 hours.

So, three days. Three, four days.

Four days. And let me tell you, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It made me reminisce about everything we put in the book.

It’s just Chamath. You haven’t done this yet because you haven’t written.

I’m not really into audiobooks. I read the book. Look, I have it. I like to have the physical pages. I mark them. I’m old school.

Yeah, I mean, sometimes I do both. But when you’re in the session, I’m sure you’ve had this, where the producer’s got the button and then you’re like, “And then I got my Maserati and I came out of the garage,” and they’re like, “A garage?” You’re like, “Yeah, I came out of the garage.” You have to do every word perfectly to sync it on Amazon, right? They have to correct you over and over again if you just miss one.

The most unbelievable thing is, the first day I started doing it, I was sitting there, talking and reading the book, and I crossed my legs. They said, “Stop. Cross your legs, didn’t you?” I said, “What?” They said, “We heard you cross your legs.” I said, “My God, I’m in trouble.”

You’re basically in, like, a Faraday cage. Like, if you literally hit anything.

Yeah. Oh, wow.

The book’s fantastic. Everybody go pause the podcast here and just absolutely go buy it because it’s so important. I mentioned on the pre-show that you’re an Irish Catholic Boy Scout, and you start the book with an Irish Catholic Boy Scout getting into a brouhaha, a donnybrook, with an Italian-Irish Boy Scout. Were you an Eagle Scout?

What? You were an Eagle Scout? That’s what the internet said. Where did you get to? First Class?

No, no. I got up to Life.

Oh.

And what happened? I was right next to it. Let me tell you what happened. 1959. I’ll never forget it.

The coal mines got automated in West Virginia. I lived in a little coal-mining community of 400 people, and there were 3 of the largest coal mines you’ve ever seen. Everybody worked in the coal mines.

All of a sudden, I came home one day, and my dad had a little furniture store. My grandfather had a grocery store. There were all these guys sitting on the curb. They got laid off because the mines were automated. They lost their jobs.

Pat Keeney was my scout leader, the best of the best of the best. If you have a good scoutmaster or scout leader, you’re going to make it. If you don’t, you don’t make it. He had to go to Lordstown, Ohio, to get a job in the auto factory, and we lost him.

You lost your scoutmaster?

I lost my guy.

This part of your story, I think, is the crucible moment for you, because I’m Catholic and Irish, and I know the Italian Catholics—that’s quite a fight.

An Italian Catholic and an Irish Catholic get in a fight, just step back. That’s my best advice to everybody.

But you got in a heater with Joe Biden over the Build Back Better bill. To the extent that I believe the Democrats or operatives were sending people to your trawler, your houseboat that you’re living on, they were sending people to your family, maybe everywhere—

Everywhere. I had death threats. They were unreal, Jason.

Your own party. Maybe you could tell that story, because it feels to me—and correct me if I’m wrong—that this is a seminal moment in your political career, or perhaps the—

I don’t recommend anybody getting caught in a 50–50 Senate in the United States, because the United States Senate is supposed to be the most deliberative body in the world. The reason it’s deliberative is because you have to have a 60-vote threshold for cloture to get a bill moving.

That was intended by our founding fathers. The House is going to be a simple majority—218 out of 435. You don’t even have to talk to the other side. You can just shove it through. George Washington said it’s just going to be like a hot cup of tea: it goes over to the Senate and should cool itself off so we can drink it.

That’s the whole premise. People keep saying, “Get rid of the filibuster.” That’s the holy grail to democracy as we know it. Without it, we wouldn’t be the country we are now. It forces us to sit down in one of the bodies, slow things down, calm things down, and talk to our friends over in the House and say, “Guys, this is how it’s got to be. We’ve got to moderate this some.”

That’s what I’d always known from Senator Robert C. Byrd, our senator forever—50 years plus in West Virginia. When I became governor, I think he kind of knew that I would probably run for the Senate, and he was getting to the end of his career. His age was creeping up on him pretty hard.

Anyway, he kept telling me all the different reasons why he did certain things and why the rules were the way they were. So I had a real understanding of the purpose of the Senate and my responsibilities.

Then the whole thing on reconciliation: reconciliation is a process that we operate under. It basically stops anybody from preventing us from making sure we can take care of our financial responsibilities. Reconciliation only takes a simple majority.

In the Senate, that’s the only vehicle where you can have a 51-vote threshold without a cloture vote of 60 votes to get the bill moving.

Then Joe Biden gets elected, and I think the story in the book starts out with Schumer calling me every hour on the hour the night of the election. I’m thinking, “Why is he so worked up?” Because in the Senate, in all honesty, whether you’re the majority leader or one of the senators in the caucus, Democrat or Republican, you have the same power. You can participate. Every senator can participate. They’re all important—100 of them.

He kept saying, “Joe, understand this Georgia thing could really happen.” I was thinking, “Well, I don’t think we’re going to win Georgia.” It hadn’t been predicted, but Donald Trump put it in play, to be honest with you. Him going down there and getting into a tiff with everybody did it.

All of a sudden, we had 2 senators running from there. The first one called: Raphael Warnock won. A little later that night, Jon Ossoff won. Schumer said, “You know what this means, don’t you?” I said, “Well, Chuck, I think it means you’re the majority leader.” He said, “No, it means that you can probably have anything you want.”

I said, “I just want my country to do well. If my country does well, my state will do well. That’s all I care about.”

What do you think he meant when he said that?

I know exactly what he meant, Chamath. Chuck Schumer, basically, coming from where he comes from, was thinking, “Whatever you can take back home.” Of course, Robert Byrd was always criticized for taking so much of what they called pork back home.

That was the situation. He thought, “Well, I’m in the catbird seat now. I could outdo Robert Byrd.” I just never thought that. I never thought of tipping the scale so unfavorably, when we all should be doing well if we can move our country forward.

But that's what he thought. “Okay, what do you want?” I just want my country to do well.

When that happened, there was a lot of thought that the filibuster—and maybe just to take a step back for the audience—the whole point is that, as you explained, laws can get passed in 1 of 2 ways. The real way is that you have to find some sort of compromise with folks on the other side and get to 60 votes. The other way is more of a budgetary process called reconciliation, which is a simple majority. There’s been a lot of talk that 1 party at some point will try to eliminate the filibuster so that, when they have a simple majority, they can pass any law they want.

There was a moment, I think, when you came under a lot of pressure to get on board with trying to eliminate the filibuster. Can you just give us a window into that—what happened, how you made the decision, and what the reaction was from party loyalists?

Well, let’s go back to 2013, when Harry Reid, because Barack Obama couldn’t get his appointments done for his Cabinet and things of that sort, and some judges. The majority party can change the rules. If they want to blow it apart, they can blow it apart.

Harry Reid decided that he wanted to get rid of the filibuster, and I just said, “Harry, I’d never do that. My goodness, you can’t just, because you can’t work with someone…” I said, “You and Mitch McConnell don’t even sit down and talk. You don’t have a cup of coffee, let alone discuss what should be important for both sides.”

