We’re Back! What’s Changed in US Politics?

- Mm-hmm.

“- I'm not introducing you here, introducing yourselves.”

- Okay. - It's a whole new world. (upbeat music) - Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gailentrick.

- I'm Claire Malone. - And I'm a 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 episode,

first episode, which is launching.

- It's like, it's like episode, okay. - It's like episode 0.5. - It's a mini. It's the introduction, 12. - It's a mini-sode, as our friends at Cricket 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 podcasts, so 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 gonna say year to year three, whatever it may be, for the rest of the rest of the day. - The long campaign.

- We wanted to turn the mics on, warm up, talk about a little bit where we've been, what we're doing with the show, how we ended up here, answer some burning listener questions, and also play even have listeners yet,

how can the listeners have questions? We have no listeners, at this point. - Hey, I mean, aspiration for this question. - Right, there's questions, I don't, I'm an email just for you yet.

I mean, the folks on social media dropped some question. Yeah, yeah, that's mostly people were very enthusiastic, which we were so excited to hear, right? Like apparently Sarah Jessica Parker retweeted us, which is the only thing I care about.

We can show them. We can show them. I actually haven't seen it. (laughing) How did she have 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 just 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 five, right? Yes, it was a joke. They just leap it out.

Yes, please leap it out. No, so I think my last podcast episode with you guys must have been December 2020. So the election had happened, but I mean, I'm very vivid memories of watching January 6th happen

at like the same desk and on the same computer where I recorded a podcast, so I smashed it all together. But like yes, we haven't been together in this forum 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 went up.

First let's talk about where we've been.

- Yeah. - Since December 2020, they won't talk about where the country's been, since December, 2020. So Claire, why don't you take us off? - Okay, wow.

So I, it's 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. - Right 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 Mahah movement and Bobby Kennedy,

and you know, 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. And yeah, that's my kind of like quick.

“- So tell my Claire, what's up with all these beef tallots chips?”

Are they gonna make me lift forever? - Well, Galen, a lot of people think it's a cleaner, cleaner, fat, cleaner oil, right? That's all, 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 questions. - All of your, yeah, sea doils, sea doils. - Cold mouth, which I mean, unpasturized mouth. - Raw milk, yeah. - What do you even up to?

- So they called the herd at ABC 538, one in a time, right? - We're going, Claire, we're just out of the way.

- I'm gonna get our first man down.

- Yeah, exactly. - No, I started a sub-stack newsletter called Silver Billaton. 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. So it can be wrong, I work my assa for ABC News for most of the time. - You do work hard 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.

We've been able to build or rebuild most of the models

that we have. We have a team before 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/ABC last, which would have been March of 2025. I will be honest, it felt like if we're really 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 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.

- Oh, 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 Rakegg, 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. - You look, the podcast is great.

There's so many, I mean, and also just yeah, just like a shout out to all of the 538 expats who are now like scattered to the winds, but are all doing such things. - We've been secretly infiltrated all of media.

- It's to make data journalism present everywhere. - Yeah. - 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 sub-stack.

So I've been working with Nate over on sub-stack, 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 gonna continue doing that, by the way, that other podcast, but now I'm gonna have more fun conversations with more people I love right here, everyone.

- We should say what we're doing this show.

I think when we first started talking about it,

it was basically just like, we wanna do what we used to do. We wanna have a smart conversation, and we don't wanna change it that much. And in some ways, that's, you know,

we talked a lot of it from people,

“and 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. And we didn't really wanna, 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 ended up here. You know, we're all journalists in one form or another, and that's what we're gonna do on the show. We're gonna be journalists,

we're gonna have our analysis, and I don't know, I'm excited we landed here. - Although it is nice to work with a team, right? - Yes, it is totally everything. - Very much.

- Because people say why don't you just have put your shows in the subject, by the way, I'll still have video interviews on my subject 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, Crooked basically said we wanna support you

and making the podcast you wanna 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 on 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, - I believe you don't think we are getting married. - All kinds of, all kinds of fanfiction, they assemble 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 wanna support you in doing that,

“and we said, fantastic, because that's what we wanna do,”

and that's what we're gonna 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 wanna do what we did back in the early days of five, 30 or earlier days of five, 30, 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, but 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 predicting on the five, 38 podcasts, but now it's not like a niche thing in all polymarket

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 environment or sort of why this work is more important than ever. - Some of these trends, like the interested in prediction markets, the interest in sports gambling, right?

