- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claaire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.

- I'm Evan Smith.

She's a legendary journalist who was formerly anchor and managing editor, and now is a senior correspondent at the PBS News Hour.

She's Judy Woodruff.

This is "Overheard".

(bright music) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

(audience cheering) You've really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving into the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standard that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard".

(audience applauding) (audience applauding) Judy, it's so great to be with you.

Thank you for being here.

- It's great to be back in Austin.

It's great to be talking to you.

- Well thank you very much.

And I do feel like I'm in the presence of greatness, to be honest.

I mean, I think about the people who have been characters in the narrative over the years, as all of us who are news junkies have watched the events of the last 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, in your case.

- [Judy] Yes.

- Unfold.

You have been there at the center.

- Garfield administration.

That was the first one.

- You went back to the Garfield?

Yeah.

(audience laughing) (Judy laughs) Yeah, jokes about being old are working for the president.

Maybe they actually should, yeah.

So can we do the bio part of this first, and then talk about the state of journalism?

- Sure.

- So you were an army brat?

- Yes.

- Right?

Born in Tulsa.

- Born in Tulsa, yeah.

- [Evan] Moved around a while, and landed eventually in Augusta, Georgia.

- That's right.

- Right.

And you went to Duke University?

- I did.

I started at a small woman's college in Meridith in Raleigh, and then I transferred to Duke, that's right.

- [Evan] And studied political science?

- [Judy] Started in math, but switched to political science.

That's right, yeah.

- [Evan] And you wanted to, you were thinking, at least, that you wanted to go maybe into politics or government and do something like that?

- Work in government.

Not run for office, but thought I would like to work in government, yeah.

- Why didn't you do it?

- Well, what happened was, Evan, it was the late 1960s.

I had two summers in a row, I was an intern, Capitol Hill in Washington for our Congressmen from Georgia.

A Democrat named Bob Stevens, conservative Democrat.

He was a banking committee.

- Yeah.

- The women I talked to on Capitol Hill, I was seeking career advice.

This was the summer before my senior year in college, and what they said to me was you really don't want to come back to Washington, Judy, because you're gonna be the coffee girl.

You're gonna be the gopher in the office, or whatever word we used back then.

- [Evan] Right.

- And I took that to heart.

So when I went back to school my senior year, I started talking to my professors, I said, well I was thinking I'd go to Washington.

Now I don't know, and one of the professors I admired the most said, did you ever think about covering politics?

And it was literally that kind of light bulb that went off.

- [Evan] It was like an a-ha moment.

- And I thought, hmm.

That's really interesting.

Now I had never written for the Duke Chronicle.

I had never done anything related to journalism, so I kind of scrambled, and thought what can I do?

And the only thing I could get a job was as a secretary, working at one of the television stations- - [Evan] At the ABC affiliate in Atlanta?

- [Judy] In Atlanta.

- [Evan] And this is 1968?

- [Judy] This is 1968.

- Right.

And so you started out doing that, but actually, you also ended up doing the weather?

- I did.

- At that station.

- Because, when the news director hired me, and I kept pestering him to let me go out and hang out, can I just hang out on the weekends, and evenings with the reporters, and he said, why would we do that, Judy?

We already have a woman reporter.

- [Evan] We already have a woman reporter.

(audience laughing) - [Judy] We have a woman reporter.

- [Evan] That box is checked.

- That box was checked.

- Yeah.

- And so along came, and he knew that I wanted to cover politics at some point in the future.

So he came to me one day, and he said we just fired our weekend weather girl.

That's what they called them.

- [Evan] Right.

Oh god bless.

- [Judy] And he said, how would you like to audition?

- [Evan] Right.

- And I said I'm not interested.

I said I wanna cover politics at some point.

I said I wanna be a reporter.

I'm not interested in the weather.

I don't know anything about the weather.

- [Evan] Right.

- He said if you're ever gonna get experience on the air so we can judge what kind of ability you have, you need to audition.

So reluctantly, I tried out.

They hired me for the Sunday night 11 p.m. weather.

(audience laughing) It was like Cinderella.

During the week, I would come in, clean the film, answer the phone, take dictation, and the rest of it.

