Last month, we had the rare chance to sit down with Gov. Roy Cooper. It’s one of the few times in 18 months he has sat down for an in-person interview. We had 20 minutes at the executive mansion.

Parts of that interview have aired on our other platforms, but nowhere has it all been heard until this podcast. We will talk in-depth about COVID-19, Medicaid expansion and redistricting. That last topic you will hear him use a word you rarely hear in politics: regret.

But on this podcast, we will also get a little insight on his personal life too talking about his own family during COVID-19, why there are now at least four pets living in the executive mansion and his love for the Carolina Hurricanes NHL hockey team. 

As the year ends, Tim and Ben are inviting a couple of friends of the program to look back at all the big stories of 2021.  

This insightful, yet hilarious discussion will review COVID-19 still dominating headlines, DHHS Secretary Mandy Cohen leaving, redistricting debates, the 2022 U.S. Senate race and the first state budget signed in more than three years.  

Communication experts and political analysts Brian Lewis and Billy Warden join us to break it all down.

On this week’s episode of “Tying It Together with Tim Boyum,” North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore (R) joins Tim and Ben to talk about a budget finally signed for the first time since 2018. 

Listen in as he goes in depth about how close the state really is, or is not, to approving Medicaid expansion. Then, he talks extensively about his decision not to run for Congress and how Congressman Madison Cawthorn appears to have run in his district on purpose. 

Later, we talk about redistricting and lawsuits that have put filing on hold and delayed the primary election by two months.

​In late November, we were honored to get an Emmy nomination for a TV story on North Carolina Representative Brian Turner. The story focused on the challenges of leaving your family behind and commuting four hours for four days a week to be a state lawmaker.

Ironically, just hours before that Emmy nomination, Rep. Turner announced he would not run for reelection. Turner cited the strain on his family and business as legislative sessions continue to get longer all while making just $14,000 for what is supposed to be a part-time job.  

We will share with you the original story and then Rep. Turner joins us to talk more about his decision and what can be done to make it easier to serve the state. Later, we'll find out why Rep. Turner used to hang out with famous musicians and how he met his wife while working for MTV.

Ed Fitts was born and raised in Littleton, North Carolina, but in 1957, he left the town for N.C. State and went on to make a fortune selling packaging to fast food companies.  

Now, Fitts has returned to the tiny town that has dwindled to less than 600 residents. He is investing with high speed internet, a school, a coffee shop and more to try and rebuild his hometown that is a shadow of its past.  

On this week’s “Tying It Together With Tim Boyum,” Tim travels to Littleton to meet with Ed and Deb Fitts and the folks trying to build a future for this town with a storied past.

You may know him as a famous White House correspondent for NBC News or NPR, but we know Geoff Bennett as simply Geoff.  

Before he made it big, he was one of our Washington DC reporters. Tim and Geoff spent hours, days and weeks covering national political conventions and will trade stories including one with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog!

Geoff, now taking his talents to PBS for a monster role in 2022, will tell us all the behind-the-scenes stories of working at the White House, seeing the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations up close, and how tiring of a job it really is.

On this Thanksgiving episode, we are going to go a little lighter to help ease your drive to grandma's house.

Jeremy Markovich is a prolific writer and podcaster who focuses on writing about the obscure and finding hidden places. From a Pitt County election with no voters to Mick Jagger going unnoticed at a bar, we'll go down the rabbit hole to tell some incredible stories about people and places even long-time North Carolina residents might not know about. For newcomers, it's a conversation you won't want to miss!

More from Jeremy Markovich:

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This week, two North Carolina reporters are releasing a critically-acclaimed book on North Carolina's infamous 2018 9th District congressional race.  It was one of the few races where there actually was documented fraud and it forced a do-over election in 2019. 

Nick Ochsner and Michael Graff tell us the stories behind the stories and why this incident was more than a hundred years in the making.

Within months of winning her first term as Raleigh Mayor, a pandemic dominated life. A couple of months later, social justice protests and then riots destroyed parts of the city.  Mary-Ann Baldwin talks about leading the city through these traumatic times, affordable housing challenges, criticism she faces and growth.  She also dishes on her favorite restaurants and we hear about moments that changed the city forever and at least one mistake leaders made in planning.

On this episode of Tying it Together with Tim Boyum, we hear from Robb Leandro. 

This month, a billion-dollar deadline looms for Republican lawmakers to comply with a North Carolina judge's ruling on a nearly three-decade-old lawsuit. It's known as the Leandro Lawsuit and centers on the idea of providing each child with a "sound basic education" as described in our state constitution. It was filed by five low-wealth school districts in 1994.  

Leandro was the name of one of the plaintiffs in the case. He was an eighth-grader at the time. Nearly 30 years later and with this latest drama of a still-unresolved case, we track him down to chat.