The Realignment: Wrapping 2022, Goals for the New Year, and Next Steps for The Realignment
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It’s been an incredibly busy week. The photo above is from our Breaking Points live show in New York City on Tuesday. We also went to Boston. I got to meet a bunch of you all there. I also wasn’t as ticked-off as I look in the screen capture. A low-stakes, high-stakes goal for 2023 is working on my resting performer’s face.
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Note: We haven’t published as many AMA episodes as I would have liked. The issue has been Saagar’s availability with Breaking Points. Therefore, I’m going to start recording exclusive content at a faster cadence. Saagar will still join, but on the reduced basis we’ve seen before. Thank you for everyone’s patience.
Goals for Next Year
With the end-of-the-year series, I’ve been thinking about show goals for the next year. Here are several, listed for accountability purposes.
Transcripts for each episode. Folks have been asking for these for awhile. I’ve started producing them for episodes from the daily series (see the Noah Smith excerpt below) but I’m not going to be able to turn them around with the daily episodes series.
Proper scheduling. The best thing that has come from the daily episodes series this month and the fact that I’ve been on the road this month has forced me to schedule the show out. Typically, I’ve recorded episodes the day before publication. Now, I’ve been able to record episodes from this series a week or so beforehand. Making this consistent next year will make the show better.
Stepping up YouTube. The Realignment puts out roughly three hours of interviews every single week. I created a clips channel earlier this year, but haven’t used it yet. Come next year, producing multiple clips per show will help increase growth and engagement. Here’s the link to the new channel.
Focused editorial. We haven’t really updated the Realignment’s show trailer or description copy since we launched in 2019. The show has obviously moved beyond its previous editorial framing, but I haven’t made it as explicit as possible.
Supercast. As I said above, the Supercast hasn’t been able to release enough exclusive content. Before, my priority was making sure Saagar and I could make every recording, at the expense of content. Moving forward, I will publish regardless.
Substack. The Substack has a more than decent number of subscribers, especially since I typically don’t produce unique content beyond link sharing. I’ve never been a writer, but I’m excited to push myself to grow on this front next year.
Improving as a content creator. Properly writing out intros, better preparation for episodes, improved show notes, proper edits and review of episodes before publication, and a focus on growing the show via social channels.
Let me know if you all have any suggestions below.
Week One Daily Episodes
I wanted to pull this quote from the first episode of my daily series with Noah Smith. It really gets at what I’m aiming for as the show moves into the new year.
In this decade, we'll be planted the seeds of highly transformative decades in the 2030s and forties. I think those will be very transformative decades. Right now, people are building the technologies that will affect, you know, modern technology changes everything.
Like the technology of the internet and social media and the smartphone and all that stuff was what enabled this age of unrest to happen. Right? That's where it all happened on these technologies. But then those technologies were built off stuff that was conceived in the seventies. All the networking and satellite communications, all this stuff that like, was all conceived in like the seventies and eighties as partly through defense stuff.
We are now going to build the technologies that will define those later decades and we are now going to Incubate new subcultures of social movements that will flower in those later decades. So we're doing sort of the groundwork even as we're exhausted, we'll be slowly doing the groundwork.
Just as you know, the 1970s, you could see the genesis of hip hop culture. You could see the genesis of like punk and anarchists and crunchy hippies and all this stuff. Evangelicals too. Evangelicals absolutely the conservative revolution with Billy Graham, all that stuff.
Really, the seventies incubated the cultures that defined the next few decades. And I think now while it looks like it will look like nothing's happening, but a lot of important stuff will be happening in a subterranean way .
The Realignment began with Saagar and I exploring the 2010s unrest that Noah described. That unrest led to multiple dead-ends, reformations, and absorptions that I’ll expand on next week.
As Noah and I discussed, it feels as if we’re coming down from the “vibes” that defined 2015-2019. If The Realignment’s going to remain relevant as a show, it needs to shift its focus away from rehasing the greatest hits of the 2010s, and focus on the themes, ideas, and figures that can lead to something productive in the 2030s.
I’m particularly curious what folks think about this framing?
Week One Daily Episodes
As you can see below, I’ve put out a bunch of episodes, and there’ll be more to come over the next two weeks until the holiday break.
323 | James Rickards: How Broken Supply Chains Will Sink the Global Economy
322 | Jeremi Suri: America's Unfinished War Over Democracy
321 | Beverly Gage: How the FBI and Its Politics Shaped the American Century
320 | Trae Stephens: Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy
319 | Frank Dikötter: Shattering the Myths of China After Mao
318 | Noah Smith: Vibe Shifting Out of the Long 2010s
317 | Saagar & Marshall's 2022 Year-in-Review: China Protests & Zero COVID, the End of History Returns, and Is America Politically Exhausted?
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I'm inspired by your take on this. As a business owner I'm really impressed by this account taking, planning and revisions. I'm crazy busy and probably one of your less intelligent and/or less well-read listeners but I make up for it with absolute enthusiasm for the show! I'm constantly surprised by the shifting focuses, but I like them! I never expect to be surprised but somehow every single episode feels unexpected and gives me a broader perspective. Thank you so much!
I'd actually like less episodes like the Noah Smith one. I get the desire to pull back from specific issues and try to examine things within a wider frame. It's baked into the original concept for the show, after all. But it's rare that you have a Zeihan or a DiStefano worthy of the task who can combine wide-ranging knowledge of a field based on deep study with some epistemic humility about their conclusions. I found Smith to be intolerable and didn't even make it halfway through the episode. It was just dramatic, unsupported assertion after dramatic, unsupported assertion, jumping all over the map. It seems unlikely that someone could know that many things, much less with that much certainty. (Though I concede this may be a personal stylistic preference.)
I'd honestly be much more interested in hearing you both in a focused discussion episode that tried to tie together a year or a quarter of interviews into some big themes and conclusions as opposed to Marshall politely querying a professional take-haver. We hear less from Saagar anyway, so this is another way to make that easier for him. Just my two cents. Thanks again for all the work you put into this.