Biden: The Candidate for the Trump Moment

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My fellow Americans, this is America's Day.

This is Democracy's Day.

A day of history and hope, of renewal and resolve.

Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy.

The will of the people has been heard, and the will of the people has been heeded.

Hi, this is Kevin the Producer.

We started the ticket at the outset of 2020 before there was even a Democratic nominee, before there was a pandemic, before an insurrection attempt at the Capitol.

And yesterday, there was a transfer of power.

And so the ticket, at least for now, at least in this form, is over.

As we move into a new administration, Isaac is going to be shifting gears, not covering the race, but covering the new administration.

And so we're going to pause this show for a little bit while we work on new projects.

For one, we're going to be launching a new show in a couple weeks called The Experiment.

It's going to examine the contradictions and ideals at the heart of the American experiment.

When it comes out on February 4th, we'll put the first episode in this feed.

I think you'll really enjoy it.

You'll get that first sample here on on this feed.

And if you like it, you can go ahead and subscribe.

But for today, I wanted to turn the tables on Isaac a bit.

He's been our guide to this crazy year.

He's interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hillary Clinton.

We recorded an episode on a bus with Beto O'Rourke in the basement of the Mother Emmanuel Church with Corey Booker, and unfortunately, way too many to count on Zoom.

He's had this rare front row seat to this race, and so

is the guest for this closing episode.

We're going to talk about Trump, Biden, and what he's learned from covering this surreal period of history.

Hey, Isaac.

Hi.

It's the first day you've woken up in Washington where Donald Trump is not the president of the United States in like four years, and it's a strange moment.

Yeah, and I came into the Trump presidency within a sort of weird view.

The day of Trump's inauguration, I covered the farewell ceremony that Obama did, and he was trying to buck up Democrats then, the Obama most loyal adherents then, to think that Trump's presidency wouldn't go on forever.

There were a lot of very depressed people in the Obama White House.

But what he said was, I'm almost getting this quote right, if not exactly, as he said, think of this not as a period, but as a comma.

Obviously,

They were much happier on January 20th this time around.

And so when I went to the inauguration for Biden, which is the first inauguration that I've actually ever been to in person, when Obama walked out, there was a big cheer for him.

And it did feel like kind of closing the circle in a way on my coverage.

So it was a period to the earlier comma?

I guess so.

Maybe now it's a semicolon.

I'm not sure.

It's a comma for Trump, a period for Biden, something like that.

Something.

Yeah.

That is very ironic that this was your first time being there in person.

Being in person at this inauguration was not a thing many people were going to get the chance to do.

What was it like there?

Really strange because I've spent a lot of time walking around that area, those buildings, and

the fences that were put up with barbed wire around them, military convoys going through, all sorts of troops.

They had National Guard troops and they had border patrol officers who were brought in, all sorts of resources that were there in addition to the Capitol Police.

So it did feel very much like a police state inside there.

I guess the upside to a police state is it's all very orderly.

It didn't really take that long to get through.

Let's do the full episode on the benefits of police states.

This is what we should really.

The distribution of the tickets ran on time, yes.

It's a strange thing.

I mean, like, there was a moment that was both really impactful as I watched, but also kind of odd to see, which I think it was during the, when Garthbrook sang Amazing Grace, but it cut to a shot of National Guardsmen with their heads bowed, sort of listening.

And it was very poignant, but also very sad that that's the image that we got going into this.

And I was wondering if there was a bit of a disconnect on the ground, feeling like, okay, this beautiful thing is happening for everyone watching, but it's kind of a distanced barbed wire police state here in an odd way.

Yeah, I mean, like, for all my joking about the police state, it was sad to see that this is supposed to be a celebration of democracy.

It should not not be that we have to have a celebration of democracy behind barbed wire and with machine guns walking around.

The inauguration was going to be secured anyway, but the reason why it was extra secure, of course, was because of the people who attacked the Capitol two weeks before climbing on the scaffolding that was set up for this ceremony.

And in talking with members of Congress, many of them brought up unprompted to me,

I can't believe there's concertina wire here.

You know, we're going to have to do something to secure it, but it can't look like this.

Or it's just so terrible.

And, you know, that was just hard to escape from it.

And I think Biden's speech also, you know, it hit on the

basics of civility and patriotism, unity.

He didn't say Donald Trump's name at all.

Of course, the whole thing is in the shadow of Trump and of the last four years.

