The President Whisperer (with Anita Dunn)

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This week, Andy takes you inside the West Wing, as he chats with Senior White House Advisor Anita Dunn about what it is really like working with the president. Dunn takes us behind the scenes as she shares her insights into how Biden keeps quietly chalking up wins while Republicans bluster in Congress. Find out what it’s like to tell the leader of the free world that he’s wrong and what Dunn, as one of Biden’s closest advisors, thinks about the concerns people have over his age and long-term health.

Keep up with Andy on Post and Twitter @ASlavitt.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Anita Dunn, Andy Slavitt

Andy Slavitt 

This is in the bubble with Andy Slavitt. Don’t forget email me, andy@lemonadamedia.com. While you’re at it, pick up a hat or a t shirt. I just love selling this stuff. Very lucky to have neither done on the show today. Y’all seen the West Wing. And you know that there’s a lot of people around a president Anita Dunn may be considered his closest and one of his longest time advisors. She is the person who has been advising him for years, and is sitting not far away from him in the West Wing. She doesn’t give a lot of interviews. And we thought it would be interesting to talk to her now. You’re probably thinking I don’t want this presidential race to come upon us so quickly. It was also painful last time around. And you’re probably if you’re checking out the news seeing a story about DeSantis. Here, Trump and his travails, and then the dozens of other candidates who seem to be announcing themselves all the time on the Republican side. But what about the Democratic side? What about the man running for President, as the President as the incumbent? What do we want to know about him? Well, there’s a couple of interesting flavors to this conversation with Anita that I think you’ll appreciate one thing I wanted to know was how does a man who really doesn’t keep an interface profile succeed in this day and age? You know, we can add up the accomplishments of Joe Biden over the last several years, from an economic standpoint, from how he has mustered our alliances around the globe, to how he’s passed legislation on climate and prescription drug costs. And yet, you will look at this man and you don’t see someone who is shouting out his own name, every which way, you don’t see someone who is just flaunting social himself on social media. And he may be the last of a kind, you know, that’s not what this man is all about. But the real question is, can someone like that, when these days, and let’s not forget the question of his age? A lot of people are saying that, hey, this guy is too old to be president. And I want to understand how a needed done. counselor to the president, Senior Counsel to the President answers that question. I will tell you, I have my own view my own perspective. You’ve heard me say it before. I think that we have a incredibly seasoned, disciplined, focused person in the White House who is getting a lot done without a lot of ego. And I think that’s a success formula that I wished we had more often. But doesn’t mean there aren’t tough questions, and we’re going to put him to neither. Can’t wait for you to listen to this. Let’s welcome her in.

Andy Slavitt 

Anita Dunn, Senior Advisor to President Biden Welcome to the bubble.

Anita Dunn 

Thank you for having me on today, Andy.

Andy Slavitt 

We’ll go in the bubble unplugged. So maybe you started telling us a little bit about you. I think people are be fascinated to know what it means to be one of the most important advisors to the President of the United States and how you got there.

Anita Dunn 

And he is, you know, because you’ve worked here, there’s really one important person in this building, and it’s the person who makes the decisions. That’s the precedent. And the rest of us. We serve that person and we try to give, give the president our best advice. We’ll try to be honest with him. This is a president who wants you to be honest with him. And if he feels like you’re not being honest, he’ll call you on it. And he’ll say nobody really, what do you really mean, you didn’t think I did a good job, right? So he’s, he’s a lot of fun to work for. I known the president since I was a Senate staffer. And he was a United States Senator, obviously, I worked with him when he was vice president to President Obama and I was here in the White House in 2009. And then I worked on this, this President’s campaign, I went to work for him in 2019. Because I felt that he was the person who was best prepared to not just win, but to govern. And so I’ve made some bad decisions in my time, that was not a bad decision.

Andy Slavitt 

I want to come back to that winning versus governing point as it reflects on the debt ceiling conversation in a moment. What kind of advice does President Biden rely on you for if we were talking to him, he would say the reason that I have needed done, and I’m so thrilled to have Anita done in the in the White House, is because when the following situations come up, she’s the person that world I want to talk to the most.

Anita Dunn 

When, when, when really tough situations come up. And I think he has a lot of people here that he talks to. I think the President looks to me for political advice, for communications and press advice, for just sometimes common sense advice. You know, he is someone who’s very comfortable with his own judgment with the fact that he has been noted was 36 years, the United States Senator, was Vice President of the United States for eight years. He’s two and a half years into a hugely consequential presidential term. And so he’s very comfortable with his instincts. You know, as he likes to say he has been in politics a long time and knows a lot about it. So sometimes he’s just looking for affirmation. Sometimes he’s looking for you to disagree with him.

