President Joe Biden
2023-12-20 00:39:08
After 25 years at the Late Night desk, Conan realized that the only people at his holiday party are the men and women who work for him. Over the years and despite thousands of interviews, Conan has never made a real and lasting friendship with any of his celebrity guests. So, he started a podcast to do just that. Deeper, unboundedly playful, and free from FCC regulations, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is a weekly opportunity for Conan to hang out with the people he enjoys most and perhaps find some real friendship along the way.
My name is Joe Biden. I'm lucky to be Conan O'Brien's friend.
Then again, I guess it's.
Because I'm Irish, yes, you've got the luck of the Irish.
Fall is here, hear the yell, back to school, ring the bell, brand new shoes, walking blues, climb the fence, books and pens. I can tell that we are going to be friends. Yes, I can tell that we are going to be friends. Hey, there, Conan O'Brien here, and we have.
A very special episode today of Conan O'Brien needs a friend. I was given the opportunity to fly to Washington, D.C. sit in the White House and have a one-on-one conversation with the 46th president of the United States, President Joe Biden. When I got the call, initially I thought I was being audited. turns out that is not the case. This is an incredible honor for me.
As you know, I'm a history buff if you've listened to this podcast at all. This was a huge deal for me. I've never been able to interview a sitting president, so it was a thrill. At the same time, I'd like to point out I am not a journalist, I am a comedian, former Late night host. But my mission today was the same mission I've had with everyone I've talked to on this podcast in the last five years. Which is to connect on a human level with somebody I admire.
President Biden has a very busy schedule, so I wasn't able to get to everything I wanted to speak to the president about. But that's what happens when you're sitting with someone who's running the free world while you're wasting his time. I'm very grateful for this opportunity. And Enough said, Let's get to it. Here, I am chatting with President Joe Biden.
When I do this podcast, I'm always looking for points of commonality. Being Irish is such a part of who I am. There are phrases that have lived on in my family. My mother always called me a bold stump. Conan, you're a bold stump.
But I think there's so much of that, that's just in who I am, and it's got to be a huge part of who you are being.
Irish Well, it really is, but I think it's because, think about it, the Irish. Even once they got here and made it, they were still viewed as lesser because they were Catholic. My mother used to say, Remember Joey, the best drop of blood in you is Irish. Remember, you're a Biden. I'm thinking, Who the hell's a Biden?
That's not Irish, Biden's not Irish. It's all about principle and pride.
Yes, it was instilled in us by my mother that we are proper Irish, we are lace curtain Irish now. My mother's father had been a policeman. Worcester, Massachusetts, directed traffic made, I think, $55 a week. But my mother was able to go to Vassar College and then Yale Law School.
It was all about moving upward in our world, it was very important for our that we were proper. Then I get into this business where I professionally make a fool of myself. She had to figure that out, but it's a lot about pride.
It's kind of expected, you think, I mean, look, for years before our ancestors came. Mine came in 1848. My mom is 100 Irish, my dad is a quarter Irish. But they got in those coffin ships in the 1850s and they came, leaving a sense of being always ridiculed and looked down on.
And there was an enormous pride in our literature, whether you were a farmer or a poet, there was always. It's just something about, look, we know who we are, we know who we are, my mother said. Joey never bow, never bend, never yield, never.
She sounds tough.
My mother was five foot one.
Five foot one.
Five foot one, almost five foot two, and she was everybody's mother. Confessor. I show a picture of my mom. You got to come over to the Oval after this is over, if you have a minute.
It's funny you're offering that and your staff is all saying No, absolutely not.
Because, you know what they've looked into my record.
They looked into mine too, so we're okay.
But there's a picture of my mom by my desk and my mom is holding Barack's hand. On the night we get announced out in Chicago, a million people, et cetera. And my mother was everybody's mother confessor, everybody would go to my mom for advice or they had trouble, and so my mom, she was hearing somebody's confession. Figuratively speaking, she'd sit so you could see her profile when you came in the door and she'd go like this, like, keep moving.