And

Biden has been wanting to be president for 50 years.

He's quite happy to have the job.

But there is a reality to it that

his election and his presidency will in so many ways be defined not by him, but by who he's not and by who he beat.

And in good ways and bad ways and whatever ways it'll, that's what I would imagine the future is going to hold a lot of for him.

Yeah.

So Biden didn't say Donald Trump's name at his speech yesterday, but by all counts, it seemed like it marked the moment in a way that felt appropriate for people.

What was your reaction watching the speech?

What he did speak about a lot in the speech was religion and religion, not in a Catholic way, necessarily.

It was

the basic morals of religion.

And religion is so much a part of Joe Biden's life of who he is, of how he understands things.

He goes to church every week, not for show, never with cameras in there.

He most of the time goes by himself, not even with his wife.

Now, it's not to say that Jill Biden is not connected to faith herself, and she has spoken about how she had a crisis of faith after their son Bo died.

Whatever you think of that as a way that people are and value that they have, it is a value that Joe Biden has.

And I think to me, what really jumped out as the most Biden moment of the speech was when he stopped and he asked for a moment of silence and a prayer.

He didn't say like, we're going to say a Hail Mary or something, right?

He just asked for a moment to stop

and to not say anything and to reflect

and to.

to have prayer in whatever way that people might have it, which,

you know, is a comment on Biden, but is also a comment on the last four years, whether it's reflection or whether it's just being quiet for a few seconds.

Yeah.

Of the ways in which he as a candidate met this moment, I feel like the

amount of grief that's in the country, that's something that he's been very connected to as a person on a human level.

I mean, you mentioned faith.

It sounds like his faith has carried him through big personal tragedy over the years and that now he's sort of been elected to be the griever-in-chief.

I think when you look at this man's life, he has gone through terrible, terrible things.

He's also obviously gotten to be a senator, a vice president, now the president of the United States.

There are not a lot of people who have to go through burying one child.

He has buried two children.

He has buried a wife.

He goes from, in the space of a couple of weeks in 1972, from being elected elected senator, the youngest senator in history, not even old enough to take the oath.

Anybody who's like heard a Biden speech has heard him tell that part of it.

But what he usually doesn't mention is that his win was a surprise.

Nobody knew who he was, basically.

And he's riding high on all of that.

And then a truck hits,

like you can't write this stuff into a novel.

A truck hits the car that his wife and children are driving without him there because he's in Washington having meetings to be a senator.

And they're on their way to get a Christmas tree and instantly kills his wife and baby daughter.

The two boys, Hunter and Bo.

Bo is, I think, it's a year and a day older than Hunter, survived, but they were in the hospital for a very long time afterwards.

Biden has this connection to firefighters that has been really important through his political career, but it's also really important to him because he credits firefighters with saving the boys.

They had the jaws of life.

They had to pry open the car.

And then Bo Biden, who was, and I knew Bo Biden just a little bit and I had done a profile on him.

He was the heir to Biden in like every way.

He was the Delaware Attorney General.

He before

he got sick with brain cancer, had been expected to run for governor.

Sort of everybody assumed he was going to run for president and probably would be president.

He had a lot of the things that people like about Biden without a lot of the things that people don't like about Biden.

He didn't have speeches that would go on for like an hour, right?

He

was in the National Guard.

He was very orderly without being strict.

So he was just sort of like a more polished Joe Biden.

At his funeral, Obama described him as Biden 2.0.

And when he died, which felt to most people who didn't know that he was sick to be very sudden, but in fact, as we've now learned, was a long process of being sick and treatments that weren't working.

That

located Biden in people's minds as somebody who's gone through this.

Not just that old story from 1972, but the story in 2015 that this guy is the vice president of the United States and he had to live through burying his son.

I mean, I remember I wrote an article.

a day or two after Bo died that had a line that was something like, he's America's Uncle Joe, and his son's death feels like a death in the family.

And, you know, Biden had at that point become like the onion character, like Diamond Joe, right?

And like polishing his trans am in the driveway, all that stuff.

And like he just was very folksy in the sort of most cliche ways.

But when Bo died, that resonated with so many people.

And I saw that over and over again on the trail, the way that people would just connect with him

and

sometimes not even need to say a word to him.

