Offline with Jon Favreau - Why Government Makes Us Miserable

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

Americans don’t trust the government anymore. Annie Lowery, Atlantic staff writer and author of the new book The Time Tax, joins Offline to identify the culprit: a plodding, vindictive, racist bureaucracy that people must navigate to get government services and benefits. The paperwork, lines and emotional strain—just to feed your kids or renew your driver’s license––adds up to a “time tax” that falls most heavily on low-income Americans. Annie and Jon take stock of the Kafka-esque system and discuss why, if Democrats don’t do something to change it, people will continue to tune out the party that wants to build something better.Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.To watch this episode with subtitles, click here and turn on closed captions (CC).You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

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That's 50% off of your first order at Sundaysforogs.com slash offline, Sundaysforogs.com slash offline or use offline at checkout. If you are making government impossible, if government is sending the message to a citizen or a resident, we don't care about you. We don't like you. We don't really want you to have this, that those people withdraw civically. They vote less. They think less of the government.

And I think it erode social trust as well. You're basically driving down rates of civic participation and political participation. And I think that there's this strange circularity to it. And this is, you know, a big thing for Republicans is they're like, yeah, we don't want the government to work terribly well so that people demand more of it. You know, we want to make this painful so that you won't get it. I'm John Favro, and you just heard from today's guest, journalist Annie Lowry. Annie's out with a fascinating new book called The Time Tax, How the Government Waste Our Time, and How to Fix It. At first glance, you might think this is a book about bureaucracy and paperwork and other not very sexy problems that could seem small in comparison to the magnitude of the political crisis in which we find ourselves.

To be honest, that was my first reaction when I opened the book. but I am so happy to have been completely wrong. This is a book about why people don't trust government and why they don't trust the party that believes government can and should do more to help people. What's more, the people who are least likely to trust government are the very people who liberals most want government to help. And that's because their experience with the government usually sucks.

This is a book where Annie Chronicles the infuriating, pointless burdens people are forced to bear just to access services and benefits to which they are legally entitled and often pay for. This includes everything from the paperwork people have to fill out, the lines they're forced to wait in, and the emotional strain they're forced to endure just to see a doctor or feed their kids or renewer driver's license. Annie argues that all this adds up to a time tax that falls most heavily on low-income Americans who understandably respond by turning against government or just tuning out altogether. It's an incredible book, and I invited her on to talk about it.

She walked me through this Kafkaesque system, which traces its roots all the way back to the Civil War and Jim Crow, and is still with us today in many ways, whether it's the Medicaid cuts with work requirements that Trump just passed, the Doge debacle, or even the failed rollout of health care.gov. And if Democrats don't figure out how to deal with the time tax, I think the party will never be able to earn back the trust necessary to deliver the change we want and help the people who need it. You'll hear that conversation today and then afterwards, we're going to play an excerpt for you from a new show.

We are thrilled to launch a crooked, still counting, a new podcast from the team that brought you 538, Nate Silver, Claire Malone, and Galen Drook. The show officially launches on Wednesday, September 9th, but we wanted to give you a taste earlier of what you can expect. So stay tuned for that. All right, here's Annie Lowry. Annie Lowry, welcome back to Offline. Thank you for having me. I love the book. Thank you.

I love the book. It brought me back to one of my earliest and most formative political experiences. Sure. Which was running a volunteer program called the Welfare Solidarity Project when I was in college at Holy Cross. And I had learned about Clinton's welfare reform in an intro polycyc class. Yeah. I remember time thought it seemed like politically smart and thought it was good encouraging, you know, we're encouraging work.

We like that. Yeah. Then I had a sociology professor who was like, hey, before you celebrate welfare reform, like, there's this project going on, like try go down to the Worcester Welfare Office and basically Holy Cross students are volunteering and working with public interest lawyers to help people navigate the bureaucracy of welfare reform. And so I started doing it and then I ended up running the thing. And it was so eye-opening.

I mean, your whole book reminded me of it because there were all these people who, like, deserve benefits, were legally entitled to benefits. Even with the help of lawyers couldn't figure out how to navigate the system. I remember like. And in a state that likes welfare, right? Massachusetts is not Mississippi, you know, or South Carolina, right? Like, this is very different. And I wish I could say it was like even the whole thing was successful.

But I remember it was a big win where like one time. I had to, I drove a mother and her two children to like a homeless shelter, like in time for them to get the last spot in the shelter because they couldn't figure out the paperwork. Like that is what, so you've spent years reporting on people in this position and now you've written a whole book on it. Like, what was the experience that made you stop seeing these stories as individual bureaucratic nightmares and start seeing a whole system that was broken and the time tax, as you call? It was fairly early on.

you know, the first time that I remember reporting and being like what was I was reporting with some vets who were homeless in D.C. Right. And we have an entire government department set up to serve the needs of retired service members, right? The VA really, really cares about service members, or former service members veterans. And they were still homeless. And they just couldn't, right? Like, I don't, I don't know. I should go back. You know, they had some substance use issues. They probably had PTSD. I'm not a doctor. I don't know. And I think that. the sheer accumulation of this, there was like a Bader Meinhauf thing where as soon as you see it, you start to see it everywhere. And I think that because there's, so there's this entire academic

literature about administrative burdens that is expanding very rapidly in public administration and sociology. But I think that it just hasn't, as soon as I started to see it, that I would tell people and they'd be like, you're writing a book about bureaucracy and paperwork. Like, why are you doing that? And then I'd be like, no, I'm writing a book about why everything is like the deal. DMV. Really, really bad. And that people would, I'm, oh my gosh, John, I'm currently in this situation where I lost my driver's license, but I still had a California license. And it turns out if you don't have a physical driver's license to turn into the state of New York, I have to get a learner's permit and go to driving school and like take, yeah, like take the written and driving portion.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, there must be a better way to do this. There must be, you know. Just so people know who haven't read the book, your main argument here is that we ask people to become basically their own benefits administrators, right? At exactly the moment that many people who receive government benefits are least equipped to do it. So you lose your job, you get sick, you have a child with a disability, and now you have basically a second job proving that you need help. Yes. Can you talk about some of the people you met during the course of writing this book who sort of best illustrate what this extra burden. actually does to someone's life because I think, like, you just mentioned the DMV and, right, like there's a lot of inconvenience, but there's inconvenience for people and frustration for people

who have the time and the means to deal with all of this crazy bureaucracy and this bad customer service. But then there's most of the people who are getting the benefits don't have that time. No, they don't. And I think that this is a universal thing, right? I think that high income people are facing the same poor service delivery. that low-income people are, it's just that they're facing less of it, right? Because we tend to administer programs for high-income Americans, either through pretty efficient bureaucracies or through the tax code. So, you know, if you are a wealthy 68-year-old, how are you dealing with the state, right? You

probably go to vote in a pretty good jurisdiction that doesn't make it impossible for you to vote, doesn't make you wait in line for three hours. You probably vote by mail, right? Or maybe early vote. And then you're dealing with Social Security. You're dealing with Medicare. which works pretty well. I'm not saying it's perfect. And you're probably getting benefits administered to you through the tax code that you, so seamlessly that you don't even know that they exist because you probably have a tax lawyer or accountant or whatever. Whereas high, low income people, we make it so that everything is non-automatic. It's like you have to go physically and do this. And the processes are so unbelievably arcane and fussy. So, you know, the example that leads the book is this

