🐨 Literally wild ethical conundrums, 🎤 singing rappers, 💔 a Phoebe Judge sucker punch, Princess Di 👑
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, July 5. There are 324 days until I go on my next Disney cruise. This week we’re getting to peek into Bryan Barletta, the voice behind the Sounds Profitable newsletter and podcast. He's extremely passionate about podcast ad-tech and ideating on how it can help to level the playing field for creators. His newsletter and podcast give you everything you need to get a jumpstart. In his spare time, Barletta enjoys hanging out with his family and playing tabletop roleplaying games.
The app I use: I'm still using Apple Podcasts but I've decided that over paternity leave I'm switching off. Over the past year I've started to fall out of love with the Apple ecosystem. I switched back to PC, stopped wearing my watch, and try to use my phone as little as possible. I just keep falling back to Apple because the search seems to give me better results than other apps.
Listening time per week: I'd say close to 21 hours of spoken word audio each week. Right now each day is about 3 hours, with 1 hour currently being occupied by a few audiobooks I wanted to finish, but usually, that time is taken up by podcasts. I've got the informational podcasts, the entertainment ones, and my toddler and I are really into kids podcasts. I can't overstate how amazing it is to get my kiddo interested in listening to a podcasts with me.
When I listen: I usually start in the morning while making coffee/breakfast. It's an even mix of Wow in the World with my son or Podnews + What A Day + whatever I fell behind on. Around midday I go for at least one walk and I continue whatever I didn't finish in the morning, then I move into more audio drama's (The Bright Sessions), comedy podcasts (Make My Day with Josh Gondelman), or shows about tabletop roleplaying games (The Lost Bay). Though I'm listening less and less to actual play podcasts, I did just stumble into Red Moon Roleplaying.
How I discover: I'm mostly finding out about new podcasts through word of mouth, by which I mean Twitter. Every now and then I'll search "topic" + podcast in google or just the topic in Apple Podcasts and see what I'll find, but I don't think I've stumbled onto anything that way that stuck for more than just the specific episode. I'm absolutely a sucker for someone passionately and directly telling me about a podcast they're sure I'd like. Though, if they don't make me put it right into my app in that moment there's a strong chance I'll forget.
Anything else? Take every chance you can get to tell people that you love what they do. Share everything you love with the people who love you. Algorithms are neat, but humans are neater.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Ivy Le
Ivy Le is the host of FOGO. Follow her on Twitter here.
How'd you come up with the idea for FOGO?
I was brainstorming hundreds of ideas to apply to the first Spotify Sound Up accelerator call for ideas, but I was stuck on all these concepts about the pain of women of color. I felt pressure to do something Important with a capital “I” if I were to get such a rare opportunity. Every opportunity feels rare when you don’t see a lot of people who look like you doing it.
But I wouldn’t have listened to any of those shows. I wanted to make something from my perspective as a woman of color, but not about my pain. I already packaged my trauma for strangers to be allowed into college, so I shouldn’t have to do that anymore. I realized I watch so many nature shows! I love them, but they’re all hosted by reckless white men! Nature is a topic deeply specific to your cultural perspective, and I was like, oh, this genre needs me.
Why are you the perfect host for the show?
I’m a nature show host you can trust. I’m not going to tell you something is majestic when it fucking sucks. Terrible things happen to me when I go outside. I’ve gotten caught in a dust storm. I’ve nearly drowned several times. I’m allergic to cold air. And I have a great BS meter. It’s so satisfying when an interviewer asks the question that you were thinking next. That’s me. I ask the questions that indoor people want to know.
How would you describe your sense of humor?
An Ivy Le joke is one that makes half the audience laugh and half the audience wince. I love a good nonconsensual laugh, where the joke is so dark, you don’t want to give it to me - but it’s so true and well-observed, I just take it. I wretch the laugh from your body. I’m shameless. Most of the time, I’m not even joking. I’m just describing the world as I see it.
