💕 Kate Takes Over 👩❤️👩 The Netflix Effect’s Rani Molla 📺
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Hi, hi, everyone! The magical person who carefully curates this brilliant newsletter each week paid me the best compliment ever when she asked me to take over the introduction for this edition to tell you a bit about the company we cofounded together, Lasso Audio. Lauren and I met while we were both working in book publishing and didn't become friends until we started our company together. I think a lot of people assume that female founders are often friends first, but our friendship (more similar to family, really, than friends), grew from our business. There is a mutual respect present that makes our partnership rare. And having her include me in this letter to you means everything to me!
Ok, so now for why she invited me here... Lasso Audio, the company we founded together, came from an "aha!" moment when we realized that podcasters need agents. This fact is truer now than it was then (a whole 8 months ago, which is like 5 years in the podcast industry), with #FreeAnotherRound trending on Twitter. (This is a super important issue, and as a fan of podcasts, you should know all about it. So read Brittany’s tweet, search #FreeAnotherRound, listen to Nick Quah talk about it here, or read Hot Pod’s overview of the situation here.) Here’s the gist: often podcasters, the people who put the blood sweat and tears into what you’re intimately bingeing, are only "creators" instead of "owners." This seemed unjust, and frankly bizarre, to Lauren and me, who were used to seeing authors (“creators”) own the rights to their work. This is similar what happened in 2007, with the advent of the Kindle, when Amazon exploited self-published authors who were preforming well in their algorithm with unfair contracts. This #FreeAnotherRound thing is why Lauren and I started Lasso! We love independent podcasters and want them to be paid and own IP (when appropriate!) We’ve helped our clients sign contracts, work on books, launch shows and grow their audiences. We constantly swing from wildly-optimistic about the podcasting industry, to regular-optimistic, and back again. (Always optimistic and excited!) And we are learning a LOT. We see this wonderful space changing every day and we’re proud to be a (small) part of it.
Now, I'll let you get to why you're actually here: for Lauren's thoughtful interview with Rani Molla and her enthusiastically curated podcast recs just for you. Thanks for letting me interrupt your regularly scheduled newsletter. Enjoy your day!
xoxo Kate / @bookishkatenyc
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect’s Rani Molla
Rani Molla is senior data reporter at Recode and Vox and the co-host of Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect, a longform narrative podcast about the history, present and future of Netflix. Follow her on Twitter here. [Photo courtesy of Alyssa Ringler]
How has making a series about Netflix changed how you feel about Netflix?
It can be easy to take Netflix for granted because it's a technology we've gotten used to, it's simple and it just works. Making this podcast has made me stop to appreciate how revolutionary it was to have video entertainment delivered to us so easily — first to our mailboxes and then, better, directly to our screens. Underlying that seemingly simple service is lots of technological consideration that's all the more impressive because it doesn't ask that we notice it.
Can you tease something super awesome about the series that will get us really excited about it?
In March, right before coronavirus made it so that we weren't allowed to leave our apartments, we flew to Netflix's studios in LA, where we got to talk to a lot of people inside the company, including CEO Reed Hastings and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos. Getting that access was amazing and should be a treat for listeners.
There are few women podcasters, even fewer women of color. What can we do about that?
It's pretty simple: If you're in a management position at a media company, hire more women podcasters of color (also for every position). If you're an employee, you can demand that your boss do so. We're beyond the point of having to explain why it's important to have representation in media. We're at the place where action is necessary.
Did you get any podcasting advice from other Vox podcasters? What did they say?
I learned a ton from my co-host Peter, who's a veteran podcaster. The advice I got from him largely amounted to "be natural/be yourself/pretend we're having a regular conversation." Of course, all that is harder to do when you know you're being recorded and have an audience, but when I could forget I probably did some of my best work.
Women in podcasting are constantly being criticized for their voices. What is your relationship to yours? How would you describe your voice?
I have a great radio voice that is beyond criticism. It calms babies, slays dragons and clearly conveys interview questions.
What podcasts do you listen to? Do you listen to them as part of your research?