At that time, I even told Harry, I said, “Harry, the only thing that the president wants—and he won reelection in 2012, gets reinaugurated in 2013, and here we go—is to put his team together. That’s his will and pleasure.” I always believed that “will and pleasure” means you get elected, you’re the executive, and you say, “Joe, I want you to be part of this. I’m going to come and go. It’s your will and pleasure. I’m not staying over. Once you’re gone, I’m gone.”

Why not let you have your team? Then they can do an FBI background check, find out if I’m of sound character and moral values and have no criminal records, and boom, let me go. So I begged Harry, “Just go over and cut a deal with Mitch and say, ‘Mitch, let’s together do this unanimously: that 51-vote threshold for all of the president’s appointed people that’ll be at will and pleasure, with no holdovers whatsoever.’”

But you can’t do it to judges that get lifetime appointments. You can’t do it for other agencies that have a 6-year or a 9-year term. Just will and pleasure. I thought that would be very simple, and he wouldn’t do it. They said, “Oh, no. We’ve got to get the judges.” I said, “You’re going to basically change the confirmation process to 51 votes for a lifetime? Are you crazy?”

But they did it. They did it for district and circuit judges. They didn’t do it for the Supreme Court. Guess what happened? As soon as Republicans took over, they were in control. Mitch McConnell says, “Fine, we’ll do it for the Supreme Court.” Now we have a 6–3 court. It didn’t work too well before he did it, whether it be Harry or that.

Chuck Schumer came out directly and said he wanted to get rid of the filibuster. That’s how they were going to run it with Joe Biden. Well, Joe Biden had always been a defender of the filibuster. How can you flip on your values when, all of a sudden, now that you’re in charge, you want to just shove things down people’s throats? I said, “I’m not going to do that.”

Kyrsten Sinema and I voted against eliminating the filibuster, which stopped all that. I was all for the voting, all the concern around the Voting Rights Act, all that. But I said we had to find a pathway where we had some Republicans—10 Republicans—who would work with us.

I want to ask you a very specific question that’s framed in the book about Obama. But before I do that, let’s just stay on Biden for a second.

I’ll get to where Jason asked me how we got to it, because how it led up to what happened is unbelievable.

Yeah. I think maybe finish that big backstory. Go ahead, because it gets spicy.

It gets spicy because of what happened, Jason. The first thing they did was the ARP—the American Rescue Plan. As soon as Joe Biden gets elected, boom, he gets sworn in, and in February he comes out with the ARP, the American Rescue Plan, which is this big overhaul.

We had just done—you all know the finances better than probably anybody observing this—we had put $3.2 trillion into the market because of COVID in 2020, from March 2020 up until the end of the year. Then Joe Biden takes over. We had already put in $3.2 trillion, and he comes out with the American Rescue Plan. They want to put in another $1.9 trillion, minimum. Now we’re at $5.1 trillion.

Our cash flow is a little over $5 trillion a year, which is what we run the country on. They’re doubling the amount. You can’t digest that. The market can’t take it. But they were doing it, and I said, “Are you people crazy right now? We don’t even know what the $3.2 trillion is going to do, let alone what they wanted. They were chasing a social reform.”

I told him, I said, “Mr. President, they heard me grumbling in the hallway.” One of the senators called the White House immediately and said, “Manchin’s making trouble already.” It was 50–50. They had to have me. They said, “Call me right over to the White House.”

I’m sitting there, and I said, “Mr. President, I’m begging you, please don’t do reconciliation on this bill. If this is your bill—which I know it’s not—this is Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.” I’d heard them respectfully. I can agree with some things and disagree with others, but it was too big a bite coming right out of COVID, and we had a vaccine that was working. So I said, “Please don’t, sir.”

I said, “You’re the only one on the stage running for president, with all that big lineup, who said, ‘You know how the place works. You can work on both sides. You can make a deal.’ I’ve always known you to be that person.”

Now, all of a sudden, you’re throwing the nuclear bomb out. You’re saying, “We can’t work with the Republicans. We’ve got to do it.” I said, “Schumer’s got you all fired up, thinking that’s how you’re going to run it.” I knew in my mind they wanted to run what we called the 117th Congress. Congress is a 2-year stint. Every 2 years, you have an election.

My thought process was that Schumer had convinced the president that we could run this Congress for 2 years with 4 big reconciliation bills—2 in 2021 and 2 in 2022. I said, “Over my dead body. That’s not going to happen. That’s not what we’re here for, and that’s not how this place is supposed to work.”

So they called me over to the White House. They made everybody leave the room, and we were sitting there. Then the president reaches over, grabs my arm, and says, “Joe, your country needs you.”

I’m thinking, “What the hell do I say now?” I said, “Mr. President”—and I grabbed his arm—“your country needs you, too. It needs us all.” I said, “Sir, I’m begging you not to. Why don’t you just put this bill that you call your American Rescue Plan in the jurisdictional committees and let us work it? Give us a shot clock. Say, ‘Guys, I’m going to give you 60 days to work these bills.’ Then, if they don’t, because they just don’t want you to have any success at all, do what you’ve got to do.”

“Oh, no. We’ve got to do it now, Joe. We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go.” Okay, so we go. Then we shut it down there for about 12 or 14 hours one day because I thought they’d lost their mind. They wanted to expand the unemployment benefits.

I said, “Do you understand what you’re dealing with now? You’ve got inflation coming at you so hard because people have been cooped up. We’ve sent everybody a check.” I told him this, and he kind of giggled. I said, “Mr. President, we’ve sent everybody a check. If we’ve missed anybody, it was by mistake, because you intended to send everybody a damn check.”

I said, “They want to go spend money, and there’s nobody working. The supply chains are shut down. There’s nothing. They’re going to pay exorbitant amounts to get what they want. You’re just fueling it, sir.”

We went through all of that, and that’s when he got pretty vulgar and told me, “If you kill my effing bill, I’ll never talk to you again.”

I said, “If I could kill this effing bill, you shouldn’t talk to me again, because if I could, I would. But I can’t, the way things are moving. I can tell you we’re never going this route again.” So this is how we worked things out.

Then, sure enough, 1 month later, they come back with BBB.

Yeah, Build Back Better.

Now they’re talking $6 trillion. That bill was $10 trillion if it was a penny, with all the revamping. I couldn’t get there, guys. I told him, I said, “Mr. President, I’m sorry, man. I can’t get there.” They tried for 8 months and beat up on me. I had to have security.

What is that like? What does the pressure campaign look like? It’s not just the president, exactly as you write in the book. It’s people showing up at the house. It’s people with little kayaks and protest signs around your boat. It’s pretty intense.

It’s pretty intense. But I can tell you one thing: every day, the Capitol Police call you and say, “Your death threats are serious enough right now, so we have to have, you know, we’ll meet you down where you live, bring you to work, and take you back home.”

