Podcast Edition
Why I am starting a podcast.
I apologize if this newsletter comes across as too self-promoting for anyone who reads it. I will return to my normal newsletter next week, but I wanted to take the time to explain why I am starting a podcast. Well, I guess the proper verbiage is why I started a podcast since I have already published 3 episodes. If you didn’t know that I started one, it’s because I have not really been promoting it outside of sharing it with a few people to illicit feedback. I wanted to work through some of the kinks before I promoted it to the world.
While I know that everything won’t necessarily be smooth sailing from here, I am excited to finally be starting a podcast since I have wanted to do one for a couple of years now. In essence, the podcast will be a weekly, 30-minute podcast that discusses the most important national and international news of the week. It will (Lord willing) post at 8 am every Saturday morning and serve as a kind of recap of the week. To be frank, this is not an original idea and my voice is not a particular special voice that is desperately needed in the world. That is why I wanted to write this newsletter and explain why I am doing it.
Audience
Typically, people are split into two camps: those who love politics and those who hate politics. Those who hate politics genuinely don’t find politics interesting and would rather be “uninformed” by merely letting other people deal with it. I think this is completely understandable, and the goal of politics should be to ensure that person never has to think about politics. At the same time, those who love politics are typically those who read/watch/listen to the news every day, read the op-eds that everyone is talking about, and love discussing their thoughts with anyone who will engage. In other words, politics is their form of entertainment.
Unfortunately, I think this dichotomy leaves out a large segment of the population (I would bet most people). These are the people that want to be informed about what is going on in the world but don’t treat politics as a form of entertainment. They want to know what is going on without getting caught up in the various arguments or dramas that consume so much of the political world. They are the people that I very often hear say something like, “I feel like I should keep with politics, but they exhaust me.”
By “exhausted” they usually don’t mean that they don’t have the time or desire to keep with politics, but that the effort of sorting through the nonsense to figure out what is important isn’t worth it. It’s like asking a coworker what you missed at a meeting only for them to tell you all of the latest work gossip without mentioning that the company is firing half its employees. There is important information for you to know, and you know that you need to know it, but the messenger has made such a mess of communicating that you give up and disconnect.
It is exactly this group of people that I am seeking to make my podcast for. The goal for my podcast is to be a one-stop shop for those who want to be informed about the world without feeling exhausted and overwhelmed with nonsense. I will sort through the nonsense and attempt to communicate what is important enough to pay attention to. While this is a large endeavor that I will not always perfectly succeed at, I think my training as a teacher particularly helps equip me to do it. What is teaching if not sorting through vast swaths of information, figuring out what is important, and communicating it as clearly and succinctly as possible?
30 Minutes, Once a Week
To achieve this goal, I am purposely limiting myself to only recording one podcast a week for only 30 minutes. This means that I will have 30 minutes to sum up all that happened in the 10,080 minutes of that week. In other words, I won’t have any time to talk about trivial nonsense that doesn’t matter or get on my soapbox for an extended rant. I will have to be concise and only discuss the important stuff. This will hopefully make the podcast more accessible for people who are looking to be informed and not entertained. I purposely don’t want to take up a lot of time because the less time I take up, the more likely people are to listen to it.
This is also why I am only doing the podcast once a week. Daily podcasts have their place but nothing drastic typically changes in one day. That means time is filled up with the usual nonsense that doesn't really matter because you’ve got to talk about something. The reality is that if something was really important at the beginning of the week then it will still be important at the end of the week when I record the podcast. If there was news that felt important at the beginning of the week, but by the end of the week it’s “old news”, then it really wasn’t important in the first place.
I think only recording once a week will force me to avoid some specific pitfalls that beguile news coverage today. For example, filling up “empty time” usually turns into making something that really isn’t that important a much bigger deal than it actually is. There has been so much time wasted “covering” tweets from various politicians that are completely forgotten the next day. Also, “empty time” makes the temptation towards media criticism much greater. When in doubt, you can always complain about a headline, media figure’s comments, or the way that another news outlet is covering the news in general.
International News
I also want to intentionally spend time discussing international news because it is often neglected by people. Americans are very often only concerned about what is happening in this country that they forget that they live in a broader world that still impacts America. For example, a virus in a region of China that the vast majority of Americans didn’t know existed until two years ago has gone from just some random international news to impacting every fabric of American life. I’m not saying that every bit of international news will have that same impact on America, but it’s better to have some idea of the rest of the world so that we aren’t caught completely off guard.
Also, I think paying attention to the rest of the world can make us appreciate the country that we do live in so much more. Did you know that there have been 5 military coups in the last year in Africa alone? This number doesn’t include military coups in other countries like Myanmar that also occurred within the last calendar year. We have a lot of problems in America, but facing a military-led coup is fortunately not one of them. Yet, without this perspective, it can be tempting to despair about the condition of America and feel like things can’t get much worse. Paying attention to international news can help us see that America, for all its flaws, is a remarkable country.
Finally, people across the political spectrum agree that a major purpose of a government is to protect its people from enemies that want to take away their life, liberty, and property. In a system of government that calls for the people to hold elected officials accountable, it is a necessity that we have some ideas about who our enemies are that our government ought to be protecting us from. That doesn’t mean every international hostility that pops will be the start of WWIII, but it is still important to be aware.
My Ultimate Goal
Ultimately, my goal is to keep up with the news so that you don’t have to. Too many people equate “being informed” with knowing every tweet, rumor, and headline being talked about. That is being entertained, not informed. This will probably be a newsletter all in itself at another time, but the goal of politics should not be to entertain but to create the conditions that allow for human flourishing and then get out of the way. Our system of government necessitates an informed public in order to function, not an entertained public. The less time that we can spend keeping up with the news, the more time we have to focus on the things that create human flourishing and have nothing to do with government.
With all of that said, determining what news is important and not important mandates some sort of value judgment. I make no qualms about acknowledging that I am a Christian and conservative, which will certainly impact how I view and interpret the news. It will shape what I believe to be important and not important. I’m sure there will be plenty of people who think I am placing too much importance on one thing and not enough importance on another. That is the reality of living in a diverse country.
If this kind of podcast sounds at all interesting to you, then I hope you will give it a chance. You can listen and subscribe to The Burnett Breakdown Podcast on Spotify here or Apple Podcast here. I’m not sure if it is on other podcast providers, but if it isn’t then let me know and I can figure out how to add it.
As a final note, I am excited to start promoting this podcast and know that I will enjoy it. However, I am also doing it for free, so if you appreciate the podcast or this newsletter, then feel free to show that appreciation by becoming a paid subscriber (donating). It’s obviously not expected, but it’s greatly appreciated.
God Bless,
Hunter Burnett