🚢 Thanks a lot Kyla 🌊 "Mrs. Morris was a saxophone" 🎷 I wanna be an medievalologist 🏰 Mitch’s magic 🤡
🍭 👂 You're in for a treat! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, March 14. There are 85 days until I go on my next Disney cruise. Shout out to readers Matt and Harold who assured me I should go through with my travel plans. Please place your blame them if I get Covid or become shipwrecked. In case this email is too long, I got the best pitch letter ever about this, this was the most imaginative thing I’ve heard in awhile, my mom will scare the shit out of you here.
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Brian Wagner, a multi-talented audio engineer with more than 5 years of radio broadcasting and production expertise. He currently runs KDUB Radio, an internet radio station that features indie bands from all around the world. He also manages KDUB Entertainment, a mobile DJ business where he spins the tunes while his partner serves as the MC for every event they perform. He also hosts, edits, and produces a weekly wrestling podcast called Brawl 4 All Radio.
The app you use to listen: I jump around. I listen to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, and SiriusXM too. Some of the podcasts are on multiple apps so sometimes I just listen to them all in one app. Just depends on which one I am in at the time.
Listening time per week: 15 – 20 hours a week.
When you listen: When I am not listening to music or binge watching something on TV.
How you discover: I discover new podcasts by recommendations from colleagues.
Anything else you want to say? Coming from broadcast media, I am still new to the podcast world. But I have fallen in love with it just as much as I fell in love with both music and radio. I hope that I can continue on my journey and have a long lasting career in the media world.
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Sarah Marshall
Sarah Marshall is the host of You’re Wrong About and You Are Good with Alex Steed. Follow Sarah on Twitter here. Follow You’re Wrong About on Twitter here. Follow You Are Good on Twitter here.
What makes the perfect You're Wrong About story?
A perfect You're Wrong About story is one where we have inherited an idea from a past event that we assume is at least truth-based, and has become a part of our culture. And then if we go back and look at the facts the available information obviously contradicts the cultural idea we have. I think the ideal You're Wrong About story is one where there's no digging even necessary because to me part of the point of doing these is showing how us not remembering the truth can have nothing to do with the truth not being available. I feel especially impassioned to do a story when I feel like a person inside of that story has has had their life affected or destroyed by this experience or has been made to suffer more than they would have otherwise through media attention.
Was there an episode that resonated with people in a way that totally surprised you?
I've always been surprised by how intensely people responded to the Kitty Genovese episode, primarily because they feel so attached to what they learn about her as a person. I think it's just always interesting to learn where these stories—these like pieces of modern folklore—come from and to try and understand why we might have chosen the stories that we did to keep passing around to each other. In the Genovese case I think that like, just based on the details that we have, the idea of Kitty Genovese Genovese that you end up with is of this like, like the, the myth of Kitty Genovese is that the idea of a general woman Genovese this terrible fate because of this issue of bystander apathy that we were trying to discuss as a concept, because it was one of our timely fears in 1964. And then if you get into the facts you end up with like, not this idea of a woman but a very specific actual person who was living her life in this way that I think a lot of people who heard the episode were struck to find out she was living an apparently joyful and love-filled life as a lesbian in 1964. I think people ended up connecting with the courageousness of that.
When did you realize the show was a big deal?
I went to see Les Mis with my friends family and we were coming down the stairs and I opened my phone and had a bunch of congratulations texts because the show had been featured on a top 10 list by Time Magazine. That was the thing that made it real to a lot of people I knew and therefore me. My friend's mom congratulated me about it and then said, "What's a podcast?"
How has your perspective shifted in producing the show?
I think my primary concerns have shifted. And at this point I understand that it's my job not to be the most insightful person in the room necessarily, but to show the audience that it's okay to be ignorant about things and to then decide to learn about them. And that it’s also okay to be surprised. I think that what I consider myself to be good at is creating a warm, emotional place for the listener to be inside of.
Who is your dream guest host?
Monica Lewinsky, who has chosen to remake herself as a public figure whose fame is about things now. And I like that she's doing that. She is a real-life example of surviving the phenomena we talk about, and doing so in a way where you're like communicating to the public that abused you what they did to you.
When was the first time you realized that you were a funny person that you were funny?
I think first grade and we were singing Raffi's "Down by the Bay" in class. And it was my turn to do a rhyme. And I said. "A giraffe drinking a decaf." And my adult teacher thought that was very funny. And so I unfortunately learned that it feels really good to make adults laugh because it gives you power over them.