Keep moving, keep moving.
I called her, I said, the president asked me to be considered to be a vice president. I don't want to do that. I said, Barack, I don't want to be vice President, right?
Because he said, Well, damn, it's only you.
There are no other choices.
No, that's what he said to me, and so he said, go home and talk it over with your family. I was on the train. It was when he became the de facto nominee in August. So I go home, sit everybody down.
Everybody wants me to do it. I didn't want to do it. I looked at my mom, who was living with him because my dad had passed, and she said, Joey, remember? I called you and I asked you about what kind of guy he was, and you said he was honest and smart. He said, Yeah.
Let me get this straight, the first Black man has a chance to be president. He says. He needs you. You told him No, wow, I said, Whoa?
Anyway, there's a picture of my mom when she wasn't even supposed to be out with a million people out in Chicago when we got announced and we walked out. She walks off the stage and there's a picture of her grabbing Barack, and she says, Come on, honey, it's going to be OK, she walks out.
That's fantastic. No, that was my mom. But I mean, it doesn't matter what you achieve in this life. I mean, this is a big moment for me. I'm a huge history buff.
I am an amateur presidential historian and I've interviewed presidents in my day, but never a sitting U.S. president. So I want to get it on the record that this is a huge honor for me. It's a big deal, but I love that.
Whoever you're talking to, and one of the reasons that I love doing this podcast so much, so much of us are the same. 92 years old. My mother tells me to do something, I'll do it to this day. She may not like the way I do it. But no matter what I've achieved in this life, it's fascinating to me that you were waffling on the vice presidency, and your mother said, you're doing it.
Yeah, well, she said. This guy says he wants your help, and you told him No, yeah, but my mother and my father, my father was a really honorable guy. His phrase was, You're a man of your word.
Without your word, you're not a man. Remember that? remember that that was my dad? Everything with him was about the notion of just being honorable and straight.
Never lectured it, just did it.
It's funny how we keep these people with us. I have. On my desk I did a performance at the Kennedy Museum, Kennedy Library. I'm sorry in Massachusetts. And my parents were in the audience and someone snapped a picture of the both of them laughing. They sent it to me. And I have that on my desk because I think that's the only reason I do what I do.
It really did start when I was a kid in the 60s, in a high chair, making them laugh. That was my first audience. And those are the people I'm trying to impress, and I'm still trying to impress them.
Well, it's interesting how many kids in the family.
There's six of us.
When my dad died, everybody thought that I should be the one to do the eulogy. We all sat and wrote it, the four kids. What stunned me was my dad was a man who came up in the 30s in high school. And was, you didn't tell your daughter how much you loved her and always hugging her.
Yeah, it's generational. It didn't happen.
So what amazed me is the different relationships we had with each one of us. My sister Valerie was, he loved her and adored her, thought she was beautiful and she is. But he'd never say it, he didn't say it out loud. So when we're writing the eulogy together, all of us, my brother Jimmy, who was more like my dad than any of us. He said. Well, talk about the time dad took me flying as a pilot.
He took you flying, but he said, Now, don't tell anybody. He went down to Newcastle County Airport, rented an airplane. None of us ever knew it, you all saw different versions of it.
I mean, it really wasn't my dad, he didn't preach it, he just did it. It was about integrity. You?
Had to be honest, I have a topic I wanted to bring up with you, which is near and dear to my heart. Because it's been the root of this podcast I've been doing for about five years. I get to talk to a lot of quote important people, people that have achieved amazing things and what I try to get them to talk about. Which is the things that they thought of as maybe a disability or a problem when they were younger, that helped fuel them, that when they were younger, they desperately wished it would go away.
They thought of it as a weakness, but when they look at the spin of their life now, they see that that actually helped forge them. And I know you've talked about this, but when you were growing up, stuttered. And it must have been the fuel, in some ways, to have.
