Offline’s Anti-Anxiety Election Special

Summary

Offline’s Anti-Anxiety Election Special – Detailed Summary

Release Date: November 3, 2024
Hosts: Jon Favreau and Max Fisher
Guest: Barton Gelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Senior Adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice

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1. Introduction to the Election Anxiety Special

In this special episode of Offline with Jon Favreau, hosts Jon Favreau and Max Fisher welcome Barton Gelman to discuss the looming 2024 election and its potential impact on American democracy. Recognizing the widespread anxiety surrounding the election, the conversation aims to provide insights and strategies to help listeners navigate their fears and stay emotionally resilient during this critical period.

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2. Jeff Bezos and Media Endorsements

Jeff Bezos Pulls Washington Post’s Presidential Endorsement

At [02:13], the hosts delve into Jeff Bezos's controversial decision to retract the Washington Post's editorial board endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Bezos argued that such endorsements can create perceptions of media bias, aiming to rebuild public trust. This move follows similar actions by other major publications like the LA Times and USA Today, leading to significant repercussions:

• Subscriber Loss: Barton Gelman highlights, “They lost at least 250,000 subscribers. That is a lot of subscribers” ([03:35]).
• Financial Impact: The Washington Post confirmed a $77 million loss last year ([03:50]).
• Editorial Resignations: Multiple members of the editorial boards have resigned in response to these changes ([03:35]).

Motivations Behind Bezos’s Decision

Barton Gelman critically analyzes Bezos's motivations, suggesting that the decision may be influenced by former President Trump's threats to use federal power against Bezos’s businesses if the Post’s coverage remained unfavorable. Gelman states, “It is just impossible to escape the very strong appearance here that this is about preemptively caving to Trump” ([05:43]).

Bezos’s Defense and Critique

Bezos contends that the decision was a miscommunication aimed at avoiding perceived bias ([06:00]). However, Gelman counters this by emphasizing the historical significance of media endorsements and the potential influence of political pressure, asserting, “It is just impossible to escape the very strong appearance here that this is about preemptively caving to Trump” ([05:43]).

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3. Trust in Media and Its Erosion

Role of Trump and the Internet in Media Distrust

At [08:55], the discussion shifts to the broader erosion of trust in media, attributing significant blame to the internet and Trump’s persistent attacks on the press. Gelman remarks, “The reason that there is distrust in the media... is the fucking Internet” ([09:43]).

Impact of Media Personalities and Policies

Gelman elaborates on how Trump's characterization of the media as enemies has compounded distrust, surpassing earlier issues pre-2016. He notes, “The same way that we were eight years ago...frankly, this is something we all have to think about” ([14:08]).

Subscriber Reactions and Media Accountability

The hosts discuss how subscribers’ decisions to cancel are influenced not only by endorsements but also by personal experiences and trust in journalistic integrity. Gelman advises, “Don't subscribe to us because it's like your civic duty... we're selling you a product” ([21:58]).

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4. Managing Election Anxiety: Coping Strategies

Personal Reflections on Anxiety

At [24:41], Barton Gelman shares his feelings of anxiety, describing physical symptoms like headaches and nausea due to constant doom-scrolling ([25:12]). In contrast, Jon Favreau reveals a surprising sense of calm, despite the close race ([25:47]).

Effective Coping Mechanisms

The conversation emphasizes practical strategies to manage anxiety:

• Limit Information Overload: Gelman advises setting boundaries on news consumption, such as limiting time spent reading or listening to news each day ([30:35]).
• Engage in Meaningful Activities: Both hosts advocate for connecting with others, engaging in hobbies, and participating in community activities to maintain emotional well-being ([26:59]).
• Maintain Social Connections: Jon shares the therapeutic benefits of phone banking and canvassing, highlighting personal stories of emotional breakthroughs ([34:41], [34:45]).

Establishing a Routine for Emotional Health

Gelman recommends creating a daily plan that includes productive activities and designated times for consuming news, ensuring a balanced approach to staying informed without becoming overwhelmed ([40:11]).

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5. The Importance of Civic Engagement

Encouraging Voter Outreach

In the final segments, Jon and Barton stress the significance of proactive voter outreach. They encourage listeners to contact friends in swing states, emphasizing that individual actions can have a substantial impact in a tightly contested election ([40:18], [42:18]).

Stories from Volunteers

Volunteers share their experiences, illustrating how personal interactions can influence voter decisions and reduce election anxiety by fostering a sense of agency and community involvement ([82:42]).

Maintaining Agency Amid Uncertainty

Gelman highlights the importance of maintaining agency and not succumbing to feelings of helplessness, even in the face of potential adverse outcomes. He advises, “Get involved, stay active, give yourself that sense of agency” ([84:28]).

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6. Safeguarding Democracy: Beyond the Election

Protecting Elections from Subversion

Later in the episode, Barton Gelman discusses his work at the Brennan Center for Justice, focusing on safeguarding elections from potential subversive actions by threats like Donald Trump. He details a tabletop exercise designed to simulate and prepare for authoritarian attempts to undermine democracy ([64:50], [67:05]).

Strategies to Counteract Authoritarianism

Gelman outlines strategies such as pre-commitments among pro-democracy actors to resist authoritarian measures and the crucial role of public opinion in restraining presidential overreach ([80:37], [82:07]).

Role of the Courts and Public Opinion

While acknowledging the challenges posed by a potentially hostile Supreme Court, Gelman emphasizes the enduring importance of the judiciary and public opinion in upholding democratic norms and preventing constitutional crises ([78:56], [80:23]).

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7. Concluding Thoughts and Call to Action

In wrapping up, Jon Favreau and Barton Gelman reaffirm the necessity of both personal resilience and collective action to navigate the election's uncertainties. They urge listeners to stay informed, engage with their communities, and prioritize their mental well-being to contribute effectively to the democratic process.

Final Encouragement:

• Reach Out and Persuade: “VoteSave America is asking everyone to reach out to three friends in swing states...” ([40:18]).
• Stay Connected and Healthy: Engage in activities that promote mental health and maintain strong social ties ([34:41], [40:34]).

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Notable Quotes

• Barton Gelman [02:54]: “They lost at least 250,000 subscribers. That is a lot of subscribers.”
• Barton Gelman [05:43]: “It is just impossible to escape the very strong appearance here that this is about preemptively caving to Trump.”
• Barton Gelman [09:43]: “The reason that there is distrust in the media... is the fucking Internet.”
• Jon Favreau [25:47]: “I'm feeling pretty calm.”
• Barton Gelman [26:47]: “It is not too bad.”
• Jon Favreau [34:41]: “Our friend, she’s a writer...phone banking is like, Molly.”
• Barton Gelman [40:34]: “You can do whatever you have to do.”
• Barton Gelman [84:28]: “To conquer their fears, impress themselves and get out there.”

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Conclusion

Offline with Jon Favreau provides a comprehensive and thoughtful exploration of the multifaceted anxieties surrounding the 2024 election. Through insightful discussions with Barton Gelman, the episode not only highlights the challenges posed by political maneuvers and media distrust but also offers practical strategies for maintaining personal well-being and fostering effective civic engagement. This special serves as both a reassurance and a call to action for listeners to actively participate in shaping the outcome of the election while safeguarding their mental health.

Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

This lasagna was so cheesy, my plate was filled with saucy slices. Then a flimsy store brand plate. No, no, no, no. Ruined it.

[Max Fisher]

Next time, get Dixie Ultra plates three.

[Barton Gelman]

Times stronger than the leading store brand. 10 inch paper plate, Dixie, make it right.

[Max Fisher]

Election officials around the country have hardened their systems, have reinforced defenses, have increased auditing. There are backup plans and backups of the backups for the things that usually go wrong in elections. The big question to me was, if Donald Trump disputes the election result and tries to overturn it, which I'm quite certain he will if he loses, can the system withstand that? Can the system hold? And I believe it can't. I believe that he will try, if he loses, to overturn the results. And he will fail.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher and you just heard from today's guest, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Barton Gelman. If you know who Barton Gelman is, even the name might make you a little anxious. He wrote a piece right before the 2020 election that basically predicted Trump's attempted coup. If you don't know who Barton Gelman is, you're probably anxious Anyway because the 2024 election is almost here. And if you're not anxious, please give us some of whatever you're taking.

[Barton Gelman]

Just mail it right to us. I will take triple.

[Jon Favreau]

In the meantime, we thought we'd do an offline election anxiety special. So we're going to talk through some news and then chat about all the ways we might be able to temper our anxiety heading into election day and potentially beyond.

[Barton Gelman]

We got to get through it.

[Jon Favreau]

Then you'll hear my interview with Barton, who's now a senior adviser at the Brennan center for justice, where he's been focused on building safeguards to protect democracy and fighting attempts to steal the 2024 election. We talked about why he thinks that this time our votes will be safe, but maybe not. America, if Trump wins, he has some.

[Barton Gelman]

Real good news, bad news out of this one.

[Jon Favreau]

Real good news, bad news. You win some, you lose some. Bart Gelman. It was a great conversation. That should make you feel at least a little bit better about the next few weeks, at least. Knowing TBD on beyond.

