Kevin and I started our Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast nearly ten years ago. We didn’t really mean to start a podcast; it just happened. We were both based in NR’s office in New York City, and I had a habit of wandering into Kevin’s office (I didn’t have an office) and talking to him — at him, sometimes — about anything that was on my mind: politics, music, movies, America. One day, Kevin said, “you know, we should record these conversations and put it on the Internet.” So we did. We called it Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
And then: a stroke of luck. It just so happened that during our second or third week of doing this, I was booked to appear on Bill Maher’s show on HBO. Bill Maher’s show, it turned out, had a lot of viewers, and when the chyron they put up announced that I was the co-host of something called the “Mad Dogs and Englishmen Podcast,” a lot of those viewers dutifully signed up as listeners. From there, we never looked back. Overnight, we went from about 300 followers to about 15,000 followers. And up, and up, and up.
And now, after 368 episodes: down. Mad Dogs died once before, when Kevin went to the Atlantic, only to be resuscitated a few weeks later, when he returned to NR. This time, Lazarus will stay home. A few listeners have emailed me to ask whether I’ll continue the show on my own, but, of course, I can’t do that. Mad Dogs was a two-man show, and those two men were me and Kevin. This week, Kevin left for the Dispatch, where I wish him the greatest of luck. That heralds the end of this show.
And — for me at least — the beginning of a new show, to be announced and inaugurated within a couple of weeks. I’ll have more details in due course, but, for now, I’ll just encourage anyone who is currently subscribed to the Mad Dogs and Englishmen feeds on Apple, Google, Spotify, etc., to stay there. If possible, we’ll put all the existing Mad Dogs episodes into the archive on NR (available to NR Plus members) and redirect the existing feeds to the new show.
For now, I’ll just say thank you to everyone who listened to us for all those years. Onwards and upwards! And remember: we’ll always have the bar.