😼 Killer cats, the Gaylord Opryland, perilous water slides, fake vacations 🏝 Chris Gethard 💁♂️
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, June 7. There are 352 days until I go on my next Disney cruise. This week we’re getting to peek into the podcast app and listening life of Evan Tess Murray (they/he,) who works for a nonprofit by day and creates audio drama podcasts by night. They're the creator of This Planet Needs a Name, a co-creator of Light Hearts, and lend their skills to a variety of projects.
App I use: Podcast Guru - I have an android phone and was looking for something pretty stripped-down and simple after Podcast Addict (which is a great app!) finally choked under the weight of my listening queue. I like Podcast Guru a lot - it has a simple interface and the features I actually need, and the developers have been really responsive when I've run into problems. My only real listening preference is for a dedicated podcatcher rather than listening in a browser or on Spotify - I like having all my podcasts in one place. Oh - and a sleep timer.
Listening time per week: I'm listening to something whenever I'm not doing anything else, so for idle listening time - maybe 40 hours a week? But not all of that is me actually paying attention! And I don't watch TV. My television is there for enrichment for my pets; they watch a lot more of it than I do. Lately, one of my challenges is that I have limited attention - the pandemic has been rough for me - and listening to new shows is challenging. I do a lot of re-listens, not just to audio dramas but to chat shows I've heard before. For new work, I mainly listen to things my friends are creating and wish I had more time and energy for all the great shows out there. In general, if I can focus enough to listen to new fiction, I can focus enough to create my own, and I'm behind on projects all the time. I should be doing take selection right now.
When I listen: While I do any housework, go for walks, drive anywhere, go out in public, or take a day to relax. If I'm not working, asleep, or talking to someone, I'm listening to a podcast.
How I discover: Once I became a creator and started talking with other creators, discovering new shows I'd like became easy - other people know what I make and they loop me in. I see a lot of twitter announcements for shows, and on the indie end of audio drama I generally find out while shows are still in production. I have so many shows I'd love to listen to and can't get caught up on that finding new ones is just not something I need to worry about. But I love https://bellocollective.com/ for their posts about new fiction shows - it's a great way to keep up. And Podchaser has been great, especially its lists feature - Tal Minear has created some great lists I can go to if I'm looking for new shows that I know I'll like.
Anything else? For me, podcasting started as a pleasant distraction for my commutes and turned into a pretty all-consuming creative hobby. I learned new skills, made so many new friends, found new family. And audio drama, specifically, brought a type of creativity I really missed back into my life. I spent years writing and failing to publish; now I create scripts and produce them myself, and I get to challenge myself as a writer, and people get to hear my stories. I cannot possibly overstate how this unpaid second career I accidentally fell into has changed and enriched my life.
xoxo lp
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Chris Gethard
Chris Gethard is a comedian, author, and host of Beautiful/Anonymous and New Jersey Is The World. His new special Chris Gethard: Half My Life came out June 1st from Comedy Dynamics on Amazon Prime Video and other platforms.
You are a podcasting OG. Did you have a hard time explaining Beautiful Stories From Anonymous People before lots of people were listening to podcasts?
Yes, I pitched it a bunch of times to Earwolf and they were quite hesitant. They were hoping I could be their first East Coast comedy person and maybe organize something improvisational with the New York scene. Something more akin or inspired by Comedy Bang Bang. But I just had a gut instinct this phone call thing would work. Now granted, I saw the show in my head as a much more consistently comedy-based thing, and it transformed into what it is pretty quickly. But there were doubts about it and I knew it had legs.
If you were going to have another podcast, don't worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would like it, what would it be?
Luckily I just launched one! It’s called New Jersey Is The World. It’s myself and some friends exploring sort of insane stories about growing up in our home state. But underneath all the idiocy and silliness, I think it’s actually a very good cultural exploration of one of the strangest states.
What was the most difficult episode of Beautiful/Anonymous that you made?
We had an episode called Love Is Everywhere. A mom was calling from a hospital waiting area as her daughter was undergoing tests related to her rare form of cancer. It was brutal. It blindsided me. But it quickly became the favorite episode of a large percentage of our fan base. It was raw and vulnerable and in the moment. So many people who heard it were inspired to live more fully, help more people, and be more compassionate. Sadly, the caller’s daughter has since passed away. I’m still in touch with the caller, who raises money in her daughter’s memory via her project Holly’s Miracles. You can find info here.