These are things that like I've always been interested in

and the world has caught up to Nate Silver. - Yes, really just look at the kind of thing in your weirds. - No, it is a little weird, as a little weird, where you walk into a sports arena, you walk in a mess with your garden,

and they have the calcium or polymer clay. - Of course, I forget who sponsors what exactly, like that's a little weird, certainly some notion, you hear this notion sometimes, like, oh, people are just going to,

we should just cover policy and civics, you know, no one needs to look at polls, like yeah, fuck that, people actually want to anticipate what's going to happen, give it how important elections are, that's the most natural impulse and the most newsworthy impulse

I can imagine. And the people who cover policy will also keep doing it, too. - Yes, absolutely, but elections, you know, have you noticed that there's almost no overlap now in the way that Democrats and Republicans vote in Congress.

So, among voters, it's a little bit more ambiguous

“than 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 a presidency in 2028. And then there are also a one-term president, and 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 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.

- We're in the middle of potentially trenchifting things during politics. I feel like when we were covering, when we first launched the podcast in 2016,

“we were always talking about the party to sides, 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. We're 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 in the next 10, 20, 30 years going to be? And I also think some of the stuff we're going to talk about on this podcast.

Yeah, right, that the sort of popularization of gambling culture, all of that stuff is going to play it 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 about my second day of work. They were like, you're doing a podcast? - I mean, that was a real trip that a lot since I really--

- But it's set in motion a lot of the trends that we've now been talking about for the past decade. - Totally.

- 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 this at a start-up 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, the way we 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, independent 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 are logical, conclusion, and something shifts. Either, you know, the populists 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

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 it 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,

any 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-- - If the actors--

- If the actors-- - If the actors-- - 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 built models, and classically in models were trying to predict how to 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 Zaron, mom Donnie, for example, where I do else I did in Michigan, really, really sharp age splits.

Not always as simple as young people are progressive, it's actually a little more complicated, but like, but when you see that, then you're almost guaranteed to have generational change come, you know, breaking news old people die off.

- Except be able to use it all day. - We all die 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 practically recorded on the time. - I guess that's it. - So 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 and 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 of the political chips 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, sure. - I have two numbers, maybe I misunderstood the directions. Can I do two numbers?

I'm gonna do two numbers, or should I do one number? - Do one number, then we'll come back around for one second. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There are a lot of numbers just left to go in for a long time. - Okay, all start off with my, my very simple first number

which is two. - We wait, hold on, let's see if I need to guess what two means. - Ah, the number of the second term that he's a lame duck now. - Ah, the number of presents we've had. - Yes, we saw you.

- No, I'll tell you. - Go ahead. - It's the number of wars that have started. I'm thinking of the wars you run. - Okay.

- We, oh no, it's my number one. - Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I was thinking of the number of wars that were in the last. - Oh my gosh, my number is even wrong. Three, okay, three. - Wait, which three? I do this, I feel like first, I did this at like five AM.

“- I don't even know which, is it that as way, love?”

- No, what is really wasn't that way? - No, it wasn't that way, it wasn't that way. - Okay, what have I got? - It's very embarrassing. Three wars, oh boy, Ukraine. - We start you praying. - No, I wouldn't.

- Okay, go ahead, go ahead. - Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. - And they've all had profound impacts on U.S. politics. - Mm-hmm. - I can't believe I forgot, Ukraine's, 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, JD Dance in some ways really kind of got a lot of sort of America first juice by being, you know,

- Three, my numbers three.

- No, two of the three though, because two of the three, I mean, the reason you forgot about Ukraine is Ukraine has not had obvious downstream effects on American Party. - 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, right? There is much more pertinent here, it's not.

The other two though, for totally different reasons, you know, I'm not sure that Americans would care that much about Iran if they 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 all series about public opinion on Israel and Palestine and Gaza, and how that doesn't 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 like, but that's had profound effects on, and I get like I said this split between younger and older voters in the party 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.

- We'll go on, Claire, can you guess more two trillion as? - Well, how much the national debt has grown? I don't know. - No, I don't know. - You're not one of those debt.

- One of those debt people? - Maybe I should. - Probably grown by a lot more. Two trillion. - Whew.

- Yeah, I'm starting. I feel like something like the medicenter? - Yeah, it was like the market cap of like all the action. It's something something something something. - The valuation that Anthropic is now trying to raise money.

“I think 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 our debut show, right? I mean, I'm somebody who believes that a lot of politics is downstream,

ultimately from technology, that some of the relative stability you saw in the 1950s

and 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 New Gingrich, still lot happening with the Cold War and things like that. But that was the era of big major television networks and radio stations, where there's a strong gatekeeper effect where they have advertising related incentives

to be kind of highly non-partisan, 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.”