And then I'd come in on Sunday nights at six o'clock, memorize the weather wires, stand in front of a map with little notes written to myself so small you couldn't see them on the camera, about a high over Dubuque, or a low over Phoenix, or whatever.

And I did that for six months, after which we mutually agreed that this was not my calling.

- [Evan] Not your thing, right.

(audience laughing) - And then, luckily, out of the blue, not out of the blue.

I'd been pestering this other news director at the CBS station to hire me, or to at least talk to me as a reporter.

He called me up one day and he said we've just lost our reporter who covered the state legislature.

He's had health problems.

And he said another reporter is leaving to have a baby.

And that was their only woman reporter.

- [Evan] Oh, woman reporter, right.

- And he said, you know, you've sent me, told me you're interested.

And so he hired me.

- Amazing.

- To cover the Georgia State Legislature.

- So you stayed there for five, six years.

Is that right?

- [Judy] That's right.

I stayed there five years.

- And you got to know as a consequence of covering the state, you covered Jimmy Carter?

- [Judy] The fellow who ran for governor and won.

- [Evan] Right, peanut farmer.

- And the peanut farmer from South Georgia, who nobody took seriously.

In 1970, he won.

And you could only serve one term then in Georgia.

And at the end of that time, this was an ambitious fellow, and the people around him were already thinking he needs to run for president.

And he was thinking I need to run for president, as he's famously said, when other candidates would come through the Georgia state house, and he'd meet them, nobody impressed him.

He said, I'm smarter than all of them.

- I'm the one I've been looking for.

(audience laughing) - Thank you.

- Right?

- So, and about that time, I was looking to go to a network.

I saw my life passing me by.

I was all of 27 years old.

- Yeah.

- My colleagues were leaving to go to bigger markets, in Washington, New York.

And I thought, if I don't get a job with a network, I'm washed up.

- Right.

- So I applied for a job.

The vice president at NBC News in New York said you need to go work on your Southern accent, because I had developed a Southern accent living in the South at that point.

And he said call me back in a year.

I was completely crestfallen.

I went back to Atlanta, went through the Yellow Pages to find a voice coach.

- Oh no, really?

- And called this woman up, made an appointment.

Two days later, he called me back, or called me, and said we just fired our correspondent based in our Southeastern bureau in Atlanta.

Send me another audition tape, which I did, and they hired me immediately.

- Got the job, and this was before Carter was elected president?

- This was before he was elected.

So this was December, January of 1975, when his campaign was really- - Taking off.

- Gearing up.

- Yeah.

- Exactly.

- [Evan] And then he gets elected, and they bring you to Washington to be a White House correspondent?

- [Judy] That's right.

After a lot of lobbying by me, because I was so green.

You can imagine.

- [Evan] Gotta advocate for yourself.

- I was green, I was new, and they had a long line of people with more experience.

- So Jimmy Carter becomes the first of, as you and I did the math backstage, eight presidents who you've covered in some fashion in your career?

- That's right.

- Right?

Carter through Biden.

What do you remember, I mean, I wanna ask a kind of high level question, because we could probably spend all day talking about every single one of those presidents, but who was the most interesting president of those to cover, and who if you had to do over again, would you just as soon not have covered?

- Oh boy.

(audience laughing) You know Evan, I like you a lot, but there's no way I'm gonna- - [Evan] No, you're not gonna answer?

(audience laughing) I thought I'd catch you off guard.

No, no.

- [Judy] There's no way I'm gonna answer that.

- Was it fun to- - They were all- - They were all good?

- Let me put it this way.

They're all interesting, fascinating in some way, because the fact that they have gotten to the highest job- - [Evan] It's a very small club.

- In the country, in the world.

The fact that they've done that, and they all did it through different means.

I mean, Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer.

Governor of Georgia.

George H.W.

Bush.

Ronald Reagan, movie actor, to the presidency.

George H.W.

Bush had been CIA director.

- George W. Bush, goofball, right?

We could go down all the list of presidents.

- [Judy] Your word, your word.

- [Evan] My word.

Let's know Judy did not call him a goofball.

- But each president is, I mean, I'm stating the obvious.

Barrack Obama, you mentioned George W. Bush.

Barrack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden.

Each one brings their own history, their own set of circumstances, who they are.

They are completely different individuals.

- [Evan] Completely different.