[Barton Gelman]

There are so many things you could potentially worry about or be stressed about, and I am in fact stressed about all of them. But hearing from him, knowing which ones to really focus on and worry about and which ones, we actually have advanced a lot in the last four years is something. It feels like you get a sense.

[Jon Favreau]

Of agency, best you can do.

[Barton Gelman]

That's right.

[Jon Favreau]

But first, speaking of democracy dying in darkness, we got to talk about the decision of Jeff Bezos to turn out the lights on a presidential endorsement from the editorial board of the Washington Post, which he owns. The Post reported that its editorial board had drafted an endorsement for Vice President Harris, but the Amazon founder spiked it at the last minute in an op ed he published this week. Somehow he got it placed in the Post.

[Barton Gelman]

I don't know who he called.

[Jon Favreau]

Bezos argued that newspaper endorsements create a perception of bias in the media and that not endorsing is a step towards rebuilding the public's trust. The Post's non endorsement was notably the third of the week with the L A Times editorial board blocked from running their endorsement of Harris by its billionaire owner Patrick Soon Chong, and USA Today announcing it would not make an endorsement either. Since the decisions were made, multiple members of the Post in the L. A Times editorial boards have resigned. And Semaphore's Max Taney has reported that the Post has lost at least 250,000 subscribers. That is a lot of subscribers.

[Barton Gelman]

And the Post confirmed that number. So it is real and it's. It's 10% of their subscriber base. It's huge. It takes.

[Jon Favreau]

And they were not. And they were struggling anyway.

[Barton Gelman]

They were. They were getting a slight uptick in subscribers after a couple of years of loss. But yes, they lost $77 million last. True.

[Jon Favreau]

So you used to work at one of these big old timey newspapers?

[Barton Gelman]

I did.

[Jon Favreau]

I did as a former newspaper man.

[Barton Gelman]

A newsman. A newsman here with my fedora and my press.

[Jon Favreau]

Press badge.

[Barton Gelman]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jon Favreau]

Can you put this in context for us? Like how big of a deal is it that the Post and the Times aren't endorsing?

[Barton Gelman]

I mean, the one thing that I will hand to Jeff Bezos is he is correct, is that presidential endorsements from a major newspaper are kind of an anachronism. It's a weird tradition that we go through that doesn't really make any difference. I don't believe that it is why public trust in the media has collapsed. Given that that is a very recent development and newspaper endorsements have been around for decades. But as Bezos knows. Well, it's not the what, it's the why. And it's the fact that it's just very hard to escape the context here that first of all, he knew about this endorman endorsement weeks or months ago and he only made this decision at the last minute to pull it. And that he has Billions of dollars of business before the federal government. We know that when Trump was president that he threatened many times to use the power of the White House to punish Bezos business in retaliat for Washington Post coverage. Did the same thing to Time Warner over CNN coverage. We know that one of Bezos businesses, Blue Origin, their executives met with Trump on the day that Bezos pulled the endorsement over federal contracts worth $9 billion. And we also know, thanks to reporting in the Washington Post, that Trump personally threatened executives at Amazon and said, you better give me a big campaign donation because otherwise it's gonna be tough for you when I'm president. Openly extorting them. Same thing with the owner of the LA Times. He's spent four years. We know from people at Times that he has been interfering in the paper's coverage to steer coverage in ways that are favorable towards his business interests. So it is just impossible to escape the very strong appearance here that this is about preemptively caving to Trump to avoid him using the power of the White House to punish Bezos businesses for Washington Post coverage.

[Jon Favreau]

So Bezos says, not true, Max. None of that's true in his. So let's just. I just want to. I do think it's worth going through Bezos argument here, which. So in his op ed, right. Or his piece, whatever it is, he says, you know, as soon as I learned I had no idea about the Blue Origin meeting, as soon as I learned about it, I sighed and I was like, oh, my God, this is going to create the perception now people are going to be mad, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, I should have. I didn't want to do this endorsement for a while and it should have happened, should have been announced earlier. And that was a miscommunication. That was my bad, blah, blah. And I think he said something like, look, you can, you can look at my ownership of the Washington Post in two ways, which is either that my wealth insulates me from any kind of pressure from the government like that, or that, like, you know, I'm just, my values are for sale kind of stuff, or they'll just like change on a whim. And he's like, what I'm saying is that I just, this is what I strongly believe about newspaper endorsements, blah, blah, blah. What do you make of all that? Do you buy his. His. Like, I do wonder if he was really worried about Trump as president, sort of making life harder for Amazon. Wouldn't you do more than just pull an endorsement?

[Barton Gelman]

I mean, this is because they've pulled.

[Jon Favreau]

Because the one thing that is true is they've pulled no punches. Since he's been the owner on the.

[Barton Gelman]

Reporting, coverage has been excellent, has been very strong on Trump. It's been really, really good investigative reporting. I mean, this is the thing is Bezos kind of implicitly acknowledged in his own op ed that merely doing this creates the appearance of preemptively caving to Trump and avoiding a presidential endorsement to try to avoid pissing him off too much so that Amazon won't get punished. So even if Bezos is telling the truth about his motivation, and it is true that throughout the Trump presidency he stood strong and no matter the threats that Trump lobbed his way, he never interfered in post news coverage. That is true. It's also true of Time Warner, which is meaningfully commendable because, because he does stand to lose billions of dollars to that. He knows that Trump is going to read this and has read this because Trump fucking brought it up at a rally, is going to read this as them caving and as a green light. And Timothy Snyder, who's a scholar of authoritarianism, has this great expression, anticipatory obedience, that people cave to authoritarians in advance to avoid pissing them off. And that is what gives them most of their power, is that it's not having to forcibly take and it's people ceding it. He knows that he's creating that appearance.

[Jon Favreau]

I also just think Pfeiffer said this, Dan Pfeiffer said this, but he's like the organizations that are always the worst at trying to figure out media relations and media coverage are media companies. Because the idea that Jeff Bezos could not see how this was going to land and the potential consequences, not just for him and his paper and his reporters, but like you said, and how Trump would see it as well is preposterous. And again, let's just take him at his word that everything he says in his pieces, right.

[Barton Gelman]

It is, it's possible.

[Jon Favreau]

It is such a fundamental misunderstanding of what has created distrust in media institutions. And it is the kind of understanding that rests with a certain set of elites, you know, in tech and finance and some media. Right. Which is very much like, well, you know, if, if. But we're getting criticized by both sides. We must be doing this something right kind of thing. And it's the, it's the liberal bias. And we got to like, go out into the country and talk with the rural folks to really understand. You know, it was like there was a lot of this after Trump won in 2016. Yes, there was. But it's like the reason that there is distrust in the media, a big, a big driver, as we have talked about many times in the show, is the fucking Internet.

[Barton Gelman]

Yes, absolutely.

[Jon Favreau]

And the fact that there's like, like people don't know who to trust.

[Barton Gelman]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Because there's a lot of media sources that aren't real journalism that just sort of like confirms people's priors and biases. Right. And there's also been a sustained attack on journalism in the media from political elites. From political elites and from, and from Trump and his movement over the last 10 years, that is. And you can, you can, you know, debate how Republicans did this pre Trump, Fox News, all this kind of stuff, but it has been nothing like what we have experienced over the last decade where Trump calls the media the enemy, the people, blah, blah. That does more to erode trust in media than a fucking endorsement from a paper.

[Barton Gelman]

I know.

[Jon Favreau]

Like I actually if all newspapers tomorrow decide announced we're not doing any more endorsements at all, I don't think it would matter that much. I wouldn't actually care that much.

[Barton Gelman]

The down ballot endorsements I find helpful.

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, they're useful. Oh yes, yes, yes. I'll be looking for the LA Times.

[Barton Gelman]

On the judges who endorsed who for president. No, it doesn't matter. Can I tell you the part of the Bezos op ed that pissed me off the most and that made me think that he might not, he might really not understand the value of media in a democracy. So he had this very patronizing line where he compared the media to voting machines and he said we must be accurate and we must be believed to be accurate. It is a bitter pill to swallow. But we are failing on the second requirement. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility and therefore decline in impact. But a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility. What I mean, no one maybe in history has done more with a single decision to blow up the credibility of his own reporters who are working really hard.

[Jon Favreau]

Also, you just lost 250,000 subscribers, right? Do you think that, do you think that, do you think that has helped your, you starting to build up the crib? Who I know. And also it's like, do you think now you think a bunch of, of, of Trump supporters or people or like, or straight shooters and independents who are on, you know, the few of them that are still out there, either you think they're Going to subscribe to the Post now because of your brave decision not to endorse.

[Barton Gelman]

It's just so stupid to turn around and to scold and to blame the reporters who are doing the actual work and whose reputations you just damaged and whose fucking livelihoods you just put at risk with this stupid, venal, short sighted little ploy. It makes me absolutely crazy. But at the same time, and I know we're gonna talk about the cancellations, what can readers do? He lost $77 million on the Washington Post last year. That's more than I gave to support an independent press and an independent media. And if Trump becomes president, he does stand to lose billions of dollars if he continues to. I hate to use the word allow because it makes it sound like he's doing something great by doing it, but if he continues to just not interfere in Washington Post news coverage, that could cost him billions of dollars personally. That's a big ask. That's the price tag for having an independent press nowadays.