Things are pretty serious. I never wanted to know the extent, but I knew they were serious. And then one time they said, “This is really getting serious now because now we’ve got things. They know where your children go to school. They know where your grandchildren are, where your kids live.” And I’m thinking, “Oh my God, this is crazy.”

Then I had a bunch of boaters come down—canoers. I got attacked by canoes. I just said, “Guys, listen. We just disagree.” They were all climate people. I said, “Listen, I want a clean climate. I just know we need energy to run our country, and there’s got to be a balance.”

So I said, “Come up to my office.” They said, “What?” I said, “Come to my office tomorrow. We can sit and talk. You don’t have to be out here on the water.” But they thought that was the show they put on. They came the next day. We talked, and we agreed to disagree on some things and agreed on some things.

But Joe, I just want to understand: Do you think these are just random acts, or do you think it’s an organized pressure campaign?

I think it was organized. They were paid, Chamath, because a lot of my friends who live down at the river on the Potomac River with me, on the boat, said, “How can I get a job with you? How can I do this if I want to protest?” They said, “Oh, just sign up and get $15 an hour.” I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. They were telling me that.

But doesn’t the message have to go from the White House? Doesn’t somebody on Biden’s team have to say, like—

Oh no. Ron Klain, I’m going to be honest with you: strong guy, okay? Smart guy, good guy and everything, but he had gone so far to the left, and he pushed Joe left. When I first went over to the White House, I said, “Mr. President, you have the most liberal staff that I’ve ever seen.” It was the first time I went over.

He said, “Well, Joe, they tell me I have the most diversified staff.” I said, “We’re not talking about diversity, sir. We’re talking about bat-crazy. We’re talking about people I’ve known and worked with in the hallway forever, and I know where they came from and where they worked before. These are people who are really far left.”

Ron put that team together. I know that because I kept saying, “Your staff is pushing you too far left, Mr. President. You’ve never been that far left.” And I just want to say, I’ve always liked Joe Biden. We always got along well. Good man. I just don’t think he lost the will to fight.

Okay. Do you think it’s that, or can I just ask you about all of these rumors—the comments about the autopen and his mental faculties?

Never saw that. Never. I’ve been with him a lot. We always had good conversations. Now, with that said, I know how much energy it takes if you’ve got to fight with your staff every day to do the things you want, rather than the staff saying, “We’ll take care of that, Mr. President.”

Because I would ask him—we’d agree on something—and I’d ask him a week or 2 later, and nothing had happened. So I knew there was no follow-up. You follow? I knew Ron was kind of driving the train.

With that, I’ll tell you how this thing came to a head. They didn’t. I said, “I’m not voting to get on the BBB bill.” And this goes on for a while. There was just pressure and pressure on me, and they needed my vote even to get on reconciliation.

Right. Right.

So it finally came down to this: I said, “You’ve got some good things in that BBB bill. The one thing you really need is infrastructure. Remember the bipartisan infrastructure bill?”

Yeah.

I said, “This country—we haven’t done anything for 30 years. Why don’t we just pull that bill out?” So Schumer, being the person he is, said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Joe. I’ll pull that bill out.”

I said, “Let me work that bill, Chuck. We’ll get you a good bill, and it’ll be bipartisan. I’ll show you it can be done bipartisan.” He said, “I’ll tell you what: I’ll do that and pull that out if you’ll vote to get on BBB.”

That’s the reason I’m leading up to this. That’s when people say, “Well, Joe promised to vote for it.” I never promised to vote for BBB. I said, “I’ll get on and let you work the bill. I’m never going to be for this bill.”

Anyway, we got the bipartisan infrastructure bill. We worked it, and we passed it. The night we were passing the bill, sitting on the Senate floor, Bernie Sanders said, “Come over and talk to me, Joe.”

I sat down. He said, “Joe, are you going to vote for this BBB bill?” I said, “Hell no, Bernie. You know I was never for that bill.” He said, “Well, at least you’re being honest with me.” I said, “I’ve been honest with everybody. You guys want to work it until the cows come home? That’s fine. I can’t do this.”

He said, “You know, I’ve cut it down from $6 trillion to $3 trillion.” I said, “Bernie, you and I know the game that’s played here. You didn’t cut it down. All you did was cut the timing down from 10 years to 5 years, or 3 years, to make it look like you were cutting them out. They’re never going to get rid of any of this once you start giving everything away.”

Right?

We went through all of that. So he says, “You know, I can kill this bill.” And I’m thinking, at first, when he said that, I said, “Well, Bernie, if you’re saying you can kill the bill here in the Senate, and Vermont doesn’t need any infrastructure—your roads and bridges, internet connections, your water and sewer lines, everything’s great—then you should vote against it.”

He said, “No, I’m not talking about here, Joe. I’m talking about on the other side, in the House, with all the liberals or the progressives over there.” So I didn’t think anything of it. We passed it that night, and boom, the bill gets held up. You remember that?

They kept getting held up, and they kept sending the president up there to talk to them and pass the bill.

And they wouldn’t pass it, and they kept saying, “Manchin lied to us.” I said, “Schumer, you better tell them the truth. You know exactly how you got me on this bill, and you know I never, ever said I would ever vote for this bill.”

Let me go back a little bit, Joe. I want to start with Obama. You wrote in the book that Trump was the most engaged president you ever worked with, and that in the first—

I said 2 of them. 2 of them.

2 of them, okay. And then—

Clinton. Bill Clinton.

If you told me the people who were most engaging with you and talked with you were Bill Clinton and President Trump, and then you said that in the first 2 years, you spoke with Trump more than you ever did under 8 years of Obama—

Correct. Correct.

Contrast and compare Obama and Trump for us, and just help us understand the positives and negatives of both as you saw them.

I think President Barack Obama is a very good man, but his politics—I knew him when he was a U.S. senator representing Illinois, and he knew about the coal industry. I come from the coal industry, being governor of West Virginia and growing up in the coalfields, and we talked about fossil fuels and why we needed this, that, and everything.

He wanted me to help him and vote for something that would help his coal industry: FutureGen, which was the new coal-fired plant that was going to capture CO₂ and all this. They called it FutureGen. That was a $1 billion project the government was sponsoring, and I told him I couldn’t participate.

I was one of the 4 states that pulled out and put my support behind it, and they got it. They never built the plant, but they got the award. So I knew he knew it.

Then all of a sudden, he became the nominee from the Democratic Party and switched everything to renewables. I’m thinking, “Well, what are we going to do with all the things that the coal miners have done and all we’ve done for our country? Does that mean you’re going to bring new jobs or this or that?”

There was no plan to replace any opportunities to live a quality of life and to live where they wanted to live, with their culture and who we are, family-oriented in Appalachia. We had a meeting about 1 year afterward, and I was in the National Governors Association leadership. We had Democrats and Republicans.

I finally got a meeting with him in the Roosevelt Room, and I’ll never forget that. We were going around the table, and different governors were speaking. He came to me, and I said, “Mr. President, you’ve done one hell of a good job villainizing coal.”

