 Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. A while back I was asked to host a book event with Joe Biden. In general, I dislike political memoirs, but I was very moved by this particular book, which is about grief and what it actually means to serve the public. I guess I should pause here and say this is a political video, and I know some people in comments will be like, when did Vlogbrothers get so political? The answer is that we've been talking about politics since like mid-January 2007, but I understand the concern. And anyway, to be honest, I did not have a particularly strong opinion about Joe Biden. I just liked the book, it was like sad and human and openly conflicted in a way that political memoirs rarely are. So right, I fly to, I don't know, somewhere like St. Louis to do the Q&A, and I'm sitting backstage in some little room editing a Crashcore script when someone comes in and says, would you like to meet Vice President Biden? And I'm like, sure. At this point in my life I had become accustomed to people saying kind things to me that they didn't actually mean, because like even very modest amounts of fame can serve as a sort of filter that distorts the way people look at you. Like once in the early 2000s, I met the guy who played Gilligan on Gilligan's Island, and for some reason I boarded out, I love Gilligan's Island, even though I had never seen an episode of the program, which became a real problem when he responded, thank you so much, what's your favorite episode? Anyway, I went in to see Joe Biden, and he said he and his family really loved The Fault in Our Stars, and that it was helpful to them as they were processing his son's cancer diagnosis. And I said, thank you. And then he asked me about Esther, and I started talking about her, and I noticed that there were tears in his eyes. Even though we only spent a few minutes together, I was very struck by the fact that he wanted to talk about Esther more than he wanted to talk about like the success of the book or the movie or whatever. So then some security-ish people came and said it was time to go on stage, and as we were walking toward the stage, Biden got asked for an autograph by one of the stagehands whose name was I think Tim, and they quickly got into a very intense conversation, and then the security-ish people were like, we really got to go on stage, and so Biden said to Tim, will you be here afterwards? And Tim was like, yeah, that's how stagehanding works. And then Biden and I went on stage and did our hour-long Q&A thing, and the moment it was over, he went backstage and said Tim, and they continued their conversation, and in fact, we're still talking when I left for the hotel. Joe Biden gave me the exact same level of attention that he gave Tim, and I have met a lot of famous and powerful people in my life, and that is very rare. So look, I think Biden's plans for tackling the COVID pandemic are far more convincing than Trump's. I think Biden's climate change proposals are serious, while Trump's are literally non-existent and so on. But this isn't an election only about policy positions. I mean, for the first time in over 120 years, the Republican Party released no new platform this election cycle, no document outlining their plan for tackling issues from taxation to COVID. The Trump administration has no comprehensive responses to these issues because their idea of governance is not about policy, it's about populism. Trump seeks to establish a clear us and a clear them, and then argues that only a vote for Trump can prevent them from taking over and ruining America. I reject that idea of governance. We are not going to us versus them, our way out of COVID or climate change or anything else. I think Joe Biden would be a fundamentally different kind of president, a president who will listen carefully and with empathy, who won't try to concentrate power, but will instead build and support teams of experts, and a president who will lead with decency and humanity. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.