The Realignment: Are You Still Listening to Podcasts? My Question for Rep. Gallagher on China, and This Week's Recs
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Hey everyone! We’re less than a week away from our live event in DC this upcoming Wednesday.
One of the things I’d like to catalogue here is what I call The Realignment’s “step-up” process. The goal is to take the show from a haphazardly organized weekly podcast to a serious (but still hopefully) entertaining place for us all to learn how to navigate an almost paralyzingly complicated world.
This week’s update is that Saagar and I released our second Supercast Ask-Me-Anything episode of the year. It’s important that those of you who’ve paid to support the show get the exclusive subscription content you were promised. Last year, we’d sometimes go a month between releases, so I’m excited to keep up the energy there.
It’s also a great way to reintegrate Saagar back into the show. As you all have noticed, the chaos of running a growing YouTube media conglomerate has made it harder for him to keep up with non-discussion Realignment episodes.
If you’d like to access the Supercast episode and support the show, click the button below:
A bunch of you also decided to use Substack’s new feature that lets people “Pledge” money to a non-monetized Substack. Thanks for doing so, it is really encouraging.
I’m thinking about how I could add a paid Substack post to this newsletter that adds value to anyone. If you’ve got thoughts, comment below. My first though is building/leading a monthly hangout/book club for subscribers. More to come next week after the conference.
Realignment Book of the Week + Updated Bookshop Lists
As part of the step-up process, I’ve started updating the show’s other Book lists. The new one is “What We’re Reading: 2023 Edition.”
Bookshop is great because it not only supports independent booksellers, but we get a 10% commission on sales. The new list covers some of what I’ve read/listened to since the holiday break at the end of last year. And yes, before you ask, a majority of the books listed were audiobooks, not paper reads. More below on how I’m looking to shift the ratio to more reading versus listening.
From now on I’m going to call out a book I particularly enjoyed each Friday.
Today, I want to recommend American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.
The country’s in the middle of a huge debate about how we should teach American history. The Realignment is going to cover the various angles on the issue over the coming months. American Midnight is *highly* critical of how the America of the 1910s-1920s handled the consequences of WWI at home: almost unfathomable backlash against anti-war activists/citizens merely wishing to express their rights, the jailing of the political opposition, private and public harassment and violence against labor activists, racial minorities, and white-ethnic German-Americans, and the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy.
The author, Adam Hochschild, does an excellent job of illustrating how all of the above dynamics are legitimate and constant threats during any military or international conflict. As a person who is clearly on one side of the “how should America respond to China and Russia” debate, learning this history is key to preventing the occurence of overreach.
This upcoming Tuesday’s episode if with return Realignment guest, Congressman Mike Gallagher, who is chairing the newly established Select Committee on China. Reading the book inspired the following question that everyone should ponder:
Three times in the 20th century (WWI, WWII, and the Cold War) the U.S. justifiably responded to foreign aggression (unrestricted U-Boat warfare/Zimmerman Telegram, Pearl Harbor/Hitler’s declaration of war, and the existence of Soviet spies in the West). However, in each case, we quickly transitioned to unjustifiably and avoidably discriminating against American citizens. What have we learned from those three wars/conflicts that can inform a second Cold War/great power competition with China?
As I said, American Midnight does a great job of critiquing/revising what many of us were taught in school without becoming unhelpful. I see it as the gold standard for revisionist history.
Last Call for Realignment Live Tickets
I’ve got a promo code for anyone (especially students and cash-strapped young professionals) who’d like to attend. If that’s you, email me at realignmentpod@gmail.com.
For anyone else on the fence and curious about the event, check out the agenda here:
Have Your Podcast Listening Habits Changed?
The chart above comes from the most authoritative source on podcast listenership data, though the space is notoriously opaque.
Personally and ironically, I’ve really started to cut back the amount of podcasts I listen to. Part of my listening decline is because of how many audiobooks I listen to, but I’m finding myself less and less compelled by audio.
My goal is to read more paper books. Not only do I retain far more information, but it helps me get off of my phone. Another attached goal is to severely reduce my screen time. It was hard at first to sit down and focus, but I now think of it as equivalent to going to the gym. At first it’s hard to lift X amount of weight (or read X number of pages before I get antsy), but every day I put in the time, it gets easier.
On a broader level, my take on the podcasting decline is that the format doesn’t feel as innovative as it did a few years back at the height of the pandemic. This tends to happen in the industry. Podcasting blew up during the 2000s, but declined before blowing up again with the launch of Serial back in 2014.
The Realignment’s doing great, but the show definitely isn’t experiencing the near automatic growth we got between 2020 and early 2022. My strategy is to double down on quality, ignore downloads, and focus on building the best show possible for the next time the podcasting format blows up again, probably in early to mid 2024.
What do you guys think?
A) How have your listening habits changed of late, or have they stayed the same?
B) What do you think is going on in the podcasting industry overall?
This Week’s Paid Episode
Realignment Q&A Mailbag: Does Davos/the World Economic Forum Matter, the Gilded Age and Today's Politics, Dungeons & Dragons, and Neocon Thoughts? (Supercast Exclusive)
Marshall and Saagar answer Realignment Supercast subscriber Q&A from our ask-me-anything page. Subscribers to The Realignment's Supercast help us monetize the show, submit questions for Q&A episodes, listen to exclusive content, and more.
You can find our Ask-Me-Anything section and subscribe here.
This Week’s Free Episodes
332 | How the Congo's Cobalt Fuels Electric Vehicles, Batteries, and Modern-Day Slavery with Siddharth Kara
Episode Materials
Books Mentioned/Useful Background Reading on the Congo/Batteries
331 | One Small Step Towards a Fusion Energy Breakthrough with Charles Seife
Episode Materials
Is This the ‘Kitty Hawk Moment’ for Fusion Energy? The Atlantic
330 | Does Great Power Equal Responsibility? America and the World from WWI to Ukraine with Robert Kagan
Episode Materials
Part One of the Dangerous Nation Trilogy - Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
A Free World, If You Can Keep It: Ukraine and American Interests by Robert Kagan Foreign Affairs
The Realignment Bookshop
We’ve created a Realignment Bookshop affiliate store showcasing books by guests, what we’re actively reading this year, and deeper dives into the featured topic of an episode.
If you purchase a book using our link, the show gets a 10% commission, a local, independent bookseller gets support, and you get an awesome book!
What We’re Reading: 2023 Edition
If you’ve made it this far, you really should subscribe to support our show : )
https://realignment.supercast.com/
Let us know what you think about this or any other week’s episodes. Please share The Realignment with anyone who’d enjoy the podcast.
Podcasts that are "information dense" like yours should outperform those that are less efficient in being actually useful for staying informed. My advice is to keep that as a metric for future plans.
People who think (your audience) are focused on maximizing the yield from their time.
I find myself more inclined to listen to a podcast episode if the topic discussed feels evergreen. Keeping up with the constant news cycle is impossible, and each topic is memory-holed after two weeks, so what was the point of listening to analysts pithy takes for hours a day?
I think that when people are expecting a crescendo politically and culturally then the (feeling of) immensity of moment seems to draw in more news consumption and opinions on current events. But weve seen the battles that we engaged in turn into forever-moments, or be swept away without the long-due victory various factions feel they are due.
If its just gonna be business as usual forever then my intrigue in a podcast is based on acquiring lifelong wisdom, not on learning the fleeting happenings of the day