My podcast diet is similar to my Netflix diet: I look for stuff that's soothing and educational. My favorite podcasts lately have been Articles of Interest, Anthropocene Reviewed and The Memory Palace. Researching for this podcast, of course, I listened to anything and everything about Netflix.
🚨If you only have time for ONE thing🚨
I asked my husband if he remembered the 1999 album Now That's What I Call Music! 2 and he totally scoffed at me, because of course he was never such a loser to listen to NOW. But I was! And I specifically remember, and being confused by, the last track on this album, “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” by Baz Luhrmann. It’s not really a song, so much as a 7 minute-long motivational speech put to music. I think I’m in good company because Avery Trufelman (Articles of Interest) remembers this too, and was on Switched On Pop getting to the bottom of the story. Who wrote this song and why was it on this album? If not for this episode, how would I have known that the words were written by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich though were often incorrectly attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, and that it’s a song that first made waves overseas before becoming Billboard’s greatest outlier here? Avery talks about applying the song’s advice (“wear sunscreen… be nice to your siblings… do one thing every day that scares you”) to her everyday life. This story was such a treat for me, because I love Avery, and it’s a mystery that just keeps unfolding.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Brought To You By… presents an important story taken from a book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain. It’s about McDonald’s franchises in Cleveland, Ohio, which in 1969, were locked in a stalemate with Black activists over who should own and operate the local franchises, and in essence who, Black people or white people, should hold economic power in Black communities. I miss hearing Marcia on The Waves and was clapping in my seat when I heard her comforting voice, plus her book sounds fantastic.
🎙️That episode reminded me I had been meaning to go back to listen to a very early episode of Brought To You By… Donald and Ivana’s Affair (with Pizza Hut.) It’s a peek behind the making of Donald and Ivana’s stuffed-crust pizza ad, with the writers behind the campaign. Unsurprisingly, Donald treated the commercial like a deal that his life depended on, and micromanaged the whole thing. The story gives us a really good idea of what Trump values and how he operates, and although we already know this, this episode confirms it with entertaining details.
🎙️Many people assume that population growth always leads to environmental denigration, but on a recent Flash Forward episode, One Child To Rule Them All, Rose talks about the ineffectiveness of population control and its racist roots, and how we’ve twisted the idea of reproductive justice, a very specific movement that has been effectively coopted by NGOs and government organizations that want a nicer way of saying “population control.” Rose also examines China’s one-child policy to see if there’s anything we can learn from it.
🎙️On One Child To Rule Them All, Rose called out a podcast called Finding Cleo, that I listened to over the weekend. It speaks to a fucked up Canadian program called “Adopt Indian and Metis” which allowed welfare workers in Saskatchewan in the 1970s to take kids from their Indigenous families and place them in white homes. Cleo was one of these children. She went missing years ago and her siblings say she was stolen, and then raped and murdered while trying to hitchhike back home. Host Connie Walker takes you through the process of methodically trying to narrow the search for Cleo, but this story has a lot of heart. The interviews with Cleo’s sister are gut-wrenching. What Connie discovers is horrifying.
🎙️Code Switch ran a piece courtesy of The Nod, They Don't Say Our Names Enough, about the life of Storme DeLarverie, a singer, cross-dresser and bouncer who may or may not have thrown the first punch at Stonewall. Her New York Times obituary called her “one of the first and most assertive members of the modern gay rights movement.” This Pride month, when a disproportionate amount of Black violence is being brought against Black trans people, these conversations are vital in our new and impassioned efforts to rebuild an anti-racist world. I’d follow up this interview with FANTI’s Black Trans Lives Matter, about the problems with calling a protest an “All Black Lives Matter” protest, and In The Thick’s Black Trans Resistance.
🎙️Queerology’s On Performative Allyship and Black Joy, a conversation with Kashif Andrew Graham and Rev. Broderick Greer, opens with the story of Shawn Dromgoole, who expressed fear that he was afraid to walk in his gentrified neighborhood, so his white neighbors joined him in one symbolic walk. Is this allyship, wonders Kashif and Broderick? Will Shawn’s white neighbors walk with him every damn day, literally and figuratively? Maybe what we need instead of performative allyship is quiet accompliceship. Maybe sometime the most powerful forms of allyship come without bells and whistles, or any noise at all. Kashif and Broderick also talk about Black joy, which is just as important to hear about as Black pain, especially when white people think about how we plan to step up to the lines to fight racism alongside with the people whose lives are being taken from it.