woman Marcella, and she's three kids. She's a single mom. She's very low income. She's never made more than, you know, 30,000 a year-ish and often made way less than that. And the state of Utah, she lives in Salt Lake. She's a manicurist, right? State of Utah considers her a fraud risk because she basically screwed up something on her taxes nine years ago. She was never charged with a crime. She's never had any interaction with, you know, any kind of policing agency at all. No criminal record, but it screwed up some of her benefits in a way that she then ended up having to like pay something back. And ever since then, ever since then, the state of Utah makes her reapply for her Medicaid or her snap or whatever it is basically every month or two,

and she's been kicked off one program or another more than 120 times. And until recently, like I talked to her a couple weeks ago, I visited her in Salt Lake. Until recently, she didn't have a, she didn't have a computer, right? She was doing all of this, like, at the library. And it's just like, that's all of this time that she could have been using to make more money or spend more time with her kids because she's a great mom and that's what she wants to do. And so she made, her situation made me very angry, but she's like the least angry person I've ever met. And she's like, I just got to keep on, you know, moving forward. And this is how, like, people just end up not getting benefits even though they are legally entitled to them. I mean, we're going to be dealing with this. We're in the middle of dealing with it now.

with all the Medicaid cuts, which they decided not to call Medicaid cuts because they're just saying, oh, it's a work requirement, but it somehow is scored as like a trillion dollars in cuts, which is because they know that the work requirement is so onerous that people aren't going to be able to get it done. And I think that when people hear this, they're like, yeah, well, obviously it's a pain to verify work requirements, like, how hard can it be and shouldn't people be able to do this if they're going to get this government benefit? Yeah, there is that argument, right? We are making people living in tents. Homeless people comply with a work requirement. We are exempting people from having to comply with

the work requirement, which is really a work reporting requirement, who might not have a medical diagnosis yet and can't get to a doctor because they don't have insurance. Isn't that the whole point? There's this argument for cash and cash-like benefits, right? If you're getting an actual TANF payment, that's cash, right? Or if you're getting SNAP, which is kind of cash-like, right? It's functionally money that you can only use in the grocery store and people do sell them on, right? There's this argument that you want to be more careful with those. You want people to work because you don't want to create this disincentive to work.

But how does that make any sense for Medicaid? We've had Medicaid apply work requirements in some states, a handful of states. and we know that it doesn't change the employment rate. And the issue that people have is that they can't use these, like we have these really, really messy systems. People don't have the technology. All it takes is messing up once. And often if you have a change in one program and you're on multiple programs, it'll affect your eligibility for the others might trigger a re-enrollment. This is going to be an absolute nightmare, a nightmare. And yes, I think that you're completely correct that they're doing this dishonest thing of saying, well, you know, if people can't comply with the work. requirement. It's their own fault. And so it lets them say that they're not cutting because, you know, it would be more politically painful to come and say, okay, you know, we're going to move these. It's going to be a lower share of the federal poverty line, right? But at least that would be honest. So the human toll of the time tax is a huge problem. The argument in the book that I keep thinking about is how it impacts people's views of government and government programs, especially people who are

low income or rely on government for help. And, you know, that seems like an enormous problem for the party that believes government should do more for people. Can you talk a bit about that and sort of what happens to people who sort of experience the time tax who are least able to afford to? Yeah, there's great research showing that basically if you are making government impossible, If government is sending the message to a citizen or a resident, we don't care about you. We don't like you. We don't really want you to have this. That those people withdraw civically.

They vote less. They think less of the government. And I think it erode social trust as well. You're basically driving down rates of civic participation and political participation. And I think that there's this strange circularity to it. And this is, you know, a big thing for Republicans is they're like, yeah, we don't want the government to work terribly well so that people demand more. of it. You know, we want to make this painful so that you won't get it. We're going to ration through fiction. We're going to tell you that we don't have any respect for you in your time.

And interestingly, I do think that there's this way in which the politics is kind of changing here. Because if we were talking like 15, 20 years ago, maybe even earlier than that in the 90s, right? There was this, you know, abiding belief among Americans that if you were poor, it was your own fault, right? Like, you had screwed up. And that's changed a lot. especially for Democrats, but also for Republicans, too. Like, I think that this was, you know, in part the experience of the Great Recession, in part the kind of modern social justice, racial justice movement has been big on this. That, you know, I do think that people have, their minds have changed on this.

And the government, you know, they want people, I think, to get the benefits that they need. Because very often, right, like we're trying to help adults, but we're often really trying to help kids, as you know. Yeah. And so, you know, I just wonder if that means that there isn't going to be sort of a, changing perception of administrative burdens, especially given what's happening in Medicaid and SNAP right now. I mean, I feel like within the Democratic Party, you know, the different factions in the party that are, you know, debating whether you're leftist or liberal or center left or whatever else,

like they all sort of miss the importance of making sure that when we promise to pass a new government program or benefit and somehow we get it done, then it also has to be delivered in a way that makes the recipients think, oh, government helped me. And this party has told me that government could help me and they were correct. And the other party clearly does not want government. And then we're all like sitting around scratching our heads like, why is trust in government so low? Why don't? And I think for, you know, for central life policy folks, it's like, and you write about this in the book, it's, you know, things like their earned income tax credit, right? Which is, you know, a great anti-poverty program, but one that people probably barely notice that they're receiving.

They have no idea. They don't even know that they're getting it. And it expires and then people don't extend it. And they're like, oh, no big deal. And then I think, and then for the left, it's, you know, well, as long as you're for Medicare for all, that's great. But if you don't pass it, then you go back and you fight for it again anyway. But like at some point, there has to be some kind of realism and what you can get done because people are going to stop trusting you if you don't actually deliver tangible benefits that improve people's lives. I do wonder, like, on the work requirement stuff, I take your point that the sort of the mindset has shifted a little bit on that, but I wonder, like, a lot of people in the country have decided that government assistance should come with certain conditions, right? Government assistance. And if you pull that,

that's probably like a majority view, right? If you can work, you should work, and the help should go to people who really need it. Do you think that we, should find a better way to enforce those conditions or change people's views on the need for things like work requirements and means testing? I would be interested to see polling on this because I haven't exactly seen polling. My sense is that people sort of say they want the work requirement and they say they want the really strong anti-fraud measures. They don't realize that you could actually have all of this delivered much more elegantly, right? Like, I'm not against means testing. It's not the means testing that's a problem, right? It's the fact that all of these programs, you have to

show your, you have to rate your own income by two income measures and like describe how you are, I know, literally, right? And my favorite little Hawaii still uses the federal, for TANF in Hawaii, the one of the income measures in current use is just the 2008 federal poverty line. And I'm like, I don't know why. I don't know why. I should look into that. I know. It's just very, very weird. But that you could actually have, like, less fraud and better outcomes through better service delivery. I also just think that generally this is a low salience issue for people. Voters are not changing their minds on who to vote for. They're not getting out to vote for somebody who's like, I'm going to harmonize the income standards across programs and require that the 50 states, you know, use a single income measure and also, So, you know, let's give some money to the IRS so that they can do a quick income verification on behalf of states so they don't have to contract for it. Right. Like, this is like the guts of government stuff that I think you could really make people's lives better, but like who's coming out to vote for that? And maybe if there's like a broader policy, you know, like a we're going to make the trains work on time after the complete chaos of the Trump administration, just like a competency argument.

