In Search of an Argument

Four days out from the midterms, John and Jim break format for the one episode they do every cycle: the pre-election forecast. Jim has been an election nerd since 1966 — paper tally sheets and all — and he is not hedging this year. He’s calling a Democratic wave, and he goes seat by seat to back it up, all while packing for a flight to Rome that puts him over the Atlantic on election night.

The headline numbers: Jim predicts the Democrats net ten Senate seats and roughly fifty-five in the House, flipping both chambers. Then he walks the map — the races everyone’s watching (Texas, Michigan, Maine) and the long shots he thinks the wave carries anyway (Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina) — and lays out why he sees the energy, the swing voters, and the “affordability” crisis all breaking one direction. John plays the skeptic, pressing him on how a wave builds on itself and whether any of this holds.

Along the way: why inflation beats every other issue (the candy-bar economy, gas-station-sign politics), the Ann Selzer lawsuit and the “herding” chill it may be putting on pollsters, a early look at the wide-open 2028 field (Beshear, Shapiro, Mayor Pete, and the AOC question), and a genuinely thoughtful detour into why LGBTQ issues became the spear tip of national politics — and why both sides keep them there.

Programming notes: there’s no post-election hot-take episode until Jim’s back from Italy, so hold your receipts. And Jim has a request for the other four hosts — record something while he’s in Rome, because he’ll be missing your voices. (His pitch: the New York Times’ 100 best TV shows of the century.)

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Fun Fact: Recorded Thursday, October 29 at 10:23 a.m. Central — four days before the election and three days before Jim connects through Atlanta to Rome. Check back after the election to see how the tally sheets held up.

Finally, a real argument. The University of Michigan floated making first-semester freshman grades pass/fail — pitched as a way to ease the student mental-health crisis — and it lit a fire under this crew. Shelly spiraled (her word), Beth brought receipts and her two college-freshman relatives, Peggy took the devil’s-advocate seat, and what starts as a grading debate turns into a much bigger fight about resilience, college, and how we’ve raised a generation.

If you’ve ever had a strong opinion about what college is actually for, this one’s for you.

Shelly makes the case that grades are just feedback — a speedometer, a scoreboard — and that pulling them for freshmen doesn’t cure anxiety so much as postpone it until the first certification exam, job interview, or hard conversation nobody prepared you for. Beth, who swears she can’t remember her own GPA and is the better for it, asks the kids directly: her niece’s verdict on the whole idea is three words long and devastating. Peggy pushes back from the other side — maybe the real problem is a culture chasing a 4.7-out-of-4, and maybe less obsession over every A is exactly the point. And John, who spent seventeen years in the classroom, isn’t sure grades matter nearly as much as everyone pretends.

From there it widens: weed-out classes and the era when universities admitted more kids than they meant to graduate, the push to send everyone to college and the trades we gutted doing it, why a European plumber trains for four years and we still call it “lesser,” and the uncomfortable thread underneath all of it — whether avoiding discomfort is quietly making us worse at everything that comes after school.

Come for the grading argument. Stay for Beth and Shelly fighting over the same soapbox, a cease-and-desist letter a student’s father once sent John over a pop quiz, and Jim arriving straight off the subway just in time to confirm he is, in fact, not yet dead.

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Fun Fact: Beth wants it on record that she delivered several visible eye rolls this episode — a loss for the audio-only listeners. And we genuinely want the pushback: if you think we’re bonkers on this one, tell us, and we’ll do it again.

It's been too long since the whole crew was together, so Peggy, Beth, John, and Shelly finally reconnect — and it turns into one of our warmest, most fun episodes. This is the one you put on to feel like you're back around the table with friends who genuinely like each other, trading strong opinions on what they're watching and swapping stories about where they're all headed next.

There's a spirited defense of the comfort rewatch, and everyone's pick is a little revealing. John has quietly finished all seven seasons of The West Wing and will tell you the exact episode it fell apart. Shelly reruns Indiana Jones and does not care one bit whether it holds up. Peggy has an airplane movie she's seen a hundred times. And Beth — who swears she never rewatches anything — is so deep in a nightly British-mystery habit she lies awake reconstructing who killed the guy by the river.

