Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

As you know, I'm a political scientist. My graduate school training at the University of

Kentucky mainly involved reading seminal and cutting-edge work in political science and then

discussing it, writing about it, and ideally building on it. Now, I mentioned

this because of all the eminent political scientist I was exposed to in graduate school,

none impressed me more than my guest today, Dr. Gary King of Harvard, who, in my view, is the

foremost political scientist of at least the last half century. His list of achievements and honors is frankly

staggering. He's authored or co-authored over 150 scholarly journal articles, 20 open source

software packages, eight books, and he's won more prizes, awards, and honors than you can shake

a stick at. And he's a fellow in eight

honorary societies, including the National Academy of Sciences. His work encompasses a broad range of

issues, including demographic forecasting, legislative redistricting, Chinese government

censorship and social media use, bias in social security administration forecast, analysis of

big data, and numerous publications in the area of what one might broadly term statistics and

modeling. Dr. King, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much, and thanks for your kind introduction and generous introduction, too.

Certainly.

Now, going through your CV, which I did in preparation for our talk, is a somewhat daunting experience.

I mean, you've done so much work in so many areas.

I'm wondering if you see any unifying theme or themes in your work. So I think of myself as a methodologist. It's

interesting you use the word unifying themes because the word unifying appears in a lot of my

work because I try to do that. But maybe I could tell the story that when I was in graduate

...