Andy Slavitt 

You know, I have my own opinion and the entrance question, but you would do it far better. A lot of times, powerful people are very hard to disagree with. It’s hard to tell them the thing you think they most need to hear. If it’s a thing you think they don’t want to hear, particularly because you know, I’m so well didn’t know where it comes from? What’s that dynamic like to come behind closed doors? Do you feel like you could tell him what you honestly think, even if he’s going to be unhappy with you for saying it,

Anita Dunn 

you shouldn’t work for a President or frankly, an elected official, that you’re not willing to have that closed door conversation with. Because it is a hugely important part of your job as a senior staffer, whoever you’re working for, to be honest with them, and to give them your best judgment. And I’ve always said that, at the end of the day, the President gets to make the decisions. But what I owe that precedent is my best judgment, and my most honest judgment about what the choices are, how they may play, how people are going to react to them, so that he can make decisions with the full knowledge that I can bring to the table. And then it’s his decision. So I think that if you can’t be honest with the person you’re working for behind closed doors, then you shouldn’t work for them, because that at the end of the day is what you owe them.

Andy Slavitt 

We’re going to come back, and we’ll talk a little bit about kind of one of the topics that people talk about with the President, which is that, you know, he’s not 50 years old any longer. But I’m someone who is, you know, I’m not quite 60, between 55 and 60. And I feel like I’m just getting to this place in my life. Where, after all this time, I feel less absorbed with what other people think about me and more focused on am I really doing the right thing, despite what people say. And I’m curious about this when it comes to President Biden, because this sort of accumulated wisdom, strength, etc. You talk about knowing who he is, and not worrying about every last press article out there. And yet it’s your job, as you said, to kind of watch his back and make sure that the administration is communicating clearly. Like how do you think about those, those trade offs and his perceptions with the last president was that Basically overly absorbed in what anybody said about him. And people could only say nice things about him and he’ll get really disturbed and it would sort of run off the rails that feels very unhealthy. Where have we gotten to you talk about someone who was positioned steadily when but govern.

Anita Dunn 

During this recent debt ceiling, fight, negotiation, whatever you want to call it. We were criticized his White House was criticized the President was criticized for letting speaker McCarthy quote, dominate the discussion. You know, he was out there on TV, he was out there communicating constantly about, you know, what he thought should be in the package, how he was going to show Joe Biden he wouldn’t back down on this, he wouldn’t back down on that. And this White House was relatively quiet. We were putting out daily messages. But we certainly didn’t have the precedent out there. And a daily Joust, with Speaker McCarthy around the negotiations. And that is what you get, when you have someone with the combination of I think wisdom and experience that a Joe Biden has someone who spent 36 years watching people negotiate things in the Senate, and then eight years as Vice President negotiating deals himself, you know, is a sense that I will play the long game here, that I will take the short term criticism, in order to get a deal I feel good about that. I can go to my party and my country, and say, this is a good deal for America, and it’s going to help us continue to grow this economy. So I’ll take two weeks of Politico and Punchbowl criticizing me and members criticizing me or pundants, criticizing me for the long game. And that is not just in this situation. You saw it constantly, during the first two years of this administration, playing the long game, how do I get an infrastructure bill passed, and I try this and then I’ll try that. There are times when my administration needs to be invisible in these proceedings, even if we’re working behind the scenes, with the chips and science act with the inflation Reduction Act, all of these things required him at times to step back or appear to step back. If you look at his campaign, when he announced, you know, he said he wanted to run for president to restore the soul of the nation to rebuild the backbone of the nation, the middle class and to unify the nation. And people thought that was a crazy message. But he had a lot of faith in it. And it turned out, so did the American people. So I think part of what he brings to the table is what you were talking about, which is no playing the long game, seeing what the goal is, and having the experience and, frankly, the wisdom to know how to get there. And not having his ego so engaged, that he can’t put up with a couple of days of bad press in order to reach the goal.