[Jon Favreau]

You know what? I don't think he cares that much about losing money.

[Barton Gelman]

I hope he cares about his reputation because something has got to swing at him.

[Jon Favreau]

And look, this is because I think your natural inclination, understandably, when a billionaire does something like this and be like, oh, it's all about money. Sure, it doesn't have to be about money to still be unfortunate or nefarious or whatever you may want to call it. These people have such egos. And again, you got to understand like the circles they hang out in. Like I know some of the people that know Jeff, right. It's just like it is a circle of people. And what, what do they do? They're like, you know, they're having all the most annoying fucking conversations about politics that you could imagine, right? This is like you wonder why like the tech world is like a little more open to Trump and Wall street and the. And poly market, the predictions market think he's gonna. Because they're all like fucking bored and they all feel put upon, like the society is mad at them and this kind of shit. And what really is needed is just, it's bullshit. It's bullshit. And so it's like it's still just as damaging as if they were doing it for the money.

[Barton Gelman]

It's true.

[Jon Favreau]

But understanding the mindset that leads to.

[Barton Gelman]

This I think is useful, is important, especially if we want to try to navigate this going forward. And what are the to apply.

[Jon Favreau]

What do you make of the cancellations? Because I don't love it. And again, I don't Want to, like, sit here scolding people, but at all. But, like, I certainly would not cancel my subscription to the Washington Post. I love the Washington Post. I think the reporters are some of the best in the world. And I count on the. What? We count on the Washington Post for this show.

[Barton Gelman]

Absolutely.

[Jon Favreau]

And for all of our shows here. And I see no reason why I would want to punish the reporters. And I know that the people canceling aren't intending to punish the reporters.

[Barton Gelman]

Sure.

[Jon Favreau]

But that is the effect, unfortunately, because that's the world that we live in.

[Barton Gelman]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

So. But I don't know. What do you think?

[Barton Gelman]

I agree with you. And we should talk about where that impulse comes from, because I think this is symptomatic of a deeper change in our relationship to our media over the last 10 years. But, you know, the Post already had buyouts last year. Bezos has made clear that he is. And, you know, again, I get it, he is not willing to burn infinite amounts of money to continue the Washington Post to be the second largest print news operation in the country. Deeper losses are going to come as a result of these layoffs. It's something like 10, 20% of their revenue. It's a huge amount. If he's not going to foot the bill for that, which it doesn't seem he's going to be, the result is going to be reporter layoffs, which means less high quality reporting, which means less accountability for another Trump administration, less monitoring of election, threats of the far right of Trump corruption. And if we want to make this a game of who can most threaten Bezos bottom line and threaten his wallet, we are going to lose every time if Trump becomes president because he can revoke two contracts worth $9 billion. Washington Post doesn't make $9 billion.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Barton Gelman]

If we make it a money game, we lose.

[Jon Favreau]

And again, I just think, what are you. So you cancel your subscription to the Washington Post, what do you think the outcome is going to be?

[Barton Gelman]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Right. Like what? I just, I mean, this is. This is something we all have to think about, honestly, whether Kamala Harris wins or loses. Right.

[Barton Gelman]

It's true.

[Jon Favreau]

Just like.

[Barton Gelman]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

When you sort of resist Trumpism, what is the way that you're most likely to have the biggest impact?

[Barton Gelman]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

And I do not. I think that the 250,000. There's a lot of subscriptions that are canceled. The impact that will have is on the bottom line on potential layoffs. The Washington Post and journalism. It's not going to. You're not going to get an endorsement. Kamala Harris from that, you're not going to change Jeff Bezos mind on that. Again, he has not yet interfered with any of the reporting whatsoever. In fact, the Washington Post is reporting on Bezos not in a positive light. There's a lot of stories that are not very positive right now.

[Barton Gelman]

It's actually great reporting.

[Jon Favreau]

It's great reporting about this. They're doing some of the best reporting about their own boss.

[Barton Gelman]

I know the idea that we're going to take their paychecks away doesn't make sense to me.

[Jon Favreau]

It's not getting. Again, it's like. Like you can do it if you want. It's not getting you anything from that.

[Barton Gelman]

So where I think this is. This impulse is coming from, I think this is a larger story that, like, I have been thinking about a lot over the last 10 years, because our relationship to the news media really changed when Trump was elected in 2016. We were all scared. Everybody was kind of desperate for someone who was going to be in a position to protect us from him and from his authoritarianism. And I think for a lot of us, that answer was the media. And that was partly because Trump positioned the press as his enemy and the thing that was going to stand in the way of what he was wanted to do. And it was also because, you know, frankly, brands like the Post and the Times marketed themselves as the resistance. You know, democracy dies in darkness. That is about, subscribe to us, and we are gonna stand up to Trumpism. Stand up to Trump. Defend your values, defend democracy. And the value proposition changed for subscribers after that. It was not as much or just exclusively about, I'm gonna subscribe to the Washington Post because they have great articles that I wanna read. It's, this is my civic duty, because the Washington Post plays an important role in our democracy. Now, I do think there's truth to that. But it created some tension because reporting the news and being a bulwark against Trumpism, there's a lot of overlap between those two things, but they're not the same thing. And they're always gonna be in tension. And this was constantly popping up at the Times, and I know at the Post, too, where it's. The readers kind of expect you to be on their side, on their side, the vanguard against Trump and against Trumpism. And listen, I believe that that is important, obviously, but that's never quite the same thing. And it is how you get to this moment where hundreds of thousands of people say, I subscribe to the Washington Post to defend us against Trumpism and to stand up for my Values. And by polling this editorial, they failed to do that. So they're no longer doing what they promised me they're gonna do. And I'm gonna cancel my subscription. I mean, did you see Carolyn Kitchener, the Pulitzer winning abortion reporter? She had this devastating tweet thread about her mom called her to say that she was canceling her Post subscription. She's read every one of her stories and she said, I'm not gonna read your stories anymore because I can't pay for the Washington Post. And I. How in context of the last 10 years, I have been worried about this since we fucking started branding ourselves, the resistance. I always worried it was going to blow up. And I feel like we are getting to that point. And I think we've got to think about reframing our relationship to our media brands.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I do too. And it's just, look, it's in some. We are somewhat insulated from that here just because we play a different role. Right? We play a different role. But also it's one reason why, like, I love when all of you listeners, like, you know, send in comments, complaints, criticism, do it. I look at it in the discord for the friends of the pod. Right. And I just, I don't. I want to always resist changing our coverage and analysis based on the audience.

[Barton Gelman]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

And that's not because I don't respect the audience. I very much do. And sometimes give me things to think about and change my mind, which is wonderful. But like, once you start going down the road where you're just giving the listeners or the readers or whatever everything they want, like, it's just it. It never ends.

[Barton Gelman]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

You know, and also it's just impossible to give them what they want because everyone wants different shit.

[Barton Gelman]

That's true.

[Jon Favreau]

You know what I'm saying? Not everyone's the same. And so everyone might agree on one coverage decision or piece of analysis, but they're not gonna. Everyone's not gonna agree on everything. And this is the whole fucking value of pluralism in a democracy. Right? Like if. And this is what's so hard about resisting authoritarianism. Right. That it's like if we want to resist authoritarianism and be a pluralistic democracy, we have to be comfortable, like, disagreeing with each other and reading things that make us mad and decisions that other civic institutions and democratic institutions make that make us mad and not sort of. Yeah, just sort of like disconnect completely.

[Barton Gelman]

I mean, the thing I would always tell to people when I was at the Times and people would get. Because we dealt with smaller Versions of this constantly where it's, you know, they would run a bullshit Bret Stephens climate denial op ed and people would be like, this is a betrayal of the values that I thought the time was supposed to stand for and I'm canceling. And I would always tell people, because you would see all these people log on and say, how could you? You know, the Washington Post is defending us from democracy. That's essential. You've got to stand up for that. And I would always tell people, look, don't subscribe to us because it's like your civic duty or anything. We're a private company. We're selling you product, we're selling you service. I think that if you log onto, you will see that we're delivering you articles that are worth your seven bucks a month. And if you feel the same way, then give us your seven bucks. And if you don't, then unsubscribe. And you know what? I logged onto the Washington Post after all this happened and there were great articles on there. It made me feel very, very comfortable giving them my $2 a month. It's also a very cheap subscription. Giving them my money because it's. And not doing this complicated calculation of do I think the Washington Post is playing the proper role in our democracy, although they are an important part of it, which also makes this very complicated. But just, am I getting the service that I'm paying for?

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. We should also say, by the way, I know the Washington Post has. There's ads on crooked pods from the Washington Post.

[Barton Gelman]

Are they really? I didn't realize that.

[Jon Favreau]

There's been one on. There's a couple on offline, there's some on psa. I just thought about. We talked about that when this happened because I was like, oh, God, we're going to get you for that.

[Barton Gelman]

But I was like, we should note that.

[Jon Favreau]

I will just say our decision was, first of all, no, we're not going to change our mind on that because we actually believe this. Whether they or not they were advertising and long before they were advertising, I would have said the same thing and I believe the same thing about the New York Times and anyone else that, you know, that we actually appreciate their journalism.