This sounds so corny, I know, but to watch people back in the days when there were events and there were

lines of people waiting to see him, and especially in most of the primary campaigning when he didn't have Secret Service on him and people could just walk up to him and he would just like literally hold people.

They would handshakes that became double arm grips that became hugs that people would just start crying into him.

And I think that that became a meeting of this moment that he was not expecting.

He knew that people would be feeling just unstable and rattled by what the last four years have been like.

He didn't know that the pandemic would be here, obviously, but

his chief of staff has now projected that we're going to hit 500,000 American deaths before we start turning the corner on this.

It's an astounding number.

And I think that because we've all been living our weird lockdown lives, most of us haven't really processed what that means.

Yeah.

So we're talking about how his status as almost griever-in-chief felt right for the moment.

There was this quote the other day at the inauguration of how he might have been the person for this moment, for this specific campaign.

You spoke to Jim Clyburn a few weeks ago on the show.

George W.

Bush, when he was there, spoke to Clyburn and said, if you had not endorsed Joe Biden, we would not be having this transfer of power today.

Joe Biden was the only one who could have defeated the incumbent president.

I'm curious, do you agree with Bush on that assessment?

Well, and I talked to Clyburn myself

again a couple hours after the inauguration, and he likes to both make sure people know his role in history and downplay it.

It's the humility of a very successful politician.

Clyburn, of course, endorsed Biden a couple of days before the South Carolina primary.

Then Biden crushed everybody else in the South Carolina primary and then went on to this bizarre four-day turnaround of his campaign where he went from

having no hope of winning anything to being the

beyond the frontrunner.

He was just like essentially the nominee by the end of Super Tuesday.

As I

closed out the year and I've been finishing this book that I've been working on about the campaign, you know, there are chapters of the book that cover a couple of months and then there are chapters of the book that cover a couple of days in that period because it really

it changed very, very quickly in ways that I think make sense when you look at the whole arc of what happened.

But to bring it back to Clyburn, look, Jim Clyburn is not the only one.

And George Bush is not the only one who thinks that Joe Biden is the only candidate who could have beaten Trump.

I think that that assessment, when you look at the way the vote counts went,

it really does suggest that that's correct.

The difference of in the Electoral College from where we were was 44,000 votes over three states.

The difference of Donald Trump winning the Electoral College was 69,000.

Now, I'm not sure what would have happened.

if Joe Biden had won the popular vote by 7 million and Trump had won the Electoral College.

I think there might have been a crack in the country that is bigger than we can really wrap our heads around.

But at least by the Constitution, Donald Trump would have been elected the president.

When you look at that and you look at how people felt either drawn to Biden or comfortable enough with Biden, or that he appealed to enough suburban voters and enough black voters and enough white voters.

Is there another candidate who would have done that?

Not in the field, not in the same way.

Yeah, I was in Wilmington the day of the riot and the two days afterwards with Biden, and he was reflecting on that picture that went around of

people in camouflage with guns standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with no identification, but with their faces covered and clearly ready to take on what was the George Floyd Black Lives Matters protesters.

And it was a contrast to obviously what we saw happen at the Capitol.

And Biden said something to the extent of, I think we all know why the protesters who went into the Capitol were treated differently than what was going on in that picture on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

And we all have to grapple with that and face it.

Yeah.

And I have talked to

a lot of people about those comments since, including some people who were other candidates for president.

And I think that if you just realistically think about someone saying that,

would that have been as easy

for Corey Booker or Kamala Harris as black leaders themselves to say?

I think the sentiment is correct no matter who says it, but just the way it would have been received seems like it would have been different.

If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren had

been the nominee over the course of the campaign and then into that, would it have seemed like they would need to answer for the, you know, the left-wing protesters in more of a way than,

again, fairly or not fairly, just the reality of how politics can sometimes bounce?

You know, we have spent the last year.

making this show the ticket where the the the title, it does not feel like it.

I have to remind myself every now and then that was, it was originally a pun that we were going to be out on the road shaking hands and putting mics in people's faces and sharing buses and strange

Austrian rooms with people in tight quarters.

But I remember you, you're doing your job as a reporter, asking people's questions fairly.

And I sort of like, you know, nudge you every now and then.

Like, okay, Isaac, but like, come on, like, be a pundit a little bit for me here.

Help me a little bit out here.

And I remember you making a comment about like Biden's appeal as just as this safe bet, the okay, it would be nice to have XYZ candidate, but we're good with this.

