An Update and Announcement

Greetings, readers!

I want to acknowledge that I haven’t posted anything in a while and to provide an update on some things I’ve been up to.

First of all, my lack of posting is not because I have stopped following or caring about what is going on in the world or in American politics. I do, and there have been many instances where I’ve felt like writing something. I’ve held off for a couple reasons.

Many of my posts last year were of the “hot take” variety and while I stand by them (and I think they’ve held up pretty well, though I overestimated the recession risks), I don’t think they contributed anything particularly new to the conversation that you couldn’t hear elsewhere. And the constant focus on the misdeeds of the Trump administration, while fair given they are currently in power and I believe them to be uniquely dangerous, was also in tension with my original goals for this blog. As I wrote in my first post, I believe echo chambers and fragmented media ecosystems are a significant contributor to the partisanship and extremism that plagues our civic life, and my goal with this Substack was to try to cut through that by trying to bring awareness to what I consider to be the good arguments on both sides of an issue.

The bottom line is that while this Substack has been a good outlet for personal catharsis and external processing, I think my best posts have been those that were more personal and circumspect rather than simply reactions to the latest news. It’s also becoming clear that as the failures of this administration mount in ways that can’t simply be ignored or spun by partisan media, more Americans are starting to recognize the damage. And those that aren’t are probably not reading an obviously anti-Trump newsletter.

The other reason is time, and for this I must blame AI. AI is a technology that simultaneously makes some tasks drastically easier while at the same time making you even busier. It lowers the barrier for certain tasks to a level that makes them doable which means you end up with more tasks. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s something I’m still learning to navigate.

The main example of this in my personal life is that I’ve been using Claude Code in the evenings to build something that wouldn’t have been possible without AI. Both because I never would have had the time to build it otherwise, and because the system itself is fundamentally AI-powered.

The inspiration connects back to my earlier point. Earlier this year, I thought it’d be interesting to have Claude read all of my Substack posts and give me an analysis of how it’s evolved, how it’s reading, and maybe help me revise my drafts in a way that’s consistent with my goals and voice. It has not proven very effective at that last part (AI is a pretty poor writer if your goals go beyond communicating information), but the analysis of my past writing was quite insightful and it did an excellent job of conveying the essence and trajectory of my writing.

This got me thinking about other datasets that could be interesting to process in this way - particularly data that isn’t easy to compile and dump into a tool like Claude or Google’s NotebookLM. I thought my church’s sermons might be interesting, which got me looking into audio transcription models, and it turns out that local transcription of lengthy audio files is now very doable with a decently powerful computer.

So my project has been building a platform for ingesting large amounts of podcast audio, transcribing it, and using LLMs (AI) to analyze it. This has resulted in a couple of product ideas that I’m currently developing. The first is Sermon Analyst, which I’m still refining with some early access churches (if you know a pastor that might be interested, please share!). The other is something I recently started on Substack called Across the Dial:

Across the Dial is a project aligned with the same original conviction that prompted Dear Partisan - the idea that it is important to hear and try to understand arguments and ideas beyond our own. And it’s particularly important if those ideas are influencing our society, in good ways and bad. This project is aimed at bringing that awareness to your inbox or Substack app through weekly roundups and other deep-dives covering about 100 influential podcasts from across the ideological spectrum. Unlike Dear Partisan, Across the Dial is intended to be closer to a journalistic enterprise - focused on observations and analysis, not judgment or advocacy. If it sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll check it out and share it! You can read more about the thinking behind it here. I just published this week’s issue, which features a roundup of the major recent arguments about the Iran war:

As for this Substack, it’s not going anywhere, but I do expect my pace of writing to remain less frequent than before. I still intend to post here from time to time, but I’ll be more selective, both to try to focus more on things where I think I have something unique to say, and to put less pressure on myself to have a “take” all the time.

To those who have read and supported my writing, I really appreciate you!