The PolicyViz Podcast

Publicly listed emails

jschwabish@gmail.com

Looking for the right person? Join Podseeker to find direct host and producer contacts and manage your podcast outreach.

Mike "SullyDawg" Sullivan: Explaining Trillion-Dollar Budgets with Solo Cups

October 07, 2026

In this week’s episode of the show, I talk with Mike "SullyDawg" Sullivan, the viral creator behind the cup pyramid videos that turn massive federal budget numbers into something you can actually see. Mike spent decades as a teacher and coach before a bike ride inspired his first video stacking Solo cups to explain government spending — and it took off almost overnight. We dig into why three-dimensional scale succeeds where bar charts and line graphs fail, how he sources and cross-checks the ...

My Favorite Graphs: Stronger Together from The New York Times

September 30, 2026

In this My Favorite Graphs episode, I revisit a 2016 New York Times visualization comparing the convention speeches of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I explain why highlighting phrases across miniature pages can reveal themes in qualitative data that word counts and bar charts can miss. I share how I have used a simple version of this technique in my own work and discuss tools for creating similar views. Alicia contributes a voice note about the project's development, including the highlig...

Playfair, Power, and the People Behind the Data: Lauren Klein on Data by Design

September 23, 2026

Lauren Klein joins me to talk about her new book, Data by Design, co-authored with a team of student collaborators. Over more than a decade of work, Lauren set out to place the history of data visualization in its full historical and political context, going well beyond the familiar “great men” narrative of Playfair and Snow. We talk about how she chose which historical visualizations to feature and redesign, the ethical questions that come up when working with data about the transatlantic sl...