Well, when I was a kid.
You've got this problem licked, by the way.
For me, I was really lucky. I had a mother and a father that my mother would say, Don't let this define you. Look at me, Joey, you're handsome, you're smart.
You're a decent young man, don't let this define. You taught me how to fight. There used to be a joke when I was growing up, in grade school and high school, that you could beat up Biden, but he'd hurt you going down.
The point was that it made me realize in our family, this is a God's truth covenant. Four of us. We're never allowed to make fun of anyone, no matter how mean they were to us. If they had something they couldn't overcome, swear to God. If you did, you'd get your rear end kick when you went home. Not a joke. And so it taught me that there's a lot of people dealing with dilemmas that take away their pride, their dignity. I don't know whether it's a thing that pushed me about, like, for example, even though I was a stutterer, I ended up being elected the class president kind of thing.
But it wasn't. I didn't run for that reason. But there's something about your dignity and your pride. It doesn't just manifest itself in terms of an impediment. For example, when we were kids, there were a couple of hard times financially for my dad. I remember being invited to. I was talking to this about my sister last night, my best friend and we were going to the Cotillion. At Mount Pleasant High School, which was rated the best high school in Delaware, in an area that was an affluent area.
And we lived in not bad area, but a less affluent area, and I was invited to the Cotillion. I went to the Catholic school, St. Helena's in that district, and it was, you know, just a little different.
I remember being invited and I was anxious to go. And my mom, I had an uncle who lived with us at the time. He was five, seven and my mom couldn't find a white shirt for me, and so we got one of his shirts.
It was French cuffs on it and my mother, and it fit loosely, but it fit. My dad had always wore cufflinks to work, and my dad had the cufflinks. We couldn't find it, I didn't know what to do.
So my mom goes downstairs over the washing machine in the basement, in the garage level, and gets two nuts and bolts and brings them up and puts them on me. And I said, No, swear to God, today, that's a fashion statement, and I said, Mom, I can't go. They're going to make fun of me.
If anyone makes fun of you, you turn around and say, you don't have a pair. Swear to God true on the health of my children. So I go to the punch bowl and this guy, Frank Grasmeier, says, Hey, look at Biden nuts and bolts. Everybody started to laugh.
And I said, Frank, you don't have a pair of these? I swear to God, I swear to God, he turned and said.
Yeah, I have them, I have them, I have them.
Not a joke. My theory is that if you stay connected to these things, that embarrassed you when you were a kid. Whatever it was speech impediment or anxiety, or feeling awkward or not being a good athlete. My list goes on and on and on. Having weird hair, having a weird name. I wish you had your hair. I'd trade right now if you would.
You want this hair, it comes off, it's, it's, it's it. Velcros on the back. Yeah, if I could do it, I would do it.
I will, I will mail you this wig tomorrow.
Do some polling first on how people are going to think about that. Um, but I think what it does is that it gives you empathy. I think empathy comes from a sense. If you've felt that pain. If you see someone else and you sense that maybe they're feeling that pain, you're awakened to it. That's, I think, the superpower.
That comes from it is you have, I'm certainly right. When I got elected, I was using Senator Kennedy's office over in the Capitol to interview staff. And, uh, I got a phone call from my fire department. They put a young woman on the phone and she said there's been an accident.
You got to come home December 18th. I wasn't sworn in yet. And, uh, he said, If your wife is Christmas, shop with your kids. My kids were then 13 months old, almost three and almost four, and, uh, she was so nervous, she said. They're dead.
And I was enraged by. I remember going out of the Capitol and looking up in a dome. I swear to God, I'm embarrassed about it. But, uh, and I, I just screamed and didn't know where my boys were alive. They were badly injured, skull fracture and bow at every bonus, body broken. Firstly, he was in a body cast arms, legs anyway.
