← The AI Policy Podcast
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Foreign. This episode is going to be a little different. This episode is in memoriam of my podcast co host, Andrew Schwartz, who earlier this month tragically passed away while still in the prime of his life. Andrew, I. I think most of you who are listening to this mostly know him as a podcast host. He hosted this podcast with me. He hosted csis, Truth of the Matter, the Trade Guys, the Impossible State, a bunch of podcasts here at csis. But that was just one tiny part of what he did here at CSIS and what he did over the course of his career. He was the chief communications officer at CSIS and he worked here for 20 years. What you might not know about Andrew is that he is actually responsible, maybe more than anyone else, for the modern think tank media playbook. And what I mean by that is, if you go back to the late 1990s, early 2000s, I've heard from my colleagues who were working at CSIS or think tanks in that time frame. Think tanks back then were mostly a paper and ink kind of a business. People would print out the reports, bind them into little books, and then they would physically mail them to people in the government or people in the news and hoped that people would read whatever it was that they sent. And Andrew, who came from the world of broadcast journalism, when he came to csis, he saw the potential, first of the Internet, later of online video, then of social media. He saw all of this before almost anyone else in the think tank industry. He was the one who led the charge in putting all of CSIS's research out freely available online and actually making it look nice and be a website that somebody actually want to go to more than just one time. When other think tanks started following Andrew's lead, putting their own stuff online, he was the one who thought about pushing really hard into broadcasting all of our public events via online video, disseminating everything we do via social media. He was a legitimate trailblazer in the world of think tank communications. And this is a trail that he was blazing for 20 years. Well, 20 years ago, I was in high school, I was a debate nerd. And the kind of debate that I did was policy debate, policy debate. For those of you who don't know what that is, it involves a lot of research. You know, there's a policy topic, the topic is the same for the entire year, and debate kids like me were doing research on that topic for the entire year. Well, two out of the four years that I was in high school, it was a foreign policy topic. And what that meant is that I had to do a lot of research on foreign policy, which meant that I was searching the Internet for good policy analysis. And again and again, csis, the institution, csis, the think tank when I was in high school, kept coming up. And that was because Andrew Schwartz had been leading the transition of think tanks into the Internet era. And the reason why I say all this is because Andrew Schwartz literally shaped the course of my life. He, you know what he did, it was part of the reason why I thought, even at a very young age, that working at a think tank might be the kind of thing I wanted to do when I grew up. He shaped the course of my life, and he did that long before he and I even met. Andrew had an enormously successful career, but he was also an incredibly kind and generous person. What I'm about to say, I mean this completely seriously, I'm not exaggerating, I'm not trying to be nice. I mean this. I say this because it is absolutely word for word true. No one at CSIS has been more consistently supportive of me, my team, our work in the three years that I've been here, really, since I walked in the door. He was just so excited about everything that I've been trying to do and, and he was constantly encouraging me and proactively thinking of ways that he could help and that our teams could collaborate. And the team that he built in the CSIS communications program is genuinely world class. I mean, we have a newsroom quality broadcast studio. We produce graphics and visualizations and interactive digital media and online video, and we do it at a quality level. Especially like 10 years ago was completely unheard of for think tanks. And that is because Andrew was not only incredibly talented and driven, but also incredibly curious for his whole life. I mean, if you go to the CSIS website, you'll notice that a lot of our reports, you can actually just click a button and listen to it as AI generated audio. And that literally just came out of a conversation that he and I had about, you know, ways in which AI could help us do our work better, get our message out, get our research out better. And I just kind of mentioned in passing, oh, maybe AI generated audio so that people can listen to our reports is the thing that we might want to explore. And I, and he immediately, you know, went off and learned how this is done, what companies are good to partner with. And I swear, two weeks later, it was already up and running on the CSIS website because when he got excited about a new vector of communication for us and our work, he and the team that he led just plowed ahead so relentlessly. Like I said, he was always curious. He loved to experiment. He was always trying to learn more, not just about the topical substance of what we do here at csis, but of everything about media and communications. And everybody knew Andrew. He had an incredible network. Not just like all the biggest journalists in town who know who Andrew Schwartz is, but because for decades he has been an extremely prominent figure in connecting scholarship to media and journalism, and because he takes so much time to form and invest in those relationships. And a lot of people who are, like, now established big names in traditional media or newer types of media, those are people that worked for Andrew earlier in their careers. He was an incredible mentor over those 20 years, not just to me, but to hundreds, probably thousands of people who passed through CSIS's doors. I'm one of countless beneficiaries of his generosity and mentorship. But, like, just to give you examples of people you might have heard of on YouTube, if you've ever encountered the work of Johnny Harris, who, like, routinely gets millions of views as a very prominent YouTube documentary filmmaker and runs a whole production company, other folks work there, like Sam Ellis. Well, both of those guys previously worked at csis. That was their first online video job. They were trained and encouraged and mentored by Andrew Schwartz. And I could give you 20 other people who have gone on to be monstrously successful in so many different types of career paths who either got their start or got some help or got some mentorship from Andrew Schwartz, because, as I said before, he was an institution in and of himself here at csis. This podcast, the AI Policy Podcast, it was his idea. He was the one who encouraged me to do this. He was the one who got the production team at CSIS that puts together all of our podcasts, engaged and interested and supportive of what we're trying to do here. And when I had ridiculous demands about emergency episodes or whatsoever, all that takes a lot of work to be timely, to be interesting, to be thorough. And that's only possible because of Andrew support and the team that he built that makes all of this possible. So I'm going to miss Andrew terribly. And I'm going to miss him not just because he was a great colleague, but because he was a great friend. So thank you for taking the time to listen to this, to hear about Andrew, my friend, who is no longer going to be co hosting this podcast. But I'm sure wherever he is, he is having some incredible conversations. So this podcast is going to continue. In fact, we're going to be having something come out later this week, which is a CSIS event that we're going to be doing as a live recording of the podcast. We've got the White House Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratzios, coming to CSIS to talk about the AI Action plan. I'm going to have a fireside chat with him. We'll release that as a podcast. So this podcast will continue. We haven't really figured out who's going to co host it with me, but I know Andrew would have wanted it to continue, and it's going to continue. So thank you for listening to this. Thank you to Andrew for all of his endless support of me and all the other people who his beautiful life touched. Thanks for listening.