Joe biden. One of the most talented journalist of his generation the first part is first in the Chicago Tribune shortly after graduating from harvard then three years later to report from iraq and other countries. And then to join the new yorker before moving to washington to cover politics and foreign affairs. In the 2014 National Book award and was a finalist for the 2015 pulitzer prize. The new book has adapted from the articles written over the past decade most recently the profiler biden last august. With all the accidental expertise and the portrait of the former Vice President with the biden extensive experience and then put them Pete Buttigieg the former mayor of south bend indiana the 2020 democratic president ial candidate also new book called trust. And so then to recognize the work and to put in a plug for the former primary opponent and out to be the next president of the United States joe biden. Mayor pete, take it away. Thank you so much. It is an honor and the treat to be participating that is iconic as politics and prose. And then especially with the writer and observer of that caliber that to help open a window is a recognized figure in us politics. And since and during his vice presidency and during the campaign it is important for the country to spend time as i hope and i will not pretend to be neutral on this, we are talking about somebody one week from tonight we will know as the next president of the United States. So thank you for the chance to have this conversation i am looking forward to it. So let me begin by asking the first time i asked the nerve why my predecessor was a mayor. If he thought it might be a good idea for me to run. And instead of directly answering my question he has a remarkable career and indiana. He sat at his desk and his french fries and said politics is so much is out of your control to let me know the first have to think about is to prepare for that i feel like americans of that is out of our control. In the meeting is forward on the one hand like a lifelong guest and then to never know they would reach this point so that group paying opening anecdote and then more broadly will you think of the relationship with the uncontrollable has played in his formation and political life and his presidency. N to begin with something people dont talk that much about is that you woke up one morning on the floor of a hotel room in 1987 unable to move his legs, he couldnt figure out how he got there. He had a brain aneurysm, two of them in fact, the ballooning of two arteries in his brain. The description of it was agony. They got him to a hospital and the surgeons told him he was at risk of such great injury he could have died so quickly they had a priest deliver last rites even before his wife could get there. Joe biden had been on the campaign trail for months and had this headache he had been putting aside. It was a strange bit of faith that he dropped out of that race and the fact that he was out meant that he was able to sort of have a moment. He was going to give a speech and thats when he was attacked with this aneurysm. The doctors had frankly you are a lucky man because if you were on the campaign trail and ignored your symptoms, you might be dead right now. They said youre going to go under the knife and we are going to give you a surgery to save your life. You may lose your ability to speak. Somehow he did find a bit of humor and said i wish it happened to me last summer. They did operate on him and of course he did come through it and it was an ordeal of the kind that shapes a persons conception of their own vulnerability and role as a father and husband and political person. He was out of the congress for seven months, he comes back and i think whats fascinating is through his life you see this recurring pattern of these moments of stored of extraordinary misfortunes and in their own curious ways extraordinary fortunes. I pursued that question to understand how he conceptualizes fate and control over ones circumstances. He has come to a bit of homespun philosophy in which he says everybody in the end had a sort of philosophical ledger in which they will be concentrated by and that is how he made a sense of it and continues this pattern all the way until today. One of the things that is interesting he grew up at a time there was this great sense of control and that was the mantra of the postwar period. There was a feeling they dont have that sense of control and they feel things are happening beyond their reach and faith is something less to define and thats a sort of nerve ending that runs through the politics in this country. That leads to Something Else i want to explore with you which is this question being shaped by the moment to the generation you come from. I came of age in a generation that started with a big argument being whether it was the end of history and whether things just settled down and all the tough stuff was over and we would ease ourselves into a period of prosperity and consensus and technology helping to create that factbased reality it sounds tragic to think how we thought about it in the 90s but now its a period to have history come roaring back at us which for many of us was the first time that a chain of events that started thousands of miles away affected us in a direct way and i think about that with the students i spend time with almost 20 years apart from me they have had their lives rocked by a chain of events that started overseas but in a different way they feel their entire experience, their awareness of the world has been fashioned during the era of President Trump and the blows of the Great Recession and then the pandemic and everything thats happened in between. Joe biden is interesting generationally because he doesnt quite sit in any of the generations we have these stereotypes. Theres the baby boomer generation he would be qualified mourners what is the silent generation he certainly wasnt in the generation that couldve been directlcouldhave been diren world war ii but he wasnt in that counterculture 60s moment which is the touchstone a lot of us are using when we make sense of 2020 so i wonder sometimes he gets in trouble for being perceived as nostalgic and at the same time has a unique conception