What I learned, though, is that after that, when I'd show up at a friend's viewing or family viewing and they'd stop everything, the family would stop. He didn't know that they'd come to me, just come to me. And I realized. What they're really saying is he lost what we lost, and he made it. He's still walking. People have to know that you can persevere, you know?
Yeah, yeah, and if you made it through, they think, well, maybe maybe I can't, maybe I will. I've spent a lot of time with families that are going through tough times because, you know, it gives them some solace. And look, I want to be clear.
I was really lucky, I had enormous help. By the time I came home, my sister and her husband had given up their apartment and already moved in to help me raise the kids. My brother. Did we have an expression in our family, for real?
If you have to ask, it's too late. If you have to ask, it's too late. Never had to ask. And think of the people gone through, the stuff that we're talking about, they're heroes.
They get up every day, put one foot in front of the other and do it by themselves. So I had an enormous advantage dealing with my.
Things I went through. I try to impart that to my kids that whatever you're going through, even if you're miserable right now, it's going to yield something later on. Of course, what you're describing is the worst thing anybody can describe, and what they're going through usually is something extremely minor. The scale of it. It's the same principle.
Absolutely, the scale varies, but the help needed.
You clearly have a strong moral compass. You do things that you think are right, you take positions sometimes that you think are right, that maybe aren't always immediately popular or popular.
With everyone. But that's part of the job. Well, it is part of the job, I think, but it's also part of how we were raised. I used to kid Barack.
We'd sit down every morning at nine o'clock together for the first 10 minutes to half hour. I used to say to him All politics is personal, that's what I say to him all the time. We used to know one another better. Things have changed so much in public life that it's like an old bad joke.
Some of my best friends are Republicans, but they were senators or my friends, I mean, close friends, when I ran the first time, 29 years old. I'm running against a man who fought in World War II, who was a judge who became a lieutenant governor, then senator for three terms. A really fine man named Caleb Box helped write the Clean Water Act, the last debate we're having. He stood up and, as he was, asked a question and he didn't know the answer.
He said Well, I'd have to get back to you. I knew the answer, but my dad would have been angry with me if I gave the answer because would have embarrassed him. You would have shamed him. But you can't do that.
No, anyway, this might be an Irish trait, or it just might be a trait that we both share. But it is hanging on to old cars. My father would drive a car until it had 300,000 miles on it and the paint would fall off. Then he once hired a house painter to repaint the car because it was cheaper.
This car looked like it had cystic acne. It was a bad, terrible. He just kept it going, but it was a point of pride. You keep a car going. My first car was a 1992 Ford Taurus.
I still have it, it's not worth anything, but I still hang on to it. Because in my lineage, you hang on to a car forever. You have a 67 Corvette.
Goodwood Green 327 350. Can flat shift, it can move.
Now did they let you drive it?
Not anymore.
No, seriously.
I think I saw a tear in your eye right here.
By the way, they take me out to the Secret Service Test Track, which is an old runway. Yeah, I've got my Corvette up to 132 miles an hour, it's only 327. The reason I had the Corvette. In 1967, when I was marrying my deceased wife, who came from her dad, was a Navy guy, owned some restaurant. Wonderful, wonderful man. But they're of greater means than we were.
My dad, he wanted to give us a wedding gift and he couldn't afford anything of consequence, he said. Joey, give me your car. Then I had a 62 Chevy Bel Air and she had a Pontiac Tempest, a 64. I guess it was. I'm not sure they're here, he said. I'll fix them all up and that'll be my gift to you guys.
You can come pick them up. She was down in Delaware 10 days before the wedding before she went home. We went to pick up the car at the dealership, he was a manager of the dealership anyway. We pull up and everybody, from the mechanics to the salespersons, everybody's outside and waiting for us.
We get out of the car and walk up and dad said, I'm going to give you your wedding gift early, guys. Everybody separates. A brand new 67 Goodwood green Chevy Corvette hardtop. He was so proud because he could afford the payments. I'm talking with Jay Leno, going out the second time to race these cars, he said. You want to sell your car?