What do you hope Beautiful/Anonymous does for people?
I hope it fosters more empathy. I hope it allows people to experience others’ stories without them being overproduced or edited or filtered. One of the great compliments I get on the show that hits me right in my heart is people saying “I’ve never heard someone from this background tell their own story in their own words.” I think especially with things that touch on political matters or social change, it’s important to hear actual people. Not just news stories or social media bullet points. Those are easily sensationalized. When you hear a person lay their journey out there, it’s hard to dismiss it or get mad as your first reaction. Humans are humans, you know? So some of the episodes I’m most proud of relate to that. We recently heard from a young black male teacher in Minneapolis the day after Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd. Years ago we spoke with a trans caller and I saw multiple reactions from people who had read about trans rights and the trans community, but said the podcast was the first time they actually heard a trans person describe their life personally. I even spoke to someone in 2016 who was planning on voting for Donald Trump and explained why. I still think if more political strategists had heard that one it could have really affected things. A lot of people are driven by their past, their pain, their confusion. You wind up empathizing greatly when that’s the case.
What is your relationship to your voice and how would you describe it?
I hate it!
What shows do you listen to?
Some in my current rotation are: Criminal, This Is Love, Outside, Murf Meyer Is Self-Medicated, Screw It We’re Just Gonna Talk About Comics, and The Art of Wrestling, which is converting to a show called Wrestling Anonymous. Colt is a dear friend of mine and I love the name of his new project.
Can you describe your fans?
Kind folks who aren’t scared to wear their emotions on their sleeves.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Rough Translation’s series Home/Front is in the middle of a three-part series on Matt Lammers, an Asian-American man who grew up in the midwest, got into some trouble as a kid, and ended up in Iraq, where he was injured and lost three of his limbs but was extremely lucky to have survived. The account of his near-death experience was fucking harrowing (you can hear that part here) but Matt’s entire life seems like it was taken from a movie. This episode is about how he met his wife and the experience she has living with and loving someone who’s been through what Matt’s been through. This piece does a great job bringing Matt’s story to life, but there are so many missing pieces. (Which is why I’m looking forward to parts two and three.)
💎BTW💎
Tweet of the week
🎙️Beach Too Sandy, Water Too Wet seems to have randomly published an episode on the Gaylord Opryland without recognizing that this is the very place where many of us will be staying for Podcast Movement in August. Beach Too Sandy, Water Too Wet does dramatic readings of online reviews of places, and quite often the reviews are fun to hear because they seem to come from overly-bitter nit-pickers with an ax to grind with small businesses. The reviews for the Gaylord Opryland were not pretty, and the reviewers had legitimate complaints. My advice to you, if you’re staying there: Knock around the sheets before you go to bed and make sure someone hasn’t left their contact lenses in there, lock your door at night so another guest can’t walk in on you diving into your Podcast Movement goody bag, and expect to spend $30 for soggy fries at the restaurant downstairs. I am going to Podcast Movement (I am presenting) and I’m staying at the Gaylord Opryland. So I was taking notes. Let me know if you’ll be there too, perhaps we can commiserate over soggy fries together.
🎙️Snap Judgment tells a story that had me completely in from the beginning, even though it’s not such an extraordinary set up (it’s just well-told): an adopted woman named Andy Marra goes to Korea to find her birth parents. She discovers that her father has died but her mother is nearby, and never wanted to give her son up for adoption. And I know I make a lot of typos but that wasn’t one of them. Andy is trans, and worried about letting her mom know. But a mother’s intuition can be stronger than our ability to hold a secret (I know this to be very true) and there is a powerful moment when Andy’s mother discovers the truth. Another moment that sticks out to me is when her mother feeds her for the first time.