🎙Learn From An Award Winning Podcaster🎙
Are you looking to start a new podcast? Do you have a podcast that you want to grow and monetize? DCP Entertainment CEO, Chris Colbert is hosting 4-week courses to help you reach your goals.🏆 Click here.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
On the 11th of every month, Pineapple Street releases an episode of The 11th, an isolated audio project that can be anything—a small series, narrative nonfiction, or something totally made up. There are no rules and you never know what you’re going to get. March’s episode, The Happiness Project, is a glorious tour of a Toronto neighborhood via Charles Spearin, a long-time member of the band Broken Social Scene. Charles interviewed his neighbors and imagined them as instruments, then created music based on what they sound like. It’s one of the most imaginative things I’ve heard, each neighbor springs off the episode into a colorful world of music and sound. It’s a cool way to imagine humans, and will make you listen to the world in a new way. Mrs. Morris sounded like a saxophone.
⚡️News from Sounds Profitable⚡️
On Sounds Profitable (check out the newsletter and podcast) Shreya Sharma, Caila Litman, and Mignon Fogarty take over the mic to talk about how we can make the podcast industry more vibrant, inclusive and accessible to women and other historically disenfranchised voices starts with everyday actions. They interview the most fabulous women in the world. It’s such a hell-yes read. Read/subscribe here.
hey.
✨Karina Longworth announced the subject of the upcoming season of You Must Remember This—Hollywood films of the 1980s and '90s with erotic themes. The first part of the series, "Erotic 80s" will debut on April 5th. Don’t miss it.
✨I will be at SXSW this week, giving a short presentation on podcast growth. If you’re in Austin, come find me!
✨In Podcast Marking Magic, I interviewed Maya Chupkov of Proud Stutter about how she was able to successfully pitch herself to several podcasting outlets. You’ll learn a lot about creating your own marketing campaign. Read it here.
✨Jake Halpern of Deep Cover and Dana Goodyear of Lost Hills are hosting a digital event on March 16th about the nuances of true crime storytelling. They'll be sharing how they make the story exciting and fresh, and the ethical challenges they face when talking about true crime. View the event here.
✨Spoilerpiece Theatre, the podcast that doesn’t give a shit about spoilers, is airing its 400th episode on 3/11, and to mark the occasion they’re inviting their original co-host Kris Jenson back as a guest to review a movie with us. This will put all four original hosts together on the mic for the first time in their 7+ years as a show. They’re also featuring short appearances from previous guest critics. Don’t miss it.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted the podcast 2 Bulls in a China Shop in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️I often say that podcasters should inform me if they’ve produced an episode about Disney, the Donner Party, or J Dilla (because they’re my favorite topics so surely I’ll listen) and that last one is almost a joke. Hardly anyone is talking about the influential producer. When I saw that one of my favorite podcasts, Snap Judgment, talked to Dilla’s mother Maureen Yancey for a special episode about some of J’s lost tracks that were found, I nearly died. Maureen was a huge player in J’s career, and we get to hear exactly what it meant to her, how she ended up with almost no cut of J’s work, and how a man who stumbled upon his secret tracks made sure they fell into the right hands. Hearing J Dilla’s lost music feels like a ghost story, it’s the music he made before he was sick, the J Dilla has mother wants to remember. This story is an ode to J Dilla, the woman behind him and her relationship with a brilliant musician we lost too soon. Listen here.
🎙️I got the most interesting pitch letter this week—Kyla, co-host of Pullback, a show about the ethics of our choices, was aware of my impending Disney Cruise and wanted to tell me about a two-part episode she and her co-host Kristen produced about the social and environmental impacts of cruises. To quote Mickey Mouse, “Oh, boy!” I listened to this with my entire body clenched. I know that my love for cruises is one of my most unattractive quality traits, but I have been able to convince myself that my ecological footprint is relatively small since I don’t eat meat and don’t have a car. This series (thanks a lot, Kyla) reassured my hunch that almost nothing could equalize the destruction I am causing with each sail on the Disney Dream. While being reminded of the tax evasions and environmental strains of a cruise (I guess you’re allowed to just dump acid into the ocean! And oh my god…whale collisions?) the part that struck me most was the impact cruises have on the people who work them. Kyla once worked in a gift shop on a ship and reports the the rigorous schedules placed on the staff, and the staff on a Disney cruise are either forced to be a) exceptionally cheerful or b) in a character costume so I cannot see if they are crying. This episode was great and made me want to binge everything, but also kind of like the most Podcast the Newsletter-targeted thing I’ve heard. (I even get a shout out!) This episode was made for your girl lp, who is probably going on a Disney Cruise in 85 days. Kyla and Kristen, blame Matt and Harold. And thank you for this. (Especially for encouraging me to write Disney and ask for greener fuel, more support for ports they visit, slower ships, contracts for workers, higher pay for the lowest paid contractors, and more investment in projects that protect the oceans. Part one here, part two here.
