Andrew ❤️ Past Present Future

In this episode of Pod, Actually,  Catherine talks with Andrew, a professor of politics at the University of Melbourne, about the podcast he’s loving right now: Past Present Future. Drawing on his life in political thought, Andrew explains why he’s drawn to a show that steps back from the daily frenzy of the news and instead asks deeper questions about history, ideas, and how we make sense of the present.

🎙 Andrew's Top 5 Podcasts:

1. Past Present Future

2. Easy French

3. Ones & Tooze

4. The Long Game (Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer)

5. Social Science Bites

🔗 Links

• Read the companion piece on Substack: https://podactually.substack.com
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• Follow Pod, Actually on Instagram: www.instagram.com/podactuallypodcast

📩 Tell us about the podcast you love: podactuallypodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:02

Hello, I'm Catherine and welcome to Pod Actually, a podcast about people's favorite podcasts. On today's program, I'm speaking with Andrew. Andrew is a professor of politics at the University of Melbourne, but he spent most of his career in the UK at Oxford University and the London School of Economics. Let's jump in. Andrew, what is your favorite podcast?

Speaker 2 0:31

Well, hi Catherine. Thanks for inviting me. My favorite podcast at the moment. Today, this week is past, present, and future. It's a podcast about the politics of ideas that is run by a husband and wife team, I believe. But David Runciman, a former professor of politics, so in my field, has been doing this for a few years now and essentially full-time.

Speaker 1 1:12

And where is it based?

Speaker 2 1:15

I am guessing that they live in Cambridge, that he lives in Cambridge in the UK, though it's possible that he lives in London. So I'm not exactly sure, but I'm assuming, partly because of the guests that are on the show, that uh it's out of Cambridge, UK.

Speaker 1 1:32

Okay, so people are gonna hear an English accent and the guests tend to skew English.

Speaker 2 1:37

Yeah, it's quite a lot about America in it though, inevitably, these days. So I think states side listeners would find it interesting and refreshing in many ways.

Speaker 1 1:50

You alluded to a connection between the topic of this program and your professional life. You're a professor of politics. Yeah. Is that why you're interested in this show?

Speaker 2 2:03

So, like probably almost everyone else on the planet, at least those people who listen to podcasts, I listen to a fair number of podcasts, particularly on politics, current affairs. Uh so the usual suspects. The rest is politics, UK and US, and the Ezra Klein show. Um I'm probably branding myself in mentioning those podcasts. But I think the big advantage of past, present, future is that it steps back a bit from the everyday chaos and madness of politics to think a bit more deeply about particularly how political ideas, in many cases, that have been around for millennia, are still important in our everyday life and for everyday society and help us to understand what's going on. So it steps back a bit from the everyday chaos of the Trump administration and so on. So a podcast like the rest is politics US, I find useful and interesting from time to time as a professor of politics, but it's so Trump obsessed and dominated that I just find it exhausting in many ways. Not to say that I don't listen to it, I do, but it's also I just want to get away from that chaos. And this is just much more reflective and interesting, I find, in a in a deeper sense.

Speaker 1 3:26

And is this what the title of the program is alluding to? Do they make a a deliberate choice to give that kind of broader perspective?

Speaker 2 3:34

Yeah, absolutely. So trying to understand the past, trying to understand the present in terms of what's come before and what's been thought about before. So it's a history of ideas podcast, with also an eye to the future about where we're going. So it's quite a lot of thematic, they do a lot of uh themed series, which are really interesting, and you know, they look towards the future. One of the most recent, just to give a a bit of flavour, one of the most recent episodes they had was with the novelist Ian McEwen, who's written a recent book, What We Can Know. So McEwen's latest book explores the relationship between the past, how we understand the present, and the future. So it was a very appropriate episode in a way that sort of brought out the whole theme of the podcast, and maybe for potential other listeners, it's a good entry point because the novel, which I haven't read yet, but I intend to, is about how a future social scientist, someone like me, in a hundred years or so, looks back on our era and tries to understand it in ways that are quite different from the kind of apocalyptic, we're all doomed mentality that I think pervades a lot of current podcasts. So as McEwen says in that interview, we're actually living in many ways in a golden age, but also a deeply worrying, uncertain, problematic, and increasingly chaotic period in history. But it raises the interesting question about what well what is history? What can we know today? And again, you know, so so much of the podcast industry, I think, is about what did Trump say yesterday? How many bombs did Israel and the United States drop on Beirut and Tehran last night, and what does it all mean? And I just think stepping back a bit from time to time, at least, you know, sometimes, is really important.

Speaker 1 5:37

Is this a weekly show?

Speaker 2 5:39

I think it's bi-weekly. Bi-weekly is an ambiguous word, isn't it? One of those ambiguous English words, I think, twice a week. So I think Mondays, yeah, Mondays and Saturdays or Sunday, I think.