If you were going to start another podcast, don't worry about the logistics or if it would even make sense, what would it be?
Just anything that doesn’t require me to go outside, honestly. If I could get a network to fund a show where I get to experience something I actually enjoy one day, that would be great. Let me judge a fashion design competition or do a rewatch podcast for Chef’s Table. I love food and pretention! Let me take prestige food documentaries, and make it comedy. I promise I’m someone you want to go to a Michelin star restaurant with.
What do you hope FOGO does for people?
I want identity-rich people to realize that in any domain in life, not just the outdoors, society tells you you’re not enough. 'You’re missing this, you’re missing that, you don’t have the right shoes, you don’t have the right face, you don’t have the right voice. You need to code switch, you need to change all these things about yourself or you’re not going to be prepared.' But actually, you’ve always been enough. There’s no one way to be human. Any way you show up in a space is valid.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Hit Parade has a two-parter on the history of musicians blending the line between rapping and song. I would suggest this episode for the music you get to hear along the way alone. It opens up with one of my favorite songs—Biz Markie’s Just A Friend, which is a great example of a rapper using song in an unconventional way. For me, this was about two hours of me thinking to myself “god I love this song!” then switching to Spotify to listen before returning to the podcast. (So it actually took me, like, forever to go through both episodes.) This says something about me…I like my hip-hop to have melody, it’s why I love Bone Thugs and Nelly. This episode goes year by year, song by song, to illustrate how this shift was made to go from singing in hip top, to Destiny Child’s Say My Name, which seems to have been a tipping point, to T-Pain’s autotune, coming full circle to the sounds that started it all.
💎BTW💎
🎙️On Depresh Mode (formerly The Hilarious World of Depression) Joe Mande usually talks to funny people about dark moments they’ve had in the past. Joe’s interview with with Joel Kim Booster is about the dark moment Joel is in right now. I know Joel as a comedian and actor and host of a very funny podcast, Urgent Care. But those things don’t accurately reflect Joe’s current state. Now he is in a dark place, unable to create, in therapy and on medication—but positive that his current slump is permanent. I don’t think this was easy to listen to and it couldn’t have been easy for Joe Mande to conduct, but as he gently probes into Joel’s situation, you kind of feel like the three of you are in this together—in Joel’s story together. You feel for him and for Joe. I don’t know how to explain it. It was nice to hear someone talk honestly about how they’re doing. No one does this. Podcasts talk all the time about how they’re here to have “hard conversations” but rarely are. This was a truly hard conversation.
🎙️Live comedy is back! But how is it doing? Comedian Sara Schaefer takes a break from her funny, craft-heavy talk to address the state of getting booked after the quarantine, and how it isn’t looking too good for women. She has observed that we are going backwards—the days when women were getting booked in higher numbers is gone, and many shows are booking exclusively male. She dramatically reads a letter she wrote to a booker in 2014 that perfectly outlines the problem, and demonstrates how little progress we’ve made. It’s funny and sad because I believe it’s probably true.
🎙️I think we can all agree that every New Yorker needs to read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (maybe everyone should) but absolutely no one should watch the film adaptation, which is often cited as the worst movie remake of all time. But sometimes things are so bad they go past bad and back to good, or at least interesting. The Plot Thickens is a show from TCM and the new season, The Devil’s Candy, is focused on how the movie got made. We get to hear from Julie Salamon, a journalist at the time, and her suitcase full of kind of explosive audio…like of Tom Wolfe saying he thought it was a terrible idea to make the movie in the first place. The show’s scene is so perfectly set. You feel stepped in 1990s Hollywood. You can’t help but feel a bit of schadenfreude listening to this series, it’s like watching a train wreck happen. But really it’s a cautionary tale that can teach us a lot about the movie industry, publishing, and storytelling. To quote another great podcast: how did this get made? (BTW season three of The Plot Thickens was just announced, and it’s all about Lucy.)