You know, maybe this could be part of it. But yeah, I think the problem is right. Like politicians, they just, they add and they never. subtract. And I think in our system, A, because of federalism, B, because of the presidential system, there just isn't the right incentive for legislators to really fix the mess they've made. Yeah, I was sort of wondering, I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is a lot of this is low-hanging fruit that, like, a new government could do sort of behind the scenes without making a big deal of it. And that would maybe not fix everything because you're certainly

going to have to still pass some legislation to fix some of this. But it does seem to like a lot of this could be fixable if Democratic politicians, I assume, because I don't think Republicans will want to, just really decide to focus on it and focus on fixing it. Absolutely. And the problem is a lot of it does need to be changed legally. So, you know, you could just have a bill. The other thing is, like, if you're making it so that more people are getting on the program, do you then run into the issue of how are you going to get it through the Senate? If it increases programmatic costs, which is, like, is not really something that I know how to answer because this just feels like so pie in the sky.

But there are zero cost things that you could do. So like my favorite example of this is like asset testing does nothing, right? So we're making dual eligibles and some people basically proves that they don't have a hidden bank account in order to receive benefits. They're really, really fussy to comply with. You just get rid of them. Just get rid of the get rid of it, right? You're not like kicking that many people off of programs through asset testing. So I think some of stuff could be, you know, maybe low cost and simple to do. Nobody's going to notice it. You don't need to run on it.

It's not going to be on a bumper sticker. But, like, that would be, that would be good. Offline is brought you by Mint Mobile. Summer means a well-deserved break and some extra time to stretch out and relax. MintMobile thinks you deserve a break, too, which is why they created the MintMobile summer sale. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 a month, even unlimited. So free yourself from big wireless and their gimmicks and gotchas

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That zbiotics.com slash offline code offline. Zbiotics is a partner of mine. One thing that Democrats would have to deal with is, and we're seeing it right now, which is the right just weaponizes these like individual stories of fraud. Some of them are now just made up, but some of them are real. and so then they get out into the media environment and they're all over right-wing media and they're reported on. And, you know, I wonder, is there a way, do you think there's methods to make sure there's no fraud or say that we are cracking down on fraud and that's legitimate without hurting the people who are doing everything right? I really think that you could basically have measures where you're making things simpler and easier.

You're taking work away from people and making the government do it instead that you could drive down the fraud. and improper payments rates. Like, if you had better systems, all of these things would be aligned, right? And yes, they absolutely, they find these individual cases. And as you know, right, like most fraud is perpetuated by criminal groups or by institutions, right? Like, it's not individuals. You're not going to be able to defraud that much from the government. And especially, like, how is an individual going to, you know, defraud the Medicaid program of that much?

Right. It's like nursing homes. And, you know, some of Florida's. politicians, right? You have to be an institution. Yeah. Committed plenty of fraud with his company. Yeah, exactly. To actually, you know, enact a major fraud. And so I think at the individual level, we could drive down the improper payments rate. And like all of these things could work together if the systems were better and if there was more money being invested in them. Yeah. I mean, something that's been debated the last couple years because of Trump that I started thinking about when I was reading the book is voting, right?

And it's, it really is a store and voter ID. And voter ID. And voter ID to me is a story of like who who bears the burden for making sure that everyone voting is eligible to vote, right? And we obviously, you know, we can do all the statistics that voter fraud is incredibly rare, but whatever. Like this is the Republicans thing. And they're like, look, everyone, you know, voter ID gets like 85% approval or whatever. And it's like, fine. I would be for voter ID if the government could guarantee that it would do all the work to. to verify that every person voting is eligible to vote.

And if you want to give everyone and you say, oh, you show a license here and there. Okay, fine. Make sure that every single person has an ID card. If they don't have a license, that's okay because the government's still going to make sure that they're identified. They're going to be able to go. So like why is all the burden? And I feel like Democrats can make this argument. Like voter ID fine, but the burden shouldn't be on the voter.

They have enough other things to do. The burden should be on the government to make sure everyone's eligible to vote and then make it easy to people to vote. Totally. I mean, I haven't like thought that much about this. But yeah, if you want to make it such that the government is doing the work, so yes, there's a voter ID, but the government is going to do it. And also you have universal vote by mail. Right. And like many, many options and many, many safe ballot drop off boxes and all of these other good things, right? Like, you know, motor voter, so everybody is getting this at the same time they're getting their driver's license. Like, I don't know that I think that that, like that might be a good trade, right? Yeah. And just as a

general point. Yeah, this is this is a place where there's low hanging fruit. This is a place. I also, I've not seen Democrats or many Democrats make the argument. Hey, these jerks are wasting your time. They're inconveniencing your neighbors. They're treating your time like it's theirs to take. Imagine if they were treating businesses like this. What? They're all for cutting red tape on businesses, but they're also just about adding it to your life. Like, I think it's kind of a, I don't know, like would that work as an argument for them? you know, if you have Republicans just talking about fraud, I think that that's actually intuitive people, right? Like, they want to make the government work terrible for you. We give the governments

$8 trillion a year. They should function, right? Yeah. And look, and this goes back to why next time Democrats are in control of government, like, right at the top of the list has to be every single thing we pass has to actually work for people and they have to feel benefit. I mean, you write about the debacle known as health care.gov, which was intended to implement... Are you okay? Well, so it's funny because I had just left the White House during the room. Oh, okay. So I left in 2013.

You were just watching helplessly. Yeah, and I was like two months out. In the fetal position? Yeah, I was like two months out watching it, watching it happen. But look, and the Affordable Care Act obviously ended up even as an overall program more convoluted than we would have liked at the beginning. Oh, it's like totally, totally miserable. And I know that that was that was the bill that could pass, right?

Like that was not the good design. That was, you know, like, yeah, every corn have, what would it? Cornhusker kickback? Yeah, yeah. All of that. This was not an elegantly designed bill. It was a bill that was designed to, you know, get 60 votes during that very, very rare policy window.

But yeah, anyway, yes, healthcare. Well, it's, there's an irony here because ever since I've known him when he was back in the Senate, Barack Obama will never shut up about. how important it is to make government more efficient, modernize it, more customer-friendly, he would always say. And every time he would say that, in fairness, like all of his political and communications advisors, we would all like roll our eyes. And he would, you know, I would, I remember like cutting down that section in the state of the union every year because I was like, this is like such small ball details. But then it's important to him. Then health care.gov happens.

And, you know, I think most people remember that as, oh, the government couldn't build a functioning website, what did you learn about the full story of what actually went wrong and potential lessons that Democrats could take from that? So it was always going to be hard to build the exchange website and to stand it up really quickly with the budget. As a general point, the government does technology contracting in an unbelievably moronic way, right? Where we have these large contracts with tons and tons of specifications. I think it's more than half of contracts go to single bidders. There's no competitive process.

These are not like the tech elite. They did not go to Silicon Valley to get like, you know, the smartest tech people on Earth, right? Like it was the same old series of federal contractors that are doing everything. And they had to make something that instead of, you know, in business development, what happens is they create small pilots and then they scale them up and they fix them as they go, but this is not how any of the contracts work. And instead, right, it's like, okay, you have to have this whole big system and it has to have data from states and from companies

and individuals and it all has to work in this pre-specified way and it has to go live all at once on one day. And so, you know, you talk to people and you're like, you know, maybe it was like, maybe there was no way that this was going to happen, right? And we just do all of our contracting for everything this way. One of my favorite, like, little reporting factoid on this is that it was only a couple years ago that we stopped partially managing the nuclear arsenal with eight-inch floppy disks. Like, that just relied on that technology, which I'm like, I haven't seen one of those in like 30 years, right? And the military, we spent some money on that, you know, like they definitely have some creepy technologies there, right? Like, I'm sure. I don't even know

what it was. And so, yes, healthcare.gov was always going to be hard. And what was amazing was once they got, like, you know, they got this team of folks to come out from Silicon Valley, I think, like, none of whom had ever really worked in government. And it was one of these kind of crazy stories where they just, like, stuck them all in a room. And those people working for, like, basically no, I think they were getting like a per DM read of like $50 a day or something, you know, some crazy small number. They just, like, fixed it in a matter of weeks, which I think. you know, it's like, well, okay, shouldn't you have just done that? Yes.