[Barton Gelman]

Well, I found out live on this recording, so you know that I'm. But I was already fucking in the tank for these newspapers.

[Jon Favreau]

I know, I know. Okay, let's talk about the most important issue on everyone's minds, our feelings.

[Barton Gelman]

We're all. We've got a lot of them. You may have noticed in this last segment we've got some feelings.

[Jon Favreau]

We're recording this on Wednesday, October 30th. Election Day is Tuesday. By almost any measure, the race is tied, as just about every fucking pollster telling us now, because they're all fucking. They're all profiles. Encourage all these pollsters. The final polls are all like, tie, tie, tie, tie, tie. Oh, okay.

[Barton Gelman]

I hate it.

[Jon Favreau]

Random sampling. They all got ties, right?

[Barton Gelman]

But you know what? I can't blame them because I check them well. Also, I've checked them all 30 times, so.

[Jon Favreau]

I know, I know. No, I feel I'm not going to. I'm not going to discredit.

[Barton Gelman]

We're not going after the Nates team.

[Jon Favreau]

If you're like us, you're doom scrolling doom texting.

[Barton Gelman]

Oh, absolutely.

[Jon Favreau]

Searching the Internet for any shred of evidence that will provide, that will provide you some sense of certainty that it'll.

[Barton Gelman]

All be okay, even. Even for the worse.

[Jon Favreau]

But alas, no such sense of certainty exists. It is. It is unknowable.

[Barton Gelman]

I would definitely checking my phone last night between, I believe it was 3 and 5am for what? Just anything.

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, just anything.

[Barton Gelman]

Just anything. Just any. Anything it had to provide me. And you know what? It wasn't good.

[Jon Favreau]

Nothing. No.

[Barton Gelman]

Yeah. It turns out at 3am The Sienna Poll did not magically untie, which I was surprised.

[Jon Favreau]

The new bad thing is John Raulston updates his blog about Nevada and the early vote. Nevada, like later in the evening because it's west coast time. And so it's like one of the nights I caught it right before bed and then I was like, nope, no more. Not checking that. Not checking that at night anymore. Which brings me to my question. First of all, how are you feeling? This is the question for people who don't know if this is your first campaign, people. The last few weeks of an. Especially if you're like involved in a campaign, all you do is you walk up to people, talk to people who are involved in the campaign. You go, how you feeling? How you feeling? How you feeling? How's it feeling out there? How's it feeling on the ground? Are you feeling good?

[Barton Gelman]

It's so funny. It's the same language as if somebody is pregnant. How are you feeling? How are you feeling?

[Jon Favreau]

So how are you feeling?

[Barton Gelman]

Bad. I'm feeling fucking bad.

[Max Fisher]

You're feeling bad.

[Barton Gelman]

It's. Look, it's scary, it's frustrating. It's very hard to wrap your mind around the idea that it could really be a coin toss. Which means that in my mind it's 70, 30 odds and it's just a matter of any given moment if it's 70, 30, Trump or Kamala. I realization this morning. I've been all week, like everybody else. I've been feeling groggy, I've been feeling nauseous, I've been having headaches. And I think, oh, it's because I'm doom scrolling all the time on my phone. I'm up, you know, 3:00am every night.

[Jon Favreau]

And you actually have Covid?

[Barton Gelman]

I don't think so. I'm looking around. I do not think that I have.

[Jon Favreau]

Covid where this was going.

[Barton Gelman]

Yeah, it's not Covid symptoms. I looked down, I was making coffee. I realized I've been drinking decaf all week.

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, God, that's terrible.

[Barton Gelman]

So I switched to caffeinated this morning and after a week on decaf, I feel like I'm sitting on a fucking car battery. So I just feel worse in 17 different ways. I'm doing great. I will be dead by the time you hear this. How are you feeling?

[Jon Favreau]

I was gonna say. Can I say something surprising?

[Barton Gelman]

Say it.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm feeling pretty calm.

[Barton Gelman]

Come on. No.

[Jon Favreau]

So I realize this is unexpected for me. It is, it is. And it's. It's. I don't want to. I don't want to confuse comfort or confidence. Like, I don't. I have no idea. I really believe that it's a tie.

[Barton Gelman]

Sure.

[Jon Favreau]

Not just because I think smart people working on the campaign, Super PACs, all the people I talk to, polls that are even better than the public polls. Everything seems to be coming up really close. Maybe not exactly tied as the poll calls, but like, you know, really close. But it's not that. So it's like I could easily see us winning. I could easily see us not winning. But I really. I've just. I've got myself to a place over the. At least maybe the last week or two where I really started trying to take my own advice and be like, look, getting anxious about this is not gonna change.

[Barton Gelman]

It's not productive.

[Jon Favreau]

Superstitions are stupid. And like the idea that, well, if I'm optimistic, then maybe that'll help. Or if I'm too optimistic, then it'll be bad. And if I'm pessimistic, then it'll be. I'm like, that's all bullshit.

[Barton Gelman]

It does agree.

[Jon Favreau]

That's not real.

[Barton Gelman]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And I can either make myself super anxious and upset in the lead up to the election, or I can decide to enjoy the time I have where I'm not working and not try to constantly either inundate myself with information, that's not helping. Or if I am going to inundate myself with information because I have a obsessive, compulsive checking behavior, I'm not going to let it really get to me. So I'll look at the polls, good polls, bad polls, and I just won't really let them get to me. And the other thing I've been thinking of is win or lose. Unfortunately, MAGA is not going away. And by maga, I don't necessarily mean Trump. But like this. What has happened to the Republican Party, what has happened to politics in this country? We are not going to snap out of it if Kamala Harris wins, even if she. Even if the weirdest thing happens and she wins by a landslide. And by the way, I think if Trump wins in a landslide, that's also weird. So we're going to have to keep fighting this battle no matter what.

[Barton Gelman]

So it's not like 100% of everything rides on this one election.

[Jon Favreau]

And it's like we can either constantly worry about the future and how scary it could be, or we can, like, wake up every day and be like, okay, sun is out, things are fine.

[Barton Gelman]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm gonna go do this. And then if something bad happens, we react to something bad, and then we figure it out. Believe me, this is not easy. I don't. It's not perfect. There are times when I can, like, maybe descend into the darkness a little bit. But it's been. It's been helpful.

[Barton Gelman]

It is why I am really glad that we are having this conversation about how to get ourselves emotionally and psychologically through not just this week or however long this election takes, but through if, God forbid, Trump wins the next four years or however many years it is. Because we have learned a lot in the last eight years about what is useful and what is not useful. And also, if this is to your point, there's going to be some degree of this around for a long time, maybe the rest of our lives. It's important that we still know how to lead our lives. Yes, you only get one. And it's important to play your part, as I know everyone listening to this show will, in getting the country through whatever the next X number of years brings. But it's also important to get yourself through it, because you only get one of these. And every day or every year that you waste spiraling more than you need to checking polls for the 18th time a day, you don't get that back.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, it's funny because on Tuesday's Pod Save America. Towards the end, Tommy and I had, like, what I thought. What he thought, too, was, like, a pretty friendly debate. Disagreement over, like, the final strategy. Like, more Trump fascism, more economic, whatever. I'm not going to relitigate it here, but I. As I just said earlier in this. In this episode, I sometimes check the discord, and I was like, I wonder how people will take this, you know? And a lot of people were like, oh, the guy seems so stressed, and I can't wait for this election to be over. And they sounded so, like, really? And I'm like, it's funny. I can understand why it came off like that. But afterwards, Tommy and I were not bickering, and we were, like, totally fine. We were like, oh, that was good to have disagreement once in a while. And I was really trying to have the conversation as an intellectual argument because it's like, I was struggling with it myself. And I think it's good to talk with people about it. But I can see why everyone's so on edge that every piece of analysis. Or are they doing this or that. Right. Can really get to you. Which is why I want to talk about, like, strategies to, like, help with this.

[Barton Gelman]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

One thing that has helped me is, and this is very offline, but, like, I have found over the last couple weeks, the times where I am alone on a screen and getting information that way, or even texting and messaging friends that way, I feel like I can feel my system getting amped up more.

[Barton Gelman]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

And the times when I am, you know, I've done, like, canvas kickoffs either on Zoom or we, you know, on Sunday, we went to three different stops in Southern California to do canvas kickoffs and, like, took the. You know, Emily and Charlie came with us, and it was like, I just. I was. It was so fun. Like, the election didn't become less close. No one in any of those canvas kickoffs was like, oh, oh, we're actually going to win. We feel great. Our polls are great. That didn't happen. But just the experience of being with people, talking with people, and talking about how you're anxious with people and talking about how you really feel about this.