🎙️I LOVE THE BIG ONES and the hosts, Amanda and Maria, are launching a mini-series within, Playcation, which challenges the two to play a traveling game that sort of reminds me when I was a kid and used to play MASH. They plan a dream vacation (who amongst us has not done this during the pandemic?) with each of them stylizing their trip around the same location, but each of them must do it with different parameters (that they spin a wheel for—Clooney Budget or Steerage? Romantic Getaway or Eat Pray Love-ing? Broken Toe/Cyst or There’s a Sexy Pool Boy?) This ends up an adventure in internet deep dives, as Amanda and Maria explore reviews of local restaurants and attractions—and I am obsessed with the specificity. Amanda and Maria are so funny together, but you can’t stop yourself from planning your own trip along with them. The first episode takes them to Bermuda—Maria’s reading from Lonely Planet (“turquoise waters, lush greenery, white roofs poised to catch rainwater, a genteel chunk of rural England lifted into warmer climes”) makes me want to book my ticket.
🎙️The Constant’s episode It’s a Date spans Egyptian kings, Aristotle and the history of Christianity, Thomas Aquinas, the theory of double truth, a beheaded great white shark and biblical arithmetic to try to answer the question: How old is the world? It’s much tricker than you may imagine, but with The Constant, the more murky the waters the more amusing the episode is. (It leaves lots of opportunities for Mark Chrisler to insert his hilarious and skeptical commentary.) At one point when he was talking about a perplexing observation about sharks and tongue stones he says, “around the time this would have happened, if it did, which it didn’t, but whatever…” which I think is representative of what I think is the beauty of The Constant. It blends history, science, myth, and lore with Mark’s humor to often leave us with more questions…and more interest…than we had in the first place. It’s about the process of science, and how it’s consistently getting things less wrong. And this episode is a perfect example. (So if you haven’t tried it yet, you could start here.)
🎙️I did not enjoy the movie Anchorman when I saw it nearly 200 years ago, and I’m not sure the reason is fair. I only remember one scene—a dog was kicked off a bridge? I swore off Ron Burgundy forever. We are now on season four of The Ron Burgundy Podcast and until last week, I had never listened to even a snippet. I noticed that Anna Hossnieh (someone I love) worked on it, so I gave it a chance and can report that I laughed and that it was silly and a lot of fun. Why do you listen to me, I cannot be trusted. On the new episode, no dogs were harmed, Ron butts heads with his frustrated producer, and he gets vaccinated in the butt on-air. (He is also convinced the pandemic is a string of people named Pam going missing, and extremely dedicated to this stance.) Does this mean I have to go watch Anchorman again?
🎙️I have been feeling very fried and have noticed that this comes up in a lot of the conversations I am having with some of you. So might I suggest this episode of Deep Questions with Cal Newport. Brad Stulberg is on to talk about how we can work less (that headline is what hooked me…there is too much work. How can I possibly do less?) The answer is that it’s all my fault, that I am in control of my situation, and there are things I can do to silence some of the noise. (Brad makes an interesting point about how much freer we would be if we stopped recording our lives via social media, fitness/sleep apps and probably newsletters, too.) He rails against privileged people who say they are busy. “You cannot be drinking your Kombucha and complaining about being busy.” The real busy people are working inhumane Amazon shifts and four jobs and don’t have time to tweet about how busy they are, listen to podcasts about how to be less busy, or write about that podcast in their newsletter. If you’re “busy” and you know it, you’re privileged. Trust me this episode was uplifting and something I needed to hear. It also made me want to move back to Ohio. (Mom and Dad, I’m joking.)
🎙️To be completely honest, it was with some reluctance that I listened to the first episode of Now & Then, a show that “brings the past to life.” (I love the person who sent me the press release and that’s why I listened!) I have spent so much time twisting my hands in knots over news and our fucked up history for the past two…hundred years, I wasn’t sure I could take it. But it was so smart and entertaining that I blew through it and immediately wanted another one. Hosts Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman cover the week in news by tying it to people, ideas, and events of the past, allowing us to peer into their history-obsessed brains. (I truly shouldn’t be surprised this show is good, I love the way Vox has been partnering up, and this time it’s with Preet Bharara's Cafe.) Episode one covers the doctrine of Biden and how it relates to the US relationship to foreign policy, drawing in the French Revolution, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Vietnam War to make sense of what is happening to foreign/domestic policy now. (And why how Biden’s response to the incident in Belarus completely proves their point.) I loved the banter between Heather and Joanne, and for the same reasons I tune into Past/Present every week, I am 100% sure this will be a regular listen for me.