- And each one, in his own way, and it's all men so far, is fascinating.

I mean, as somebody who has followed politics as long as I have, I'm fascinated by every one of them.

- Well, the front row seat you've had as history is being made in real time, no one would dispute, is interesting.

And of course, I'll acknowledge that not only have you covered eight presidents and eight presidencies and eight administrations, but you've also moderated debates.

When I was preparing for the show, I had to be reminded, you did the Quayle Benson debate.

- That's right.

- You did the famous Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy debate.

- 1988, your Texas senator, Lloyd Benson was Michael Dukakis' running mate.

- [Evan] Right.

God, it seems like forever ago, doesn't it?

- And Ronald Reagan's vice president, George H.W.

Bush, had chosen this relatively young senator from Indiana, Dan Quayle, to be his running mate, and everybody, wait a minute, they were saying.

This man hasn't been around long enough to be one breath away from the presidency.

- He looked a little bit like a deer in the headlights, at moments.

- And so- - At moments.

- In the debate, he had said on the campaign trail, Dan Quayle had, he had compared himself, on occasion, to John Kennedy, who was also young.

So we learned later, the Benson campaign expected that he might bring that up again.

- Yeah.

- And he did.

- They were lying in wait.

- They were lying in wait, and he did bring it up, and Senator Benson was ready, and the line is memorable.

- [Evan] It's one of the most memorable lines from any debate ever.

- From any debate.

- [Evan] In history.

- And he looked at him, and sort of stood even taller than he was, what he was six three, or whatever he was.

- [Evan] Big guy, right, yeah.

- Even taller.

Said Senator, I know, knew John Kennedy.

Senator- - [Evan] He was a friend of mine.

- [Judy] John Kennedy was a friend of mine.

Senator, you are no John Kennedy.

- [Evan] Right.

- And the house, the building exploded.

I mean, the audience exploded.

There was, of course, a big audience.

And those of us who were on the panel, I was the moderator, just thought wow, this debate's over.

He just cleaned his clock, you know, probably the election's over.

This means that H.W.

is not gonna win.

Well, of course.

- [Evan] Well whatever happened to that Dan Quayle guy?

Oh, he became Vice President.

(audience laughing) - [Judy] He became Vice President.

Which is a reminder that debates don't determine election outcomes.

- [Evan] In the end, it doesn't necessarily matter.

- In the end.

They can be a moment, and they have, on occasion, made a difference.

- Right.

- But they also can make no difference whatsoever.

- So let's think about the 50 and a little bit more years that you've been at this, you have seen journalism.

Speaking of things happening in real time.

You have watched journalism change over time.

- Completely.

- In real time.

And back to this idea about gender, and when you got into the business, there were so few women in these news organizations.

Some of those women who were there at that time with you became very close professional and personal- - And personal friends.

- Friends.

Andrea Mitchell is the godmother of one of your children.

- Of our daughter.

- Yeah.

- That's right.

She's a very close friend.

- Leslie Stahl was somebody you knew for years and years.

- We competed against each other at the White House.

She was at CBS, I was at NBC.

And of course, she still has an enormously successful career at 60 Minutes.

We are good friends.

She's in New York, I'm in Washington.

Ann Compton, who covered the White House for ABC.

- [Evan] ABC, right.

- We remain friends to this day.

We've all, back in the day, Evan, there were so few women, that we were, I think, in many ways by network executives, kind of pitted against each other.

Nobody ever came out and said that.

But each network had, not one woman, but only a few women.

And the women were, in so many ways, contrasted and compared with each other.

And we figured out at some point along the way, it wasn't in the very beginning, but at some point along the way, we decided we had to be close to each other.

- [Evan] You had to support each other.

- [Judy] To support each other.

- [Evan] Right.

- And that's what we've done.

And today, I have so many women friends, thankfully, and younger women will tell you today who are newer in the business that they have made close friendships with other women.

- Well fortunately, the news business has become much more equitable in terms of women being given not only opportunities- - Thank goodness.

- But are in very visible roles.

You know, you have Kristen Welker now hosting Meet the Press- - Thank goodness.

- And you've got, I mean, we could go down the list.

- Norah O'Donnell.

- Norah O'Donnell.

- Is hosting the CBS Evening News.