Then the conversation turns to travel, and it's a lot: Shelly's Zurich-to-Munich-to-London marathon (with a packing challenge she's more excited about than the trip itself), Beth's sister who was offered Italy and asked for a football game instead, and Peggy planning an entire vacation around a credit-card perk and a stranger who gives private tours of his Frank Lloyd Wright house. Somewhere in the middle, everyone realizes just how much of the world John and Peggy saw together back in the day — and it lands with a little more weight than anyone expected.

Come for the movie opinions. Stay for Peggy's dog getting skunked at six in the morning, a stuffed-animal wedding staged for the kids, and John trying, and failing, to get anyone to admit a weekend away counts as a vacation.

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Fun Fact: Recorded Sunday morning, technical difficulties finally licked, Jim on hiatus — and Peggy got Wordle in two.

Two years ago, John Mellencamp stood on a stage in Bloomington, got heckled to play the hits, and told the crowd exactly where they could put their requests. He wanted to play the new album. This is not that tour.

This is the redemption tour — a looser, happier Mellencamp at Grand Rapids' brand-new Acrisure Amphitheater, chain-smoking through the greatest hits at 74 and blowing past the noise curfew by fifteen minutes just to spite it. Peggy's hosting, Beth's out, and in her seat is Peggy's niece Molly — a twenty-something concert fanatic who sat down next to us at the show, charmed the entire group, and got herself invited on the podcast. Shelly's here as the resident superfan who knows every lyric. Jim's here fighting his microphone.

We get into whether a good football season can put a rock star in a good mood, the competitive blood sport that is ticket-buying in Molly's family, and whether artists who run past curfew should be fined by the minute (Jim's ruling: complain about concert noise and you should try a week in New York). Then the real fight — John swears we've lost the shared culture where everyone knew the same songs; Jim has Billboard data and is not backing down. It ends where every good episode does: a quiz about Beth, conducted entirely behind her back.

Come for Mellencamp. Stay for the Denver skillet.

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Special guest, special format. Our friend Jaime Haak — digital nomad, currently somewhere in the Mountain time zone — joins John and Jim to argue about two of the most talked-about screen productions of the moment: Pluribus on Apple TV and Spielberg's Disclosure Day. Fair warning up front: this one is wall-to-wall spoilers for both. If you haven't watched and don't want to know, hit pause, go watch, and come back.

The two works turn out to be perfect opposites, and the contrast becomes the whole argument.

Full spoilers ahead. In this episode:

• Pluribus — Vince Gilligan's return, a lab-escaped peptide that turns 7 billion people into a happy, honest, harmonious hive mind, twelve survivors, and one deeply unlikable protagonist. Jamie loved the concept and was left deflated; John bailed after two episodes; Jim watched all nine and won't be back for season two
• The core complaint: is it nuanced, or just inert? Jim's theory that the story needed three hours and Apple wanted nine — and the long detour into how 19th-century serialization shaped Dickens the way episode counts shape TV
• The Breaking Bad comparison, the New Mexico Easter eggs, and Jaime's case that Gilligan took his own fast, ego-driven universe and deliberately turned it inside out
• The thought experiment: if 7 billion people were at your beck and call — unable to lie, unwilling to harm you — what would you actually do? And why 40 days of solitude might have been the more interesting story
• Disclosure Day — Spielberg back in Close Encounters mode: visitors from outer space (never "aliens"), a shadowy quasi-government captor, Colin Firth as a villain who isn't pure evil, and a Hitchcockian chase that barely lets you breathe
• Jim on why Spielberg still moves like no one else — the storyboard trick of cutting every shot he can, the lesson of Jaws, and Hitchcock's line about movies being pieces of cake, not slices of life
• John's confession that he watched a Spielberg spectacle in the worst possible way — half on his sister's TV, part in a car, the rest on his phone while cleaning — and his defense of slow cinema anyway, from Roma to Bergman's Persona
• The bigger picture: why nobody's finishing season two of anything, whether cliffhangers are training audiences to quit, the long gaps between seasons, and the genuinely hopeful news that theatrical box office is having its best year since before the pandemic
• Empathy as the holy grail — whether Disclosure Day's plea for compassion lands differently at 18 than at 60, and whether even the worst actors among us can be redeemed