about how transition and transformation might be the hallmark of this administration so with all of that in the atmosphere i wonder what conclusions you drew and how now he meets this moment. I found that compelling. There is a way you talked about it there is a point you dont want to assign characteristics but theres certain elements in the moment that shape us. There is an essay by my former colleagues that wrote about the postwar generation and called them the society of movers and doers and as he put it [inaudible] he meant it was a community that felt they could do things because they had the tools to create their own realities. They were coming out of world war ii and they were one of the smallest generations. They had all kinds of specific advantages because there were so few of them sociologists called them the lucky few. That meant it was easier to become class president and the star of a show and get promoted along the way and it does shape our politics and the way people came to imagine they have a degree of control and to some degree thinking of a topic we will talk more about today they didnt need to trust the institutions. They could do it themselves. Fast forward to today and millennials are the largest generation in history, the most diverse and have come of age in this time when you have two recessions in 20 years, the war that began with 9 11 and is giving them a different sense of what they can and cannot control. At some point when i was reporting i spoke to a scientist who studies politics and said theres never been a moment which the gap politically, culturally, technologically, ideologically between the generations have built as pronounced as they are and i think that poses a challenge to you and joe biden how do you begin to build for people and pose for the identity that allows them to say im coming of age at a different moment but you and i can find something together. This is one of the challenges right now and so much depends on having the touchstones if they are not generational then otherwise, to take one example the experience of my generation is radically different from the experience of the baby boomer generation and those who experience to the vietnam era but i found i can walk into an American Legion and have certain terms for talking to a veteran in the vietnam era because we both had the experience of service, different with the service all the same, the same country perhaps the same branch and it gives a touchstone to understand. I think part of how the society and communities are supposed to work goes back to to tocqueville we create these circles of belonging that overlap. I dont belong to your generation but you belong to my church. You dont belong to my church but i belong to your soccer team or we live in the same neighborhood. The more there is overlap the more there is a sense of trust. This is another area that shows the ability to cut across but i can quickly be in conversation with an elderly resident of pakistan as i can my nextdoor neighbor and yet what we often find is the algorithms serve things that reinforce our pockets of belonging and the circles that ought to be overlapping have proven to be concentric that shows a sorting that is dangerous and so we are running out of things and ought to create more but we are running out of things we all have in common. One of the things we have in common is the presidency. Part of the point of the presidency is symbolic not to be discounted with a minimal amount of things i have in common with people who are incredibly different. We may not support the same person for president but we have the same president and a president that grasps that can use that in the same way a mayor knows they are a symbol of existence something i had to learn the hard way because i took office wanting to do policy and of course that was my focus but i began to once i admitted how important it was i begin to lean into the symbolic functions of the office so this brings me to another question central to joe bidens appeal and his message and thats the idea of unity and bringing us together whether it is across generations or political boundaries as our country has gotten polarized and sliced and diced, what attributes or anecdotes did you encounter that might shed light on how as president he would be able to deliver on this promise bringing us together which is one of the reasons i support him and part of what he has to offer the country right now. You hit on something that is very interesting which is this idea is it plausible to talk about unity. Is that a euphemism for saying we are just going to come to some kind of a consensus and in fact that is not what it has to mean. One of the things ive always found fascinating if you go back through his life or follow him for a while, you see he has these democratic habits that are ways of establishing a connection with people in which you try to transcend the boundaries of belonging. Ive been with him overseas in places, beijing and at one point i was following him for reporting. He has a line he says to people wherever he goes he tends to say to somebody when he meets a fellow politician he says if i had hair like yours i would be president. Hes used that in baghdad, beijing, wilmington i dont know how many times. He probably tried it in south bend once or twice. The reason it works as it is disarming to everyone and its his understanding of how political people function. He said to me one time he and obama have a shared idea that unity is possible. That is what brought them together. Then of course obama had the ability to use a transcendent language that reaches down into your soul and he puts it out there and you begin to feel elevated by it. Thats what we saw at that famous moment that he emerged talking about not read america and blue america. He says something more functional that he believes as he said to me he said look, a lot of diplomats dont like me because when i start in on a process of negotiation into the samand thesame thing applies inc politics, my first idea is that i cannot Say Something to somebody that i think is bullisl shit. I have to understand they have a rational conception of their own interest and from the very beginning you have to acknowledge they