🎙️Vanishing Postcards is telling an American story that almost nobody hears, the story of Conjunto, an American invention that brought together sounds of polka and Tejano. Host Evan Stern brings us along for a trip to San Benito, Texas, the nucleus of Conjunto, and where it was born, in a piece that’s not a report, it’s an invitation. The interviews don’t feel like interviews, they feel like conversations. And woven throughout is the music that is the pulse of the story. Part of me felt like I was taken back in time that doesn’t exist anymore—when people come together to dance halls to listen to authentic, traditional Texan music. (Not a trace of modern hip-hop or pop music to be found.) People are leaving San Benito, which means its music is fading. But the people there who love it love it, and you can imagine a world in which is stays alive. Each conversation about Conjunto makes you realize it’s not just music, it’s food and people and Texas history. And I think you’ll feel grateful for this episode to get to hear the music alone.
🎙️If you feel like getting sucker punched by Phoebe Judge this week, listen to the new episode of This is Love. Phoebe tells a story we’ve all heard countless times before (on Unsolved Mysteries?)—a man named Jeff Ingram has Dissociative Fugue, a rare type of amnesia, which means he at any moment he can completely lose his memory and forget who he is, and everything about his life. He is found one day in Denver, with no idea how he got there, and had to go on TV so his girlfriend could identify him. But there’s a twist—his girlfriend, Penny, is at the heart of this story. She gets cancer and dies, so Jeff is left alone, afloat in the sea, without someone to ground him or remind him who he is, or why he loved Penny. He made a voice recording of himself talking about Penny so that he could always remember who she is to him, but is worried that he will remember all the little things about her, and he without-a-doubt will. This is a story that makes you want to call your mom crying in the middle of the day, “I JUST LOVE YOU SO MUCH” and she will worry about you and ask if you are dying.
🎙️Marlon & Jake Read Dead People is back and I just love this show so much. Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James and his editor, Jake Morrissey, discuss the (dead) authors they love…but also the ones they hate. The magic in this one comes from getting a peek inside the relationship of a writer and editor. And I love how it’s not all positive. It’s fun to hear Marlon James take a crap on The Old Man and The Sea. The new episode tackles short stories and books, and I cannot stress this enough: it made me want to read everything they talked about at once.
🎙️More good news for the booknerds out there! Elena Nicolaou (I know her from Refinery 29 and Twitter) has started a show with Kristen Evans and Rachel Mans McKenny—Blind Date with a Book. For each episode, they invite a guest on and prescribe books to them based on their reading preferences, habits, and histories. On episode one, the guest is Alexa Nicolaou (Elena’s sister,) a teacher in search of emotional escape. This show is very much my jam…the recommended books for so on-point (though I feel like recommending Circe, one of my favorite books ever, is kind of cheating.) But it looks like that’s what you’ll get with this show—a list of books to add to your TBR list, books that you’re dying to read with a frenzy. The casual conversation makes Blind Date with a Book extremely listenable.
🎙️On Factually, Adam Conover talked to environmental writer Emma Marris about several complex moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding our relationships with wild animals. This is such a fascinating crossover of topics. Should we vaccinate animals? Should we help them when global warming is impacting their environments? When should we step in, if ever? The questions come up are important and directly impact our ecosystem, proving that philosophers can’t be left out of these conversations. Emma doesn’t have a specific answer to these moral questions, but she does have a guideline when considering them: how do we preserve the autonomy of wild animals and let them do their thing—while at the same time be sure we’re helping them to survive? (So zoos=bad, because it’s a place where animals don’t have natural freedom.) The reason these questions are so tricky is because our moral rules do not match up with the rules in the animal kingdom. And the more time you spend engaging in the animal kingdom, the more you realize you’re deeply embedded in it, and that in the animal world, things are not always “sunshine and rainbows.”