🎙️Here’s another twist on history—Not Past It, Gimlet’s own version of looking back at history to better understand today, by focusing on the anniversaries of certain dates that changed the world. This one is a little more pop-culturey, and it does a great job weaving archived audio into its stories. The second episode is about the story of Kelloggs cereal, which makes rounds on many history/food podcasts. But this time it goes to interesting places, talking to Amanda Mull about Special K and diet culture. Host Simone Polanen is personable and keeps the energy up. This is Spotify only, which means I’m surprised I listened to it. But it was good enough that I’ll keep listening, despite the annoyance.
🎙️CBC’s Telling Our Twisted Histories is using language to decolonize our minds and reclaim Indigenous history by dedicating each episode to a word we see and maybe use all the time, and going into great depth, using valuable voices, to explain why we need to cut it out. The first two words are here (reserve and discover) and they’re words I think I’ve stopped using, but the episodes really made me think about why. And I’m having a hard time coming up with which nine words will be next! (We can all find out the third word tomorrow.) Listening to a single episode made me examine the way I talk about things, I think this show could rewire our brains. Pass it along to your racist uncle, and don’t think you already know everything about how problematic the words “discover” and “reserve” are—this podcast will deepen your understanding.
🎙️The makers of Disgraceland and Def Jam is coming together to produce Here Comes the Break, a show that is unlike anything I’ve heard. It’s a narrative show that tells the story of Ruben, a young creator who anonymously launches a podcast interviewing hip hop stars (called Here Comes the Break,) that goes viral but weaves in real artist interviews and exclusive new song drops from emerging Def Jam artists like Bobby Sessions, Saint Bodhi, Nasty C, Bino Rideaux and more. Maybe it’s because I’m an old lady, but it feels like really fresh insight into the life of a Gen Z kid. The diary-like format opens Ruben up to a lot of his vulnerabilities, like race, mental health, and creativity. For example: Nevaeh Jolie’s “Sorry” is the first featured song/interview, which dovetails with an episode about Ruben accidentally taking Adderall when he meant to take his anxiety medication. I’m enjoying the story, but interested in the story about the story—what Double Elvis is doing with this creative format, and how the whole thing will unfold. I’m really curious about how it was made.
🎙️On Ethnically Ambiguous, Jessica Gao (of Rick and Morty and an I-think defunct show she used to have with Dan Harmon, Whiting Wongs, which was totally funny and an open look at the fucked up things white people assume about Asian and Asian-American culture) talked to Anna Hossnieh and Shereen Lani Younes about lots of things, including being put on a plane to go back to China alone when she was seven. The absolutely best moment of this conversation was when Jessica talks about having to show her entire Chinese family the Pickle Rick episode of Rick and Morty that she wrote, and the lack of support she received. (It’s a long story, I loled, worth a listen.)
🎙️PEOPLE recently launched PEOPLE Everyday (it is literally where I learned what cheugy meant) and now they’ve launched PEOPLE in the 90’s, which shocks your entire body and soul into this era that was for me largely defined by PEOPLE magazine. (My mom used to binge read PEOPLEs on airplanes, and thought our plane would crash if she did not do this, or if she read an issue on land.) Before social media, our access to these people was so limited, so we probably all remember the same stories. Hosts Jason Sheeler and Andrea Lavinthal, who obviously have enormous respect for the 90s, are funny and casually call up people like Elizabeth Hurley, Tori Spelling, Paula Abdul, Jamie Lee Curtis, and more like they’re on speed dial, which is so 90’s. This show has personality—there’s a regular features called Chasing Fabio, a weekly update on Jason’s quest to land an interview with Fabio. (This reminds me of the delightful segments like Chunch Chat on Baby Geniuses.)
🎙️Joe Exotic is Tiger King, but Sharon Guynup is Tiger Hero—she’s a journalist, author who recently wrote 'Tiger King’ stars’ legal woes could transform cub-petting industry and investigated the famed Thai Tiger Temple for National Geographic. On Species Unite, she talked to Elizabeth Novogratz, catching us up on where the cast of Tiger King are now, which is catchy, but it was even more interesting to hear about the tiger crisis in America and the probably with “sanctuaries” and the common personality types of people who collect exotic animals. They’re people with a “malignant narcissism with a distinctly masculine element.” She ran some background checks and found that almost all of them had reports of gun and drug charges, physical abuse, and sex offenders. This is the more-interesting backstory of the wildly juicy story we already know and hate.