- Evening News.

- Exactly.

- You know, when you and our dear friend Gwen Eiffel were co-hosting the news hour, over time, the baton passed.

Now the absolutely magnificent Amna Nawaz.

- Amna Nawaz is there.

- With Geoff Bennett, right?

- And Geoff Bennett.

It's an incredible team.

- And again, there is a case where gender is better than it was in the news business, and also people of color in positions that are visibly in leadership, in leadership roles, very visible anchor roles and everything else.

- No question.

- All better.

- I mean, nobody thinks twice about Lester Holt being the anchor of the NBC Nightly News.

And nobody would think twice about Amna and Geoff.

It was a very natural transition from my- - That's one of the things that's better about our business- - To them.

- Right?

It's more representative.

- We have become more representative, no question.

And I think that makes us better able to cover America, because America is more diverse today than it's ever been.

We in the media, not just in television, but in print.

And the people who are covering the big stories need to be diverse as well.

- Have the same lived experience as the people they're writing for, and writing about?

- It doesn't mean that only those people can cover those stories.

- But acknowledge the moment we're in, right.

- But let's acknowledge it, exactly.

- Now that's one of the good things about journalism over time.

One of the bad things, and there could be a long list of those, is that the economics of doing this kind of work have really gone south on us.

- Yes.

- Haven't they?

- The business is upside down.

When the wonderful, we all love the internet.

We live with our devices.

But it has completely, I would say, thrown the world of journalism into crisis.

Because more than 2,500 newspapers across America have shut down in the last couple of decades.

Tens of thousands of reporters have been laid off.

We have lost the guts, the beating heart, of so much of journalism in city after city, town after town.

Now most of those 2,500 papers are weeklies, but many of them were dailies, or not but, and, and those weeklies, I mean, we covered right here in Texas.

We went to a small town in the Panhandle.

- [Evan] Canadian?

- Canadian.

- Yeah.

- Went there to cover the Canadian record, this amazing woman named Laurie Brown, who had held this paper together for decades, picked up where her father had left off.

He had been the editor for several years, almost literally died at his desk because he put in so many hours.

She couldn't afford to keep it going.

She had to shut it down last year.

The community was in mourning.

We go to this community, it's politically conservative.

- One of the more conservative counties in the entire state?

- In the entire state of Texas.

We talked to a rancher named Steve Raider, and I'll never forget it.

I sat down with him in his kitchen, and he was in tears, talking about how this paper was the glue that held the community together.

He said, this is the newspaper that told the story, he said it told all of our stories.

Birth, marriages, deaths.

Who got stopped at the traffic, you know, got a traffic ticket, and on and on.

And he said it told the story of my family.

I could read about my grandchildren's high school football games.

- Right.

- In this paper, she put out, I think it was a 46 page paper, believe it or not, every week for two and a half decades.

- Pretty much on her own back.

I mean, that's a thing, right.

- And now with a very small staff.

- Very small staff.

- And then the internet comes along, and again, as much as we love, and hate, the internet, people get their news for free, and they don't wanna pay subscriptions- - Yeah, and it eats the lunch of people like Laurie Ezzell Brown.

Yeah, which is really too bad.

And look, the thing is that I think in a world that has become so polarized over just the simplest things, whatever her personal politics were, whatever the rancher's personal politics were, the paper was a place where they could come together.

- Exactly.

And in fact, he said to me, Steve Raider said to me, I don't always agree with her columns.

He said sometimes I do, I surprise myself.

But he acknowledged, she's more liberal than he is.

But he said the paper is what is, literally, he said it's holding us together.

Now she's still, you know, they've had terrible wildfires up there just in the last, within the last month.

It's destroyed a lot of the community around Canadian.

They're no stranger to wildfires.

They have them.

And so I checked in with folks who'd been checking in with them, and she's been reporting on Facebook, using Facebook to put something out.

- [Evan] Whatever it takes.

- But it's not the same.

- So the trust issue is another thing that is a big difference from today going back to the day.

When you started in the business, I would say, it's probably safe to say, that the default setting was people trusted the media.

Today, the default setting is absolutely they do not trust the media.

- Well, Walter Cronkite was probably, or was, the most trusted man in America.

- [Evan] Most trusted man in America, right?