I said, he's probably listening, I hope I get it right.
He's not listening to this. Don't worry about it.
He may learn something he should, he should.
Learn at any rate, he said. I noticed you have in a glove box you have the original sticker. I said, Yeah, I didn't realize I have all that. He said. You want to sell it? I said, I don't think so.
My son would come down from heaven because they rebuilt the engine, all original parts, he said. You get $144,000 for it. I said, No, can't do it, yeah. For 36 years, I was also the poorest guy in Congress, but I couldn't separate with that car.
By the way, the new Corvette coming out, this one electric zero to 60 2.
9 seconds, you're going to drive that one, I'm going to give it a shot, I drove the other one.
I can distract the secret service. You can make a run for the car.
By the way, I drove one of those big Ford Broncos Electric 4.
9 seconds.
Oh, it's unbelievable.
Mine is 5.
2.
That's flat shifting. All kidding aside, I just love car. I don't know a damn thing about the engines, I don't know anything about it.
I just know how to drive them and I.
Love it. I just know there's a big wheel in the front and I put on the gas and I move forward.
That's all I know, I know nothing else. By the way. You know, the new ones, they have a launch switch. I got a Porsche up to 171 miles an hour.
What you do is you put your foot on the gas and the brake, and on the button on where the gear shift is. You hit launch and you watch the launch symbol inside the speedometer and it counts down. When it gets down to zero, you just take your foot off the brake and you move. It is like it is incredible.
Hearing you talk about cars, it's the most excited.
You brought up something that I've been thinking about. You have more experience than most people in public life. You came to Washington 1973 and you've worked pretty much. Or you've known every president since Richard Nixon, and you've known every world leader since Golda Meir. You've met so many of these different people.
Who pops for you? After all this time? Are there people that come to mind where you think now that person really stands out as an incredible leader?
Well, there are a number of people who fit that role. I remember spending a lot of time in her first term with Golda Meir in Israel. I had great working relationships with. I didn't agree, but with the Bush family, they were both decent, honorable men. I think one of the smartest guys ever worked with, and knowledgeable but also facile, was Bill Clinton.
Look at Barack Obama, he has a backbone like a ramrod. The guy that I recently saw was a guy who was just really, totally decent. He was as good a former president as a president that was Jimmy Carter.
Unbelievable.
I went down to his wife's funeral and saw him he was in tough shape as I went over to give him a kiss. All he said was, I love you.
Republicans I became close friends with, like, Chuck Hagel, man, there's a guy talk about courage, decent, honorable guy.
You were good friends with John McCain.
Real close.
I never voted for John McCain, but I respected him and I admired him. I didn't vote for Mitt Romney.
I admire him too, he's an honorable man.
I respect him, I think he's an honorable man. I think those are both men that have a strong moral compass. It begs the question we're living in this time now, where having those kind of relationships? You think about Ronald Reagan working with Tip O'Neill? You were there for that.
You saw that that used to be how it worked, I don't know. Do you think we can get back to that?
Well, it's interesting, I guess. It was my sixth year as vice president. Toward the end of the vice presidency, you recall, my responsibilities would deal with the House and the Senate Congress. I realized there were new senators that I didn't know that well, like I knew most of them, I went over to the private Senate dining room to meet the new ones.
It's gone. Right after I got elected. I didn't want to be here because my wife and daughter were killed anyway. But a group of five senators came to me and saved my sanity. Starting with Mike Mansfield, Teddy Kennedy, a guy from South Carolina, Fritz Hollings, Anyway, Eagleton, others.
Right?
To convince me, just stay six months so we can help us organize well. They already had 58 Democratic senators they didn't need, and I had elected a Democratic governor, so it would have been a Democrat. But I stayed and I used to spend a lot of time trying to avoid being with people. Finally, one day, Teddy came in and says, You're going to lunch with me and just come and sit and listen.