🎙️If you’re into cats, you’ll like an older episode of Outside/In, Loser Wolves: A Cat Fancy, which visits Bengal sanctuaries explore how they are bred (by using a wild animal’s genes, while leaving out the wild animal personality) to ask: is it possible to isolate the parts of a wild animal that you like, and forgo the parts that you don’t? The team also goes into the history of cat breeding and why it’s farther behind than dog breeding, which will make you question your instincts to go out and buy a $2K Bengal cat right away. I want one, I do, but I have a mutt named Monty who really needed a home and I love him more than anything, and I do not think he would appreciate it.
🎙️When I tap my Instagram discovery icon, 90% of the posts I am served are of otters. If you have not explored #ottersofinstagram yet, do it. With their weird little fingers they eat food with an enthusiasm I’ve never seen, and they are pulling off that whole playful/rascal aesthetic. A recent episode of Roaring Earth promised to “ruin otters” for us, and I get what they mean, but I had the opposite response. They introduce us to a kind of otter I’m not seeing wearing little outfits and playing with babies on IG— giant river otters, the longest members of the weasel family, that can grow to be almost six feet tall. They’re extremely territorial and aggressive, and are known to hunt down and kill anything in their path. The only creatures that stand a chance in a giant river otter fight are jaguars, (large) anacondas and (large) caimans. Humans, I guess, if you have an AK-47. Now I am obsessed with #giantriverotter Instagram—they’re like the cute otters’ evil twins. In pictures, they are either seen violently beheading their prey or looking pissed off and about to kill you, or both. Justin and I were up until like 2AM the other day watching videos of giant river otters taking down enormous caimans. (No need to send me more, I have been to the bottom of the internet and have seen them all.)
🎙️Every Little Thing starts with a question from a listener named Megan: Is my cat (her cat is Puskin) trying to kill me? It’s something I think every single cat owner has grappled with. And Flora brings in support from Jon Ronson (author of The Psychopath Test) and cat psychologist Eva Waiblinger to unravel Pushkin’s personality traits and put Pushkin through the test. There are probably not a lot of surprises, here: your cat would eat you if you died—much before your dog would, and probably checks off nearly every box in Ronson’s test. (The number one red flag is lack of empathy, and I bet your cat isn’t losing sleep over the fact that he ripped out the bowels of a rat and left the carcass on your front porch.) But it’s a fun exercise, in wackiness anyway. I listened to it in my apartment with Justin, making sure Monty could listen, just so he knows that I know what he’s up to.
🎙️I am woefully behind on one of my favorite shows The Alarmist, but had to skip to a recent episode about Action Park, the New Jersey water park that was so corrupt and dangerous that in its heyday in the 70’s and 80’s, six people died on rides. Class Action Park was one the funniest documentaries I’ve seen (and features people you know and love…Chris Gethard and narration from John Hodgman.) Rebecca, Amanda, and Chris are joined by comedian BJ Gallagher, who worked there, to go through every lawsuit and hazardous water tube to nail down who we can blame for the deaths. One of the tubes was lined with the teeth of people who were chucked onto the sides face-first, which caused more injuries when people ran into them going down, which is, as host fact-checker Chris points out, “something from the Saw movies.”) That is only the beginning.)
🎙️If you’ve been following It’s Nice to Hear You (I love this show) you’ll be excited, and maybe sad, to hear that Heather has dropped the final episode. It’s bittersweet for me, and I’m sure for her. (It’s Nice to Hear you is a project where Heather tried to match people up romantically and for a period of time only let them communicate through voice messages sent through her. It’s like a dating/reality TV show for your ears.) Heather shares the outcomes of the love matches that were part of her project, and gives an update on her own life, and how she used the structure of her project to find a match that she acknowledges might not be the love of her life, but a love that will teach her things. I think she’s learned a lot from making this show. It’s incredible how she’s been able to foster real relationships between these complete strangers using only audio.
🎙️I love you!