Finding the Place for Politics in Our Lives

Happy Thanksgiving

To all of you who subscribe, I apologize for having been off line for a few days. Sometimes, I just get tired of hearing my own voice.

My average week includes co-hosting the DSR Network’s daily podcast, hosting two or three of our main podcasts (they’re all at www.thedsrnetwork.com), writing a column or two for the Daily Beast and then writing four or five or sometimes six Substacks a week (fewer in the past few weeks since the election but soon to be back up to the “usual rate), and then joining other shows whether on MSNBC or other TV, radio or podcast networks.

The events of the past few weeks have been both a shock to my system and have led to some deep introspection (still on-going) about how to play the most constructive role possible in the years ahead. That means rethinking how to make The DSR Network relevant and not duplicative of other programming out there and, at the same time, trying to consider how best to focus my own writing and speaking and activism such as it is.

The core group of us at the DSR Network have been podcasting together for almost a decade. We were pre-Trump and I am committed to ensuring we’re around long enough to be post-Trump. Also, I founded the DSR Network in conjunction with a guy named Bernard Schwartz who for decades was a big time voice and donor within the Democratic Party and we had a goal: to do what we could to ensure Democrats could stay unified, focus on the right issues and approaches to win in elections, and at the core of it, to help make sure that democracy in this country would survive. That sounds like a heavy lift for the world’s smallest media company. But over the years, thanks to many of you, we have built an audience that is gradually approaching a million downloads of our podcasts each month. Bernard died earlier this year at age 99. But that has only led us to redouble our commitment to our original goals.

That number and the number of you and others signing up to be our DSR Network members has increased dramatically since the election. Clearly, in the world we serve there is a new sense of purpose and urgency and we want to make sure we serve our listeners/members and that we also grow where we can.

We have a clear niche. We provide expert-based analysis and commentary on politics and policy. Our goals is to convene the best experts and conduct explorations of critical issues in greater depth than you would find in other media. We’ve been very privileged to grow an audience that is influential enough that we also can draw world-class experts and we want to build on that—with meaningful discussions rather than hair-on-fire political howling (popular in many pods), non-stop glibness (also popular) or faddish pursuit of the hot-button issue of the day.

As I have written here before, focusing those discussions on real rather than imagined (or simply feared) threats and opportunities and how to achieve best outcomes is where I think we do best. We’ll double down on that…and try to do it while building a community among our listeners, responding to your/their needs and inputs.

The pods we do include our DSR Daily analyzing the most important headlines of each day, the “mothership” of our podcasts “Deep State Radio” that regularly features Ed Luce of the Financial Times, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law School, Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute, David Sanger of the New York Times and many other top commentators, the New Republic’s Daily Blast hosted by Greg Sargent, our show on Congress and critical policy issues hosted by Norm Ornstein and Dr. Kavita Patel, our weekly show on the “big issue” of the week that often covers the Supreme Court, legal issues, and social and political trends, our fastest growing new podcast, already one of the tops in its field, “Siliconsciousness” on AI (the leading podcast anywhere on AI and public policy), our “Above Average Intelligence” podcast with Mark Polymeropoulos on intelligence community related issues, our defense tech podcast “We’re All Going to Die Radio” hosted by nuclear weapons expert Jon Wolfsthal, periodic specials and special series and, for a lighter touch, my sister’s podcast that convenes newsmaker discussions while baking, “The Secret Life of Cookies.” We also have plans for new podcasts including, starting next month, one on the intersection of AI, Energy and Climate (that follows in the footsteps of our acclaimed and very popular “Road to COP 28” podcast last year that was, while it ran, ranked among the top podcasts on climate issues.

We also convene live and virtual events focused on subjects like these and that—plus increasing the audience for our programming on YouTube, Tik Tok and Instagram—is going to increase greatly in the year ahead.

During the past few weeks, I’ve sat down with the hosts of all of our podcasts and some of our regular guests to talk about how to approach the new administration. The universal guidance I have received is “more light, less heat.” Than may not be a formula for giant ratings but it is, what I think, we all need. Where there are positive trends, we want to focus on them. Where there are emerging threats we want not only to understand them but to focus on the kind of bi-partisan, ad hoc coalitions that will be essential to achieving desired outcomes. (Why bi-partisan? Because on most issues there will be important allies emerging among members of Congress, mayors, activists and business leaders from both parties who should be identified and embraced.)

How to I reconcile this approach with my own personal views that are increasingly progressive? Well, first, the purpose of the podcasts is not to serve me, it is to serve our audience. Secondly, hosting diverse truly expert views is critical to understanding any situation. Thirdly, if the goals we are serving are as important as we believe them to be, then outcomes are more important than political purity. I won’t relent in my own personal advocacy for the kind of change I believe is best. But I also do not want to let that distract us from the urgent work at hand.

I hope that makes sense. I also hope that you, as a subscriber to this Substack which has become the primary community convening that I can rely on for guidance, will share your own views about what we can do and how we can do it to better achieve what I believe are our shared goals. (Although you can also find me on Bluesky if you want to reach me on that type of platform. I’m off X completely and…candidly…don’t miss it a bit.)

In the next few days, I’m going to share a few thoughts I’ve been having on bigger questions…essential framing issues that I think may not have gotten the attention they deserve.

For now, I will conclude with a brief nod to just one point that has been important for me to remember as we enter the holiday season. For many of us these past few months…and especially for those of us who live in the Washington, DC area…not only has politics loomed large, it has loomed too large. That’s not to say questions of how we organize our society are not vitally important. They are. But a little perspective is in order.

My wife and I took a long walk with our dog in the woods behind our house yesterday. We walked past streams and ponds and over to neighboring meadows. In the woods, our dog Grizzly, a 100 lb mostly-Great Pyrenees rescue who is now six years old, was hyper-alert. There were white tail deer everywhere and foxes and you could see his ears twitching and his wet black nose sniffing constantly as he tried to monitor them. It was so intense that he triaged the squirrels right out of his mind.

In the meadows were the paddocks of our neighbors who happen to be horses. Grizzly has befriended a number of them and has made it his job to drink from all their troughs just to make sure the water is suitable and fresh enough for his large friends. As we walked by, the horses would follow us with their eyes but go back to doing the very little that they do and every so often, one that was particularly friendly with Grizz or with my wife would walk over and say hello.

The sun was setting. There was a bit of a chill in the air. The fox was tracking us, observing from the crest of a nearby ridge.

Washington was just a few miles away. The hawks overhead probably could see it. The Potomac was rolling along just over the next hill and its the waters passing not too far from our house would roll past the Lincoln Memorial and the Tidal Basin a little later in the evening, perhaps just after the sun had disappeared somwhere over Virginia.

But all the politics and the threats and the lunacy and the heartbreak and the fury and the corruption and the lies and the promises yet to be fulfilled, seemed impossibly distant. Was it all still relevant? Of course. But for a moment, late on a holiday afternoon, we were grateful that it all seemed far, far away and our world was limited to the November breezes and the half indignant, impatient glances we would get from the deer on the hillsides along the path back to our house that seemed to say, “Move along. We have business to attend to here and you are not part of our plans.”