I'd go over and sit down and you get to know people, then you travel and we travel together. It's hard to really feel the vitriol for a man if you learn his wife has breast cancer, or if he has a child with an alcohol problem. Or if he has, I mean, it, humanized people and you get to know people.
It's what Michelle Obama, I think, says, you can't. It's hard to hate up close.
Well, that's a great line.
And I think I can tell, and this relates a little bit to earlier when we were talking about this Irish quality. But I know that I like to be in a room with people. When Covid was happening and I was talking to people on Zoom, I felt like I wasn't quite coming across the way that I wanted to. I like to be in a room with people and let them take the measure of me and I take the measure of them. And I get the feeling that what really helped us in a bipartisan era, the Washington you came to, is that people were in physical proximity the dining room that you were in.
That doesn't happen anymore, and so it's a lot easier to hate when you don't know. And so, as I said, I went over and found out there was nothing there, nobody to talk to. By the way, John McCain became one of. We were like brothers. He asked me to do his eulogy.
He asked you, yeah, to speak at his, to do the eulogy at his funeral.
But interesting thing, he had been released as a prisoner of war. Came back to the Senate to be part of the military cadre that sits down in the Senate to travels with senators when they go abroad. And John ended up traveling with me well over 300,000 miles, and we became friends. As a matter of fact, I introduced him to his wife. We were going to Japan and we stopped in Hawaii.
And the admiral's daughter was this beautiful woman who now works with me, and he talked about it. I said, go up and meet her and he wouldn't do it, so I went up and I introduced them.
They ended up getting married, we were friends.
Have you done a lot of matchmaking in your life?
No, no, but John would have done it for me. In other words, he wanted to, but he didn't want to be. He was still in the military, we were in a military base.
And I'm the one that talked, one of the ones that talked him into running for office. I knew he wasn't going to run as a Democrat, and he ended up running. And we would argue, like, hell, I mean, Hammer and Tong like two brothers.
But then that was it.
That's a good way to put it because I have that relationship with one of my brothers, in particular, my brother Neil. We're very close, we love each other. We argue, we just really go at it.
And then we put that aside and we have these great conversations and laugh. And I say, Okay, I'll talk to you tomorrow, and he says, All right, we'll see you tomorrow, love you, that's the conversation.
But there's a safety, there, feels like there's a safety in these relationships. Maybe that's what we're getting away from a little bit is. I don't know if it's social media, I don't know if it's. The politics has changed so drastically.
I think it's beyond social media, I think it's the media generally, and I'm not blaming the media. But things have changed. I mean, who are the editors anymore? I don't know if someone's saying, no, you can't print that in this paper because that's not accurate.
There's no editors anymore. But we have to get back to knowing one another, just knowing each other. When you know someone and you know their personal problems, not that they have to open up to you and everything, but you just become acquainted with them. A lot of it has to do with a sense of decency.
You have to get to know the other person. Is it frustrating for you? Because I do see the way you? And again, I think this is something I like to do too. I like to shake a person's hand, I like to be in the space with them.
Now you're the most powerful person in the world, you're in the White House, and it's harder to just get your hands. Shake hands with someone. Look them in the.
Eye, the secret service is here. I drive them crazy because I want to have tactile contact, I want to look somebody. You can tell in their eyes what they're thinking about you, what you're thinking about them.
For example, I met yesterday with the families. All have hostages still held by Hamas. It's personal, I don't know, by the way, the secret Service. God love them.
They put up with me in terms of I make their job harder. I know I try not to, but my instinct is I see a.
Crowd and decide to get out and say hi, talk to them. I understand that I have the same issue. I have no secret service, I want secret service.
I probably need it. A lot of people have different opinions about me, but I desperately love to dive into a crowd and start talking to them. And often I've had the experience where someone will stop me on the street and ask for a selfie and I'll be chatting with them. And then 15 minutes later, they say, Conan, I have to go, I need to go now.
Okay, I'll do another 10 minutes. I've had that experience. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they say, Mr. President, we just wanted a selfie, but we really don't want to hear.