From the outset? Yeah. I know. I also worry that the catastrophe that was Doge has now, like, ruined the idea or the possibility of a better doge, a good doge in the future that's like not focused on, let's see, how many random things can we cut in the federal bureaucracy, but how can we actually, because I think people look at it and they're like, you know. it's big and bloated and we need to cut it down. And the truth is, it's bloated and it doesn't work

well and we need to make it work well. But that doesn't sound sexy that we're going to like fix government to make it work well. And I just wonder like what the constituency is for this, which is a question you ask in the book? And is it possible to build a constituency that is anti-bureaucracy without it turning into being anti-government? Yeah, totally. Because it's like you can make the government itself smaller, the amount that it's spending smaller. You can improve the contracting processes, all of these things. Yeah, and it is. It's like very technical. It's small ball. I would say, you know, so Mayor Mom Donnie here in New York has put up like his version of Doge to basically be like this was a good idea done stupidly. Like we're going to, you know, he's like a sewer

socialist. He's like, I'm going to try and make the trains run on time if I can. And so I do think that you could have that. I think a lot of this is just, right, like the White House has to want to administer and has to want to get these million little provisions into small bills and then fix things. I think it really starts with creating incentives for actually efficient government programs. One of the things that really struck me in reporting the book is that there are these civil servants and government that are just full of ideas for how to fix stuff.

And like nobody ever asks them. And they are not given the capacity to like generate a policy outcome. they just kind of have to do what they're told. And this isn't a great system. They're really, really smart people. Like, they should be able to do that. And I think creating incentive systems such that the government wants to work better would be really, really good.

But yeah, Doge was so hard because it was a good idea. My favorite little Doge story, I guess in Yosemite, there's, like, thousands of key structures, and they fired the locksmith for Yosemite. And it's like, okay. Cool. Great. I guess there's, like, gun safes and stuff, too. and like bathrooms and gates and, you know, I don't know.

I just like, it has always been important to me and as someone who's worked in government, and it's like, yeah, they did it poorly. But like, we've all, like, we've seen government in action. And it is old and outdated. And there's too much bureaucracy and there's too much paperwork. And the reason it's a problem is not just because it's annoying to every. It's like, if it doesn't work for people, then people aren't going to vote for more government. They're not going to vote for a party.

They're just like, that's just people's like, oh, you know, vote for the party that says, we're going to make this work better. Oh, you are? Well, because this benefit program didn't work very well for me at all. One of the most enraging things was reading about how, like, you know, we are the richest country on Earth, and yet somehow so many other countries have figured out how to make government work for people without much of a time tax, like Estonia. Yes. Can you talk about only once? Yeah, only once. Yes, from Estonia. So Estonia, we are not going to be like Estonia. Estonia is very different to us. They are setting a government up de novo.

in 1991, right? Like, they get to do it from scratch. And the people who are making the Estonian government, they were very young, they wanted to have a government, they had like no money, right? It's still a much lower income country than the United States is. And it was really important given that they had just reclaimed their independence from the Soviets that, you know, it was a government that people could trust, right? And so they just always emphasized technology.

They created a national, like, ID number. You get like a number that you are assigned. Social security number is probably the closest thing. But this is, they're actually public. Like you can know somebody's. It's just all the privacy is on the other side. And they create like a unitary online system of data sharing across all of their agencies. And they have this policy, it's legal policy that if you tell any part of the Estonian government, any piece of information about yourself, I had a kid.

I bought a house. My address changed. I got divorced. Like, whatever it is, you only have to tell the government once. It automatically updates everywhere. And I was like, wow, is that not how it works in the United States? I can't even imagine. We would have to, like, start from scratch also.

We would have to be like, everything is done, and we're just going to have, like, a new constitutional convention, and we're going to start from scratch. Everybody's fired, you know, like. I do wonder. We're rewriting everything. I mean, you know, the first thing that comes to mind, which probably wouldn't have before the second Trump term, is privacy concerns. and this was a big thing with Doge as well, right?

Yeah. And even now you have DHS out there just, you know, trying to vacuum up any information on anyone it can possibly get. And, you know, and even beyond that, I know that some of your potential solutions here are, you know, more of these programs need to be federalized. Yes. Because there's, you know, too many states, not talking to each other.

Like, how do you get around the concern that, you know, if you scoop up too much information on everyone and federalize everything, and then you have a government like Trump's that has more, that has all these authoritarian impulses and has taken plenty of authoritarian actions, then we're all in a lot of trouble. Yeah, it's really, really, really tough. And you can actually look at Estonia at the times that they've had data breaches, like, it's been really bad.

And they take it very, very, very seriously, precisely because all of this information is, like, stored in a single repository. So I think that the way to do this is really make it about permissions. and make it the citizens' responsibility to say, like, okay, I'm okay with this or I'm not. Can my state welfare office talk to the IRS, right, just to get my income stuff updated? So you can opt in for this? Yeah. Can, you know, a worker at whatever office it is that I'm going to, can they help me with these things?

Can they see what else? Can they search for what else might be out there that I could use? I think that that kind of thing would probably work. And merely creating systems that can talk to each other instead of perhaps putting them all in one place, would be a good way to go about it. And it's so hard just because, like, I would love to federalize a lot of things.

I know that there's, like, legal concerns with doing that. But that feels like the really, really, really difficult stuff. And it's like a lot of this is just kind of like, again, the endless small ball. I always thought of it as like a rat king. Like you can start to unleash some of the rats. It's horrifying. Sorry. I'm sorry for sharing that with your listeners. I think that it sticks. I was thinking about AI when I read this. Do you think, obviously, there could be plenty of privacy concerns there and acts and, you know, we got the agents doing their own thing. But do you see ways that artificial intelligence could potentially be helpful in sort of simplifying government and making it work better for people? Or is it just, is it all scary?

I don't know. In part because I feel like I don't know. I will say this. Like computers and the internet have not made this better, right? If anything, they have made it worse. And so I just, I come from a place of skepticism. Also, because a lot of what we're talking about, it's about like, you know, you have to go in person to do something. You have to show up, right? Like, or if you're trying to renovate. your house. All of your neighbors get to come yell at you in struggle sessions, and it takes two years for you. Get a permit for an ADU that you're supposed to have by right. I know California is working on that. Yeah. Sliberture. Yeah. So I don't know. Burden is very easy to replicate digitally, which is, again, just something that we've learned over and over again in last 30 years. I do think that for the kind of narrow thing of like, help me fill out this form, what does this mean, I think that it could probably really help with that. But it's, you know, like when it comes to federalism, right, and what permissions is this going to have, if it makes it cheaper for the

government itself to kind of procure good, like cloud-based architecture, like, that would be, that would be good. Yeah. I'm really, really uncertain about it. I'm really not sure. That makes sense. Last question, if you were sort of advising, or if there was a 2028 candidate who was looking for, okay, I like this idea. I want to get rid of the time tax. I want to reduce the time tax. Like, what's a good place to start if I'm on the campaign trail talking about something big that I want to get done for government that's actually feels tangible to people, doable, and would solve some of the problems that you've been writing about. Yeah. So my number one for this thing, let the IRS do people's taxes for them. Let them pre-fill your tax forms and send them to you.