Andy Slavitt 

Yeah, point I don’t want to talk about that record in a moment. But you hit it something that I think is very interesting. And it’s related to this view of the media. And it’s almost harder, which is the willingness to make the other side appear to be winners. We’ve sort of, for so long been in this mentality that my side wins, your side loses, there’s no other way for it to work out. What felt very unusual about the debt ceiling conversation was that the President seemed to be doing what he could to support speaker McCarthy to appear to be winning with his caucus. And I will say that, to me, it felt a little bit like, if you let me when I’ll agree to let you look like you one, because it’s substance, it does look like speaker McCarthy got very much. But being conscious that the other side needs to look good. It’s a sort of old fashioned governing notion.

Anita Dunn 

You know, when I worked for Bill Bradley, he used to say that the way to get things done in Washington was not to worry about who got credit for it, that there were, there was an unlimited amount you could get done as long as you let somebody else have the credit for it. And I think that is less true now than it was then. But it is still very true. That figuring out how to make everybody feel good about an outcome, or how to make the other side, not lose, but also have something where they can say they won is a much better way to approach these things. And as you point out, given the partisan, you know, the polarization that we live in right now and that we functioning right now, in terms of politics, that’s not the mindset a lot of people have is like, in order for me to feel like I really won, you have to lose. That is simply not the way that Joe Biden approaches these issues. His approach, which I know people think is kind of old fashioned, is extraordinarily effective, because it’s how can I make it possible for people to feel good and at the end of the day, to have Vote for something to support something that they don’t get everything they want. I didn’t get everything I wanted. But, you know, it’s probably a pretty good deal for both sides. And that is that is very much a throwback to the way Washington used to work. And yet, as he has shown since he took office, you can still do this.

Andy Slavitt 

Do you have faith that in 2023, the voting public can see through the hour by hour news cycle winners and losers and really recognize what you just said? I’d like to think the answer is yes. But it feels like it’s the $64,000 question is, by behaving that way, will the public see it and appreciate it?

Anita Dunn 

You know, I, I have a lot of faith in the American people. And I have a lot of faith in their ability to figure out what’s really important. If you remember, in 2022, the prognosis for the Democratic Party in the midterm elections was dire. And that was from the optimist. That’s true. I mean, it was terrible. You had the historical nature of midterm elections, which are referendum on the party in power, you had inflation that was higher than we had seen, since probably the early 80s, you had a country that coming out of the pandemic, is anxious and upset and scared, and all of those emotions that I think people still have. And you had a number of very vulnerable Democrats who were running in this midterm. And so the prognosis was very bad people thought it would be, you know, devastating for the Democratic Party. And the reality is, it wasn’t and part of it, a huge part of the democratic success in 2022, was that the President spoke, and he spoke about the economy spoke about the economy all the time, because we have a great story to tell. But more importantly, he also spoke to democracy. And he spoke to rights, he spoke to people who are concerned about what he calls the ultra mega wing of the Republican Party, and political violence. He spoke about issues that politicians normally haven’t spoken about. And the American people do care about democracy. And as it turns out, a bunch of voters came out because they cared about democracy, and they cared about rights. You know, and so I think, you know, we like to do a little punted accountability once in a while, and then go back and look at what the pundits have said and what they’ve written, and how wrong they can be sometimes, this was a situation where the pundits were very, very wrong, because you tend to I think sometimes, people in Washington underestimate the American people.

Andy Slavitt 

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Andy Slavitt 

But let’s focus on the actual record of the first couple of years of the term. And rather than ask you to lay out what you think his accomplishments are, I thought it might be interesting to have a third party objective person. So I asked Jen Rubin, who was on an episode a couple of weeks ago, she’s a conservative columnist for the Washington Post. So, you know, hardly a partisan hack. I asked her the question, to just have her lay out what she thought was, how the term was going. So far what she thought the President’s record was. So let’s, let’s listen to that. And I’d love to get your comment.

Anita Dunn 

He is portrayed by Republicans and often by the mainstream media as kind of a doddering old fool that he is either out of it or that he’s not really in touch with what people want. Or Democrats accuse him of being too soft or being unrealistic about Republicans. So whether from the left or the right, the mainstream media, no one other than a few of us are willing to stand up and say, he is having one of the most successful presidencies in our lifetime. He is passing more legislation than any president since LBJ. He is fundamentally transforming the American economy by making these huge investments in the heartland, both on green energy and chip manufacturing and infrastructure. And oh, by the way to boot, he’s put together this formidable NATO alliance to oppose Russian aggression and expelled expand NATO. So what more could you want, if you drew up the list of I’d like to have. And the job, of course, for progressives is if you want progressive gains, vote for a moderate, because they’re the ones who are going to be elected, and intellectual ideologically. They agree with improvements in the social safety net, they agree in the importance of investment to make American workers more productive. But they have some hope of getting elected. So I think if you had told me two years ago, that this would be the end result. I could have said no way. The Republicans are way too crazy. Democrats are too unrealistic. Biden’s gonna get only a fraction of that, but somehow he does.