🎙️Every year to celebrate the birthday of Princess Di (July 1) I binge every single thing I can find on The People’s Princess. (jk…I was looking for great Di content for Hark.) I know I am late to the party, but I listened to the Princess Diana series on You’re Wrong About, and it felt like a break I needed—juicy, intimate details of the Princess’ life, sprinkled in with laugh-out-loud humor. Michael is steering the ship on this one, Sarah acts as the comic relief/brilliant question-asker. They are incredibly in-sync, and Michael has such a firm understanding of Diana’s story that he is able to make sense of it all. Sarah’s input brings so much humanity to this fairy tale. I felt like I was paging through a dishy magazine with friends. But there’s more—I relistened to the entire Images of Diana series from the BBC. In each episode, journalists and photographers unpack a single photo of Princess Di, explaining what was going on behind-the-scenes and the impact that the photo had. This series is packed with personal stories about Di and the inside scoop of the machine that was running her life, both publicly and privately. It’s a fun way to explore the entire royal world. (Listen to a clip here.)
🎙️If you’re looking for a philosophical conversation about bukkake, turn to Girls on Porn, where Laura and Rachel brush us up on its origins and what it is (this is a family show so I won’t get into it,) what it means as a sexual experience, and they do a play-by-play of a film titled “Nordic Hunk Humiliated and Bukkake in Flower Shop.” Girls on Porn offers the best conversations on sex in podcasts, period. They’re funny and critical but open, and intelligently unravel what porn says about human nature. They are proof that porn talk can be so smart it could be a course in college. (Like a real one, taught by academics.)
🎙️Telling Our Twisted Histories examines how, word-by-word, we can decolonize our minds by looking at our language, particularly how we use vocabulary to undermine Indigenous communities. (If you’ve been keeping up with the news of the Indigenous remains found in unmarked graves on the site of a former boarding school in Canada, I recommend you listen to the episode about School.) A recent episode is about the phrase “running on Indian time” and it’s full of interviews with tribal members about what this word means to them, and why they don’t often run on the same clock as everyone else. The idea of Indian Time is a harmful stereotype and white people do not own it, but it’s rooted in truth, and instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, it’s cool to hear Indigenous people talk about how it fits into their lives so we can understand what this means to them.
🎙️I got hooked on The Constant with the Foolkiller series, a 5-part saga that goes deep into a submarine that was mysteriously found at the bottom of The Chicago River. It’s an excellent series (the moment in which Mark Chrisler—spoiler alert—cracks the mystery at the end is so joyful and exciting and rewarding, it’s one of my favorite moments in podcasting.) But it’s not exactly the episode to hook people with. (“Hey, want to listen to a show I like? Just listen to this 6-hour story about a submarine.”) Mark knows this, and for his 100th episode of The Constant did a genius thing—for his 100th episode, he made one called Start Here. It’s a much better place to start, offering a mish-mash of some of his earlier episodes, but just enough of them to get you wanting more. Listen and I think you will become entranced with Mark’s storytelling style and energy. Then you can listen to Foolkiller parts 1 through 5.
🎙️If you love The Constant, listen to Mark Christer on Follow Friday (a show I am obsessed with, about interesting people and who they follow on the internet.) Mark has mixed feelings on Malcolm Gladwell, discusses his shifting relationship with the McElroy brothers and how he relates to them, and offers a great Twitter account to follow—@frootoftheloom1, which highlights real-life Mandela Effect stories. Mark is just the kind of smart person I want to steal from when it comes to following people on social media. Like always, listening to this podcast has made me a better internet consumer, and has made social media a more fun place for me to be.