About that story. I've become an expert at taking it. It's easier for me to take the selfies. Yes, but look, I think it's important people know and able to get a sense of who their leaders are.
Yeah, not just what they say, but I mean, who they are. It's one of the things about the presidency is. I mean, it's amazing to me. Understandably, how people, if they know your background and know you, what you've done, there's more of a connection. Like, for example, people were surprised I wanted to go into Kiev in the middle when the attack was taking place.
I was going to ask you about that because I believe I was trying to find a precedent. But you've gone to two active war zones and that is highly unusual and I don't know how. First of all, when you was the first lady, okay with that, when you said, I'm going to go into-.
I wanted to demonstrate that, first of all, I wanted to see for myself what was happening. The secret Service. God love them. The last thing they want to do is put a president on a train 10 hour train ride. And when we got off the train and I met with Zelensky, where we really do have a moral obligation to help these people. And then the ride back was similar, but I didn't view it.
I got coverage of this. The only thing it did was say, Well, he's not 300 years old. Well, how could he do 20 hours back and forth? But for me to see, I was showing the staff today, we're talking, getting ready to come over here.
I have a photograph of when Chuck Hagel and John Kerry were with me. And it was in the first month after we became president, the president Obama said. Joe, I want you to go and make your own assessment of what's going on in Afghanistan. So we traveled the entire country in a helicopter. We're going back. And John Kerry wanted to see where Osama bin Laden had escaped through the Konar Valley, the mountains, and a helicopter was forced out in a snowstorm. And barely they found this place to land, which was incredible.
And there's a picture of us all standing behind the helicopter to stay warm. I think it was something like 18 below zero, only 17 clicks from Bagram Air Force base. And I'm looking at that and thinking to myself, the guys I was with, the Centcom commander, the pilots, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel. Because, well, we wanted to see for.
Ourselves, what was real? If you're in a briefing room and someone's giving you papers or they're showing you photographs, it's really not the same. You've got to go there. No, it's not the same. And.
It depends on who's talking to you. And by the way, it's really tough, I think, for a briefer to come in and sit down with the president of the United States and tell him this, that or the other thing. And the people that I've. Matter of fact, I'm going to be seeing Chuck Hagel after this program, he's going to come over to the office. We're still friends.
He's a Republican.
I wanted to read you a quote. It's a quote that I love. It's by Vladimir Lenin. I don't think he gets quoted a lot here at the White House, but I'm going to go for it. There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where everything happens.
You are living through an extraordinary time as president. It feels like the world is turning on its axis every 36 hours. Are there times when you wake up in the morning and think, I wish it was a little bit duller right now?
I wish things would just settle down well. Yes, and no, look, yes. When I had that cranial aneurysm, the doc was trying to explain to me whether it was congenital or environmental, and I said, Doc, I don't care, just fix it.
Yeah, this is back in, is this 88? this is 88? And he looked at me and said, You know what your problem is, senator? and I said, No, doc.
Well, he said, you're a congenital optimist. Well, seriously, that was his quote. Here's the deal, though. One of the things that I've never been more optimistic about America's chances in my whole life. I wasn't going to run again because I just lost my son.
He should be sitting in the interview, not me. He was the attorney General Bronze Star winner major in the U.S. Army anyway. One of the things that comes through to me is that for all the difficulty when I wasn't going to run, because I was going to write a book on inflection point in American history. I think we're at one of those points that every seven or eight generations occurs, not because of any one leader. But the world is changing, everything's in motion.
And what we do in the last couple of years, the next three or four years is going to determine the course of the country and the world for the next five or six decades. I believe that, with every fiber of my being. If we prevent Ukraine from collapsing, I've worked like hell, not just me, to hold NATO together tightly. It's never been this tight. Expand it.
We have an opportunity to change the dynamic in Europe for generations. My mother, God love her, I remember her going to identify my family. They actually said, Joey, out of everything terrible, something good will happen if you look hard enough for it.