We're looking at the alternative of another four years of Trump and we're good with this.

And it feels like that instinct ended up being correct, possibly.

Yeah, someone said to me a little while after Biden had wrapped up the nomination that he was the consensus candidate.

And the consensus was not an ideological consensus, but a consensus among Democrats that

he could probably beat Trump.

So that consensus pick at this point has worked out, but now all that work is done.

I mean, if Joe Biden was elected to beat Donald Trump, his job was already done.

Now he's got four years and Democrats unexpectedly control both houses of the legislature.

The divisions within the party are not gone.

There was unity this week at the inauguration, but the divisions are very much there.

I'm curious.

There could be very big changes in the Senate, very big hopes for progressive policy changes, but also Joe Biden is definitely an institutionalist in a lot of ways and not really prone to try and throw things into disarray to accomplish policy goals.

What do you think the next couple of weeks and months look like as he tries to respond to the pandemic, but also pass big bills on immigration, on

COVID relief, on

statehood for D.C.

or Puerto Rico or any of these things?

What do you think the coming weeks look like?

So I am

maybe going to betray my

professional duties as a political reporter who spent a lot of time writing about Democratic divisions and

have this book coming out that will be about the Democratic campaign.

But I think at this moment, the idea of divisions in the Democratic Party may be overstated.

That's not to say that everybody agrees because they don't.

I think that the margins that they are dealing with means that there is a sense of reality and pragmatism that has, at least so far, stretched throughout the party.

And it may change.

And there's certainly a lot of people who want this thing or that thing and still want it, but look at what they have in front of them and how they have to do it and

are saying, okay, well, we got to do this thing first or that thing first.

For example, I think we are going to see a COVID relief bill that is pretty big and probably pretty close to what Biden proposed.

I think that when you look at stuff like statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., which is not just something that progressives want or that is the right thing to do because Americans should have the ability to vote or

that Democrats want because

it is a structural change that would almost certainly make it close to impossible for Republicans to have control of the Senate.

And

that's on the Republicans because they need to figure out how to appeal to black and Puerto Rican voters.

And since D.C.

is predominantly black and Puerto Rico is predominantly Puerto Rican voters,

it should be that Republicans don't see that as like

dead territory for them and Democrats see that as completely great territory for them.

And there have been Republicans who've been elected in Puerto Rico, but you know, that's the reality of it.

If those four votes were there in the Senate, they would probably be four Democratic votes and the Republicans wouldn't be in the majority for a very long time to come.

The problem that the Democrats have right now is that there are not 51 Democratic votes for that quite yet.

And

they need to figure out how to navigate that.

They also need to get real about things like, you know, we spent a lot of time of the presidential campaign talking about Medicare for all.

There is no way, zero, zilch, zip, whatever, that Medicare for all will get through Congress.

It's just not true.

It's not going to pass the Senate.

It could maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe pass the House.

It definitely couldn't pass the Senate.

So, you know, where Biden stands on this is that he wants to

be the bipartisan guy who reaches out and connects with people.

But

he

has

been schooled by these last couple of years and seen what the Republicans were.

And he's seen, of course, like Trump got himself impeached the first time because he was trying to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.

And Republicans stood by Donald Trump, even though he was leveraging foreign policy and military aid into his political campaign.

And then Donald Trump got impeached the second time because he, it seems like, helped incite a riot to try to overturn Biden's election.

So like just in those two things, but many things in between, like Biden gets it.

It's not like he's in like a black and white fantasy of the 1950s, right?

Like he knows what is real now.

And so I think the way that you're likely to see this play out is that he will say, please come work with me.

I would like to work with you.

And that will go on for a little bit.

But if it's not working and if it's a feint by the Republicans to say, we need unity in the same way that people often talk about bipartisanship.

It's like, we need bipartisanship.

And what they really mean is like, we need you to do what we want,

then Biden is not going to continue on that.

And the lessons of the early Obama years are very much in his mind, right?

When Democrats had far more votes in the Senate.

They had far more votes in the Senate.

And Obama, because of, well, there were a bunch of reasons for it, but like he chased one vote, Olympia Snow's vote for Obamacare, a Republican senator from Maine at the time, because he wanted to say it had bipartisan support, which was, first of all, kind of ridiculous that like one Republican vote would have made it bipartisan.

But second of all, it delayed what he wanted to do with his entire legislative agenda for a year, probably more.