🎙️Seriously dissects a world famous work of art, the 70-meters long Bayeux Tapestry that tells the story of the conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy in 1066. It’s both a piece of political propaganda and mystery that befuddles scholars to this day. We don’t exactly know who made it, though it was certainly women embroiderers, but whoever did left us clues in the margins that Abigail Youngman spends time trying to unlock. These women are sending us a message from beyond, and by scrutinizing their work (Abigail talks to an embroiderer who has an architecture degree) we can learn a little bit about them, something traditional history hasn’t let us do. (The women depicted in the tapestry are outnumbered by penises. Do what you will with that fun fact.) How these women viewed themselves, men, and violence can be found in the stitching. This was a fascinating history lesson that made me want to be a medievalologist. Paging Alie Ward. Listen here.
🎙️There has been much ink spilled and podcast space taken up by talk of Britney Spears as the abused pop star and her conservatorship. But can we talk about her music? On Switched on Pop, Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding are producing a four-part series on Britney Spears and the first episode gave me chills. They isolate her vocal tracks and talk about the way Britney expertly relies on vocal fry and a multitude of music genres to appeal to everyone, and why that strategy works. If you’re asking who Britney Spears is, you’re not going to get an answer. But Charlie and Nate are getting pretty close by examining the music that put her in the spotlight. Listen here.
🎙️Yuba County Five (which I discovered not via a pitch but because they followed me on Twitter) starts out perfectly setting the scene of the Yuba County California, where on February 24, 1978, five men with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions disappeared on the way home from a basketball game. You really have to understand Yuba, and these five men, to understand how strange their disappearance was, and how wildly it was misunderstood. In the 70s, we had a shamefully light understanding of people with disabilities, and so much of this story was written off as five disabled guys who got lost. The Mopac Audio team spent four years doing the work that should have been decades ago to find out if something darker may have taken place. And oh my god, I just listened to the most recent episode, and it certainly seems like it. Listen here.
🎙️I have been waiting for this one—Treefort Media and the Miami Herald’s Collapse: Disaster in Surfside has launched. It’s a 12-part series about the 2021 building collapse outside of Surfside, Florida that killed 98 people in a matter of minutes. Using interviews with survivors, witnesses, forensic engineers, first responders and journalists, and rarely heard 911 calls and police body camera recordings, Paul Beban is digging through the evidence we have to find out what and how it happened and how we can ensure it doesn’t happen again. It’s about so many interesting topics—people and a town and the media and architecture—that come together to bring us back to a tragedy in a way we can feel it in our bones. Listen here.
🎙️The BBC has released a new show, Putin, a biography of Vladimir Putin. Jonny Dymond takes us back to the beginning—Putin’s tough upbringing, his unremarkable career in the KGB (he almost became a taxi driver,) and how surprised everyone by rising to the top. As a Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Department, his secret was flying under the radar. In 1996, nobody knew who he was other than a loyal henchman who was good at keeping secrets and good at carrying papers from one desk to the other. In doing this, was blazing his own trail to turn Russia into the fully fledged authoritarian regime it is today. This is an important companion piece to all the Ukrain news podcasts you’re listening to. Listen here.
🎙️Radiolab’s episode on Helen Keller wasn’t just a great look at her complicated legacy, it was created in a way that Helen Keller would have been able to experience. They’ve released the episode in both podcast and digital braille formats. Deafblind writer Elsa Sjunnesson responds to the recent “Helen Keller isn’t real” viral meme on social media, which springboards the conversation into Helen Keller’s life and the fact that she once wrote in favor of refusing life-saving medical procedures to infants with severe mental impairments or physical deformities. Elsa explained how this squared with her, as someone who lived her life trying to buck all expectations of someone who is both blind and deaf. It’s a great history lesson and personal story that allows us to consider what Helen Keller means to the blind-deaf community. There are ghosts, surprises, a few tears, a bit of romance, some hard conversations, and a possibly psychic dog. Listen here.