- [Judy] 25 or 30 million people were watching Walter Cronkite in the Evening News.

- Now happily, you and I both know, because we're both PBS fans.

We both, if you cut us, we bleed PBS Blue, right?

As we say.

That PBS enjoys some of the highest ratings in terms of the public's trust of any of the producers of the news.

- [Judy] But we never take it for granted.

- [Evan] Never take it for granted.

- Everyday, we try really, really hard to get it right, and if we ever make a mistake, which we try not to do, to correct it right away.

- Acknowledge it.

Why do you think the rest of journalism has been suffering as it has?

And why do you think PBS is the outlier, relatively speaking, in terms of the public's trust?

- Well, it's happened over time, Evan.

And you know this very well.

I mean, there's so much opinion that has crept into journalism.

And frankly, people are having a harder and harder time distinguishing between what's reporting, and what's opinion.

And it's got mushed together.

You've got people who work in a White House, they show up the next day, anchoring a program on television, and you're thinking, wait a minute.

- [Evan] How am I supposed to, right.

- How am I supposed to know?

Are they a journalist, or what are they?

And you know, I'm a journalist, I've never, I mean, I think journalism should be about reporting, and then there's room for opinion, absolutely.

We wanna, free country, First Amendment.

We should have a great debate everyday about the big issues of the day.

But do we want this much, do we want opinion to be what's swamping everything else?

I worry about the survival of fact-based, frankly just straight ahead journalism.

That's what we're forgetting about.

That's what we're losing.

When young people come to me, and they say they're thinking about going into journalism, I say yes, by all means, but don't go in assuming that you're gonna be writing an opinion piece everyday.

- Well, the reality is what the world needs is not more of what I think.

It needs to be more of what the audience you're serving thinks, believes, care about, right?

- Well, and what you know to be facts.

What you know to be facts.

And frankly, for reporters to be more humble.

As we go into covering stories, I don't think it would hurt for us to acknowledge that we don't have the whole story, that we haven't got it all figured out, that we're talking to people, we're doing the best we can.

But a lot of these stories are moving targets.

I mean, the whole immigration story, which is so controversial.

The third rail right now in American politics.

There's so many, and a lot of it's very complicated.

I think the press needs to be more humble about the way we cover it, and the way we talk about it.

We need to do more educating and informing about what's actually going on.

That's just one example.

- Yeah.

So I wanna come to America at a Crossroads.

So you have what is, I think, a series within a series, is how I think of it.

It's something that you've hosted where you are focusing on the decline in trust, the lack of faith and competence in institutions, the polarization in this country.

We have a country that has come apart in many ways.

How do we bring the country and its communities and its people back together?

This is a worthwhile effort on your part to try to highlight this problem.

Do you think the problem is really solvable?

- Because I'm an optimist at heart, Evan, I have to believe it's solvable.

But do I think that on the day after the election in 2024, we're all suddenly gonna come together and sing "Kumbaya", no.

No, I don't.

- Regardless of the outcome.

I mean, there are people who think well, the election goes one way, we're gonna be bad, but if the election goes, and this is on both sides.

But if the election goes the other way, well, we're gonna be fine.

But the reality is no matter what the outcome of the election is, we have fundamental systemic problems, right?

- This is not just about what's happened in the last few years.

A lot of people have said to me, oh why are you doing this project?

We all know it started a few years ago, and the country's just much more polarized because our political leaders are stirring the pot.

The fact is, we started to become more polarized in the early 90s.

The political scientists have all documented this.

It's gotten worse.

If the American people were here, in the 90s, we're now here on issues from government spending to immigration to abortion, you name it, we're here.

And here's what's significant.

The feelings, the thoughts that people have about people in the other party are much darker, much worse.

If a few years ago, a Democrat thought, 40% of Democrats thought Republicans, or 35%, thought Republicans were dishonest.

Today, it's 72%.

And Republicans, it's even more so.

The numbers have doubled and tripled, where people just think the worst.

And this is exacerbated by politicians who are out there saying the other side is, they're not just ill-informed.

They are un-American.

They are people of no morals.

- How much do we bear responsibility to this?

I understand that there's been an intentional effort by some in politics to undermine, as I said, faith and confidence in institutions, the media, Congress, the courts, all that, and to divide people because it benefits them at election time to have divided us all.