Andy Slavitt 

So what do you think of that take?

Anita Dunn 

Well said Jen Rubin. That’s what I think. You know, it’s quite true. He, he is and continues to be one of the most underestimated politicians and underestimated presidents that I can certainly remember. Why is that why do we think that is? I think it’s a combination of things. I think that many of the reporters who cover him are generationally so removed from him, and also from his formative experiences in politics, they have a very different orientation on politics, and what they think voters should be doing and what they think voters care about, because they tend to live in Twitter, and in social media, which really does not represent the majority of the American people, not even the majority of the Democratic Party. I think that he’s been around for so long, that there’s not this sense of news surprise, that you can get Joe Biden and yet we should all be surprised by just how much he has been able to get done with those incredibly narrow majorities that he had, in his first first two years. I mean, he had a 5050 Senate. So the Vice President was continually having to break ties, as we like to say here, when the Vice President votes, we always win. But he also had a very narrow majority in the House of Representatives. And now of course, he has a one vote majority in the Senate. And we’re down five seats in the House, and yet, and yet, he can get these things done. I think, too, that he you know, he never really played the Washington game. He, as a senator, went home to Wilmington every night, to be with his family. He never really worked in Washington, the way you tend to build those relationships over social engagements. He was very much a creature of Wilmington, Delaware and continues to be. So I think it’s a combination of a lot of things. And finally, and this is an important point ending, you know, this from your own government service, which is governing requires competence. It requires a huge amount of hard work, and it’s really, really complicated. So it doesn’t lend itself to the kinds of stories that the incentive system of error in a modern press, literally look for, you know, the quick, flashy, you know, maybe slightly snarky things that are going to really go out there and make reporters into stars. You know, this is hard stuff that he’s trying to get done here and I’m You know, Jen, in her clip mentioned, rebuilding the United States global alliances in order to marshal the world against Russia and its aggression. You know, that’s a lot of phone calls behind closed doors, that’s a lot of time spent one on one with world leaders, it’s a lot of time this President has spent to rebuild America’s leadership in the world to keep those alliances alive. And you know, that time that he spends, it’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous, is not particularly clickbait, but it’s effective. So I think that’s one of the reasons why he’s underestimated is because people don’t see so much of what goes on. And then these things are complicated, and they’re just hard to get ahold of.

Andy Slavitt 

You know, it strikes me that there was a point in time when Joe Biden was in the Senate. And he was bringing two sides together of people who had a basic set of agreements, and what they wanted this country to be, and in certainly differences in policy, the thing that is so interesting now is as we roll into 2024, that all of the things that Jen Rubin said, which quite honestly, I’m gonna get to, people know my bias. Those are sound to me, like the kind of country we want, and the President we want. Yet there are people out there who are saying things like Tucker Carlson, who got on Twitter the other week, and said, that he has sympathy for Putin. And there are people who I think, just look at those things, and see them very differently. Because their values are different. And it’s a disturbing reflection of how, as a country, we have communities of people that are headed in different directions in terms of what they believe. And I think as we go into 2024, like, I wonder if we look back on Biden’s presidency, and where you’re gonna say, one of two things, this was the adult who saved democracy and saved us and get us back on the right course. Or we’re gonna say it was the last blip of holdover of the old way. And we are now fully into this nationalistic, populist place that is a country that had a recognize, so it feels like the, almost no matter who the nominee is on the Republican side, we’re going to face that kind of contrast.

Anita Dunn 

So I really can’t talk directly about a 2024 election, because I’m a federal employee, and I sure operate under the Hatch Act. But I will say that the recent debt ceiling agreement, and really the three big five partisan bills from 2021 and 2022, the infrastructure bill, the chips and science Act and the pact Act, which was the veterans bill to address, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who came back from those wars with having been exposed to toxic substances, those those bipartisan bills, and then this, this debt ceiling bill, you know, showed a center in politics that I think people often feel does not exist any longer, but it is there is very much there. If you look at who voted for the debt ceiling package and how it came together. In the House of Representatives, what you saw was no one predicted I don’t think we predicted that the vote would be as large in the house as it was for this package that we, you know, 370 members would end up voting for it that that you had such a large number of people kind of came together. And you know, the same for infrastructure, same for chips and science where you really had people who crossed party lines, a kind of center, forming itself in a very divided very polarized Washington where all the incentive systems are not to work together. So I’m perhaps not as pessimistic as you are. Because I do think that there’s a center here that is holding and if anything, Joe Biden has made it stronger and safer, to kind of work together with each other.