He jumped up, and it went nuts on me. I’m thinking, “Woo, boy, here we go.” He said, “Why would you say something like that?” I said, “Because it’s true. You have basically put benchmarks that we can’t meet, because there’s no technology that we can get our industry to meet that gives you the right to shut it down.”

He made a statement, if you recall: “Go ahead and build a coal-fired plant, and we’ll break you.” He knew that the technology wasn’t there. So I’m thinking, “Christ, what happened? You’re leaving us behind.”

These people have nothing. They said, “What happened to the West Virginia Democrats?” I said, “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. They ran them off.”

Now all of a sudden, they’ve done everything our country’s asked. Now all of a sudden, we’re not good enough, clean enough, green enough, or smart enough. To hell with them. Just don’t leave us by the wayside.

So you remember the slogan, “Don’t leave anybody behind.” At least Joe Biden picked up that slogan in 2020, and he has done a lot of things trying to have incentives to bring businesses into coal country, if you will.

So is it that Obama is just an incredibly strategic political calculator?

He was elusive.

He's elusive.

What does that mean as a politician?

I don't know. When I talked to Bill Clinton, it was always, “What about this?” He was always so inquisitive about this and that, what I was thinking about this and that. Then we always had a couple of good jokes to tell each other, and it kind of broke the ice. We had a lot of fun. And with President Donald Trump, you go meet him, and he's charming as can be.

He sits down, talks with you. He says, “Hey, Joe, what about this?”

“What about that?” No. And we talk about a lot of things. One time I told him, “Mr. President, just call me last.” I was the only Democrat he was talking to. “Come over, have breakfast, come over for lunch, or do whatever. Come to a movie.” We had a lot of fun.

I said, “Just call me last.” He said, “Why do you say that?” I said, “I don't know who in the hell you talk to last, but that seems to be what happens. I'd like to have one of those dates.”

A lot of your fiscal courage around spending and entitlements in the book comes from this rugged individualism and personal responsibility.

Accountability.

Yeah, and this accountability that you grew up with.

Yeah. As a Catholic, as well. You had that as well. A little bit of guilt if you don't work hard sprinkled in there, too, as a backstop.

We're looking at a country now where it seems the operating principle is, “How do I get mine? Hey, you've got something. I need to get something.” And now you've got Mamdani in New York.

He's going to give free pizza and bagels and bus trips and whatever it is. Whatever people want, he's going to give it to them for free.

Yeah. You have not been able to turn this around in the country. This entitlement—as many of us have been screaming from the rooftops, like, “Ask not”—you talk about this in the book over and over again: “Ask not what your country can do for you; what can you do for your country?” You bring it up over and over again.

So I think we failed in the last 2 decades, and socialism is on the rise. Why is that? How do we turn it around?

Let me just say, the last time at the BBB—the last time President Biden and I had met—he called me up into the White House and took me upstairs to the living quarters. And boy, when you go up there, that's really going to the woodshed, if you will.

We were talking and everything, and I said, “Mr. President, I can't get there. I really can't get there, sir.” I said, “You and I are both at the same vintage. You're a little bit older, but not that much. We're in the same vintage.”

I remember very vividly, as a 13-year-old kid, watching television—the inauguration in 1961 of John Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you; what you can do for your country.” If we pass this piece of legislation you're asking me to vote for, the BBB, you're changing the psyche of the nation to, “How much more can my country do for me?”

I wasn't born that way. I wasn't raised that way. I don't believe that way, and I can't do it. You could put a gun to my head and say, “I'm gonna pull the trigger.” I can't vote for it.

And then all hell broke loose after that. So how it happened is this: My grandmother took everybody in. We lived by the railroad tracks, between the creek and the railroad tracks, in a little 3-room garage apartment. My grandparents had a little home right beside us. She took everybody in.

I never knew; I just watched. I was the eldest of the boys, of about 20 of us grandkids. We had to whitewash her basement, keep it clean, and make it a nice place for people to stay. There was no social safety net back in the 50s.

We had people who would ride the train. You can call them what you want to. These were people who had fallen out of society. They were all intelligent, smart craftsmen and so on, and alcoholics, probably most of them. They'd come down. They knew they could go to Mama, and she'd take care of them.

She said, “I have 3 rules. You can't drink. You can't swear. And you've got to work.” So my first introduction was that there were rules, and they were all good rules.

Pretty basic operating system.

After a while, we had some of the best painters and carpenters you ever saw, but we'd lose them every now and then. We had names for everybody. We had Wilbur Willie, Peg Leg Peggy—you name it, we had them. They were all characters.

Oh, Peg Leg Peggy especially.

He was a firecracker. He had a peg leg, a wooden peg leg, and he got caught in the tracks one time. We had to pull him out.

Anyway, I said, “Mom, okay, what happened to Lloyd? Where'd Lloyd go?” “Oh, honey, he's on a toot again.” The toot was always the bottle. When you see the old-timers on a toot, they go like this.

She said, “Don't worry, honey. He'll be back in 6 weeks.” That was just the cycle. That was it.

So I learned that from my grandfather. People would come in, and Papa—my grandfather—never kept books. He just kept all his money in his pocket. He was an immigrant from Italy.

No matter who they were, they'd say, “Hey, Papa, can I borrow 5? Can I have 5?” He said, “Sure, honey.” He called everybody honey. He said, “Here's a broom and shovel. Go up and clean the parking lot, and I'll give you the 5.”

I understood you had to do something for the 5.

Right.

They'd say, “Papa, I'll be right back.” He looked at me and smiled. He said, “Don't worry, Joe. Only about half of them take me up on it.” So I knew you had to do something.

That's a filtering mechanism.

Yeah.

And it relates directly to your belief in having a work requirement.

I wanted a work requirement for anybody capable and able-bodied to work.

They got on me, saying, “Manchin's killing child tax credits.” I said, “I'm killing child tax credits?” First of all, you have child tax credits up to $400,000 of income. You really want to know who needs the child tax credits? People right above the poverty guideline, mostly single females, above $25,000 a year up to about $75,000. They need it, okay? And they're working. Please help them.

I'd go into all of this, Jason and Chamath, and then they said, “Oh, no. We've got to do this, that, across the board.” I said, “Don't you think that rather than just sending checks to people who have children, who don't work and won't work and sit at home, why would they need child care money when they're sitting home with their children? That makes no sense to me at all. I can't go home and explain it.”

My north star has been this as long as I've been in political life: If I can't go back to my little hometown of Farmington or to the people I grew up with and explain it, I knew they wouldn't let me get by with anything. They'd hold your feet to the fire. That's how it is, and it never changed.

Do you think that we're now in sort of this intractable period where there can't be any centrism? There can't be this idea that you work and then you earn something, that there's that dignity of work. Instead, it's these extremes that are constantly about, “What giveaway can I give to people to get them on my side?” Is that where we are?