And that was a mistake, especially given that Snow didn't end up voting voting for it.

It was like wasted effort.

And I do not think that you will see Biden fall into a trap like that.

He would love it if Mitch McConnell would sign on to the COVID relief bill.

He would love it if he can get Republican members of the House and the Senate to work with him on, let's say, a Voting Rights Act.

That is not going to stop him.

He knows that there is a lot riding on him.

One of the questions that I walked around the inauguration asking people is like, does this feel like the last chance for the federal government to like get things right?

And he knows that's his responsibility at this moment.

That's where we leave things with Joe Biden at the moment.

Watching an impeached president get on Marine One this week and fly off, my mind went to the trip we did together out in California where we sat together and interviewed, you know, interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger one day and then interviewed Tom Steyer at the Nixon Presidential Library another.

And then afterwards, we hung out and sort of explored it.

I'd never been there.

And the actual helicopter that Nixon flew away on is there.

And we got to walk around that.

And

I'm so curious what, like, that is how the legacy of Richard Nixon, who's the modern president seen as a failure.

What the legacy of Donald Trump is, not just like what the Donald Trump presidential library is, but like where that political energy goes and what happens from here.

I mean, we don't know so many things, but I am curious, having watched political careers go up and down, where you think things stand at this point.

Well, so that day with Steyer at the Nixon Library was, of course, the day that the House impeached Trump the first time, right?

And that was that crazy walking around with him in the Nixon Library.

And then we sat in a conference room at the Nixon Library.

It was one of the

one of the stranger, but best little bits of time that we did with the podcast.

And then, yeah, being in Arnold Schwarzenegger's office.

It was the next day, I think, right?

I mean, Schwarzenegger's office.

Yeah, that's right.

The Austrian decor and the crib that he used to rock his children in when they were babies and Bierstein's on the wall.

One of the things that I've been thinking about with Trump is that his whole life, he has been about promoting Donald Trump.

And he's been able to do it for free.

He obviously has been doing Twitter for the last bunch of years.

But before that, he was the master of planting blind items in page six in the new york post and when he wasn't doing blind items he was doing you know something that people wrote a profile of him or a story or whatever because he would say something outrageous and not politically outrageous outrageous about real estate or whatever the very strange thing that has happened now is that he has gone from having the biggest megaphone on on the planet as president and with that twitter feed to in the course of a day or two losing it.

Right.

And because it was after the right people who were listening to him started to shut him down much more.

And then of course the Twitter feed went away.

And then when he got on the helicopter and Air Force One to the last trip to Florida, like that's it.

Now he, it's a very weird thing.

He has to pay for coverage, basically.

He doesn't have the control over it that he used to.

I think that we are not going to be able to process what these four years were like in America for a long time.

There's a lot of things that were changing about the country, some of them having nothing to do with Donald Trump and some of them prompted by Trump's election.

The example that most easily comes to mind is like the Me Too movement, which I'm not sure would have happened in the same way if Hillary Clinton had won.

I think that that is a

function in part of people thinking that they were about to elect the first female president and instead electing a president who is like the caricature of the alpha male and had that Access Hollywood tape and what was on that recording right before the election in 16.

You're just seeing someone get away with it in that way.

Yeah, and it just brought out a lot.

I think that that's happened.

I think that the reckoning over race and everything that happened with George Floyd tracks back to Trump.

But it's a time of major, major change in this country and the world.

And

he was a catalyst in the true scientific sense of the word catalyst in that he did not change, but he changed a lot of things around him.

And so, you know, that's what happens with the Trump piece of this.

But what I think that it has really done is it's made people

think about politics.

and think about government in a much more present way

than

they had been doing before, right?

This has an immediate impact on your life.

And not just because you're happy or pissed or whatever about something that happened in the campaign or in a tweet the day before or whatever,

but because you can see like this is what the impact is.

And of course, we're all feeling it more directly because of the lockdown.

And, you know, the last time that you and I saw each other in a studio to record a podcast, Kevin, was in February.

Yeah, the mics we're using right now, I remember dropping that off at your apartment and you're like, yeah, maybe this will be useful for the next week or two, I guess.

Yeah.

And I think that, and I hope that I'm right about this,

that that will continue, that people will think about the issues, some of which we have talked about in this podcast and some of which we didn't get to and hopefully we'll get to in the future,

about taking seriously what's going on here.