Andy Slavitt 

Certainly, it feels like the signs of optimism, or as you say, but of course we’re all a little bit pins and needles to make that optimism hold. I want to talk about maybe a couple of other quick things before we let you go. The first is this general sense that of all the things that Biden has accomplished that we’ve talked about only a fraction of them, I think, both talked about some of the important ones. They don’t appear to be reflected in political polling. It’s another question I asked Jen Rubin. And I want to play what she had to say. And it made me have you react to that, because your expertise in communications, I think is very, very useful. And how do you think about this?

Anita Dunn 

I hope that the Biden experiment is teaching people that it shouldn’t be the last throes that this is what they really should want. And I think I’ve come to the conclusion that polls are fairly meaningless. It’s become culturally inappropriate to say, I think things are great, or I love Biden, or my Congress is doing a great job. People are so disposed to be cynical to be negative. And the media coverage, even when news is really good is so overwhelmingly negative. I think the polls have less and less salience. And we’ve seen a few of these focus groups now, which seems to leave the mainstream media gobsmacked. But shouldn’t, where they interview a bunch of voters and they say, Yeah, we really don’t like Biden, we really don’t like Biden, well, who are you going to vote for? If Biden and Trump are the nominees? Oh, Biden, of course. And I think that this is some great revelation. But of course, the only thing that really matters is how they vote a year and a half, or whatever it is from now.

Andy Slavitt 

How do you reflect on that? And what do you think when you see these polls, because they don’t seem to reflect to me, the reality of what we’re experiencing as a country,

Anita Dunn 

With a lot of the reality that we’re experiencing as a country, I think, is still to be understood coming out of this pandemic, I don’t think we have really come to grips with just how deep the scars are, for a lot of people from the last three and a half years. And, and, in particular, from 2020 and 2021. I’m in, you know, part of 2022 as well. But those, you know, that anxiety that people have, the fear people have sometimes, I mean, it’s kind of the what’s going to happen next, right, and what terrible thing is going to happen next, I don’t think you know, the psychic scars from the pandemic are very real. And it means that people are anxious about the future, and they’re not willing, right now to be as optimistic as maybe they’re going to be in a in another year or so. And Joe Biden’s the incumbent. So, you know, the incumbent tends to bear the brunt of those things. But as you point out, and I can say this hype, or as Jen Rubin pointed out, elections are about choices. So if you know, and elections are not referendums, they are about choices. So, I would say that we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what polls show at this, at this stage. Because at the end of the day, this President knows his job is to move this country forward. And he’s extremely focused on it. You asked earlier about age. And, you know, one thing about Joe Biden is, you know, he’s not wondering what his next job is, right? I mean, he, he knows why he’s president. He knows what he wants to get done. He knows what the jobs are, that he feels need to be finished. And he knows what he wants to leave behind. In terms of an America whose economy really does work for middle class, working class people where people feel like there’s a path forward again, for them, where America’s world leadership means that everybody can feel more safe and more secure, as opposed to in a kind of adrift in an unsafe world where people are judged as people. And we’re people in this country not divided against each other, but where we’re encouraged to see each other’s neighbors as fellow Americans as members of a community, so he knows what kind of country he wants us to be. He knows and he hasn’t been Have a good sense of how he wants to get there. And that is really, at the end of the day, I think how he’s going to measure his success.

Andy Slavitt 

I want to ask you want one twist of the question around age. I think there’s a lot of people in this country who are absolutely terrified at Donald Trump becoming president, again, terrified, and they are supporters of Joe Biden’s. And the one thing that they might say to me, is, how do I talk about, I’m worried that I have neighbors that might not vote for him? Because they say he’s too old? And so they worry? Yeah, they don’t take actual credit for saying they worry about his age, although some might. But they, but they want an answer. And they worry that the one place that he could be in trouble, would be talking about his age. And I am sure you get that question, both at a personal level, as well, as you know, sort of from a communications standpoint, I’m curious what advice you’d have for people who are confronted with that question.