🎙️Convince Me To Like This Band is a smart idea for a show. Eric Speck brings on two people with conflicting feelings about a polarizing band or musician to debate whether or not it’s any “good.” Of course this is subjective, and Eric is not an unbiased host. But if you have strong feelings about music, you will be totally engaged in the conversations, rooting for the side you want to “win.” Justin and I listened to two episodes—Morrissey and Insane Clown Posse. I totally disagreed with Eric on both subjects (I think Morrissey is pretty brilliant, though flawed, and Insane Clown Posse, as fascinating as it is, plays bad music) but the point is that Justin and I discussed these episodes for probably two hours. The guest on the ICP episode was Derrick Braxton, a Grammy winning hip-hop producer and engineer, who solidy argues that ICP is pretty problematic and terrible (the other guest, super juggalo “Hanka” retorts with points like “yeah but I once stole a car to see ICP.” On the Morrissey episode, Jose Maldonado (The Mexican Morrissey) argues that Morrissey’s music is funny and smart, and speaks directly to angsty teens with dramatic lyrics.
🎙️Republicans Defeating Trump is a fascinating show hosted by political experts Ron Steslow, Jennifer Horn, Reed Galen, George Conway, Steve Schmidt, Mike Madrid, Rick Wilson, and John Weave, republicans who are going against their party in an effort to convince America to defeat Donald Trump and Trumpism in the upcoming election. I am guilty of listening to people in my liberal bubble, so it’s interesting to hear opinions from Republicans. Listening to them talk about how destructive Trump is to our constitution and country makes me sweat—I’m not used to agreeing with them! But listening has added depth to my own thinking about the presidency. I’d start with this interview with George Conway.
🎙️Unfortunately most Americans learned about the Tulsa Massacre on Watchmen, Juneteenth on an episode of Atlanta or Insecure, and most of us don’t know there is a Black National Anthem. What the fuck were our histories teachers doing? Black History Year is cleaning up their messes by reeducating us on important moments that were overlooked in American History—the history of Black people in America. A Young Black Millionaire Forced Into Hiding goes even deeper into the story of the Tulsa Massacre that we are just now learning about, Fear of a Black Woman’s Body is a rage-worthy look at medical treatment disparities for Black women. Every episode is sharp as a tack—these don’t just feel like history lessons. They are better than any lesson I got from any history teacher, ever. It’s about time. I hope “Black History Year” doesn’t mean this podcast will run for only one year, because we have a lot of catching up to do. To make sure this show continues until we properly learn every single story, consider donating to Black History Year. It’s a non-profit and needs our help so they can continue the great work they’re doing.
🎙️I love Radio Rental because often the stories are just the perfect amount of bizarre—scary enough to make me widen my eyes and get a chill but not so scary that I cannot imagine these things happening to me. Listening, you feel like you’re circled around a camp fire in the middle of nowhere listening to your friends tell you exactly what it was like to almost be murdered or about the completely unexplainable things that have happened to them. The stories are often told with great detail (I can actually still picture the image of red fingernails gripping a grocery cart in this episode) and the production pushes the listening experience to beyond-scary. Episode two of the new season has two stories of CLOSE, SCARY, WEIRD calls. That’s all I will tell you. Listen.
🎙️I am a fiction truther and strongly believe that reading it (and listening to it) helps us better understand ourselves, others, and the world, blah blah blah. For awhile, The Chronicles of Now has existed to commission major authors to write short fiction stories inspired by non-fiction news of the day. The website is fantastic, it offers lots of context and facts that back up the beautiful stories, as well of great ideas for additional reading. And now there’s a podcast, developed with Puskin Industries! Hosted by Ashley C. Ford! Pinch me! There’s a preview episode up now, The Ponz: Michael Cohen's Memoir from Prison, where Jess Walter imagines Cohen’s life behind bars. It’s beautiful and funny…I LISTENED AT ONLY 1x SPEED. THAT’S HOW MUCH I WAS ENJOYING IT. (And it made me think of 14 Days with Felicity.)