🎙️Conner did it! For years on his show Dead Eyes his mission has been to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO mini-series, Band Of Brothers. (Hanks said he had “dead eyes.”) He’s been talking to people about rejection, others who were actually cast on Band of Brothers, and nearly everyone connected to the project—everyone except the man behind it all, Tom Hanks. Until now. On the newest episode, Connor tells in painful detail what it was like to be fired and insulted and how he’s kept it with him all these years, and Hanks explains what was going over on his end of the interaction by talking about coffee cups and telling a great story about Penny Marshall. (Hear a clip here.) If you haven’t listened to the show, listen to at least the first episode before you listen to this. It’s the strongest episode of the show and sets things up perfectly. The whole show is an ode to the way we blow-up criticism in our own minds, something we are all guilty of. Listen to the Tom Hanks thing here.
🎙️The Experiment dropped a story about Ukraine that explores the history that Putin is distorting in his Russian invasion, framing it around the story of Atlantic writer Franklin Foer (also the brother of Jonathan Safran Foer) who carries trauma from his grandmother Ethel Kaplan, a Holocaust survivor. The episode traces the gripping story of Ethel’s survival and takes us through how Franklin grew up believing the false “Nazification” story of Ukrainian people that Putin is pushing today. Franklin recounts meeting, for the first time, the Ukrainian family who saved his grandfather’s life, its descendants now living in Ukraine and under attack, and how it shifted his perspective of Ukrainian people. It’s cinematically told. Listen here.
🎙️Bridget Todd (There Are No Girls on the Internet) joined Jackie Johnson on Natch Beaut to talk about Bridget’s love of cheap Prosecco, her skincare routine, how she stays sane online, and how the beauty industry and the tech industry overlap. It’s more fun than I make it sound. On TANGOTI we learn so much from Bridget about online disinformation and the people shaping the internet from the margins (this week there was a great episode with data analyst and Bot Sentinel’s Christopher Bouzy about how bad actors and disinformers are causing internet chaos when it comes to the online discourse about the war in Ukraine,) but this was a really fun way to learn about who Bridget is has a human. (She says her favorite places on the internet are podcast Facebook communities. Learn more about this in Podcast Marketing Magic.) Listen here.
🎙️Cookie Passell (my mom) was a guest on Jim Harold’s Campfire Stories, where she tells a story that still scares the shit out of me, even after hearing it a million times. (I’m in it.) It’s the second story, around the 18 minute mark. Listen here.
🎙️On American Hysteria, Chelsey Weber-Smith gives us a comprehensive look at boy bands and the svengali (manipulators) lurking behind the curtains who have shaped them. By tracing the intersecting story lines of The Beatles, The Monkees, Boys to Men, New Kids on the Block, The Backstreet Boys, and NSYNC, we get a grim version of how these guys made it big. It’s Chelsey, so you can expect equal parts comedy and darkness, and you’ll be laughing and stomping and thrusting as the scales fall from your eyes. To quote the people who protested the all-woman remake of Ghostbusters, “this is ruining my childhood.” Listen here.
🎙️Sorry/not sorry for continuing to write about Wild Boys. The story is perfectly progressing from a WTF true-crime to a sad and troubling story of a boy with an untreated eating disorder. In the latest episode, Roen’s mom enters the chat, and we hear from her what was going through her mind as she tried to protect her son, and how Roen’s brother was supposedly trying to do the same. I’ve gone to loathing the bush boys to feeling for them to now almost wanting to pat them on the back for committing the perfect crime. The question posed in this episode is: why did they agree to be on TV when they knew it would expose them and put an end to their con? I guess even pulling off the perfect crime gets exhausting. Listen here.
🎙️On Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out, Mike usually works on improving jokes with his comedian guests. It’s always an exercise in seeing what makes funny brains tick. For a special episode, he talked to Lynn Shawcroft, the widow of Mitch Hedberg, and the two of them remember Mitch’s magic and how the person differed from the comic. They remind us all how incredible it is that he was able to write these short, bright, golden lines that kids today, who have no nostalgia for Mitch, parrot to each other today. (LOL if you remember the line “Quit tryin’ to act as if I am a steamboat operator.'”) Listen here.
🎙️Love Thy Neighbor has been nailing every second of every episode, but the latest one was something I thought that everyone should listen to, even if they aren’t interested in downloading the full series. (But after listening, they will be.) Collier takes us back to the day 30 years ago in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, when a car accident set off four days of unrest that left two people dead, dozens injured, and hundreds arrested. Collier explains in detail the chaos that ensued, the complicated battle between the Black and Jewish residents in Crown Heights, and how to even wrap your brain around the tragedy that pitted two marginalized communities against each other. Collier gives us the perfect history lesson to understand exactly why what happened happened, and how the story went on to be told in two completely different directions. Listen now.
🎙️I love you!