🎙️Rough Translation finished up a three-part-series that focused on a couple, Alicia Argelia and Army veteran Matt Lammers, who had lost both legs and one arm during a deployment to Iraq. Matt has his own incredible story (I clipped the hard-to-listen-to moment about how when his limbs were blown off here) but Alicia illustrates the hard-to-hear-story that is harder to see. As the wife of someone with serious limitations and PTSD, Alicia was saddled with caring for someone who was almost impossible to care for, and doing so put herself at risk. She is the voice of the partners of vets, the burden they bear when the government offers minimal support to veteran families, and their own challenges in relating to regular people who haven’t experienced this specific kind of trauma. It’s part of a series Home/Front which is exploring the cultural and communication gap between those who have served in the military and those who have not. Another episode of the series, Marla’s War, tells the story of Marla Ruzicka, who was initially driven to telling the stories of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. She was an unlikely spokesperson, but had a nearly impossible time trying to help the people impacted by war, while protesting the war at the same time. It’s another disconnect of how we talk and think about war, that led Marla on a path that nobody would have expected. I love the way Gregory Warner is letting us think about war. This series is extremely listenable and spotlight a corner of the whole veteran conversation that many new outlets miss.
🎙️The Village: Season Two just launched, and this time is addressing the danger transgender people experience just by living their true-selves, with the stories of Alloura Wells and Cassandra Do, whose tragic deaths have left people with more questions than answers. (Season one dealt with the cases of missing and murdered men in Toronto's gay community.) Justin Ling hosts, and the first two episodes are perfect. One for Alloura, one for Cassandra, so you get a feeling of who these women were. The question in this series’ bones is about searching for the connective piece between seasons one and two. In all these years, have we learning anything about protecting the queer community?
🎙️A few things I listened to on Saturday morning had me thinking about water: An episode of Decoder Ring goes over our weird and illogical obsession with hydration, and how having a water bottle within arms reach at all times is a new part of our culture. Freakonomics ran an old episode about our lawns and how much money we spend keeping the watered. (And why this also makes no sense, and how there might be better uses for our lawns.) And an oldie but a goodie: I listened to an episode of 99% Invisible about how a drought in California allowed skateboarders to being practicing their tricks in empty swimming pools. (I’m making a Harklist about skateboarding. Let me know if you can think of podcast episodes that deal with this subject!)
🎙️Pod Broads’ Alexandra Cohl had another great interview with someone I admire, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams. Juleyka is someone everyone in podcasting (and anyone even tangentially interested in storytelling) should know. Her career path has dipped into many worlds, but she seems to have followed her heart and instinct throughout it all, so it all just makes so much sense. I am always taking notes from Juleyka, but this podcast episode was like “what would Juleyka do?” Cliffsnotes. Business, being a mom, being funny, loving your job, listening, finding stories to tell, building a team, etc.
🎙️I’ve been enjoying Sensemaker from Tortoise, a podcast that bring you one quick story every day to help you make sense of the rest of the news. It’s reflecting on the biggest news stories, but with deeper dives that twist in all sorts of directions. For example, when everyone was talking about Britney’s conservatorship, most everyone just saying ‘god isn’t it terrible?’ Sensemaker had an episode about how people with disabilities are regularly stripped of “legal personhood” through conservatorships or guardianships. Each episode expands my thinking beyond what is just contained in the headlines. And the episodes are so quick I find myself looking forward to every one.
🎙️If you’re looking for more good (and not bad) stuff on Britney, listen to the Harklist on Britney’s conservatorship that Cory and I made. It includes the best moments we could find from The Journal, The Alarmist, Britney’s Gram, PEOPLE Every Day, and more. We listened to a ton of podcasts to find this stuff, and I promise you this list is full of the most interesting takes. Two more interesting pieces came out after we made the list: Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino appeared on New Yorker Radio Hour to talk about why this is all happening now, and they take a step back to look at what it means for our culture in large. And an episode of Popcast gets into lots of interesting things I hadn’t thought about before, like how Britney’s music might have been communicating her feeling of losing her own agency.
🎙️I also made a Harklist about Undiscovered America—it’s a celebration of some of the weirder places in our country, odd spots you might want to add to your next road trip. From Hitler’s toilet in an auto-repair shop in Florence, New Jersey to the a tiny bridge made for squirrels in Longview, Washington, this list makes you appreciate the weirdness of America. (With clips from Baby Geniuses, Atlas Obscura, Sawbones, and more.)
🎙️I love you!