[Barton Gelman]

It really does help, especially if it's in person. Yeah. The advice that I give people when they ask me, like, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Is draw a hard line for yourself between. And you kind of referenced this between what is actually productive and what is not productive. Every morning I. What I've been doing for myself, I try to make a plan for one or two things that I can do if it's, you know, signing up for canvassing, whatever that are going to be productive. And then I kind of give myself a set amount of time where I'm going to have half an hour to read the news or an hour to read the news and I'm going to listen to these two podcasts. And then I tell myself, that's it, that's the line. Because I know if I just let myself do whatever, it's just going to be flailing, it's going to be doom scrolling. And then I try to be really thoughtful about what those one or two things are. Because if they're with people like you said, or they're just things that I know will make some kind of a difference, that feeling of having agency over what's happening will make you. I mean, first of all, it matters. And second of all, it will make you feel so much better. And then even though it's hard to do, I try to be really ruthless with myself. Things on the other side of that line, once I've kind of checked the things off my list, making sure that I am doing things that are feel good for me, that are emotionally healthy for me, that I really take time. Even though it feels weird to give yourself permission to goof off this week, it feels weird to give yourself permission to like, we had a party over the weekend and in the first half hour I was like, it's like we're on the fucking deck of the Titanic. What are we doing? This is so stupid. But an hour in, of course, like we all felt great, everybody felt great. I've been actually watching more movies than I do usually going out more with friends because you have to take time and force yourself to do the stuff like this that is healthy for you. And you have to do it because otherwise you're not gonna be useful in the stuff that is actually productive.

[Jon Favreau]

And that's important. Cause it's not giving up. Don't beat yourself up over having the good time because like, hey, we could. No, you need to have. You need to be like emotionally ready to then get back into the fight here.

[Barton Gelman]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

In order to take that time and everyone needs it. You're not a fucking superhero. We always say, like, go canvas and phone bank and all this kind of stuff. And yes it is because it's useful. But if you take that as, oh, they want me to do something useful and not worry, it's not just useful for the cause of winning, it really is useful for yourself.

[Barton Gelman]

Absolutely.

[Jon Favreau]

Our friend, she's a writer. In la, she was texting me and Emily and saying she did phone banking. And she's like, I talked to this mom who wasn't going to vote. She said, I don't know if I can bring myself to vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. And she's like. And then we talked about our kids for like 30 minutes. And then. And she's like, at one point, we were both crying. And then afterwards she said that she's voting for Kamala Harris. And I swear, phone banking, she goes, I swear phone banking is like, Molly.

[Barton Gelman]

That'S amazing.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, whatever Molly calls.

[Barton Gelman]

Which I believe the listeners are sending us for our request.

[Jon Favreau]

I can say this because Emily did post this. Post the text conversation without her name on Instagram, but it was. Yeah, but I get the feeling of connecting with someone about the election and, like, you know, not everyone's gonna have a conversation where you flip a voter just letting you know. But I'm telling you, the conversations are gonna be long.

[Barton Gelman]

Connecting with people makes a big difference.

[Jon Favreau]

Are you thinking about post if the worst happens?

[Barton Gelman]

That's fucking all I'm thinking about. So I have been thinking a lot about what it was like to go through the experience in 2016 of him winning and what we've learned how try to make it less terrible this time around. And I really think that as terrible as it is to preemptively imagine the idea of him winning, have a plan for that day and have a plan for that week, even if it's just something vague in your mind for, I'm gonna call my parents and then go for a walk. Because if you know what to do with yourself, even if it's not anything political, although it is very good day to get engaged, it will just be easier to get through that day because what I don't know what you're experiencing of 2016 was like. But I know me and everybody I knew, we just felt like we were adrift and it just totally unmoored. And that led to a lot of really productive grassroots energy. Like, there was so much organizing that came out of that, but there was also so much kind of flailing and just people felt like they had to take absolutely everything on themselves because they didn't know where else to turn. And it felt like I have to keep up with every single development that's happening, and that led to a lot of burnout. And I would really urge you to keep in mind that if he wins again, yeah, it's going to be hard and it's going to be really Scary. But we are not starting from zero this time. The same way that we were eight years ago. That states have learned a lot of lesson, organizers have learned a lot of lessons, state AGs have learned a lot of lesson. And I know it feels frivolous to talk about fucking self care in case of the return of far right authoritarianism, but you know, number one, this is a marathon, not a sprint. It's going to be a long however many years it is and you're not going to get through it unless you can take care of yourself and get through each day and week and you don't want to burn yourself out. But number two, yes, you will have a role to play in everything that will happen in getting our country and our democracy through this, the other side with as little damage as possible. And you do have a power to have a little bit of influence, but one place where you have a lot of influence is the people around you and the people in your life. And it's a small thing, but getting your friends and family member through another Trump term is meaningful, it's important. And you're not gonna be able to get them through it if you're doom scrolling all the time, if you're spinning out over every Trump development. So I would give the same advice that I did about getting through this week, which is just try to make a plan for here are the things you can do. Stay involved, stay active, give yourself that sense of agency, but know what the limits are for that. And know that on the other side of that, you have to still live your life for yourself and for the people around you.

[Jon Favreau]

It's very well said. And I would, the only thing I would add is again, a very offline thing, but throw your phone in the river. Yes, if you can. But also what we're saying for this week too, don't go looking for the worst information.

[Barton Gelman]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

Or the scariest information. Right.

[Barton Gelman]

Which is what your brain wants.

[Jon Favreau]

It is, it is. Of course, if he wins, it is very possible things get quite bad. And I'm not trying to predict anything, but if you have that mindset constantly, there's going to be so many people who are like, oh God, this is it, he's transcending the mill. This is happening, this is happening. And it's like just, you don't need to go searching for all the scariest shit to keep revving yourself up.

[Barton Gelman]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

And so before you search for it, before you read the news, think, like, be intentional about what you're looking for in the news. What am I really want to get out of what I'm looking at today about a new Trump presidency and what am I going to do with the information? How am I going to respond to it? Where am I going to fight? Where's going to have the most impact? But don't just go like, oh, someone tweeted this and every new thing.

[Barton Gelman]

If you spin out.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Barton Gelman]

That's not useful. It's not a useful way to spend your time. And I saw. So, I mean, I did it all the time in his first term.

[Jon Favreau]

Me too. Me too. Every day. Yeah.

[Barton Gelman]

Being deliberate is hard. The thing I will say about your screen time and your screen is going to be so fucking bad for you is that I'm not going to try to tell you, either you, the listeners, or especially Joan Favreau, to delete Twitter off of your phone. That's a big ask. That's really hard. I think that something that we learned from when we did that offline challenge where we took all those screen time breaks or really tried to break ourselves up with our screen, is that the screen time limits deleting app in itself is not actually that useful. What is really useful is identifying healthy activities that will fill whatever psychological or emotional need you're reaching for your phone to fill. If it's anxiety, you know, getting out and exercising, if it's a sense of despair or hopelessness, it's spending time with people that you care about. Filling in those activities will make it much easier to put down your phone and make it much easier to get through the day and the week. So you can do whatever you have to do.

[Jon Favreau]

Here's one thing you can do before that happens to avoid that outcome. Again, we talked about being intentional.

[Barton Gelman]

It is not too bad.

[Jon Favreau]

And like worrying, controlling what you can control. Right. Last call. This is Vote Save America's last call.

[Barton Gelman]

It's great.

[Jon Favreau]

Vote Save America is asking everyone to reach out to three friends in swing states. Go through your contacts, see who's in a swing state, reach out to them. If you don't have three friends in swing states, maybe someone in your contacts also has someone in a, in a swing state that they can talk to.

[Barton Gelman]

Call people who call people.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep, Call people who call people, ask them if they're planning to vote. They can go to votesafeamerica.comvote to make a plan or you can persuade them if they're Trump curious or third party curious or maybe not going to vote at all. And if everyone in swing, if everyone does that, everyone finds three friends in a swing state and Gets them to vote like Kamala Harris wins.

[Barton Gelman]

Man, you want to talk about finding a sense of agency, that'll do it. The vote is going to be so fucking close. The incredible opportunity. Okay, so the most likely electoral outcome is 270 electoral votes with the three upper Midwest swing states. And Nebraska too, right?

[Jon Favreau]

Maybe.

[Barton Gelman]

I mean, that's what. According, according to the 538 model, that is the modal outcome, it's 270 out of all of their potential models. Wait, you don't think that that's gonna happen?

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, no. Again, this is my. Like, I really, I genuinely have no idea what's the most likely. Like, I think it could be. I don't know.

[Barton Gelman]

Of course.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Barton Gelman]

Well, it's just to say that in the models, the outcome that occurs most frequently is that she wins with 270 with those three states. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska second. Nebraska second. The Republicans in that state tried to get rid of that electoral district so that we would. The Democrats would not be able to get those electoral college votes. They were stymied in that by two Nebraska state lawmakers who won their seats with 250 votes each. Yeah, that might make the difference. 250 votes.

[Jon Favreau]

That's wild.

[Barton Gelman]

You could call five people tomorrow.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep.

[Barton Gelman]

You're one person. You could really make a difference.

[Jon Favreau]

I, I say this at every canvas kickoff. Like the upside of an extremely close, polarized, divided electorate that makes you anxious all the time is that everything you do actually matters. And so you can have an impact that actually changes the whole race, that.

