My name is Andy Slavitt. I was in the Obama administration overseeing much of health care.

Now I'm a podcaster just like you at what's a show called The in the bubble.

Yeah, not just like me. I never ran anything for any presidential administration.

But here's a story. I first took notice of Andy Slavitt last March, early in the pandemic.

On Twitter, he would post these long threads every evening saying here's

the kind of folks I was talking with today and they'd be like governors and public health officials

and hospital administrators and he'd be like here's what I. And it was all this info I wasn't seeing anywhere else.

Because he was plugged in.

He'd worked in the Obama administration,

done a bunch of business side stuff.

So he knew who to call, and they took took his calls and he was putting out all this

information in real time and then he started a podcast called in the bubble a kind of

extension of that Twitter report one conversation at a time on tape. Political leaders, infectious disease

experts, public health experts, journalists, just keeping a conversation going.

What do we know? How do we stay safe? How do we keep our heads together in the meantime? So this fall I was

talking with my collaborators, Daisy Rosario and Marion Wang, who guide this show about how

in December we'd want to look back at the coronavirus pandemic so far and ask what we'd

learned like from 40,000 feet up and what we could maybe expect and we were like yeah

who would we want to talk to you for that and I, I was kind of thinking, Andy Slavitt? And there was a beat. And then they both said, yeah, I was kind of thinking of him too. So we asked him and he said yes.

This is an arm and alert, a show about the cost of health care.

I'm a reporter, I like a challenge, so my job here is to take one of the most

enraging terrifying depressing issues in American life and bring you a show that's

...