🎙️You know I love Pessimists Archive, and the episode The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds is NOT, as I originally thought, an episode about how we used to be incorrectly concerned about putting other people’s earbuds in our ears, but is instead a departure from the normal format. But it’s a really fun listen. Nine years ago, host Jason Feifer took a photo on a New York City subway of an unlikely pair united by a set of headphones, listening to the same music. The photo went viral. The episode tracks the two down—who are they and how did they cross paths?—but also speaks to the incorrect assumptions we make about people. Why DID this photo go viral? Why was it so newsworthy that a white business dude and a Black man with an afro would be listening to the same music? This photo clearly was pandering to our hearts and is a critique on what we may find shareable on social media.
🎙️My dad texted me this quote that he heard T Bone Burnett say on Broken Record: “What artists do, is we are going down a road and we mark things. On this day, at this time I saw something beautiful. I mark this spot that is beautiful so that maybe you don’t miss it when you go by.” Isn’t that beautiful? How lucky am I that I have a dad who sends me great quotes he hears on wonderful podcasts?
🎙️Hillary of Other People’s Problems talks to Louise, who was hospitalized for anorexia and contracted COVID in the hospital. Louise puts to words things that people who don’t know a lot about eating disorders may find so confusing—she talks about her craving to feel pain, the guilt she feels when she is healthy, and her struggle to maintain her weight while hooked up to feeding tubes in the COVID ward. (She isn’t allowed to be in the ward for people with eating disorders.)
🎙️On History: Unzipped, Tony Perrottet unearths sexual stories from throughout the ages. TBH I wasn’t going to listen to this show, but this episode Who Stole Jesus’ Foreskin? lured me in, and now I’m digging the entire show. I cannot stress this enough: This was SUCH a good story, thanks to David Farley, author of An Irreverent Curiosity and star of a National Geographic TV special, The Quest for the Holy Foreskin. (What an odd thing to be an expert about!) It’s a lesson on Jesus, weird relics, the occult in Turin, and the history of Rome, and it attempts to track down the sacred prepuce, which was supposedly stolen by a local priest in 1983. But was it? Who has it? Satanists, neo-Nazis, the Vatican?
🎙️I love Love Me (if you haven’t listened, you are in for a treat) and they ran an episode of Jonathan Goldstein’s WireTap, which was a podcast before there were really podcasts. In each episode, we get to eavesdrop on Jonathan’s telephone conversations with family and friends. These are random and wonderful moments spiced with Jonathan’s loveable sense of humor and the heartfelt rapport he is known for. (The conversation with his parents on this episode made me lol.)
🎙️An episode of Rough Translation goes to the Netherlands to present the heated debate over Black Pete, Sinterklaas’ assistant who is celebrated every December with ginger nuts and black face. Some Dutch people insist Black Pete isn’t racist, but one Afro-Dutch activist named Jerry is trying to use the Netherlands tradition poldermodel (a lengthy process of getting together to talk out your differences) to try to convince his fellow Dutch citizens that Black Pete part of a bigoted tradition that needs to be eliminated. It’s a wild back and forth, a peek into the way the Dutch solve their problems, and it all both seems completely ridiculous and eerily familiar for people in the United States, where we often cling to our own racist traditions. I think if you polled people in the United States the consensus would be that Black Pete should be kicked off a fucking bridge, but I also think those same people might be against tearing down racist statues in the United States or changing the names of some of our sports teams. It seems like a whole lot of trouble when we’re talking about OUR STUFF, the things we have grown up with.
