A canon for people who do public affairs for a living
The best performers work the fundamentals. Elite athletes drill footwork and form long after they've made it, because mastery lives in the basics. I believe public affairs has its own version of that practice: core books that explain how power moves, how opinion forms, how institutions behave, and how change actually happens. While the channels and players change constantly, the fundamentals don't.
Masters in Public Affairs exists to work through these fundamentals, one book at a time.
What this is
Every episode takes one book that has either shaped our profession, or my own work. I pull out what still holds: durable frameworks, mental models, and modern applications, and what it teaches about becoming excellent at our craft.
The canon so far runs from Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) to David McRaney's How Minds Change (2022), with Luntz, Cialdini, Centola, and Ries and Trout in between.
With each episode, I aim to go deep on the ideas that transfer to real work, and do so in a way that will be worth your time today as much as in ten years from now.
Who it's for
People who do public affairs for a living — government relations, corporate affairs, communications, campaigns, advocacy — and who take the craft seriously enough to keep studying it. I'll assume you're smart, busy, and experienced, so no basic definitions and no industry platitudes. What you'll get instead is fewer, sharper ideas, and the mental models behind them.
If you believe that deep reading and sustained attention are a competitive advantage in this profession, this podcast is for you.
Who's behind it
I'm Joseph Lavoie, a public affairs strategist and partner at Crestview Strategy. I've spent two decades running campaigns — first as one of Canada's early digital public affairs campaigners, then as director of strategic communications for Canada's foreign affairs minister and for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. I've also been trusted by executive leaders and global brands to move opinion and mobilize citizens on hard problems.
I'm not an academic, and this isn't a literature review. I read these books the way a working practitioner reads them — looking for what holds up under contact with a real campaign — and I started the show because the ideas I reach for most in that work come from these books. It seemed worth building the resource I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago.
Where to listen
New episodes every two weeks, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Subscribing here (it's free) gets you each episode's essay by email, plus full access to the archive — every book, every essay, every framework, in one place you can come back to.
If you spend your days trying to shift opinion, change a decision, or get an institution to act, this is meant to be the shelf you return to for a career.