And you can do your taxes by hand if you want. You do not have to do this. But let the IRS, they already have all of the information. The dorks of the IRS would love to do this. You would be saving the average American $12 hours and $290 every year. That's pretty good. Yeah. Maybe they can go back to cracking down on rich people front.

Exactly. Exactly. Then all of these lovely IRS people can go get tax cheats. Perfect. Annie Lowry, thank you so much. The book is Time Tax. Everyone check it out. I had the same thought. I'm like, is this a book about bureaucracy and paperwork? And I was like, no, this is actually a book about why people don't trust the government, which is maybe the most important challenge that we're dealing with right now in the country. So it is a huge, it's a huge, huge issue. It's a book about, it's a project driven by anger and frustration itself. So, but thank you so much for having it. It's always a pleasure to be on. Take care. Thanks to Annie Lowry. When we come back, an excerpt from Crooked Media's new podcast,

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Find your next fall favorites at Quince. app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash offline, get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK 2. That's QI-N-C-E.com slash offline. You guys know your jobs, right? Mm-hmm. Yes. I'm not introducing you. You're introducing yourselves. Okay. It's a whole new world. Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Galen Druk. I'm Claire Malone. And I'm Nate Silver. We are back. As folks may know by now, Nate, Claire and I are getting back together to start a sequel, if you will, start a new show. Before we get to our official first episode, which is launching Wednesday.

It's like episode. Okay, this is like episode 0.5. It's a mini. It's the introduction to our book. It's a minisode, as our friends as at Crooked have been calling it, which is a new term for me, which I like. Yeah. Our first episode, dear listener, launches on Wednesday, September 9th. So mark it down on your calendars. subscribe, smash that subscribe button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you listen to

podcast, you get the drill. But before we sort of dive in with the midterms and Trump and like the parties and everything that is going to take up a lot of our time for the coming I was going to say year, two years, three, whatever it may be. The rest of our guys. The long campaign.

We wanted to turn the mics on, warm up, talk about a little about where we've been, what we're doing with this show, how we ended up here, answer some burning listener questions. And also play... Do we even have listeners yet? How can the listeners have questions?

We have no listeners at this point. Hey, I mean, aspiration. Write us with questions. I don't have an email address for you yet. I mean, the folks on social media dropped some questions. Yeah, yeah. I mean, mostly people were very enthusiastic, which we were so excited to hear, right? Apparently Sarah Jessica Parker retweeted us, which is...

The only thing I care about, personally. We can shut the podcast. I actually haven't seen it. Not if she has Twitter. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what we've been up to for the past. So Claire, we haven't sat down for an official podcast since right before January 6th, 2020. Well, you know what?

I went back and looked this morning. I departed 538 in December of 2020. So in my memory, I thought that I was still employed by five. am I allowed to say 5.30? Yeah, it's a joke. They just bleep it out. Yes, please bleep it out. No, so I think I, my last podcast episode with you guys must have been December 2020.

So the election had happened. But I do, I mean, I'm very vivid memories of watching January 6 happen at like the same desk and on the same computer where I recorded a podcast. So I smush it all together. But like, yes, we haven't been together in this form in five years. The last time we were, I guess, together in person, we did not know what the world had in store for the country, us, the parties, whatnot. First, let's talk about where we've been since December 2020. Then we'll talk about where the country's been since December 2420. So, Claire, why don't you pick us on?

Okay. Wow. So I, so much, actually. I freelanced for a while. I made a podcast about Hollywood and pop culture for The Ringer, which was actually super fun. I had sort of like my rum spring a year of like not doing as much about politics, which was really fun. Wrote a cover story from New York Magazine about Andrew Yang. Yeah, that was fun.

And then I kind of got like my dream job, which I still have. I am a writer at The New Yorker. I cover media and politics, and I'm currently on leave from that job, writing a book about the Maha movement and Bobby Kennedy, which I'm really excited about. So I'm kind of on leave for a year and doing that book and reporting for it and writing it. Yeah, that's my kind of like quick. So tell me, Claire, what's up with all these beef tallow chips? Are they going to make me live forever?

Well, Galen, a lot of people think it's a cleaner fat, a cleaner oil, right? Oh, that's a whole, you know. I'm so excited for this book to come out and be able to ask you all of my quirky health questions. Yeah, seed oils. Zero, yeah. Whole milk. I mean, I. Which I mean, un-pasteurized milk.

Raw milk, yeah. What have you been up to? So they called the herd at ABC 538, one in a time, right? We're going in order, actually. We are going in order. First man down. Yeah, exactly. No, I started a substack newsletter called Silver Bowl.

bulletin. I took about two seconds to come up with that name. Thank you very much. But it's kind of stuck now. And it's kind of my dream job in some ways, right? I'm my own boss. I actually have incentive to work hard. Don't get me wrong. I work my ass off for ABC News for most of it. For most of it. Important caveat there. For the first like eight and a half years, the contract until they totally fucked around at the end. But no, the newsletter is great. We've been able to build or rebuild most of the models that we have. We have a team of four, counting me right now.

And now I have this show with you guys that I'm very excited about. We're very excited to have it with you. So I left 538 slash ABC last, which would have been March of 2025. I'll be honest, it felt like if we're really like pulling back the curtain, it felt for a while like I was recording a podcast

on the deck of a sinking ship. Like all of my like main sort of friends on the ship had gone overboard and I was just still there, you know, every day turning up the mic and whatnot. But anyway, so 538 went down early March of 2025. I started a new podcast called GD Politics, which is a play on, yes, both of my initials, but also goddamn politics. I think the way that many people feel about politics these days started it on St.

Patrick's Day in honor of one of my best friends, one of my best Irish Catholic friends. Thank you. And my parents' anniversary. Aw. Yeah. So yeah, we kind of got the podcast up and running two weeks after 538 went down. And I'm still talking with folks who used to work at 538, like Nathaniel Rakeach, Mary Radcliffe. I'm talking to pollsters and all different authors, some politicians.

We made news with Lisa Murkowski. She told me she would consider becoming an independent under the right circumstances. The podcast is great. There's so many. I mean, and also just like a shout out to all the 538 expats who are now like scattered to the winds, but are all doing such amazing things. We've secretly infiltrated all of media to make data journalism present everywhere.

But anyway, so I have been doing that for the past year and a half now, and it's been a lot of it's on substack. So I've been working with Nate over on substack, which has been a lot of fun. And it's kind of my dream job too. You know, I get to have a lot of fun conversations with many different smart people. And now I get to have, which I'm going to continue doing that, by the way, that other podcast,

more fun conversations with more people I love right here every Wednesday. We should say what we're doing the show. I think when we first started talking about it, it was basically just like, we want to do what we used to do. We want to have a smart conversation. And we don't want to change it that much. And in some ways, we talked a lot of different people. In some ways, that's why we ended up at Crooked because I think they had listened to the old

show and kind of knew what we did and liked it. We didn't really want to, you know, curb our analysis or sort of maybe strong opinions or things that came across on the show. We just wanted to make our show. And that's kind of why we've ended up here. You know, we're all journalists in one form or another. And that's what we're going to do on this show. We're going to be journalists.

