Welcome to a special bonus rather than just a regular bonus episode of the book

ride podcast further a field than we've been of late with the bonus

episodes outside of Rebecca and I doing half-baked

ideas about nothing. This was a half-baked idea that you all came up with and I

think knowing that the bait on this particular hook would not be hard to set on me to talk about the pilot

episode of the West Wing and then maybe the West Ring writ large a little bit and we've talked

about maybe doing some more episodes in the future

as double secret bonus episodes at some point as well. I want you guys to talk to me

about why we are doing this now. I mean some of it's obvious I guess like you

know election season blah blah blah but what's the non obvious part about why

you're talking about the West Wing right now? Yeah, I think the quick background of like Amanda and I spent the last couple months of election

season creating what we ended up referring to as the Hope Train which began with just texting each other like

good hopeful news whether it was polling or you know mostly it was polling let's be

honest about the direction of the election and the

direction of politics in the country and as the election really happened

Amanda spun that out into sort of daily updates on Instagram

and we ended up being like the internet's election moms I think

where I was doing the like everybody takes some deep breaths and

like drink some water and put your feet

flat on the floor and Amanda was like and here are the statistics and this is

statistically why you should not be that worried it's all going to be fine get on the

hope train and as the election ended in our favor, Amanda was able to get

...