[Barton Gelman]

Changes the course of history.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep, yep. So no pressure. So last call. Go call. Go. Reach out to three friends. This message has been paid for by VoteSave America. You can learn more at VoteSaveAmerica.com this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidate candidates committee. We're also going to have a lot of coverage here at Crooked because this is it. This is our super bowl here. What a day will be. Fresh in your fees with Jane Costen breaking down what you need to know. In 20 minutes, pod save America will release new episodes with in depth analysis of the latest news every morning until the race is called. And in the in the case the Trump campaign's feeling a little loose with their legal challenges, Crooked's go to legal experts from strict scrutiny will stop by on shows across the network to unpack breaking news. Plus drop bonus episodes on their feeds for those who want more. You can find all this on your favorite podcast platform and YouTube. When we come back, my conversation with Barton Gelman about the fight to protect the 2024 election. Offline is brought to you by ZBiotics pre alcohol if there's a surefire way to wake up feeling fresh after a night of drinking, it's with Pre Alcohol zbiotics Pre Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mort mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day. Pre Alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just Remember to make ZBiotics your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. And with their GMO technology, ZBiotics is continuing to invent probiotics that will help with the everyday challenges of modern living. I now carry a couple ZBiotics in my bag. Me too. My Dopp kit to work to anywhere else. Just in case. Just in case I need them on the fly. In case fun breaks out. Yeah, in case fun breaks out and it's easy to forget them so. But you don't want to because they work. Go to ZBiotics.com offline to learn more and get 15% off your first order. When you use offline at checkout, ZBiotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee. Remember to head to ZBiotics.com offline and use code offline at checkout for 15% off. This podcast is sponsored by the Washington Post. If you listen to Offline, you know the great work the Washington Post does on topics like Capitol Hill, the economy, climate change, foreign policy, and much more. And if you're in a rush and need to catch up quickly on the day's most important and interesting stories, the Posts the seven newsletter is a quick commute read sent each weekday morning. The Post even offers a cool feature for audio lovers like you. You can actually listen to articles in addition to reading them so you can tackle your to do list and catch up on the news at the same time. Love the Washington Post. Wouldn't be able to do offline Pod Save America. Any of the pods here without the Washington Post?

[Max Fisher]

No.

[Jon Favreau]

It's one of America's great papers. They do great feature pieces. They do great international reporting, political reporting. All called it. Yes. With the election rapidly approaching, now's the time to sign up for the Washington post. Go to washingtonpost.com offline to subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year. That's 80% off their typical offer. So this is truly a steal. Once again, that's washingtonpost.com offline. To subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year offline is brought to you by Henson Shaving. According to a recent study, 2/3 of men expect some irritation when they shaved. There's virtually no information on how to prevent irritation, only on how to treat it. This is why Henson Shaving wants to change the shaving industry. Not through gimmicks like subscriptions or moisturizing strips, but through groundbreaking research on the impact shaving has on your skin. Here's a dirty secret about the razor industry. Even the cheapest dollar stored disposable razor will likely give you a reasonably smooth shave. The trick is in removing the hair without any negative outcomes to your skin. Henson wants to change the paradigm away from getting a smooth shave shave to getting a skin friendly shave. And you know what? They do it. They do it. You're listening. You're like, what is a skin friendly shave? Well, you use Henson shaving and suddenly, you know, you finish shaving and you touch your face sound. It feels good. I'm not bleeding, doesn't irritate. Yeah, it's great. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com offline to pick the razor for you and use code offline and you'll get two years worth of blades free. Free with your razor. Just make sure to add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A v I n g.com offline and use code offline. Barton Gelman, welcome to Offline.

[Max Fisher]

My pleasure.

[Jon Favreau]

So you wrote a piece in the Atlantic just before election day 2020 that really scared the out of people people. The title was the Election that Could Break America. If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Turns out you were on to something. Since then, you joined the Brennan center for justice to work on the specific challenge of safeguarding our elections from the kind of thing Trump tried to pull off in 2020. And I wanted to have you on because Trump and his followers are clearly laying the groundwork to subvert this election if he loses or potentially subvert democracy itself if he wins. Both scenarios that you and others have gamed out. So maybe let's start with the election itself you wrote a piece this month in Time titled your vote is safe, which I took as quite reassuring coming from you. Why should people feel more confident that their vote is safe this time around?

[Max Fisher]

Because election officials around the country have hardened their systems, have reinforced defenses, have increased auditing. We have got like 98% of people will be voting with human verifiable paper records. There are backup plans and backups of the backups for the things that usually go wrong in elections. And the big question to me was, if Donald Trump disputes the election result and tries to overturn it, which I'm quite certain he will if he loses, can the system withstand that? Can the system hold? And I believe it can't. I believe that he will try if he loses, to overturn the results and he will fail.

[Jon Favreau]

So I'd love to unpack that a little bit because there's obviously a lot of different entry points in the system where he could try to challenge the results. So you talked about sort of the voting machines at the local level, like the actual machinery of the vote counting has been protected a bit more since even 2020. Does a lot of your reassurance come from the fact that this time Donald Trump is not in power?

[Max Fisher]

That is actually for sure a big piece of it. I mean, look, last time there were people trying to persuade him to send troops to seize voting machines. If you're not president, you can't entertain ideas like that. Last time, his appointee, the guy he wanted to make the acting Attorney general, drafted a letter to the Georgia Legislature after he lost the state in which the Justice Department was going to tell the Georgia Republican legislature, Legislature that it had evidence of wrongdoing that could have changed the election results and encouraged them to send an alternative slate of electors, that is to say, fake electors, to pretend to be the electors and cast the state's electoral ballots. For Trump, that would have been the Justice Department doing that. He doesn't have control of the Justice Department anymore, and that matters a lot. He does, however, have a lot of help from the national and state Republican parties. Last time, it was kind of outlandish that he wanted to reverse election results. You know, a lot of people had never thought about that seriously. And a lot of people poo pooed my article in 2020 when I talked about how you would try to do that. But now it's become a comfortable and accepted thing in the Republican Party and there are lots of well resourced party leaders and lawyers who are getting ready to try to help him do exactly that.

[Jon Favreau]

One thing that I've wondered about is what if these Republican controlled state legislatures or the courts somehow delay sending the electors to Congress past the safe harbor deadline in the hope that they could then if no candidate gets 270 electoral votes, they throw it to the House. And of course, if the election goes to the House, Trump wins because Republicans control more state delegations. So how much are you concerned about the fact that there, there may be a delay in sending the slate of electors to Congress?

[Max Fisher]

A delay is actually, I think one of the greatest risks that still remain right now. The Congress, in a bipartisan move a couple of years ago, reformed the Electoral Count act and they turned what was then a kind of optional deadline of December 11th for safe harbor into a kind of a hard deadline by which governors have to specify who the electoral of the state are going to be. And it's left two governors. That, by the way, is good news because in the battleground states, five of the seven are Democrats and the two Republicans are not election deniers. But meanwhile, what Trump and his allies have done in a number of states is to try to mount a tax on the certification of the election, the certification of the ballots, so that they're in a position, if Harris wins a state to try to get the people who do the certifying to say, no, no, we won't certify. And that is a losing battle in courts. So in Georgia, the state courts have stated unequivocally that election officials, officials for each county must certify within seven days of Election Day. They have stated that no election official may refuse to certify for any reason. In Arizona, the two Cochise County Election board members who refused to certify an election two years ago have now been indicted for that. In Pennsylvania, judges have also put the kibosh on refusing to certify. So I think it's going to be a losing argument for these guys. But it is clearly part of their strategy that they're teeing up that they would use the certification process to stop electors from being appointed in time to vote in the electoral college on December 17th.

[Jon Favreau]

So that is one risk. The other risk I've heard is so say the Republicans keep the House. Mike Johnson, a speaker, and he decides that the, you know, Electoral Count act, the Electoral Count Reform act, isn't, isn't constitutional and just decides to ignore it and says that there's irregularities in the voting. And there's a, there's, you know, a set of electors from the Republican state legislature in one state and a Democratic governor in the same state, competing slates of electors. And then Johnson does some tries to pull some funny business in the House. Is that a risk that you're concerned about?

[Max Fisher]

Well, keep in mind that it is not the speaker of the House if Johnson remains speaker of the House. It is not the speaker of the House who presides over the joint session of Congress that counts the electoral votes and certifies them. It is the President of the Senate who is the Vice president of the United States who is also one of the candidates in this election race. So there's no question that Kamala Harris will actually have the gavel at that joint session of Congress. So there is some limit to the mischief that Johnson could pull off. And as far as declaring the Electoral Count Reform act to be unconstitutional, I don't think he can just do that and act to the contrary of the statutory law. He might mount an attack on it in court and God, who knows what comes of that. With the current Supreme Court, there is apparently a legal issue about whether one Congress can commit a future Congress to doing a certain thing that the future Congress must obey, for example. But I don't give a lot of credence to this new January 6th shenanigans scenario. I think that whoever wins the most popular votes in any given state is going to get that state's electoral votes and Congress will count the electoral votes and the person who wins the election will be sworn in as the next president.

[Jon Favreau]

So it seems like there is some, some outside risk with litigation delays and safe harbor deadlines. And you never know with the Supreme Court what they might do. But generally the process of certification as it gets to Congress seems secure. We actually first thought about talking to you for this after the news broke that someone set fire to two ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington, which was a scenario right out of an exercise the government did to prepare for the 2020 election, which also then became a storyline on succession. How much are you concerned about sort of threats like this or even the threats of violence and intimidation in and around the election?