Do we in the media have a responsibility to try to push back against that in the work that we do to try to, to call it out when it happens to acknowledge it at a minimum?

Are we in any way culpable in this?

- Absolutely yes.

And not that we have a responsibility, not that we have a different role to be advocating for something, but we have a responsibility when people are stirring up artificially, often, different points of view, and when they're exaggerating and just making the position of people on the other side much worse- - Than it actually is, yeah.

- Than they actually are, and frankly, not being truthful about it, making stuff up, we need to call that out.

We need to say okay, so and so said this, but in fact, this is the way it is.

Now it gets complicated, because in a 30 minute television program, do you have time to correct half of what somebody said in an interview?

- Well not to mention to do it in real time during an interview.

- To do it in real time, that's the hardest thing.

- You have colleagues in the broadcast side who have interviewed people on air who have said things that were not true, and the people doing the interviews were criticized for not working as quickly to correct that stuff in that moment.

It's hard, as necessary as it.

- It's a very hard thing, because what it means is that we either don't do those interviews, excuse me, we either don't do them, or we lengthen them, and then that means we can't cover as many news stories.

So we have to make tough judgment calls about what we're gonna cover, how we're gonna cover it.

All I will say is that right now, I don't think we're doing, and I say we in the cosmic sense.

- Royal we.

- All of us.

Are not doing a good enough job of putting this in context.

We are falling into the trap of just repeating the ugly things that each sides say about the other, and just letting that sit there and fester, and get people upset, and a lot of it is just frankly not true.

And I will say- - [Evan] That's how we got to this point we're in.

- [Judy] And some news outlets are worse than others.

- [Evan] Do you wanna call those out?

- No.

(audience laughing) - I didn't think you did.

All right, so we have like two minutes left.

What have you not done in your extraordinary career that you'd still like to do?

I mean, you seem to me to be as energetic and as focused, as on it, as you've ever been.

I've watched you for so many years.

You are the same Judy Woodruff in so many ways as the Judy Woodruff who's narrated the big events of my lifetime.

You don't seem to be remotely thinking about hanging it up.

- No.

- What do you still wanna do that you haven't done?

- Well, one thing that I would love to do more of that I did start doing this year, and I started to do a series of pieces on the challenges facing people with disabilities.

My husband and I have a son, an adult son now, with significant disabilities.

That's become something that I've become more and more interested in, and I don't think it gets nearly enough attention.

And there are so many things- - [Evan] Well it affects the lives of so many people in this country.

- So many people.

- [Evan] We don't talk about that.

- And I'm frankly now getting, and just welcome them, so many emails, messages from people who say we ought to do more.

I think we need to get out in the country more and cover what's going on in Texas, in Oklahoma where I was born, in Colorado, in Louisiana, in Mississippi, in Nevada, and you name it.

We need to get out there, talk to the American people.

It's the kind of thing I'm doing with America at a Crossroads.

We need to be hearing from people who aren't heard from often enough, because a lot of people, I went to Steubenville, Ohio this year, Evan, and people said to me frankly, they said we don't think anybody listens to us.

And liberals and conservatives were saying this.

I think we've gotta do a better job, we in the press, of listening to people and respecting them, and not labeling them.

And frankly, you asked me what I wanna do, I'd love to continue reporting, getting out there, doing it in a way that remains some measure, that continues some measure of humility, 'cause we don't know it all.

I've been covering this stuff, as you said, 53 years, but there's still a lot I don't know.

And I'm eternally curious.

- Boy, what a great opportunity to sit and talk to you about this period, in your life, in our lives.

It's amazing to get to do it, and I thank you so much for making the time.

- Thank you.

- [Evan] Judy Woodruff, give her a big hand.

(audience applauding) (audience cheering) - [Judy] Thank you.

- [Evan] We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at AustinPBS.org/Overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- In some respects, Donald Trump has shifted shapes.

I mean, he was one thing when he ran for president in 2015 and 2016.

He became something a little bit different as president, and certainly in the three years since he's been in office.

So there's what we're covering is changing.

His experiences have changed.

The kind of things he says have changed.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by HillCo Partners.

A Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart.

And by Christine and Philip Dial.

(cheerful music)