Speaker 1 5:50

And do you listen to both episodes?

Speaker 2 5:52

I don't. So one of my uh one of my guilty secrets is that I'm uh I'm not a great subscriber to podcasts. So, you know, increasingly the Ezra uh no, actually not the Ezra Klein show, I guess because that's funded by the New York Times, but this one, Past, Present, Future, but also many others, constantly asking you to become a subscriber, and I'm not. Partly because I just I don't have the time to listen to every single one, including for this one, my most favourite one. So I've kind of got an archive there which I can dip back into, and because, as I say, the past, present, and future has conversations with really interesting people, run by David Runciman, who's a really interesting interviewer and interrogator, it I'm not saying they're timeless, but they age much better than many of the episodes that I don't get around to on say the Ezra Klein show or you know, let alone uh the rest is politics, that uh just sort of out of date within a week. So, no, I don't listen and because I you know I've got so many podcasts I listen to, I usually do it when I'm walking or doing some exercise or something. So I I listen to a number of podcasts a week, but I I listen to many different ones, and to be honest, it was quite difficult to choose one favourite.

Speaker 1 7:16

Do you find yourself thinking about the show after you've finished listening to it, you know, a week later when you're in the car one day at the supermarket?

Speaker 2 7:25

Yeah, absolutely. I mean though I think I have to say one of the problems I find with podcasts in general is that it's a bit like flying on a transatlantic flight, you sort of consume it and it sort of goes goes in and you enjoy it and you're potentially stimulated by it and think about it. And then a week later it can be quite difficult to remember exactly what happened. So often what I do so I don't listen to podcasts that are video casts because I'm always moving when I listen to a podcast. I'm doing something else, usually as I say, walking to work or something like that.

Speaker 1 8:02

So it's irrelevant to you if they have video.

Speaker 2 8:04

Yeah, completely irrelevant. I don't particularly need to look at the people. But if I usually stop, if so if something really strikes me, I stop and I note it and I either do a little voice memo to myself or send myself an email and I say, think about this for the lecture that I have to do in six months' time. So that's my way of reminding myself and sort of making sure that I don't forget something that really strikes me at the time because yeah, the danger is, you know, I just forget about it.

Speaker 1 8:36

But don't you think that's the beauty of it, that you can just pause, make a note, move on? Yeah. It's a different kind of interaction with that knowledge.

Speaker 2 8:45

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 8:47

A different kind of engagement.

Speaker 2 8:48

I mean, obviously my sort of industry, uh, you know, listening to people live is a pretty uh it's a pretty common thing, you know. So I've been in academia for thirty plus years now, and you know, listening to people give lectures, seminars, having to think about something on the spot and respond to it is a very common occurrence, but the great beauty of podcasts, and particularly by an acad someone who's a really well-trained academic who understands the whole history of particularly Western political thought and theory inside out, like David Runston, yeah, you can stop, you can pause, you can think about it, you go, wow, I actually haven't heard that before. Or I haven't heard someone talk about I was listening to one yesterday about the special relationship, so-called, between the UK and the United States, thinking about the history of that relationship over more than two centuries now. I hadn't thought about it like that, and the the ways in which the understanding of the relationship, mainly from the British side in this case, has evolved over time. So absolutely fascinating in many ways, and I think it'd be interesting for American listeners as well to think about how they're seen by one of their so-called special allies.

Speaker 1 10:09

How long are the episodes usually?

Speaker 2 10:11

Uh usually about an hour. So they're not short ones, unlike easy French, which, you know, is usually twenty to thirty minutes.

Speaker 1 10:19

And do you listen at regular speed or do you speed it up?

Speaker 2 10:22

I speed it up. So I listen to pretty much everything at about 1.3. Some people speak a lot faster than others, though, don't they, on podcasts? So it's quite you have to like custom um adjust the speed a bit on some podcasts, because some people speak really slowly, and that drives me crazy. Because I want to I want to consume more or as much as possible. And others speak quite fast, so I have to slow it down a bit.

Speaker 1 10:46

Do you carry that into your real life? Do you get a bit impatient, maybe in a professional setting? Can you sit through a lecture without wishing you could speed it up?

Speaker 2 10:57

I am sure that my students speed up my lectures because the majority of them increasingly listen to lectures or review lectures online. I'm sure they listen to me at double speed. When I have to do training for the university, like how to be a good person kind of training from the training industrial complex. You know, how to fix cybersecurity pro or how to deal with cybersecurity issues and so on, I speed that up to two times at least, because it's so painful often. Uh often it's really I feel as though it's a bit it's treating me like a child. And so I speed that up much more than I do my podcast because I want to think about my podcasts.