[Max Fisher]

Look, I'm quite sure that bad stuff is going to happen and if Trump loses, he's going to pull out all the stops to try to reverse the result. And during the election there will be efforts to intimidate voters. There might be, you know, AI powered, you know, disinformation telling people their election polling site has blown up or the election is canceled or who knows what I mean, ballot boxes burning. You know, a lot of things may happen that sound really bad, but what I think your listeners need to remember is that they're not cataclysmic, they're not apocalyptic. Let's take the case that there were ballots burned in Portland and in Vancouver, Washington, just across the border. One of them, three ballots were lost. One of them, there were 200 that seemed to have been burned. On the other hand, election officials know exactly when they received their last shipment of ballots from that Dropbox. They are able to tell all voters who voted by Dropbox, if you voted after this time of day on this date, please send your ballot in again. If they have two of them, they'll only count one. And if they only. And if one of them has been burned, you know, then sending in a new one will fix that. The number of votes that are going to actually be lost is probably trivial. And, you know, a lot of things that sound really terrible when you first hear them are fixable.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned disinformation, and, you know, this is something we talk a lot about here. Sort of the impact of the weaponization of information and the impact it has on public trust and opinion. You know, I just saw Today that a QAnon account posted a viral video that supposedly showed illegal ballot harvesting in Pennsylvania. Turns out it was just a postal worker delivering ballots to the elections office. Have you talked to officials, local, state, whoever, about some of the more effective ways to sort of fight the information war? They're fighting the information war. What are your thoughts on that?

[Max Fisher]

Well, you know, they're just speaking on repeat their reassurances about how. How everything works. You know, let's take Georgia. I talked to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of 2020 election fame. As your listeners will remember, he's the one Trump called up and said, he's got to find me 11,780 votes to reverse the results in the 2020 Georgia election. He told me that in 2020, the count was very secure and very accurate, and they did two recounts, counts and a hand count. But because there was criticism of the Dominion voting machines, he has now hired another contractor, another technology company that will do a second count, a second tabulation of all the votes in Georgia. So one will be done by Dominion, but then Dominion won't check its own work. Somebody else check its work. This is an example of the ways that these folks are trying to reassure voters that their votes will count, their votes will be counted accurately, and the election will be secure. Still, they have to contend with a lot of intimidation, a lot of threats, some actual attempts to assault them. You know, I talked to the guy who's running elections in Durham County, North Carolina, and you know, he's around that all of his poll workers are going to get little badges with an activation button where if something bad is happening, they can just push the button on their lapel and call 911. It is a sad place to be in this country where election workers are facing this kind of threat, but they're also standing up to it.

[Jon Favreau]

It's scary. They have to do Offline is brought to you by bookshop.org you know what independent bookstore I love? The one on Larchmont. Yeah, Chevaliers. Great one. It's fantastic. One of the oldest bookshops in Los Angeles. Yeah. This election season, arm yourself with knowledge. On bookshop.org there's some knowledge from political thrillers to environmental policy deep dives. Find the perfect read to stay informed and entertained. And check out one of Bookshop.org's most anticipated books of fall 2024. More like Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. Share the memoir Part One or We Solve Murders by Richard Oseman. [e-mail] is like voting for local businesses. Support your neighborhood bookstore or uplift LGBTQ+, black, AAPI, Latino or women owned shops nationwide. Make your choices count. At bookshop.org you can align your dollars with your values, support independent bookstores and help shape our literary landscape and our democracy. Bookshop.org believes local bookstores are essential community hubs, fostering culture, curiosity and a love of reading. They're committed to helping stores survive. That's why in just over four years, Bookshop.org has raised over $32 million for local bookstores. Use code offline to get 10% off your next order at Bookshop.org Crooked that's code [e-mail] Crooked offline is brought to you by Quince. I'm sort of looking forward to the weather getting a little cooler here in Los Angeles because, you know, it's nice to wear. Sometimes it's nice to wear like pants and longer shirts and not just T shirts every single day. Love some cozy and that. I kind of need some, some warmer clothing and I think Quint is perfect for this. They got it on. They have affordable, high quality essentials for any wardrobe. That includes seasonal must haves like Mongolian cashmere sweaters from $60 and comfortable pants for any occasion. Quint only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices along with premium fabrics and finishes. And they partner with them directly, cutting out the cost of the middleman and passing the savings on to you. That means Quint's Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands so you can update your look without breaking the bank. Love Quint. Great stuff, very affordable, very comfortable. Looks great. Upgrade your wardrobe with pieces made to last with quint. Go to quint.com offline for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C.com offline to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com offline offline is brought to you by Mosh. If you're looking for an on the go protein snack that satisfies your cravings and is also chock full of nutritious ingredients that support brain and body function, look no further than Mosh Bars. Mosh Bar is made with ingredients that support brain health like Ashwagandha, lion's mane, collagen and omega 3s. Mosh is the only food brand boosted with Cognizant, a premium nootropic that supplies the brain with a patented form of citicoline. Proportion of proceeds from your order will fund gender based brain health research through the Women's Alzheimer's movement. It comes in a variety of flavors like cookie dough, peanut butter, chocolate brownie, blueberry, almond, mint chocolate. More finally, words I can say. Mosh was founded by Maria Shriver and her son Patrick Schwarzenegger with a simple mission to create a conversation about brain health through food education and research. As such, a portion of proceeds from your order will fund gender based brain health research through the women's Alzheimer's movement. All you need to know about Mosh bars They taste good.

[Max Fisher]

It tastes really good.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Max Fisher]

Sure, absolutely. And I have to give a disclaimer because I work for a tax exempt organization. We did this exercise on a completely nonpartisan basis. We had Republicans and Democrats. We had 175 people playing over the course of five games. We had former governors, former two and three and four star flag officers, a senator, a couple of former members of the House, former state attorneys general, former cabinet officials, again from every recent administration, including Trump's. We had a number of former Trump officials. Everyone in the room was pro democracy with a small D, but their political affiliations were all over the map. And we deliberately did not try to test in these games any policies that fall within the normal range of political debate. It was all about how do you restrain someone who is trying to abuse executive authority to do illegal things, things that are contrary to the rule of law or to our constitutional structure, or break sort of fundamental governing norms of a democracy? And so it was, what can you do if the President sends troops to crush a political demonstration that is protesting his election or his policies? That, like every other scenario we tested, came directly from things that Trump has promised to do or said he would do or tried to do the first time he held office. What we were looking for is can you delay or deflect or diminish the damage of these authoritarian acts by using the instruments of government or civil society? And I should have mentioned we had people there representing grassroots activists, faith leaders, the business community, unions, NGOs, like the Brennan center, litigators and so on. So we were basically looking at a whole of society response.

[Jon Favreau]

And so the way it would set up, I think you guys had like a red team and a blue team and you had the president. And then how did it work? The President would say like I'm sending in troops to X state. And then you'd have someone playing the governor of that state. Or how did the gameplay actually go?

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, well, that's pretty close. What we did was in two of the exercises, we did not constrain the President at all. We called him the everything everywhere all at once games. And. And we let the red president, who was a stand in for Trump and Trump's agenda, do as many things as he cared to do along as many policy fronts as he wanted so he could prosecute his political enemies and send the troops and do mass expulsions and replace civil servants with political appointees using schedule F and so on. First of all, every President has to foot the scarce resources of his own time and staff priorities. So in real life it would be very hard to do a lot of those things all at once. But I will say it had the effect of overwhelming the blue team. The blue team had trouble kind of keeping up with all the things the red President was doing all the time. And by the way, we had red and blue and those are like traditional designations in tabletop exercises. That's not the kind of red blue of Republican and Democrat. It's sort of the home team and the away team. And our games were played under the Chatham House rule, which means that we can't attribute things that were said or done to specific individuals unless they gave their permission. But a number of our players did give permission. So I can tell you that Christy Todd Whitman, the former Republican Governor of New Jersey, played a blue Governor in this exercise. And when the President said I am federalizing the National Guard in your state and I am ordering through my chain of command that these federal troops go break up those demonstrations because I'm calling them insurrections as riots and I'm invoking my power under the Insurrection Act. Governor Whitman tried to prevent that by ordering her National Guard onto active state duty. And she actually commanded the Adjutant General in her state who is in charge of the State Guard, not to obey any federal order. So that would be a fairly extraordinary thing. It's never happened, I don't think in American history and I think in real life it would not go well for the Adjutant General if he did refuse to obey a presidential order when the President activated the Guard. But what this brought up for us in our kind of after action review was that that we don't think governors and state Attorneys general necessarily have a fine grained understanding of the boundaries of their authority vis a vis the federal government in cases where they believe the federal authorities are being abused. So you know, what is the limit of the Governor's ability or a mayor's ability to constrain what federal troops or federal law enforcement officials do in their jurisdictions. Those are not super easy questions and we would certainly recommend that every pro democracy governor and state Attorney general and police chief pay some attention to those questions in the coming days.