🎙️This American Life ran an old episode, Burn It Down, the story of a career police officer named Leen Schaap who was hired by the Amsterdam Fire Department, but kicked up a lot of dust by waging a war with his own firefighters to change their macho, racist culture. In a time when we are all talking about abolishing the police, we have all heard jokes about how nobody is rapping “Fuck the Fire Department.” But fuck THIS racist fire department. We think of the Netherlands as a liberal place with wonderful health care, but as displayed by the Rough Translation episode above, and this one, there is a lot of racism. (This episode also talks about how Leen and the fire department tried to compromise using poldermodel.)
🎙️Throughline gives us a deep dive of Typhoid Mary and the tension between personal responsibility and personal liberty she faced when she was forcibly quarantined her for nearly 30 years. Mary didn’t understand why she was a threat and did NOT feel like handing over blood and stool samples, even though testing her was an important step in protecting the public. It makes an interesting comparison to people today who refuse to wear masks or do not want to be good citizens in the name of public safety.
🎙️I swear to God I wake up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, excited to listen to Neon Hum founder Jonathan Hirsch’s Telescope, which goes inside the lives of different people during COVID. Deaf Anxiety talks to Gracie, a student in the Deaf community who has had to adjust to online learning and Zoom meetings in a complicated way. We ALL get annoyed by Zoom snafus, but what if the platform’s tiny ticks (or even a presenter just turning around or not speaking clearly) thwarted us from understanding what was going on? Deaf Anxiety is the perfect name for this episode. I cannot imagine how stressful this must be. Gracie also talks about navigating in a world where people are coving their mouths with masks, making a strong argument for people to use clear masks. (Can you imagine if you were a Deaf COVID patient and you couldn’t understand what your masked doctor was saying?) It’s been almost four months of this, and I’m still having moments where I realize another community of people is more horribly affected by the pandemic than I am. This show has given me a lot of empathy for many of these people through storytelling. A true gift!
🎙️Dani Shapiro’s The Way We Live Now is another look into the lives of people coping with the pandemic, and Dani’s interview with Chelsea Ursin of Dear Young Rocker was lovely. I was almost NERVOUS to listen to it because I helped set this interview up, I wanted it to be so, so good. And it was! I love both Dani and Chelsea so much, it was a treat to hear them together. Both of Chelsea’s parents are nurses and she talks about the danger they are in, the heartbreaking things they see at work, and how they sometimes downplay the situation to calm Chelsea’s nerves. Chelsea is a beautiful, honest, open storyteller and puts to words so many of the feelings I have had through COVID. She talks about how abandoning hope can be a healthy thing and reads a quote from Pema Chödrön: “To stay with that shakiness, to stay with a broken heart, a rumbling stomach, with the feelings of hopelessness, that is the path of true awakening. Stick with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, that is the spiritual path.”
🎙️I will listen to ANYTHING about dinosaurs, and Pindrop plops us behind a hardware store in New Jersey, which also happens to be a massive prehistoric graveyard. Geologist Ken Lacovara and a “Leslie Knope-type local government official” are determined to preserve it. Hear about how a community came together to keep the site from becoming an apartment complex.
🎙️Asian Enough interviewed Kamala Harris, who has Indian and Jamaican roots, about racism in America and specifically the recent rise in anti-Asian hate. I must confess I have never been the biggest Kamala fan, but she has a good shot at being Biden’s VP, and I felt a bit better about all that after hearing her on this show.
🎙️When I decide I want to treat myself I turn on Meddling Adults, a hysterical whodunnit game show FOR CHARITY, and although I can never solve the mysteries, I always laugh my butt off. This is just a reminder that I LOVE THIS SHOW and please listen to it, and please donate your money to it. Each episode, the winning contestant earns money for a charity of their choice, and this prize pool grows with the help of the show’s Patreon account. The Patreon will cover expenses of creating the show, and all proceeds will go directly into the prize pool for charity.
🎙️Small Triumph Big Speech is another great FOR CHARITY show, where Dylan Maron rewards people like you and me who have accomplished tiny things (like filling out a form) with a MIGHTY SPEECH from someone cool (like in this episode, a speech read by Roman Mars.) In order to get a speech, you have to donate money, and you should. Dylan has raised over $10K for domestic workers and is now raising money for bail funds.
🎙️I love you!