Hey everybody, it's Joe Trippy, and welcome back to a special guest episode of That Trippy show.

This one is a long time in the making, my friends. It goes back to 1979 when I was just a kid in college,

excited about Ted Kennedy entering the race, volunteered after running some city council races

or working in city council races in San Jose, California. And I got this phone call.

And the guy at the other end asked me to go to work, recruiting me to go to work for Senator

Ted Kennedy back in 1979 was no other than Lanny Davis, our guest today. And, you know, it's taken a while, and we've both been through a lot.

But Lanny has a new book out, finding the third way, lessons in the politics of civility from my journey through history.

And I think there are a lot of lessons we can learn, not just from the book,

but from Lanny's experience and his journey. So really looking forward to talking to my old friend

and somebody I owe, well, or you can all blame for everything I've done in politics because he got

me started. Lanny, welcome. It's great to see you. Thank you. I don't want to do

the math how young we were, but I do want to tell the quick anecdote that I had known Senator Kennedy,

and he was rather disorganized. And when I went into his headquarters to volunteer to try to organize,

there was a box of letters and contacts,

and I just blindly called every one of them to say you want to go to Iowa. And one of them was

Joe Trippy. So that's how we got to know each other, Joe. I just went through the box.

Well, it worked. It worked for me.

I got in this beat-up old Ford Pinto and drove like a crazy man to Des Moines, Iowa, and went to work in Jones County.

So, Lanny, before we get into the book, I want you to talk a little bit about, you know, presidential politics and how things have changed or how they change. What, what, what, you know, in your career, because you've

seen so much, you know, what do we, what do we expect now, you know, if people are talking about

the, the party's brand, et cetera, and, you know, thinking it's going to change

in 26. You know, my own experience is midterms, take care of midterms because the local candidates,

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