We're going to have our analysis. And I don't know. I'm excited we landed here. Although it is nice to work with the team, right? Yes, totally. Very much. Everything here. Because people say, why don't you just have put your shows in the substack?

By the way, I'll still have video interviews on my substack that aren't related to like this content necessarily. But yeah, I don't know. I've been experienced enough to be kind of an old media hand. And I just got good vibes that they were really interested and engaged. A couple of things. One, I think to your point, Claire, Corkin basically said, we want to support you and making the podcast you want to make. And that was really exciting. And we asked a lot of questions.

We asked a lot of questions. And one of them was like, of course, Crooked is a progressive, democratically aligned media company. And we are not a democratically aligned podcast. Just to make that crystal clear we never were. We still aren't and we won't be. You know, we have opinions and analysis that sometimes the left likes and sometimes the right likes and people can make their own conclusions about what sort of biases and opinions we may be secretly hiding or we may say up front even. Remember when people thought we were getting married? I mean, all kinds of, all kinds of fanfiction based on both politics and our personal lives.

But to be clear, Crooked said, we don't mind that you're not Democrats, that you're not progressives, that you are journalists and analysts first, and we want to support you in doing that. And we said, fantastic, because that's what we want to do. And that's what we're going to keep doing here, which is trying to reflect the world as it is and analyze it that way, instead of telling people either what to think or the way that the world should be or whatever. Which, Claire, you mentioned that we want to do what we did back in the early days of 538 or the earlier days of 538, which is true. But as we've all mentioned here, we've changed. We've grown a lot in the past five years.

And also the environment in which we're in has changed. Yes, media and vertical video and all that we've taken now our fourth pivot to video in the past decade. But numbers have changed, right? Like we used to joke about the Scottish teens and predicted. Oh, my gosh. on the 538 podcast. But now it's not like a niche thing anymore. Polymarket and Kalshi are out front.

All of these media organizations are doing collaborations with them. There's, you know, the polls are coming hot and heavy. There's the eternal conversation about whether the polls are getting worse or not, how hard it is to reach people. We've just had big polling misses and some primaries. We can debate how expected those kinds of polling misses should be. There are new polling upstarts, et cetera, et cetera. And so the media environment,

has changed, we've changed, but also the numbers environment, you know, hashtag still counting. The numbers environment has changed. And so I just want to hear a little bit how we're going to approach maybe this new, new environment or sort of why this work is more important than ever. Some of these trends, like the interest in prediction markets, the interest in sports gambling, right? These are things that like I've always been interested in and curious about. The world has caught up to Nate Silver. Yeah, it's really just like we're kind of living in your weird little. No, it is a little weird.

It is a little weird where you walk into a sports arena. You walk into Massachusetts Square Garden. They have the Cal Sheik or Polymarket Concourse. I forget who sponsors what exactly. Like that's a little weird. Certainly some notion. You hear this notion sometimes that, look, oh, people are just going to, we should just cover policy and civics.

You know, no one needs to look at polls. It's like, yeah, fuck that. People actually want to anticipate what's going to happen given how important elections are. That's the most natural impulse and the most newsworthy impulse I can imagine. And the people who cover policy well should keep doing it too. Yes. Absolutely.

But elections, I mean, you know, have you noticed that there's almost no overlap now in the way that Democrats and Republicans vote in Congress? Among voters, it's a little bit more ambiguous. And I think people, I think the swing voters become more underrated than overrated. But like, you know, when you are deciding who wins an election, voting in an election, that everything is kind of baked in from there for at least the next two years. Right. There's not a lot of, I mean, obviously there are stumbles and policy misfires. If anything, though, the equilibrium we're in now is that because you have this rapid fire switch back and forth, by the way, it wouldn't surprise me if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028. And then they're also a one term president. You have this ping pong effect. But it's almost like because they know they're going to lose power quickly and become unpopular quickly. They therefore rush to do everything they can in the first 100 days and bear the consequences of that. And, and, and, and, and, And, yeah, we're almost taking turns now instead of building durable majorities. I don't know how stable that is. But that's an important dynamic.

So we're in the middle. Yeah, we're in the middle of potentially trend shifting things during politics. I feel like when we were covering, when we first launched the podcast in 2016, we were, what we were always talking about, the party decides, right? That was the current theory going on. And I feel like over the past decade, oh my gosh, that we've been doing this, were in this weird interregnum of there were sort of traditional American party politics. And now we're a little bit in this wild west. And I think that's interesting. Like,

what's the next, what are the trends of the next 10, 20, 30 years going to be? And I also think, you know, some of the stuff we're going to talk about on this podcast. AI, right? You know, the, yeah, the sort of popularization of gambling culture. All of that stuff is going to play in in some way, politically. Yeah, I mean, we, the 530 politics podcast became popular during the 2016 election cycle, which was. I didn't even know we were going to do a podcast. But on my second day of work, they were like, you're doing a podcast. I mean, that was a real trip, that election cycle. But it set in motion a lot of the trends that we've now been talking about for the past decade. The reality is that Trump is going to leave office and there are going to be likely

new dynamics that set in may start as soon as this fall, the midterms that we're going to be covering. But I think one of the things that made me most excited after doing basically a decade at 538 to still be doing the civic startup politics podcast right back up again is that I do think we're in a period of change. Like the Democratic primary in 2028 is going to be is going to start in four months and it's going to be absolutely fascinating. And to the point about these trends, I do wonder if at a certain point, we become so polarized. The trends in education and below it become so, they extend to their logical conclusion

that something kind of breaks and something new is created. Back in 2016, we're always like, the system is very stable. It's a two-party system. Third-party candidates have no chance. Independence have no chance. You know, the American political system is the way it is. And you can oftentimes bet on that and be right.

But at a certain point, trends reach their logical conclusion and something shifts. Either, you know, the populist, and the two parties may see eye to eye and reshape the more establishment parts of the two parties may see eye to eye and form common ground. There are different ways, you know, there are different ways right now that you can see things breaking open. We've never had more independence in American politics. Like people are just really dissatisfied with the two parties. And there's, and the two parties, the coalitions within them don't make a ton of sense necessarily. And so I'm excited to

cover something that will be, I think, dynamic and hopefully dynamic in a positive way. Yeah, the last really major shift in American politics that played out over, you know, anywhere from the 1970s through the early 2000s was the shift of Southern Democrats into conservative Southern Republicans, right? And in some ways, the map, if you look at the map from 2000, Al Gore versus George Bush, a few. States have changed, right? Georgia, Arizona, so forth, Ohio, Iowa, in the other direction. But it's still about 80% the same map. And yeah, I don't know. I think people might underrate the chance of a seismic shift. Of course, pundits have been saying, talking about this

for years, but like two things. One is, you know, if AI is as transformative or half as transformative as a labs claim it is, you're going to have great destabilization. to the political system. We can debate if the AI optimists are right. Data centers are kind of the early, early canary in the coal mine for that maybe, right? The other thing is more and more, you know, look, I build models and classically in models we're trying to predict how do different demographics, predict voting behavior, and the big ones are always race and religion, right?

Increasingly, though, you see these really big divides with respect to age on Gaza, for example, in New York here with support for Zerun, Mdani, for example, or Abdul-Salad in Michigan, really, really sharp age splits. Not always as simple as young people are progressive. It's actually a little more complicated. But when you see that, then you're almost guaranteed to have generational change. Yeah. You know, breaking news, old people die off, except the electorate, right?