Plus: the candy-corn story behind Psycho, Jim's list of 200 films he's never seen in a theater (and the day trip to D.C. to cross two off), and Jim's sincere concern that once everyone hears this episode, they'll replace him with Jaime.

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Fun Fact: Recorded with John finishing Disclosure Day roughly eight minutes before hitting record. Jaime's connection gave out right at the end — she broke the Zencastr — so Jim signed off convinced this was his last episode before the group replaces him with her.

Just John and Jim this time — a return to the old two-man format, recorded minutes after Spain won the World Cup, with John hiding from his extended family at a Michigan vacation house. The topic is genuinely egghead: deliverism, the idea that the purpose of politics is to deliver for your constituents. Did the bridge get built? Did the school open? Did the garbage get picked up? David Runciman filed it under "The History of Bad Ideas." We try to work out whether it deserves to be there.

In this episode:

• Jim's opening move: anyone who says politics is one thing is wrong. Is it partly deliverism? Obviously. Is it only that? Not a chance
• China as the hard case — John lived there, and argues the Communist Party's legitimacy runs entirely on delivery. Jim broadens it: every dictatorship survives by satisfying enough people to get away with repressing the rest
• The question that organizes the whole hour: is deliverism a theory of legitimacy or just a theory of winning elections?
• The symbolic counter-case — Jim argues a big share of Trump's appeal was never transactional at all, but a middle finger at the status quo, and that AOC and Bernie trade in symbolism just as much
• Jim's rapid-change thesis: 25 years of dizzying technological change has been profoundly dislocating, politics hasn't changed to match, and the reaction — reactionary in the literal sense — shows up on both left and right
• Biden as the deliverism test case: the Inflation Reduction Act delivered, and he got no credit. John blames the theory; Jim blames Biden, and makes the case that Nancy Pelosi deserves the real credit for the whole legislative record
• Great men or great events? John plants his flag on events; Jim says that's too simple
• Handicapping 2028 — why Jim thinks Andy Beshear is the strongest Democrat nobody's talking about, why Newsom's case collapses under a single question, whether AOC runs, and the wealth tax he predicts will pass whoever wins
• Plus a Popper detour on falsifiability, a Malthus digression, and Henry Gee's argument that humanity peaked around 1794

Jim's midterm forecast, on the record: close races don't split evenly — they break one direction, and usually against the party in the White House. Check back in October.

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Fun Fact: Recorded two minutes after the World Cup final. Patreon subscriptions are up 100% — from one to two.

With Beth somewhere around Topeka on her cross-country drive, Shelly's husband Ian pinch-hits — freshly retired, just back from a European tour, and wearing his England shirt for a World Cup conversation that finally gives us two people who actually know the sport.

First, the retiree's report: Ian was dreading retirement and now can't figure out how he ever had time for work. He also got an unexpected epiphany about mortality and how few years there really are to have fun — a million miles from where he was six months ago.

Then we dig into the 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the US, Canada, and Mexico:

• Why this tournament is historic — the first-ever 48-team field — and how the World Cup grew from just 13 teams at the Depression-era 1930 debut
• A whirlwind history with Jim and Ian trading facts: the home team that won the first cup, Brazil and Pelé, England's lone 1966 title, and the year Celsius and Fahrenheit agree
• The Iran question John can't stop turning over — the host nation bombing a competitor mid-tournament, travel-banned fans, the LA "home game" for a largely Persian diaspora, and what it means to love a people and not their regime
• FIFA under Infantino, the deals with authoritarian regimes, the cancelled Seattle Pride match, and money as the engine behind every decision — set against the genuine joy of tiny Cape Verde and Curaçao making the field
• The theory that American football's stop-start rhythm is a perfect accident of commercial TV — and why sensors in the ball, water breaks, and endless review all come back to selling ad time
• Soccer vs. rugby vs. football as physical feats, why goalkeepers play into their 40s (good news for Peggy), and how Messi is still scoring at 38
• The brutally early UK academy system — full-time soccer schools, no playing with your friends — and whether culling 10-year-olds even produces the best players
• Did Ted Lasso (and Wrexham) actually grow American interest, or was soccer already here? Shelly and Peggy disagree

Plus: Peggy's broken wrist, new boobs, and a co-ed goal she was never going to catch; Ian's coaching philosophy ("if in doubt, kick it out"); and the reveal that he and Shelly met watching a Euros match.

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Fun Fact: Recorded Sunday, June 28, the first day of the round of 32, with the US through to the knockouts and Ian in full England kit. Beth couldn't join — she was busy not being in Kansas anymore.

All five of us, and a mystery finally solved: John spent eight days in Estes Park, Peggy was there the same week — same tiny town, blocks apart — and neither of them knew. We get to the bottom of exactly how that happened, and it's even funnier than we expected.

First, Jim clears the decks: he corrects himself on the producer behind "Sounds of Silence" (it was Tom Wilson, not Bob Johnston), reveals that by Billboard chart performance the greatest living American songwriter is — not even close — Taylor Swift, and shares a new documentary on the great producer Peter Asher, including the story of how Asher got a Beatles reject song and turned it into a number one record.

In this episode:

• The full Estes Park reckoning — overlapping dates, a misread text, a snow-capped mountain John didn't notice, and Bear Lake hikes you both did without crossing paths
• Peggy's trip that started as a Paul Simon show at Red Rocks and became a baseball game in the fifth inning, the gloriously bizarre Casa Bonita, and a fancy Boulder spa
• John's family week — killer elk outside the door every morning, the non-negotiable hotel pool, and why the mountains hit little kids (and winded flatland adults) the way they do
• Beth's Sufjan Stevens and Linda Ronstadt detours, plus Peggy's grandfather and the six Linda Ronstadt cassettes he could no longer listen to
• Whether you'd ever pull young kids out of school for a trip — Jim and John disagree, as is tradition
• John's closing quiz on Rocky Mountain moose, altitude sickness, Chicago's phantom third airport, and the EU rule that actually makes airlines pay for delays (the throughline: John cannot get over the airfare)

Plus: a surprise four-legged guest named Pearl, Shelly's personal-best four laps around the lake, and a Norwegian mountain hut stocked with food and trust that, as Shelly notes, would never survive in America.

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Fun Fact: Recorded on Peter Asher's 82nd birthday. Final tally on John's quiz: everybody held their own, nobody got arrested at Graceland, and Jim still wants to know the source for every answer.

A follow-up was inevitable. After our episode on the New York Times' 30 best living American songwriters, the Times ran a readers' poll and came back with a top 100 — and 29 of the original 30 survived the vote (sorry, Missy Elliott). This time it's a leaner crew: John, Jim, and Beth, the first time this particular trio has carried an episode solo.

In this episode:

• The expanded list does right by a lot of our snubs — John Hiatt, Carole King, Stevie Nicks — but reopens the question we never settled: are people voting for songwriters, or for performers?
• The Linda Ronstadt problem — one of the great interpreters of all time, but is interpreting the same as writing? And James Taylor, beloved for singles he mostly didn't write, ranked above Carly Simon (#50), who wrote far more of her own
• Jim's potted history of how the singer-songwriter became the norm: Dylan started it, Brian Epstein told Lennon and McCartney to write their own, Andrew Loog Oldham pushed the Stones to follow — and the real engine underneath was songwriting royalties
• The radio quirk almost nobody knows: on terrestrial radio, songwriters collect royalties and performers don't — a holdover from sheet-music days, not logic — and how that connects to Taylor Swift re-recording her masters (which, Jim argues, was about control, not money)
• John plants his flag for the producer — where's the list of the 100 greatest? — from William Orbit's fingerprints on Madonna's Ray of Light to the secret history of "Sounds of Silence," which a Columbia producer quietly turned into a hit without telling Simon or Garfunkel
• Can a record even be "overproduced"? John says no; Jim says it depends; Beth just likes what she likes — and the Taylor-Swift-as-"factory-music" knock gets a hearing
• A genuine detour into newspapers: why all three still love the physical paper, the surprising median age of a Times reader, reading the news to find out whether we've started a new war, and the quiet art of avoiding a certain name in every headline
• Substack overload and the coming wave of bundling, a Nate Silver gripe, and why the Times' sheer depth buries the competition
• The real argument underneath it all: is a "best songwriters" list news, or opinion dressed as authority? That cracks open a lawyerly debate about truth, belief, and whether you can ever fully separate the two

Plus: the Replacements reunion show Jim once dragged John to, MacArthur Park as grounds for disqualification, and the moment Jim risks his life by dissing Beth and the print newspaper in a single breath.

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Fun Fact: Recorded Thursday, June 4 — same-week turnaround, because we're finally publishing faster. This one's outside the Patreon paywall, as all of Jim's episodes shall forever be.

Two episodes nearly back-to-back — unheard of around here. This time all five of us take on the New York Times' list of the 30 best living American songwriters, which is to say we take on a list expressly designed to start a fight. Peggy admits up front she's neither opinionated nor musically savvy; she also admits she was fine with the entire thing the second she scrolled past Paul Simon and Dolly Parton.

In this episode:

• How the list actually got made — 250 industry nominations narrowed by a panel of six NYT critics, in no particular order — and why every top-whatever list exists to generate disagreement (and subscriptions)
• The two words that trip everyone up: "living" (RIP Prince, Michael Jackson, and Brian Wilson — whom Tony Kornheiser apparently forgot had died) and "American" (sorry, Elton John, McCartney, Bono, and Joni Mitchell)
• The online outrage over Billy Joel's omission — and Jim's iron rule that to add one name, you have to cut one
• The real argument underneath: what even makes a song good? Popularity, influence, craftsmanship, lyrics, music, or production — and can you ever separate the song from the recording
• John's neuroplasticity theory of why everything you heard between 12 and 18 is permanently filed under "genius"
• The covers test: a great song is one other artists want to sing — Robbie Robertson's "The Weight," the endless Dylan covers, Dolly's "I Will Always Love You," "Jolene" by way of Beyoncé and Miley, Ryan Adams remaking all of 1989, and Johnny Cash gutting everyone with "Hurt"
• John's parlor game: cross off every artist you already loved, then rank the strangers — a genuinely harder exercise than it sounds
• Where the table would find room: Randy Newman, Jackson Browne, John Prine, John Fogerty, John Mellencamp, Fiona Apple, Heart, and the American half of Fleetwood Mac
• Where the table pushed back: Jay-Z, Missy Elliott, and whether Bad Bunny's couple of years of dominance should wait out a Hall-of-Fame-style eligibility clock
• The songwriters who never sing their own hits — Diane Warren, Nile Rodgers, Natalie Hemby — and why writing for everyone else might be the purest mark of the craft
• A favorite-Madonna-song lightning round that exposes exactly who each of us is

Plus: Springsteen opening a rainy D.C. show with a pointed Edwin Starr cover, the 16-minute YouTube rant Peggy made everyone watch, an Aaron Sorkin button nobody dares push (except John, on purpose), and the greatest closing flub in show history, involving a premium tequila.

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Fun Fact: Recorded about five weeks after the list dropped on April 27, 2026. Beth listened to an actual episode (one she wasn't on, naturally), Jim dropped an F-bomb so it wasn't Beth's turn for once, and despite Peggy's verdict that Paul Simon belongs at #1, the list has no rankings at all.