Let me give you the other thing about me and Bernie talking one time. Bernie wanted free tuition, right? He always wanted free tuition, and then they finally thought, “Well, we'll get it free if we go to junior colleges.”

I said, “I'm not for anything free. I'm for earning it.” Here's what I'm going to tell you. First they talked about free college. I said, “Bernie, my son's, at that time, 40-some years old. My son's 40 years old. If you had free education, free tuition, he'd still be in school.” He liked it so much he'd still be there.

So anyway, I said no, I'm not for that. I said, “Let me tell you about free. If we identified skill sets that are needed and we can teach them in junior colleges, have them sign up, get a Stafford loan, a guaranteed federal loan, they don't pay it back until they finish their education.”

If they finish in 2 years, they took a Stafford loan, they took what they needed to get educated in a 2-year community college, and they get a degree in a skill set, we forgive it. They've earned it. You didn't give it on the front end.

Because let me tell you what happens on the front end. Only half of them ever get through, maybe 25%. They go for 4 years, and I don't know if you know how they give money.

All you have to do is show your family's income. They have a scale they go by, and you can get $12,000 a year. You might only need $4,000. I'll guarantee you, if you tell a kid who comes from poverty that they can get $12,000, they'll take it all.

They're going to take it all.

They don't know what accrued interest is. They don't know about paying this back. It's a death trap. They don't know any of that. They drop out in 2 years for one reason or another. Then it all comes due. They had had a payment up until then.

No one's explaining anything.

And I told Elizabeth Warren, I said, “Liz, can't we just change the Stafford program so that you have to have financial literacy? You cannot get a loan without financial literacy.”

What was her answer?

It didn't happen.

Let’s just put it that way. Yeah, put it that way. What’s driving—I understand populism, and I understand trying to buy votes—but at the core, in your opinion, what drives these individuals who think that not learning to sustain yourself in society and getting all of these freebies is the answer? What’s in their mind? What are they missing about the basic human condition—that we have to work for stuff?

The human operating system is that we need challenges, and when you don’t have purpose in life, it’s a road—it’s the primrose path. It’s not a good place to go. I don’t mind saying it’s the devil’s playground, as my grandmother would say. Rest in peace.

Let me say to both of you what has happened in this political process. I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to have term limits, and I’m going to tell you how I came to that conclusion. When I was a governor, I was doing a town hall meeting in southern West Virginia, and a little lady stood up in the back and said, “Joe, I wish you were for term limits.”

I said, “Well, tell me why, Sus.” I knew her. She said, “Well, I just think it would be better for us to have turnover.” I said—and I wasn’t for it, and I gave her all the reasons. I said, “You’re going to lose your most experienced people with the talent and know-how.” Boom, boom, boom. I went through everything.

She said, “Joe, think of it this way. If we had term limits, maybe we’d get 1 good term out of you.” I had no comeback. She convinced me right there. From that point on, I’ve been for term limits, and I’m more for it today than I’ve ever been.

The reason I’m telling you is, yeah, maybe we’d get 1 good term where you’d have the courage and conviction, with the oath you took to defend and protect the Constitution, to do the job, put country before party, and quit playing this game and worrying about getting reelected. It’s gotten to the point now that public service—when John Kennedy said it was the noblest of all professions—that’s gone. It’s fame and fortune now. I get in there, and I can keep churning it and churning it and churning it.

I’ve basically said that 2 6-year terms in the Senate is enough. 12 years is enough.

Let’s actually look inside the political parties for 1 second.

Oh, boy.

Let’s start with maybe an easy one, but it’s actually quite a nuanced answer. Tell us who you think are the 2 most dynamic senators, 1 Democrat and 1 Republican.

I was thinking about that because, if I were you, I would have been asking the same question. I can name 6 or 7 on both sides. When I’m saying that, I’m talking about people that I’ve worked with. I know their DNA.

First of all, I’m always going to be deferential to former governors. A governor can’t afford to be a governor of 1 side. The most perfect, simplest answer to that is that the pothole that busted my tire, bent my rim, and messed my car up did not have a Democrat or Republican name on it. But I was responsible for making sure the repairs on the roads didn’t do that.

You have Senator Angus King from Maine, a former governor. You have Mark Warner of Virginia, a former governor; Tim Kaine, a former governor; Jeanne Shaheen, a former governor; Maggie Hassan, a former governor; Mike Rounds, a former governor; and John Hoeven, a former governor. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins were always my go-to people on the Republican side, and Mitt Romney was 2 or 3 of the best of the best.

You could always work with them because they were always looking to do the right thing. They didn’t care about politics. Then you’ve got Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Jacky Rosen, and Tom Tillis on the Senate side, on the Republican side. Bill Cassidy is one of the best of the best. Bill Cassidy is bright, sharp, always wanting to do the right thing, always very articulate, and he will get down to the nitty-gritty and go into the depths of it to find out an answer.

You’ve got Mike Rounds, a former governor, a great guy from South Dakota. These are people that I know have the ability to do it, to make it happen. You just have to push, push, push.

I was asked a question the other day, Chamath, about what I would do, Joe, if I were still there. If I were king for a day and had the ability to use the Roosevelt Room in the White House, I’d bring them over. I’d put them in the room. I’d put Schumer and John Thune and their teams together and say, “Guys, you’re not getting out until you come to a deal. This is not that hard.”

Everybody wants to blame someone: Whose fault is it? Let’s look at whose responsibility it is—not fault. Whose responsibility? My friends in the Republican Party have the trifecta. The president is Republican, the House is Republican, and the Senate is Republican. You have the mantle. You have the gavel. You’ve got to keep the train running. You’ve got to keep this place open.

I’ve said this: I know that the president has the ability to do that. But you can’t always have politics driving the end result. Your job is to keep it open. I’ve never voted for a shutdown. I’ve gotten caught in a couple of shutdowns, but I never voted for them. They’re tough to get out of because people get ingrained and get in like there’s rebar and cement. They can’t get out.

I think the president has to move this. I’ve said this: Our great country—and the president, with his leadership in the Middle East, is able to get Hamas and the Israelis to sit down and make a deal. Surely to God, I know the president can get Democrats and Republicans to make a deal. I know that. But everybody has to quit playing politics because of what the outcome of the 2026 election will be. It’ll take care of itself.

Which group hates each other more: Democrats or Republicans?

Oh, that’s a good question. Yeah, I was going to say, which one hates each other more, in your opinion?

It’s a shame. Let me tell you, this is such an easy lift. You know what happened with this health care thing?

I was right in the middle of this whole thing. I know exactly what happened when they did the Affordable Care Act. You remember in 2017, when John McCain made the famous vote to vote it down? I was in the back hallway of the Senate when all that unfolded, before John came out and cast his vote. John had been getting pressured heavily by President Trump, the White House, and his staff at that time.