We all die. Yeah. On that topic. Yes. Mortality. Yes. We, so in classic form, we were like, let's do a little feed warmer. Let's turn the mics on.

We've practically recorded an entire podcast episode now. We wanted to, before we go, play a little game because it has been a long time since we've all been together in a studio. And we were reflecting on that time when we were discussing in our editorial meeting and, you know, what we want to talk about. We're like, okay, let's try to settle on the most. important number that defines the period that we were apart. So say, you know, January of 2021 to now August of 2026, what number either during that time is most significant to the political ships or whatever themes that we've seen or in this very moment, what number is the most significant? So, Claire, should I start? Yeah, yeah. I have two numbers. Maybe I misunderstood the

directions. Can I do two numbers? I'm going to do two numbers, or should I do one number? Do one number? Then we'll come back around for one or something. You can number draft. There are a lot of numbers. It's draft to go on for a long time. Okay, all right, fine.

I'll start off with my very simple first number, which is two. Wait, wait, hold on. Let's see if Nate could guess what two means. The number of Trump's second term, that he's a lame duck now? The number of presents we've had since we saw you. No. I'll tell you. Go ahead.

It's a number of wars that have started. I'm thinking of the war with Iran. Okay. Wait, oh no. Is my number one? The number of wars do yous? It's not funny. I was thinking like the number of wars that were.

That like America started. Oh my gosh, my number is even wrong. Three. Okay, three. Wait, which three? I did this. I did this at like 5 a.m. This morning.

Wait, I don't even know which is it Venezuela? No, Venezuela wasn't. That was a little. Encursion. It was a excursion. No, what did we keep on calling it? An expedition? He kept on calling an exploit or an expedition.

Anyway. Okay. Oh my gosh. It's very embarrassing. Three wars. Oh, boy. Ukraine. We didn't start Ukraine.

No. Okay. Go ahead. Ukraine, Gaza. Yeah. And Iran. And they've all had profound impacts on U.S. politics. I can't believe I forgot Ukraine. Wow. But Ukraine, I mean, Ukraine and Gaza have, in their own ways, I mean, I think Ukraine has reshaped Republicans in some ways more because it created, you know, I mean, J.D. Vance in some ways really kind of got a lot of sort of America First Juice by being, you know, the guy who was saying some pretty outtray things about the Ukrainians. The conduct in Gaza has obviously reshaped the Democratic Party.

And then the war in Iran has profoundly impacted America economy and obviously Trump's presidency. Three, my number is three. No, but two of the three, though, because two of the three, maybe the reason you forgot about Ukraine is Ukraine has not had obvious downstream effects on American politics, right? You go to Europe or something, right? I was last summer in Tallinn, Estonia, briefly, in Helsinki, Finland, and there, I mean, they're right near Russia. Russia, right? There it's much more pertinent. Here it's not. The other two, though, for totally different reasons. I'm not sure that Americans would care that much about Iran if there weren't the effect on gas prices and commodity prices, but that's literally the most visible thing that you see. And then look, we could do, I'm sure we could have a whole series about public opinion on Israel and Palestine and Gaza and how that does and does not shape political developments and how that has reshaped the Democratic Party and whether our vantage point. in New York is over-indexed or under-indexed on that. But that's had profound effects on, like I said,

the split between younger and older voters in the Democratic Party, too. Okay. So, Nate, what is your most important number of the past five years? If Claire picked two, then I'll pick two trillion. Hold on, hold on. Claire, can you guess what two trillion is? Well, how much the national debt has grown? I don't know. No, it's probably

I'm not one of those debt people. One of those debt people. Maybe I should be. Probably grown by a lot more. Two trillion. Ooh. Yeah, I'm sorry. I feel like it's something about data center.

Yeah, I was going to say like the market cap of the number of all the AI companies together. It's something, something, something. It's the valuation that Anthropic is now trying to raise money. I think they're trying to raise. That's the most important number of the past five years. It was a big fucking flashy number. I want a big number for, for our debut,

for half debut show, right? Our mini debut. I'm someone who believes that a lot of politics is downstream ultimately from technology that some of the relative stability you saw in the 1950s in post-war America. And this is a time when you had record low partisanship and Eisenhower had very high approval ratings. So before Watergate, before Newt Gingrich.

Still a lot happening with the Cold War and things like that. But that was the era of big major television networks and radio station where there's a strong gatekeeper effect where they have advertising-related incentives to be kind of highly nonpartisan. And that begins to change with the internet, right? Social media needs to be a category unto its own, I believe. And I think a lot of politics is downstream from that. And so, you know, again, I take, I don't know, compared probably to most politics listeners, I don't know what counts as being an optimist or a pessimist in AI these days, right? You know, I am more convinced about the transformative power of AI than the average politics observer,

less convinced than the average Silicon Valley person working in a lab engineer or something. But, you know, people are talking about mass displacement of tasks that humans used to do. Even the biggest optimists in Silicon Valley would probably say in some way, shape, or form AI is probably likely to concentrate power in the hands of fewer rather than more people. You know, at the same time, also in terms of how we communicate, I mean, people say in some ways having these three big models, Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT are like, they're kind of like the big networks, right? They have actually, believe it or not, the quality information you get from ChatGPT or Claude, probably better than you get from Twitter.

Okay. I mean, I'm trying. There's another conversation about what happened. So we're going to talk plenty about AI on this podcast. I think that was a good little preview. Yeah. You've won up Claire Plenty. Claire chose two. You chose. You chose. $2 trillion. I, when we were talking in our editorial meeting, we're like, we're all going to choose inflation. And so I think we all went out of our ways not to choose inflation. I will just say here, for those who are following along, the total inflation that America has experienced since the last time we recorded a podcast together is about 28% over those five years. And to put that into it's four and a half percent annually over those years. And to put that in,

context, you know, the same amount of time prior, so what, like five and a half years or something like that, uh, from July 2015 to January 2021, the country experienced 10% inflation, which is about 1.7% annually. So I think that we have seen inflation obviously, undoubtedly affect American politics, but basically turn populations against incumbents around the globe. And, you know, you talked a little bit about this already, Nate, but the fact of inflation is that you see it everywhere. Yeah. And you see it advertised to you on the side of the road at gas stations, whatnot. And unlike unemployment, which does affect beyond just the people who are unemployed because people start getting scared about losing their jobs. Ultimately, like really high unemployment in America is 10%, right?

But 100% of Americans experience this inflation. I have seen an $11 gallon of milk at a New York City grocery store. And I mean, and I believe you. And the other thing that all of that inflation has wrong, right? It is upset politics here in America and abroad. It's also been particularly new because we hadn't experienced those kinds of inflation numbers for two decades. But one other thing that is raw is higher interest rates, which disproportionately affects young people who are in a time in their life when they want to be borrowing money to do big things. go to school, buy houses, by cars.

And it has sort of frozen a little bit of our economy, especially for younger people in Amber, in a way that I think has created a lot of frustration and anger. And feeds movements, feeds populism. And feeds populism for sure. I want to say, I have a runner-up number because I thought somebody else might choose inflation. So, Claire, go ahead with your runner-up number,

and then I'll go ahead with my. Do you have three? You told me you had three. Indeed. You only get to start one of your runners-up. Oh, wait. Okay. My runner-up number is 20. Okay. Okay. You guys aren't going to guess, so I'll just say it.