So again, I take, I know, compared probably to most politics listeners, I end up what counts as being an optimist or a pessimist in AI these days, right? 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 an AI engineer or something. But, you know, people are talking about mass displacement to 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. At the same time, also in terms of how we communicate, I mean, people say in some ways having these three big models, Jim and I and Claude and so many catchy PTR, like the kind of like the big networks, right? They have actually, believe it or not, the quality information you get from catchy PTR Claude,

probably better than you get from Twitter. Okay, I mean, I mean, there's something that I'm not aware of. So we're going to talk plenty about AI on this podcast. I think that was a good, a little preview. You've won up Claire plenty, Claire chose to, you chose two trillion.

I, when we were talking in our editor on the news, 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 four and a half percent annually over those years, and to put that in context, you know, the same amount of time prior,

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 population to 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. 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 brought 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 has brought is higher interest rates, which disproportionately affects young people who are in a time in my life when they want to be borrowing money to do big things.

“Go to school by 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 so these feeds movements and feeds populism and feeds populism for sure.

I want to say, I have a runner up number because I thought something like, choose inflation. So, clear, go ahead with your runner up number and then I'll go ahead with number. Do you have a runner up? Are you three? You told me three? Yeah, you only have to start one of your runner up. Oh wait, okay, my runner up number is 20. Okay, you guys are going to guess, so I'll just say it.

20 is the percentage of US 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 have a real lead to the 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. I have much people love video.

Hi. And as a sponsor, who's now on video, I love it. But I just think that the politicization of social media spaces like Instagram and TikTok, which you speak. I don't know what we're 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 watching this clip on Instagram, right? If you see us. And then 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.

“Negative, negative, negative. Yes, that's what rises to the top of the feed. Yes, exactly. Yes.”

Nate, with the fifth pick in the 2026 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? That's, I take the over on that. Galen, eight is the number of Democrats running for the U.S. House that have lost their attempts at renomination. 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 immediate narrative is more or less correct about.

It's either more matter of Democrats in progress. There's something I'm just old 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 any club of charge if you'd be a judge like we'd a judge. Oh, didn't they all come into the same rally and they're like doors. And by 2024, the party in a complicated way got its way to there was not really a, there was not really a vote in 2024.

People in the party didn't like the way it went down under Obama famously. Yeah, no, and obviously very contentious process, but like voters did not have a lot of say directly and who who received the 2024 Democratic nomination.

And then was a relatively obscure, you know, political figure until then like that was a remarkable development I would say. But like, but that that's been a relatively recent change since the last time since even before you were working. So we're working for 538. It was, I think, less clear until last summer was or I'm that all this is a real, a real, a real, a real show. Okay, so my final number is a little 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%.

And 15 to 20% is based on research that was done by Yonipropnikov and John Berry 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% 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 21% of Americans who donate to campaigns and 20% of Americans as a 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 rally those are the people who get interviewed who get put on CNN who get written up in the New York Times people who purchase media 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% right and that 80% a lot of sort of what they don't like about politics is not necessarily that they like hate the left of a 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 a heterodoxy of Americans people who support legal abortion and are skeptical of trans girls participating in great 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 is a good great Washington post. The whole years ago that was like what do Democrats think of Republicans and what of Republicans think of 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.”

The primary is 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 also really more quote normie people into the process.

And I hope we can bring some normie people into the process on this podcast.

Like and subscribe. That's the important because it used to me that like the media was more simplest than the voters were right meet the press and crossfire and and all these things the big 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 some stack US bestseller list almost all that has a pretty strong identifyable. Partisanly not us me not us we're pure as a driven slash but like but that's but that's been a big change to right where like the normies have like and by the way.

I don't have a say all this person is uh is a pro trans rights but also pro Israel and making he said well actually like there's no reason why you're stands and all these unrelated issues. That should be related necessarily right people this is what parties do you take a country 350 million people and it complex multi dimensional sphere of all the complex interconnect issues in the world today and you switch 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 parties use and all these issues when that's actually fucking stupid.

Yes, I mean, yeah, yeah, we're going to have a lot to talk about.

“And that is a kind of context you can find every Wednesday starting September 9th at still counting but in all seriousness, that's it for today. Thank you so much Claire and this has been truly.”

I've had more fun in front of a microphone these past 45 minutes and after 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 are pretty pictures that all the video with the lighting in the studio is fantastic.

So if you want to see that you got to go to YouTube YouTube dot com slash at still counting podcast still counting is a crooked media production or producer is Saul Rubin our music is by Frank master cylinder our production team includes retry when Johanna case and bed has production support from that.

“To grow Katie Wong and Adrienne Hill our production staff is proudly unionized with the writers field of America.”

My name is Shannon Maldonado and I'm the founder of Yaui, who is the founder of Kunstverke and has a specialised project.

My role as a hobby-fi, as a hobby-fi, in comparison to the other platforms that I tested with Ambenutzer.

I have already thought about all the topics. All the tools that are important for the development of the podcast are, for example, from Lager, find the right in the dashboard.