from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, June 27.

Peter Hamby is with us. He's been writing about the presidential race for puck news.

He also hosts their podcast called The Powers That Be.

His experience puts him in a good position to preview tonight's debate because he worked for

CNN for a long time and won Emmy's there for coverage of election nights in 2012 and 2006,

plus a Peabody Award for CNN's Hurricane Katrina coverage and a Murrow Award for Innovation for

creating the Snapchat podcast, Good Luck America.

And he lives on the West Coast.

So, Peter, thanks for getting up early for us.

Welcome to WNYC.

To be here, Brian.

I was there in New York last week and joined the Heat heat dome, but I'm a fan of the shows.

I'm happy to get up early out here. Thank you so much. And hope the wildfires don't get you

now that you're back in California. Everybody's talking about how Trump and Biden are preparing

for tonight's debate. Based on your experience at CNN, how do you think the moderators, Jake Tapper,

and Dana Bash are preparing? I'm glad you asked that. I was thinking about talking about that a little

bit before I came on. In my time at CNN, I was behind the scenes many, many times, untold a number of

debates. Those were all primary debates, of course. This is the

first national general election debate that's owned and operated by a single television network.

But CNN does a very good job of these things. There are obviously a lot of dart throwers and

critics on Twitter every time a network runs a debate.

But CNN, they do all the bells and whistles.

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