John finally walked out. He was getting ready to walk out, and he was sitting there when I came through the hallway. I said, “John, listen. I’m not crazy about the Affordable Care Act. The way it is, you have to be forced to buy a product whether you like it or not. You can’t shop it, and you’re fined if you don’t. The penalties make no sense. But John, if the Republicans have anything they can give us, I probably would support it and vote for it. They don’t have anything to replace it with.”

What it did do was help poor working people who were using the emergency room and workers’ compensation as the only delivery system they had for health care. With preexisting conditions, we stopped people from being eliminated from the process, so people could get, for the first time, any type of care. That was good, but somebody had to pay for it. So they switched it.

Once you got above 150% of the poverty level, then you were hit pretty hard to pay for what we were giving away on this end. That means you have a broken system. Sooner or later, you’ve got to fix the system, and no one was willing to fix it. They’re just moving it around.

So, when COVID hit, the Democrats said, “Hot dog, that’s our time to shine now. Let’s go ahead.” They went to 400% and even greater.

Right?

The Republicans are saying, “Can’t we just get back to pre-COVID?” Well, it’s hard to take something back, Jason and Chamath, once you’ve got up there. What you can do is say, “For 1 year, we’re going to extend this for 1 year. We’re going to come from 400% to 200%. We’re going to gradually get back, and we’re going to try to fix our delivery system of health care.”

The insurance companies are running health care. It’s not the professional doctors or the professional health-care providers. It’s insurance telling you what you can and can’t do, what you’re paying for, and chasing the dollars. That has to change, but someone has to be willing to do it. So that’s where we are.

There’s an issue, Joe, which is that they’re also talking about the unintended consequences of the cost we have to bear for folks who don’t have legal immigration status, right? There’s a burden that that includes. Can you give us your opinion on that? You can expand on immigration, whatever, but maybe you can start with health care, because I think that’s the wedge issue that seems to be slowing everybody down.

Well, the Democrats are telling you that it’s not in there—that illegal immigrants who’ve come to this country are not getting the benefits that citizens of our country get when they hit hard times. And people will say, “Well, why did you write this in your declaration of what you want done as far as bringing it back and getting going again?” You put that in one of your demands. There’s some reference to that in the demands, so it kind of showed what their intentions were.

The bottom line is, no, there’s no way immigrants who come here illegally and don’t have a pathway forward, or whom we’ve been unable to put into a workable pathway forward.

That should ever happen. You should never be able to have benefits coming here. That should not be an attraction for that. And that's what they're saying had happened. I beg the Democrats: Are you crazy about doing asylum at the border? We've never done that.

We had a 2013 piece of legislation put together through bipartisanship. It was a bipartisan Gang of 8 that put it together, and we passed it with 68 or 69 votes in the Senate. It went to the House. I begged John Boehner to put it on the floor. I like John Boehner; he's a friend of mine. John said, “Joe, I can't put it on. Eric Cantor just got defeated in Richmond because a person from the far right accused Eric Cantor of supporting this immigration reform.”

They said it was amnesty. By God, anybody that came here the wrong way had to get out of here. We had to send them back. That bill that we put together in a bipartisan way basically gave you so many days—let's say 60 or 90 days or more, I forget the exact amount right now—to go to the courthouse and turn yourself in and pay a fine for a misdemeanor. Let's say it was $750. Then you would get in the back of the queue.

Once you turned yourself in, we would know whether you had a criminal record or not. Then we knew whom to go after, because those people had been here for 10, 20, 30 years. They brought little children here who are now adults serving in the military and basically professing and teaching in our schools. These are productive and supportive people. They love the country as much as, if not more than, Americans who were born here.

So, this is what gets me. We had that bill and couldn't get it because they were afraid that he would lose the right. He lost them anyway. The far right wasn't going to go. The Tea Party at that time wasn't going to go. But John could have put it on the floor, and it would have passed. I think if you talk to John—

Do you think Americans would be shocked if we really knew the inner workings and understood that, at the end of the day, bipartisan coalitions and reforms literally stop on a dime on all kinds of issues because one person, on one day, interprets and reads the tea leaves and says, “Yes, no, yes, no”? Is that really basically what happens?

Well, let's look at the easiest thing we could have done. There are 2 things: Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and then the Dobbs decision on abortion.

Sure.

Well, on the Supreme Court, we've lived with Roe v. Wade for 50 years. It was unprecedented law. We never codified it through the legislature, but through the courts, it was precedent. Now, all of a sudden, that blows apart and everybody gets torn apart.

All they had to do was codify Roe v. Wade. That's all we had to do. I teamed up with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, and we had a bill that simply codified it. It wasn't pro-life enough, and it wasn't pro-choice enough, but it was something we had learned to navigate for 50 years.

Well, guess what? Our Democratic friends wanted to open abortion up wide, wide open. They can tell you what they want and what they intended, but that's exactly what they were trying to do. I called them out. I said, “Are you going to try to explain to people and make them believe that this piece of legislation you're trying to put through on freedom of choice is just codifying Roe v. Wade? That is so insincere, and I will not have any part of it.”

Then the Republicans wanted to double down—make it criminalizing abortions. We couldn't because of politics. I've seen things like that that we had right in the palm of our hand and let slip through. We could have done that, and we could have done the immigration reform. Right now, you'd never be in this immigration mess.

A lot of this history gets swept under the rug because nobody really knows what was possible. People like you typically don't leave and then write a book like this to share all of it. Then, when you do share it, unless people like us help amplify these stories, it's never said, and it's never really well understood.

The biggest problem, Chamath, is this: Very few people who have been in political life and had any notoriety at all have an almost impossible time saying, “I got it wrong. I made a mistake. I tried. I thought I had the answers, but I didn't. I misread that one.”

How many times have you heard anybody in politics today, or anybody who has been in politics, say, “I screwed up royally on Don't Ask, Don't Tell”?

I'll tell you why. I was there in 2011. All the Joint Chiefs of Staff were there explaining the situation, and Obama wanted to get rid of it. Before that, everybody had kind of kept Don't Ask, Don't Tell. That was a Bill Clinton thing: Let's let bygones be bygones. Let sleeping dogs lie.

It came out that Obama wanted to get rid of it. I'm listening to everybody talk, and it got down to the commandant of the Marines. The Marine commandant said, “Listen, General. I've got 50% of my troops on the battle line right now. This is a heck of a policy change. It could jeopardize the welfare and well-being of my troops.”

So, I was against it. I said, “Don't get rid of it.” No, that meant if you were known to be gay, you could not serve. I was totally wrong on that, because they went ahead and passed it. Thank goodness. Then I found out that it didn't change anything. Everybody already knew. Everybody knew who was who and what their sexual preferences were. It didn't affect their ability to fight or defend our country.

So, I made a mistake. I got that wrong, and I lived up to it. I said, “I made a mistake. I'm sorry, but I thought I was doing the right thing listening to a professional.” Those things happen. But I don't know how we get to that. That's why I kept saying that if we had 2 6-year terms for a senator, 6 2-year terms for a House member, 1 18-year term for the United States Supreme Court, and 1 6-year term for the president, maybe we could all do a better job by not worrying about the next election.