[Jon Favreau]

Do you think a lot of governors have. Since you guys did this tabletop exercise, I assume you probably have been in contact With a lot of state and local officials.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, we've put out word and we've given briefings to state officials in a bunch of states and they are actively considering these questions. I just thought it was fascinating. We had two governors in our exercises and they actually didn't know whether they could countermand a presidential order or whether they could do anything to slow down the activation of their state Guard into federal status. And I just find it fascinating that you can hold an office like that and not really know what the exact boundaries of the authority were, because there have been so few cases in American history in which there was a conflict.

[Jon Favreau]

So which guardrails did the Red President have the most difficulty getting around and which were sort of the easiest to just plow through?

[Max Fisher]

Well, we did not come up with one weird trick to stop a time. In general, the blue team was frustrated by its inability to sort of throw its body in front of the train and stop the President if the President's determined to do something. But there were a number of things that can slow him down. For example, when he wanted to send in troops, I wrote about this in the Washington Post after the fact, he tried to give the order to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who's not actually technically in the chain of command. So that was clarified. He ordered his defense secretary to send in the troops, break up the demonstrations, which he called riots, and said, don't be gentle about it. Feel free to use all the force you want. And the chairman immediately, as his chief military advisor, started pushing back and saying, you need to give that order in a form that is not obviously illegal on its face. If you tell us to break up a political demonstration which is an exercise of First Amendment rights, and to use force on American citizens despite the constraints of the Posse com tatus act and so forth, know we need to clarify here and we need to let you know what the consequences are. At one point, the President in our exercise said he just wanted to activate and federalize the national guard in all 50 states. He just wanted all of it under his control. In that case, the commander in chief of the US Northern Command, who was in fact a former four star, a retired four star general, said to him, you are about to take away more than half of our worldwide contingency force for military emergencies elsewhere in the world. And that would be very unwise, sir. And it went back and forth on rules of engagement. Military is very much aware that it falls under civilian control and must obey lawful orders from the commander in chief. But under the uniform Code of military justice, an officer is also obliged to disobey an unlawful order. There's a high bar for that. You know, you don't want to go around disobeying orders, and how do you know it's unlawful? But, you know, the. The Judge Advocate General, who was one of our role players, was opining on the legality of presidential orders to use force on civilians. And in general, this process forced the president to narrow down and soften his orders. So, you know, it's famously the case that Trump asked Mark Esper and General Milley in reference to demonstrators outside the White House, why can't you just shoot them, Shoot them in the legs or something? And in that case, from Esper's account, they just ignored that. In this case, the military chain of command, pushed back and said, that would be illegal, sir, and got him to not give that order. They got him to change his order and sort of reverse his order to federalize all 50 states of national Guard when he realized what a kind of calamity he was setting in motion. But in the end, they did not stop him from sending troops into the cities. And the troops did break up the demonstrations. And so you could slow things down, you could make them less worse, but you can't necessarily stop it altogether. The blue Congress tried to defund, prevent the use of any funds, any federal funds for this exercise, and the red Attorney general figured out a way to reprogram funds that were in a piggy bank for FEMA in case of emergencies to pay for it. We weren't honestly sure in the exercise whether that would work or not, but all the things the people tried were interesting and they probably had some impact. For example, the faith leaders sent in a lot of clergy to the demonstration, and they stood in clerical garb between the demonstrators and the troops as if to kind of dare them to use force on a bunch of priests and monks and rabbis. And maybe in part in consequence of that, the encounters with the troops were not violent and there was not a lot of bloodshed.

[Jon Favreau]

So maybe public opinion still matters here.

[Max Fisher]

I actually think public opinion does matter. I think Donald Trump cares a lot about his polls and he cares about public opinion. And, you know, if there's a clash on the streets, you know, there are basically two possible storylines. One is that this is a bunch of crazy mobs, rioters burning things down, and that the President is imposing law and order and a lot of citizens would approve of it if it were cast to them that way. And the other is that he's sending armed people to crush civilian demonstrators in an exercise of their First Amendment rights. It's going to depend a lot. I think if there are big demonstrations, they're going to have to be disciplined and peaceful. And, yeah, we're gonna have to push that message.

[Jon Favreau]

So it seems like, at least in the exercise, the President can fairly easily steamroll Congress. The military maybe can slow him down, but ultimately he found a way to send them into the cities anyway. I want to talk about the courts, because you see in a lot of the scenarios, the blue team relied on a strategy of litigation to stop the red president. And it seems like that is challenging for a number of reasons. One, just the delay, two, potentially the makeup of the Supreme Court, and three, the possibility. And, you know, I interviewed Liz Cheney about this on Pod Save America, and she said her worry is that Donald Trump in a second term, just wouldn't abide a court order.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, that's, that's a.

[Jon Favreau]

Seems like the courts are not really the answer here either.

[Max Fisher]

Well, I don't discount the importance of courts. In Trump's first term. Courts did constrain his actions a number of times. And although he did a lot to change the makeup of the federal judiciary, not all the judges are alien canon. I mean, there are a number of Trump appointed judges who have ruled against him in sort of civil and criminal and in issues of presidential powers. So the courts may constrain him. The increasing partisanship of the Supreme Court is not a good sign. But the worst thing is, what if he simply flagrantly refuses to obey a court order? And that's a constitutional crisis because it's, you know, it's two coordinate branches of the government. And I just think there again, public opinion is going to be a very important thing. I mean, are we a country that's going to sit back and watch the President defy the rule of law, open just be openly a lawbreaker? I hope not, and I think not.

[Jon Favreau]

So what else can we do to sort of Trump proof our democracy aside from winning the election? I know one safeguard you recommend is pre commitments. What are pre commitments, and where are the areas that they would best be applied?

[Max Fisher]

The idea of pre commitment is that you get together with pro democracy people. Let's say there is in the corporate world or they're in a union or they're in any number of places that have an influence on our society and say, can we agree here among ourselves that if a president tries to, let's say, declare martial law, that you're going to speak out against that and they say, oh, yeah, sure, everybody's against martial law. We would speak out against that. Now, if you pre commit it, it can be possible to remind you of that pre commitment, you know, if and when the bad thing actually happens and to make people feel that they won't be acting alone if they step up and object to dictatorial behavior. If you say, you know, I've got, you know, this company and this company and this company over here who are going to step out with you, you have a better chance of getting people to overcome the natural human instinct to keep your head down and not pick a fight with the President.

[Jon Favreau]

All right, so it seems like the best hope here is still an engaged, disciplined, attentive civil society here that can continue to organize, shape public opinion and try to resist that way. And obviously the best thing is to win the election.

[Max Fisher]

That's the part I not in a place where I could comment on.

[Jon Favreau]

Of course, of course, I understand. Barton Gelman, thank you so much for joining OFFLINE and letting us know both what's at stake and what we can do to preserve democracy. So appreciate it.

[Max Fisher]

Thanks for having me.

[Jon Favreau]

One last thing to hopefully inspire you to go call some friends and do some volunteering in these last couple days. Some of our VSA volunteers are sharing what it's like phone banking and canvassing in these last days. Very inspirational, very informative. We'll leave you with a little bit of what they had to say.

[Max Fisher]

Hi, I'm David.

[Barton Gelman]

I'm 40 and I've been volunteering from New York City into the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada. My name is Sarah. I'm 35 and I've been knocking doors in New York and New Jersey in.

[Jon Favreau]

Two of the closest House races in the country. My name is Kat. I'm the daughter of a public school teacher and a labor union negotiator working in St. Paul, Minnesota. I've been volunteering with VoteSave America and the DCCC calling for tight congressional races all over the country and door knocking across the river with the Wisconsin Democrats.

[Barton Gelman]

I couldn't forgive myself if I didn't do everything I could to ensure that.

[Jon Favreau]

Kamala Harris and Democrats up and down.

[Max Fisher]

The ticket were elected.

[Jon Favreau]

Even here in the deepest blue of.

[Barton Gelman]

The Northeast, there are critical races to.

[Jon Favreau]

Turn out for and boy, we use the help. In my own circle of influence. In my neighborhood, it seems like everyone is essentially the same. But when I called all over the country, truly there are a lot of people who have not made up their mind. And what that means is that we have the power to actually change them for the better. Don't worry if you've never done it before. You talk to people all the time. You talk to your friends and family.

[Barton Gelman]

And the barista who makes your coffee.

[Jon Favreau]

And the librarian who checks out your book. There were a ton of things that surprised me about the process of phone banking, and the first thing is that people actually pick up their phones. Truly, in this day and age, people answer. The thing that resonates most with the voters I talk to is when I stop and I say, this is why I'm showing up. This is why I'm making calls to strangers. This is why I'm knocking on your door. It is the best way to channel and ease my election anxiety.

[Barton Gelman]

This is my first time phone banking.

[Max Fisher]

And having that direct contact with voters.

[Barton Gelman]

And I've been doing it by repeating.

[Max Fisher]

The mantra being scared is not a good enough reason not to do something. So I'd encourage everybody out there listening.

[Barton Gelman]

To conquer their fears, impress themselves and get out there.

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is a crooked media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Iluk. Frank Jordan Cantor is our Sound editor. Charlotte Landis is our engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Churlin and Adrian Hill for production support and to our digital team Elijah Cohn and Delon Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.

[Barton Gelman]

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