Anita Dunn 

I think if people get asked that question, why would you support Joe Biden, don’t you think that his age is a problem? With age comes wisdom, with age comes experience, and with Joe Biden, what you’ve seen our results, more results than any president has gotten that really make a difference for people in decades. And so just as there are advantages to youth, there are also advantages to the wisdom and experience that somebody brings to the table when they have been around for a while. So I think that now you look at the positive results, you look at what he’s gotten done. And you measure that, because at the end of the day, you’re hiring a president, you’re voting for a president to get things done, that are going to be meaningful in your life. I mean, you see that roads being built, when you see those lead pipes being removed from your community, when your relatives who live in a rural area have high speed broadband, for the first time, when that new factory is moving into your community, where you haven’t had, you know, manufacturing jobs for decades. That’s what wisdom and experience gets you. So that’s what Joe Biden has gotten you. And I think that the answer is really to talk about his achievements. But also, why was he able to get them done? Because he does know how to get things done. And that’s something that age, wisdom and experience get you.

Andy Slavitt 

In the second term, you think people will be able to kind of make the leap to being him even slightly older? And say, Yeah, I still a very comfortable with that. Or do you think there’s some thing else that you need to say to people, and you know, I find it hard because everybody’s met the man, but the guy is like, fit and lean and strong and clear. And people saw the State of the Union, sharper and quicker than a bunch of hecklers. And yet, it’s not so easy to communicate that to people, because they may know someone in their 80s Say, I could never imagine that person being president. And that’s the sort of, it’s a sort of almost ageism, that people run up against. It’s true,

Anita Dunn 

But we, we’ve gotten some of the best testimonials we’ll ever get Andy, from some of the Republican members of Congress who are upset about the debt ceiling bill, and who have talked about how Joe Biden took Kevin McCarthy to the cleaners on this now, you know, I think Speaker McCarthy did get some concessions that appeal to his party. But at the end of the day, you know, if you look at the State of the Union, if you look at the negotiations here, if you look at what he’s gotten done, the reality is that, you know, you can put him up against any recent precedent, and he’s gonna look damn good.

Andy Slavitt 

Well, I needed I so appreciate you coming in to the bubble. As people on the show know, people like Angela Merkel and Winston Churchill are people that we would have liked to see and serve for it, ever until they were done. I’m so glad the President isn’t. And I’m so grateful that he has you around, and the rest of the team to advise them. Thanks for bringing the bubble.

Anita Dunn 

Thank you for letting me join you in the bubble for a little while this afternoon.

Andy Slavitt 

All right. Thank you to Anita Dunn, for that wonderful conversation. I hope you felt like you got it inside. Hope you can in the bubble with Anita, who’s terrific. And appreciate her coming on. Let me tell you. We have so many great shows coming up this summer. I can barely contain myself, but I’m trying. We have among other people, Zeke Emanuel, who is going to talk to us in front of a audience of some selected healthcare experts. about what’s gonna happen in the future to our health care, Tom Frieden, who is working on a report on how to be prepared for the next pandemic, and he’s got a cool new system that we’re going to talk to him about. And he’s the former head of the CDC. We’re going to actually have our very first live studio audience show, recorded from Aspen with the head of Medicare. Nina Somani. We have the new head of the CDC coming on. And we have the California Surgeon General coming on. You might think, wow, what should I pay to listen to this show? And I wouldn’t blame you. But it’s nothing. It’s free. It’s just absolutely free. You don’t even have to buy the t shirt or the hat or the coffee mug. Oh, but you can if you like. Anyway, I hope you have a great week. Thank you for tuning in. And I will talk to you next week.

Andy Slavitt 

Thanks for listening to IN THE BUBBLE. We’re a production of Lemonada Media. Martin Macias and Kyle Shiely produced our show, and they’re great. Our mix is by Noah Smith and James Barber, and they’re great, too. Steve Nelson is the vice president of the weekly content, and he’s okay, too. And of course, the ultimate bosses, Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittels Wachs, they executive produced the show, we love them dearly. Our theme was composed by Dan Molad and Oliver Hill, with additional music by Ivan Kuraev. You can find out more about our show on social media at @LemonadaMedia where you’ll also get the transcript of the show. And you can find me at @ASlavitt on Twitter. If you like what you heard today, why don’t you tell your friends to listen as well, and get them to write a review. Thanks so much, talk to you next time.

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