As we get toward the end of our time, I want to talk to you a little bit about how dysfunctional and unpopular the Democrats and Republicans have been over the last couple of years and since Nixon. I think Trump's first and second terms both had low approval ratings. I think his approval rating is about 37% right now. Biden ended with around 34%; he was averaging about 40%.

People really are not happy with their choices, and there's a No Labels group. I've been mocked and dismissed here on this very podcast for talking about how I think there's a perfect time for a third party. We had Ross Perot; people forget he got 19% of the popular vote. You are in my camp. You believe there's a possibility and that we're primed for it. Give your best explanation of why you think now is the time for a third party to challenge these 2 extremely unpopular parties.

Jason, we've got to change the process. You have a duopoly right now. The duopoly is almost a business monopoly, but it's a duopoly. You have the corporation of the Republican Party and the corporation of the Democratic Party, and that's a business model. They can control the flow.

So, how do you control the flow? Through the primaries. You can say it's through redistricting and all this, but it's really the primary process. The primary process is this: I cannot, being a no-party affiliate right now—an independent, that's my registration—vote for a friend of mine who's a Republican in West Virginia. The Republican Party in West Virginia will not let me vote in their primary unless I register as a Republican.

The Democrats do the same thing all over the country. They close them down, because if they can control the flow—and during, let's say, the 2024 election, maybe 24 million people, 11 or 12 million on each side, participated in the national primary—but 160 million of us voted in the general election. Twenty-four million people made a decision on our choices. That's it.

Our democracy is still an experiment. We thought we could govern ourselves, and governing yourself means we can pick representatives who represent us. I can't even vote. So how am I represented? I can't participate.

Forty-five to 50% of us can't participate in the primary process. We're the largest group of registered voters who can't participate.

You're referring, of course, to independents.

Independents. No-party affiliation. Independents. There's only about 23% or 24% who are registered Democrats, about 27% or 28%, I think, who are registered Republicans. The rest are like myself.

I said, “Wait a minute. The Voting Rights Act was taken to court over African Americans not having the right to participate and vote, and they won that one. Why don't we take this to court? Why don't we do this on this podcast? You all take off with it and run with it. It should be that we're not—I am not able to be represented, and I can't pick a representative because I can't participate.”

Let me just summarize what you're saying. You think there's a legal avenue under the Voting Rights Act that says what we really need is first-past-the-post or some form of electoral reform. Otherwise, if you just do it via these primaries, we're getting disenfranchised.

My position is this: The majority of people who are registered to participate in a general election in the United States of America are basically prevented from participating in the primary process of electing who they're going to vote for in the general.

I think there definitely is a court procedure that could remedy this and basically stop these closed primaries.

Mhm.

Let's talk about 2026 specifically. What do you think happens in the Senate and the House? What is the balance of power in your mind coming out of the 2026 election?

The only thing I have said, and I will continue to say this, is that my Republican friends are the only ones saying we will not get rid of the filibuster in the United States Senate. I hold them to their word. These are my friends—John Thune and his staff and all of his people on his leadership team.

I hope the Republicans keep the Senate. Now, if you want a little bit of balance of power to change, to challenge things a little bit and calm it down, then you would want the Democrats to win the House, the Congress. If that could happen, then it might calm things down. We have got to calm it down. We have got to turn down the temperature.

If that would turn it down, maybe fine, because when you have the trifecta, you can keep throwing stuff up there and pushing things pretty darn hard.

Joe, I know that Jason has a final question, which I'll let him do, but I want to give you my question.

Okay.

Let's start with when you went into the Senate, up to now, when you're leaving.

President Obama, then President Trump, then President Biden, and now President Trump.

Give us the expectation versus the outcome on what you've seen from these 4 presidential terms, if you will. Expectation versus outcome for these 4 periods.

The expectation with Obama was that he was bringing a completely different scenario to it—an all-inclusive scenario, if you will. It was a possibility for all of us to participate, no matter what your gender or what your race was. So we were expecting an awful lot, and I think he had a lot of compassion, but he just didn't communicate well with the legislature.

I didn't know that because I didn't serve with him until I got there at the end of 2010, in 2011. I could see that you have to participate, you have to get involved, and you have to call them over to the White House and work with them. I thought he could have done a lot more with that to get better participation.

They got rid of the filibuster for the judicial system. I wasn't upset by losing it for basically at-will-and-pleasure appointments, but it went further than that. I think that helped erode a lot of the checks and balances we had. Then it went further after that, too.

So, with that being said, you go right in from there, and then we have Trump. We didn't know what to expect, but we were thinking, here's a businessman who always told us how successful he was, and we were expecting some things.

I met with him from day 1 in 2016 and then met with him in 2017 and 2018. There's a cute thing in the book about how he said he wasn't going to campaign against me in 2018. He liked me. I was his friend. Well, he ended up coming 6 times to my state, and they spent an extra $25 million trying to beat me.

Afterward, he called me 1 week later and said, "Come have lunch with me." I walked in, and he said, "I told you we couldn't beat him." I'm thinking, "Well, Jesus, what the hell am I going to say?" It wasn't for lack of trying. He said, "Oh, Joe, you know I didn't want to beat you." I said, "I knew you weren't serious, Mr. President. If you were serious, you would have spent $50 million and come 12 times."

So that's what I'm dealing with. But a lot of the things he did, I was more in sync with what he was doing because he understood we had to have an all-in energy policy.

Yeah.

I still would tell him, "Mr. President, we need everything. We need oil. We need gas. We need coal. We need to use the technology." I said, "You cannot eliminate your way to a clean environment. You can innovate it, but you can't eliminate it. You've got to use technology."

He was more in tune with what I was trying to push through than my Democratic base was and the people I was working with.

Then we had Joe Biden, with whom I had an awful lot of history. Oh, man—here's a guy I've worked with for a long time. When there was a shutdown with Ted Cruz in 2013, I'll never forget this. Biden—Obama sent Joe Biden to make a deal: open this government up and get a deal done.

Joe Biden went directly to Mitch McConnell, sat down with his old buddy and friend, and they cut a deal. We opened the government back up. I went into the caucus the next week with the Democrats, and Harry Reid said, "I told President Obama, 'Don't ever send that damn Joe Biden back to make a deal. We don't want him here at all making a deal for Democrats.'"

Now he's the president. He was going to be the president. I thought, boy, we got it now. And boy, was that a letdown. He went far to the left, and I don't think that was in his heart. But he came out of Iowa badly, came out of New Hampshire even worse, went to South Carolina, got resurrected, and within 3 weeks, everybody dropped out.

He had to make a deal, I think, with the wrong side of that and tried to calm it down. Just for the sake of being president, I think he had to sign up, and his people took him to the promised land of the far left, which has no return.

Now, I think President Trump has a chance to be monumental in what he can do because he has that support from a really strong base. I want to see the compassion. I want to see the man who could just charm you when you walk in and talk to him. I want to see that being shown now.