Speaker 1 11:38

But would you have sped up those training videos, for example, before you used to listen to podcasts? Or has speeding up the podcast informed how you consume other audio?

Speaker 2 11:49

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I hadn't thought about that. I mean, certainly I'd become aware of the option of being able to speed things up much more. So I always look when I'm dealing with a say a training video, I always look for the option settings. Wow, I can run through this in some cases at 2.5 or 3 because it's so damn obvious what they're trying to get me to think that it really just doesn't bear listening to at anything like normal speed.

Speaker 1 12:18

Okay.

Speaker 2 12:19

I'm probably breaking some rule university rule here. That's fine. That's fine. I'm happy to tell that to the Vice Chancellor.

Speaker 1 12:28

If someone hadn't listened to a podcast before, would you recommend this one?

Speaker 2 12:32

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think for anyone interested in politics, or indeed just in history and the history of ideas, I think it's a great podcast. I think it's one of the best out there in terms of just the sheer quality. Not only David Runcaman, as I said, is a very articulate, thoughtful, incredibly well-read host. He's a writer as well. He's written a lot of books. He writes for the London Review of Books quite often. He's well connected in the UK and he just gets some of the very best academics, from scientists to historians, political scientists, political theorists, and so on. So he just has fantastic access to really good people. So it's consistently really high quality, and there's just a lot of fun, interesting stuff that you just don't come across in many others, I think.

Speaker 1 13:25

How much does your respect for the host uh play into your respect for the program, for example, if you found out that in his private life maybe he wasn't such a great guy? Would it change things for you?

Speaker 2 13:39

It would. I recently cancelled on my podcast feed Peter Attia. You know, the the sort of wellness guru that has turned up in the um Epstein files, and his reputation is now being shredded, or was, you know, only two or three weeks ago. Of course, we're, you know, almost in a different era now, but um yeah, I mean I l I started listening to him because I was having some sleep issues, and um someone said, Oh, you know, he has some good episodes on this. And he turned up in the Epstein files and good pals with and monetizing actually his relationship with Epstein. So I thought, well, I actually I didn't listen to him very much after having listened to a couple, so I cancelled him. So yeah, it would I mean, as I say, it was a hu it's a husband and wife team, past, present, and future. So my impression is that um and look flipping through the website and looking at the kinds of people who are in the team. Uh it's a small team, but they draw on other, you know, Cambridge students and so on to help them out and this sort of thing. It looks like a fairly happy um little group and organization. So I'd be pretty surprised. It has um I don't want to say a moralistic tone, but it has a fairly ethical tone as well, the podcast.

Speaker 1 15:04

So But they're always the worse.

Speaker 2 15:07

If those people are the hypocrites, who actually, you know, one of the fascinating things, uh the the main book I've read by David Runciman is on hypocrisy and politics. And um actually has quite an interesting take on hypocrisy, which is that in politics it's sort of endemic and necessary, and that we're far too obsessed. We had become far too obsessed about rooting out hypocrisy. Look at all those liberals who talked about the rules-based global order and now they're moaning about what Trump's doing, but they intervened too. They were hypocrites. Yeah, okay, of course they were, but at least they tried to maintain some semblance of a slightly more ethical approach to foreign policy.

Speaker 1 15:56

Final question. Do you think that liking this podcast says something about you? And if so, what is that?

Speaker 2 16:03

Oh, no doubt it says something about me, you know. I'm uh I'm professor of politics, so um I've always been interested in politics. Politics becomes more horrifying and fascinating by the day, so I'm naturally drawn to it, I guess, in the same way that I'm drawn to say the Ezra Klein show or the rest is politics and so on. But beyond that immediacy of the importance and just the difficulty of understanding what's going on and situating it in its historical or contemporary context, this one really helps me to think about I guess everything I've really read since I was a teenager in this area and everything I've been doing in my career. It it sort of brings it all together for me in a really fascinating way.

Speaker 1 16:51

Do you feel that there's a darth of opportunities to contextualise one's work?

Speaker 2 16:59

Yeah. I think well no I think there's plenty of opportunity. I think David Runcaman's quite brave in a way. He quit being a professor of politics at Cambridge. But actually he is reaching so many other people in ways that it's just impossible for an academic these days. There's no dearth of opportunity, I think, for academics to do that. But you have to be pretty brave to quit your day job. Now, he was running and began his podcasts and it had a previous incarnation, talking politics or something like that, which I didn't really listen to very much. So he was trying it out while he was still a professor of politics. But having quit that, he's now in a perfect position to be able to bring that knowledge, those networks, those people and friends and colleagues to a far broader audience than I think anyone else has, at least anyone else has that I've discovered.

Speaker 1 18:00

Andrew, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Speaker 2 18:03

No, you're very welcome, Catherine. It's great talking to you. Good to see you.