have something worth listening to and to say im going to have the conversation. But i would be curious im sure you encounter people along the way that say how can you look at our politics and think unity is possible right now, how is it not we just need to fortify our own tried in effect and prepare. I think all of us think about this through the lens of our experience. It comes by way of local. Ive been in so many local political processes that are no less ferocious than the National Politics in terms of how fired up we get with one important difference which is the coalitions are not quite as stable. They are not predicted by what party you are in and so the same person who might be at my throat and vice versa on his owning dispute might turn around and be the swing vote that delivers my budget on the council, the same person who i might be going toe to toe with on an issue with housing policy could be my greatest ally on a matter of a quality that is at stake in some situations and because of that nature and the fact we encounter each other first as human beings. When you are a mayor, you eat what you cook. You are on the same streets and shopping at the same grocery stores. To me that creates a level of bedrock faith not to be unified on what to do. Thats what politics is for is to adjudicate differences but we can at least arrive at that Public Square in good faith and not blow each other up because there might be an unlikely strange bedfellows moment. I think that the moment opened up the possibility for that because hes done so many things that are as contrary and create a once in a generation moment after the election goes the way i hope it well and forces the Republican Party to decide what is going to be next. There could be an interesting moment for that and it doesnt require naivete. This may be Something Else nobody can say someone with as many years in the senate as he has under his belt is naive or innocent about how things work and at the same time you are right as he often says i really do mean it, he does mean it when he talks about the need to bring us together and i think you can feel that. I want to mention i see questions coming in and just a little bit later in the hour we will turn to those so keep them coming. I look forward to bringing in some audience questions but i want to share a few more i just couldnt resist. Youve been made here and now you are moderator. [laughter] i will take it. Good honest work. Something you ar were talking at before one of the questions we often hear about bidens how is he going to contend with a party that doesnt agree with him on a lot of things and is so suspicious of his fundamental instincts. I had a fascinating conversation with an activist who said i have been surprised by the degree to which joe biden has been genuinely open and honestly he said the Biden Campaign has been more open than we expected. There is an openness to it and a good example of it if you take for example alexandria cortez had her differences with joe biden in the primary and she said if we were in europe i may not be in the same party. They get to the end of the primary and joe biden could have been within his rights to say i dont want anything to do with you and instead he said i would like you to come help me write my Climate Policy so thats how you end up in a room with a range of voices representing different interests that goes back to that word the conception of politics and they were all given a chance to speak. They said they were pleased how much they were interested in hearing and that is the tone if weve learned anything about politics it really does matter. Absolutely. I think of moments where if you are a sitting or former Vice President and some 30 somethingyearold mayor shows up challenging you and at some point is ahead, i think you would have every reason to say who do you think you are or worse. One of the things i appreciate about this at the beginning, middle and end of my arc he was equally interested in just being decent and getting to know you and talking to you. There was no break or need to change tone and how he treated me certainly and by the way, before, during and after my decision to support him. Its not only a political strategy but something more woven into the core of who he is. Today i believe that he is in warm springs which is a place that is associated with fdr. I think theres there is a grog interest comparing this moment and anything that could seem parallel. Theres nothing that quite fit said. But a moment when democracy seems to be in question in a moment when people are hurting in many different ways, a moment when the future of the american project is in question and a moment where perhaps the immediate decisions that will be made about managing the crisis will also turn out to be decisions about what the political and economic order might look like. You see the circumstances and he reached the presidency. I wonder how much you think that analogy holds up or if theres ananyways maybe it doesnt and given some of the mentions hes made how much is that a part of how he approaches this season in American History that he may be arriving in . There are some who are skeptical of the idea he spent his career saying im pursuing transformative change in politics and is that a matter of law to in authenticity. Its a different country than it was when he entered the race. He understands the structural issues but we are facing a moral emergency in a way we werent even before and that calls upon a greater ambition for the office and i think that it ties into this threat we see running through his life and something i try to capture in the book that in some ways his ambition to achieve something meaningful is part of the reason why he finds himself in this moment taking on the mentor and aroma even when he imagined might not be his identity before and it gets to something that i think is a feature of his we dont talk about explicitly enough. He does something not everybody in washington does is he will admit mistakes. I say this partly because its full of examples of him making mistakes. Anybody with a career as long as his there are things he regrets or things he realizes he didnt fully understand and rising to that moment is pa