Welcome to Poet to the world, I'm Tommy Vittor. I'm in New York City. It misses you.

I'm going to be there soon. I'm going to be there next week.

Very excited, the annual summer pilgrimage to New York.

The road summer pilgrimage, the Hodge.

We are doing, and this is the first of about two weeks of travel and press to roll out our new book, Democracy

Realis.

It's the first of two trips to New York.

By the way, Democracy Realis is available June 25th, but you can

preorder it now wherever you're at your books, crooked.com slash books, and if you

do pre-order it it will really, really help us make the New York Times

bestseller list, which is a big deal but Ben being here thinking

about the book talking about the book made me think about a question that I get all the

time I know you get all the time which is basically how did you get a job working

for Obama?

What's the best way for me to get involved in politics myself?

That's the path.

And so in the book, we walk readers through all the escalating steps

of political engagement from just kind of being better informed

to voting to donating to volunteering to working on campaigns and in government. But I thought it could be fun for us just to talk about

our individual paths into politics because we started at very different places but wound up like

literally in the same office and so it's kind of an interesting story of like a couple of options available to people.

Yeah no and I really like that in the book because people, you know, sometimes people ask me all the time,

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