20 is the percentage of U.S. adults who say that they regularly get their news on Instagram and TikTok. And that's up from the 2020 numbers by a lot. In 2020, only 11% of people said they got their news on Instagram, and only 3% of people said they got their news on TikTok. This is so interesting. I've a related number. Yeah. So, I mean, I think I wanted to choose something. that just reflected just the quick and radical changes that have taken place over the past five years when it comes to the media landscape when it comes to how we're consuming things. I mean, as a writer, I am disturbed by how much people love video. Hi. And as a podcaster who's now on video,

I love it. But I just think that the politicization of social media spaces like Instagram and TikTok, which used to be, I don't know, what were we all doing on Instagram, taking pictures of food? That is just, you know, it's shorter bursts. The information environment is changing how you're probably watched this clip on Instagram, right, if you see us. And that, I think, has changed the way the depth of people's understanding of certain issues. It's fed polarization in lots of different ways, not just algorithmically, but also like when you're actually watching a clip of something, there's less time to get into the nuance of an issue. So I just think it's really changed Americans' brains.

And it is negative, negative, negative. Yes. That's what rises to the top of the feet. Yes, exactly. Yes. Nate. With the fifth pick in the 2006 still counting number draft, I select the number eight.

Do you have any guesses what eight represents? The number of times we said fuck on this podcast so far. I take the over on that. Galen 8 is the number of Democrats running for the U.S. House that have lost their attempts at renomination in the primary. That's a good number. That is a good number. That is a good number. That number is typically something more like two, except in redistricting years.

It was kind of halfway redistricting year, but most of these are, you know, as the media narrative is more or less correct about, it's either more moderate Democrats listen to progressives or sometimes just older out of touch resistance 1.0 or pre-resistance. era older Democrats who are being replaced by by younger candidates. And that's something which is a relatively recent trend, right? In 2020, the party got its way. The party, you know, remember it was like super friends and like, didn't Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, like, Buttigieg, oh, didn't they all come to the same rally? And they're like, Biden, Biden, Biden. In 2024, the party, in a complicated way, got its way to.

there was not really a vote in 2024. Although some people in the party didn't like the way it went down. Obama famously. Yeah. And obviously a very contentious process, but voters did not have a lot of say directly

and who received the 2024 Democratic nomination. And look, I don't know if you tie a particular moment to this. Obviously being in New York, we think everything revolves around the city, So Zoran's defeat of Andrew Cuomo When Zoran Mamdani started out polling at 1% And was a relatively obscure, you know, political figure until then. Like that was a remarkable development, I would say.

But like, but that's been a relatively recent change since the last time since even before you were working You know, even when you were still working for 538, it was I think less clear until last summer was Zoran that. Oh, this is a real a real big deal. A real, a real shift. Okay. So my final. number is a little bit nerdy. I apologize. But if you've stuck around this long, maybe you're a true head and you'll appreciate this. My final number is 15 to 20 percent. Okay. And 15 to 20 percent

is based on research that was done by Yanukov and John Barry Ryan. They wrote a book called The Other Divide, which I talked to them on the 538 politics podcast way back in the day when they published this in 2022. And basically what they were saying was that the main divide in American politics is not left versus right. It's the people who pay close attention to politics and are very engaged on a daily basis versus the people who are not. And it is only 15 to 20 percent of Americans who are engaged on a regular basis in sort of consuming all of the news that comments out about what's happening in Washington and in elections who are posting on social media. And it's about 15 to 20 percent of America. It's about 15 percent of Americans who donate

to campaigns and 20 percent of Americans as of recently. who show up in primaries. And so much of the way we understand politics and the conflict in politics is set by that 15 to 20%. And it shapes, and like the media goes, those are the people who are going to rallies. Those are the people who get interviewed,

who get put on CNN, who get written up in the New York Times. Those are also the people who purchase subscriptions, who are the readers. And these are the people who are probably listening to this podcast. But our job is not just to reflect to our audience what they think,

or their own biases or stereotypes about the world, it's to look beyond that and data helps us do that and to tell the story of the other 80%. And that 80%, a lot of sort of what they don't like about politics is not necessarily that they like hate the left or they hate the right, but they hate the conflict that is driven by the 15 to 20% who are so involved in politics. And so I think a couple things.

One, when you focus on that 80%, you get, a much more diverse set of views. This is your like people who want a border wall and a public option. Right. It's the heterodoxy of Americans. People who support legal abortion and are skeptical of trans girls participating in girls' sports. And once you open the aperture to the 100% of America, you get a world in which we agree on a lot of things. A world in which a lot of these stereotypes are not, you know, there was this great Washington Post poll.

years ago that was like, what do Democrats think of Republicans and what do Republicans think of Democrats? Democrats think that Republicans are all like millionaire fascists and Republicans think Democrats are all like gender queer or sexuality queer socialists. And it's like America is far more complicated than that. And the way that oftentimes politics gets defined is by, just keep this in mind, a small subset of Americans. And those are also the people who are deciding our elections. So in primaries of the very least. And so if you don't like this highly conflict-driven environment. You actually have to bring more people into the political process, more sort of

heterodox, and ultimately more, quote, unquote, normie people into the process. And I hope we can bring some normie people into the process on this podcast, too. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Send us to your mom. No, that's important. Because it used to be that, like, the media was more centrist than voters were, right? Meet the press and Crossfire and all these things.

The big three networks, Fox always challenge. that paradigm a little bit, to be fair. And now it's kind of the opposite. Now the media, now, you know, if you look at Substack U.S. bestseller list, almost all of that has a pretty strong identifiable partisanly. Not us, Nate.

Not us. We're pure as a driven... Don't get a twisted. But that's been a big change too, right? Where the normies have... By the way, sometimes you'll have, say, oh, this person is... is pro trans rights, but also pro-Israel.

It doesn't make any sense. Well, actually, like, there's no reason why your stance on all these unrelated issues should be related necessarily, right? People, this is what parties do. You take a country of 350 million people in a complex, multidimensional sphere of all the complex interconnected issues in the world today, and you smush it down into a flat surface where there are only two political parties, right? That's what partisanship is. It makes people think they have to be aligned with one party's

use and all these issues when that's actually fucking stupid. It's an important force for understanding how public opinion is shaped. I think you're really getting a flavor of the podcast. Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to have a lot to talk about. And that is the kind of content you can find every Wednesday starting September 9th at Still But in all seriousness, that's it for today. Thank you so much, Claire and Nate. This has been truly, I mean, I've had more fun in front of a microphone these past 45 minutes than I have in a long time. Yes. I'm very excited for what's to come. As I mentioned, we will be back in your feeds for our first official episode, as if this

wasn't really an episode, on Wednesday, September 9th, and every Wednesday after that, plus bonus content. You can listen to still counting wherever you get your podcast, go, like, subscribe, comment, whatever. We're also on YouTube. So subscribe, comment, like there as well. Our pretty pictures, all the video, the lighting in the studio is fantastic. So if you want to see that, you've got to go to YouTube.

YouTube.com slash at Stillcounting podcast. Stillcounting is a crooked media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our production team includes Reed Trillan, Johanna Case, and Ben Hedcoe. Production support from Matt DeGroote, Katie Long, and Adrian Hill. Our production staff is proudly unionized with Writers Guild of America East. If you like what you heard, head on over to the Still Counting feed and hit subscribe. The show officially launches on September 9th. Thank you.