He is the perfect president for the Middle East: strong man, strong arm. "I say what I mean. I mean what I say." Using my military might will work in the western part of the world, where we have diplomacy. We work, we give and take a little bit. He's a good enough negotiator to understand that, but his people are still pushing him to stay hard, hard.

It's just not what we need right now in America. We need a leader with that compassion, but also the ability to bring us together and make us work together in the United States.

Last question before I give it to Jason for the last, last question. If you had to think about 2028, people that are on both sides—I think the Republicans mostly, the die is cast, but let's not front-run that—but on the Democratic side, maybe, if you will, who are some people that you think could bring some normalcy, try to veer that party back toward more of the center? Are there younger, emerging people that you see in the Democratic caucus and in the Democratic Party who you think have this potential?

I'm not sure it's going to come out of anybody in the United States Senate on the Democratic side. People who are capable, like Mark Warner, my dear friend—I know he's capable as all the get-out—but I'm just not sure you're going to break loose because you get identified. You get labeled. You know, you're in that Democratic Party that was just so far to the left and this and that.

It's going to be somebody coming, whether it's going to be a governor or an up-and-coming statesman within the party. It could be someone like Stephen A. Smith. You know, Stephen—

Yeah.

I mean, he is incredible.

Incredibly dynamic.

He's as center-left, center-right as you want. He can go both ways. He's not going to go extreme.

As good as it gets. There's a lot of good people I think could rise up.

Now, will the Democratic Party accept him? The Democratic Party has basically been taken over by the extremes, okay? They say, "Well, the MAGA party has taken over the Republican Party." The Grand Old Party wants to be grand again. Democrats want to be responsible and compassionate again.

I tell people I'm fiscally responsible and socially compassionate, which I think most Americans are. And then you have—I know Steve Beshear. I mean, I know Andy Beshear. I served with his dad. We were governors together.

I know. Good family. I know those people. So there's going to be some people who rise up who might be surprising. Shapiro—do you think that there are entrepreneurs like Donald Trump but on the left, or do you think that avenue is closed for businesspeople on the Democratic side?

I wouldn't think so, because a businessperson on the Democratic side could come across with a heart and a soul and be a little bit softer in their approach, and I think be able to hit a nerve there.

We have someone with the smarts to do it, and we have someone with the compassion but also the strength to make sure that we remain—I'm concerned. My biggest concern is what Mike Mullen told me in 2011, at my first Armed Services meeting. Chamath and Jason, I sat there. They asked the question, "What's the greatest fear the United States of America has right now?" And that's 2011.

I thought he was going to talk about China, North Korea, Iran, and on and on and on. He never missed a beat. Within 1 second, he said, "The debt of the nation will take us down. We will fold because of the debt we have, and it's going to be unmanaged debt, which will lead us to make cowardly decisions."

We're at $37 trillion. For every $5 that we receive in revenue to run our country, $1 of that—20%—goes just to pay the interest on our debt.

That's horrible.

Jamie Dimon and Bob Iger come to mind.

Absolutely. That'd be big. I mean, I would be receptive to all of them. There's a lot of good people. I think it's going to be very interesting.

The Democratic Party will have to get out of its own way and its ideology left.

People aren't going that direction.

Let me give you one other thing, Jason, to think about. Bernie and AOC are going around the country with these rallies and rallies.

Yeah.

If that was effective and that's where the country is going, why have the Democrats lost basically people who were registered? They've lost registration of over 100,000 people who've left the Democratic Party since they've started that crusade.

Nobody wants it. It's a road to nowhere.

No, that's exactly right.

Wow, Big Joe, you've been so honest and candid here. It's okay if I call you Big Joe because I have a lot of respect for you.

Okay. I just don't know. I've been called Big Joe. You know what Joe Biden called me? He said, “Jojo.” I could always tell if he was in a good mood with me. He said, “Hey, Jojo, what's going on?” And if he was pissed, “Hey, Joe, what's wrong?”

Oh, yeah. I'll just call you Big Joe because I have a lot of respect for you.

You've been so honest today, and you have permission to be totally candid here. How close did you come to running as an independent for president? You can be especially candid about this. Now that you've got this great book and a great track record—obviously, a profile in courage—how would you make the decision to run yourself in 2028? Walk us through both.

First of all, I would have loved to have been in it, and I begged the Democratic Party to have a mini-primary, a 30-day primary.

I love it.

I begged him. I said, “You had to dispel some of the things that they were labeled with.” Not every Democrat believed in that. That would have been a time to dispel a lot of that stuff. But boy, when he doubled down and came right back within, what, an hour or two, and threw everything behind Kamala Harris, it was over. And, you know, when he endorsed her, I knew we were in trouble then. I would have loved to have been on that dais.

Would you have run in a speed run? Would you have put yourself out there in a speed run?

I'd have been right in there. I'd have done everything I could to be talking about things that we're talking about now. Do we need energy? Absolutely. Don't turn your back on energy. Let's make sure we do it better than anybody in the world.

Do you need a strong border? Well, let me ask you something. You all have property lines. When you buy a piece of property and a house, you either build a fence or you live in a gated area. You want to protect your property.

Why can't we protect our borders but also have a legal immigration policy that works? I got to bring all of that stuff out. And I think a lot of Democrats believe like I do, but they've gone so far to the left they can't retreat.

And if they don't get out of their way, they're going to go down in defeat.

And so, 2028—to Jason's question.

Yeah. Well, 2028, guys, we'll have to see. I'll do anything I can to help my country. But, you know, I want to make sure—2028, I will be what? I'm 78 years old right now.

You're going to be 81, the same as Biden, close to Trump. And you're sharp as a tack.

And I'm a year younger.

Mitt Romney and I were talking about running. I said, “Mitt—” He said, “Joe, let's—we have to start a new party.” I said, “What would it be, man?” He said, “We'll call it the Not Stupid Party.”

I said, “Hell, my question is, why are we involved then?”

Yeah. What are we doing here?

Yeah. And then I said, “Well, man, what do you think?” He said, “Joe, listen. They don't want 2 old white guys running.” And I said, “We're the youngest ones out there right now.”

Yeah, you're whippersnappers.

We were both younger. We have a lot of fun with that. We talked a lot. Anyway, look, we'll just see what happens. I'm going to be involved every way I can, and if the good Lord gives me the health and strength to participate any way I possibly can, I will.

But I guarantee I'll be trying to find the right people that put country before party and get behind them. Let's get this country back on track.

Heck yes. Well, Joe, on behalf of the All-In community, I just want to say thank you for your years of service.

Yeah. Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense. Don't be stupid.

Your daughter is incredible. Heather is the best.

Heather is a force, and you know that she thinks the world of you and your wife and your family. I'm just so happy that we got to spend a little time together, and I look forward to coming out with you all and Jason to meet with you.

Come do a live one. Yeah, we'll talk.

Let's do a live one. We'll have one hell of a poker party.

That'll be a blast.