It matters who wins elections.

It's not just entertainment.

It matters.

And it matters what they do when they're in office.

The intricacies of this stuff often have huge, huge impacts.

And I also think, and it's been one of the lessons that I have carried with me from my early days as a reporter, that...

So much of politics is actually the people in politics.

The dynamics between people, who they are, what kind of leadership they bring to things drives just a huge piece of what goes down.

That is definitely going to be true in the difference of Donald Trump as president versus Joe Biden as president.

They are very different people and they are going to lead their White Houses and the country in different ways.

But it's true all the way down throughout.

And I keep plugging my book, but it's been a lot on my mind as I start to get it to a closing point here.

It's mostly focused on the Democrats.

There was a lot of people who ran for president to be the Democratic candidate.

Had a lot of material to work with.

I did not try to write, you know, like a chapter on each one of them.

But on the leading candidates, you'll see a lot of material in there that are about who they are as people.

Because you can't understand

Joe Biden's approach to race, Bernie Sanders' approach to race, Pete Buttigiege's Elizabeth Warren's, Kamala Harris's Corey Booker's, whatever, go all the way down without understanding who they are and how they think about things.

Because ultimately, that's what this comes down to.

What I like about talking to people for the podcast is the joke that I often make to people is that I feel like every politician has about 15 minutes of material.

Right.

That they know what they're going to say for about 15 minutes.

And you can throw them off.

And it's my job to throw them off when I can,

even in those 15 minutes.

but yes there are some times where it's like oh boy we're stuck in the thing that they wanted to say this little cul-de-sac of of

word salad and a metaphor on top of a metaphor just to get at how terrible the politicians can be sometimes

but letting them speak at length what I like about the podcast And we've had a lot of these moments is where I feel like, oh, that was just not on anything that I prepared for.

Yeah.

This was, this was, I got to see this person as a person.

Yeah.

And like, I didn't know we were going to do that.

Like, I, I, and, and that, and, and it's a feeling that's almost like a physical sensation of like being picked up and moved on something.

Like as if you're like on a train and the train starts moving and you didn't do that.

Uh, and I think that that's as someone who spent a lot of time recording podcasts, a,

not surprising, I think that's a good thing.

I think it's a necessary thing to have in the political conversation.

You just don't get it in cable shows or Sunday shows, and you don't get it in print articles, even though you have a little more room.

Part of the reason why I was drawn to podcasting, despite having started out as a print reporter, is because I would often look at my notes and say, I didn't even get to this section.

And it was like so interesting.

And it's just gone.

It's lost to the ages.

And the great thing about the podcast is you can hear it.

And so, yeah, we're closing this chapter of the podcasting.

And it seemed like the right moment to do it because

a podcast that was focused on the campaign, the campaign's over, the inauguration has happened.

Joe Biden is the president.

See what this looks like now with Congress as it is.

But that's why I hope that you'll hear from me again before long.

And I think that there's a lot more to say.

Well, it's been a fantastic time being a partner with you in this and for me cutting those 15 minutes that all politicians have so that we can just get straight past that to the other stuff.

It's true.

You have saved the listeners sometimes that you and I have had to suffer through.

Well, I look forward to working again on things in the future, Isaac, and I look forward to reading your coverage of the Biden White House and

your book.

Yeah, out in the spring.

We don't have the exact release date yet, but when it starts to get warm, but it's not hot out yet.

Put it that way.

Well, let's leave it there.

Thank you to everyone who's listened and stuck with us for the podcast.

It's been a real joy to bring this strange year to you.

And stay tuned to the feed.

We're going to have the first episode of the experiment come out in a few weeks, and we'll do more great things in the future.

Yeah.

And thanks to everybody who listened and who wrote emails and stayed in touch that way.

And thanks to Kevin.

Thank you, Isaac.

And I guess I got to do the outro now, huh?

Thanks for listening to The Ticket, produced by me, Kevin Townsend, with help from senior producer AC Valdez, and music by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Thanks to Isaac DeVer for all his hard work throughout the last administration and going into the new one.

And listeners, we want to remind you: this feed is going to go dormant for a couple weeks since the show is winding down.

But please stay subscribed.

We've got a brand new show coming out soon, and we'll be putting the first episode right here for you to check it out.

The experiment launches February 4th.

Thanks for listening and stay safe.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called it truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia made to travel.