I look, what's going on in the Middle East now? I was able to get a resolution passed through the G20 leaders of the 20 largest nations to build a railroad. From Riyadh, all the way through into Saudi Arabia, Jordan, up through Israel, all the way into Europe. Because there's much more reason.
For them to be together than to be apart. I'm not a journalist, so I'm allowed to give my opinion. And I, as a again amateur historian, I think it's absolutely crucial that Ukraine prevail, and it's something that I'm very passionate about. I get confused, you know, as you know, the Washington you came to in 1973, Republicans were always tough on foreign policy, tough on Russia.
And now mag Republicans, they've kind of flipped the script and they're saying, Well, we can let Ukraine go. It's not really in our interest and I don't understand it. It's confusing.
To me, the other guy says we could work with Putin, he's smart, yeah, the other guy I like.
He's the other guy.
He's like Voldemort now, his name shall not be mentioned well.
Good point, I plead guilty. Yeah, but look, I mean, just if nothing, but global warming is changing the world.
Yeah, ice caps are melting, that's true, but guess what brings that along with? Now you got China and Russia and the North Pole trying to circumvent the globe, change the dynamic in the region.
I mean, the things that are happening, for example, the idea that we're having to rebuild infrastructure, but some countries don't have the capacity to do it. I've been met now twice, I've had the leaders of the Pacific nations come and be with me here. Because they're worried about going underwater and not making it just go down the list. But I think maybe because I'm a congenital optimist. When I told my staff a couple of years ago I was going to bring South Korea and Japan together, they looked at me, like, now, look, I know a fair amount about foreign policy.
I have more experience than any president has ever had. It doesn't mean I'm good or bad, just I know these heads of state. It's a small world, it's getting smaller and smaller.
Yeah, and for example, China, China is a competitor, but I have a relationship with Xi Jinping, I've spent more time with him than any world leader ever has. Just because when I was vice president, Barack wanted me to get to know him. Because it wasn't appropriate for a president to spend time with him, because we knew he was going to be the president.
He's a very tough, smart guy, but he's got enormous problems. And so, for example, when I put together the quad, India, Japan, Australia, the United States. He said. You're trying to surround me, I'm not trying to surround you. I said, We're just not going to let you change the dynamic of world rules. So whether it's international airspace or whether it's sea space.
I said, Well, I didn't write them, I said, Well, that's what they are, we're not going to change them. So many parts are moving that there's an opportunity to realign the world in a way that is less likely to result in war, less likely to result in human suffering. Now I know people look at me and say, Well, you're just too optimistic.
There's ways to step up and lead and look. One of the things is, again, I'll make it clear, it's not because Joe Biden's president, it's the moment, Madeleine Albright said. America is the essential nation. CONAN That's not a joke.
Who leads the world if the United States doesn't? who?
No one else can, and we have an obligation and an enormous opportunity to leave our kids and our.
Grandkids A Better World. Well, I like that. You describe yourself as an optimist, congenital optimist. I always tell people I'm a 52 optimist. There's a good, healthy dose of me that is very worried and very concerned, but I always lean towards optimism.
It's the more.
Challenging standpoint. Well, don't get me wrong, I have written about, and I think I know pretty intimately. Downside, Yeah, but look, we got to remember.
We're the United States of America, for God's sake, nothing, nothing, nothing is beyond our capacity when we work together. I mean, it really isn't think if we're the only nation that has come out of every crisis.
Stronger than we went in, I did want to end on. I've been doing this for a long time and so it was a big honor. When I got the call that the president of the United States was going to speak to me in the White House, and it's an honor. And I'm rooting for you, and, as the Irish say, God bless you.
Thank you, thank you for taking the time to do this. Oh, come on, do you guys have a?
Chance to come over and see the Oval? I'd love to see the Oval. Come on, let's go do it all right.
Let's do it, thank you, thank you.
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