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. Public affairs has its own version of that practice: a small shelf of 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.
This show exists to work through that shelf, one book at a time.
What this is
Every episode takes one book that shaped the field and pulls out what still holds: the two or three durable frameworks worth carrying into our work, the places where the book gets misread or misused, and what it teaches about becoming excellent at this 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. The century-wide spread is the point — good ideas don't expire on a schedule, and a 1922 diagnosis of how the public forms its picture of the world explains more about our current moment than most of what was published last quarter.
Two commitments shape every episode. First, depth over coverage: I go deep on the ideas that transfer to real work rather than marching through chapters. Second, durability: an episode should still be worth your time in ten years.
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.
Underneath the show sits a bet: that deep reading and sustained attention are a competitive advantage in this profession, and a growing one as they become rarer.
Who's behind it
I'm Joseph Lavoie, a public affairs strategist and partner at Crestview Strategy, based in Vancouver. 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, and since then for clients trying 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 this shelf. 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.