🤪18 Steps for Listening to More Podcasts 🤖Flash Forward's Rose Eveleth 🧠
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
Start listening during your free time, when you cook and clean.
Start listening at 1.2x.
Start listening when you workout!
Listen while you are at the grocery store. You don’t need to listen/talk to the cashier or anyone you encounter.
Start listening at 1.4x.
Turn on easy-listening shows while you fall asleep.
Listen while your husband watches WATCHMEN for the fifth time.
Start listening at 1.6x.
Wake up at 3am every night and listen to a show on 1.7x while you get the coffee maker ready for tomorrow morning. At this point, you are really packing in a lot of podcast into a short amount of time.
Listen during Zoom calls. There are way too many people on those things anyway, and if you have your headphones in they will think you are listening to the conversation. If someone asks you something, perhaps say “how does that make you feel?” ???
Start listening at 1.8x.
Stop going to Zoom meetings all together, including those scheduled with your friends and family. More pod time!
Stop going to social distance outings. Instead collapse on your couch and blast the AC while you binge Mob Queens. Tell your husband to inform your friends that you are too stressed about COVID to leave your home. It is impossible to get mad at someone for doing this.
Start listening at 2x.
Listen during dinner. Tell your husband if he wants to tell you something important he can text you.
Is your job getting in the way of your podcast listening? Maybe you should quit and take up a data entry job where you don’t have to concentrate and can instead listen to podcasts.
Start listening at 3x.
Make sure you are doing steps 1-17 every day. Do not skip one.
Congratulations. You are now listening to a lot of podcasts.
xoxo lp
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Flash Forward’s Rose Eveleth
Rose Eveleth is the host of Flash Forward and Advice For and From the Future. She also has a newsletter about podcasts, Bucket of Eels. Subscribe here. Follow Rose on Twitter here. Follow Flash Forward on Twitter here. Follow Advice For and From the Future here. Photo courtesy of Eler de Grey
Kindly introduce yourself and tell us what you do!
I’m Rose Eveleth, and I’m the “chief futurologist” (a title I just made up) at Flash Forward Presents. I’m the creator and host of Flash Forward and the brand new Advice for and from the Future, and my goal is to help demystify the future. You know when you see a headline like “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg clash over the future of artificial intelligence” and you’re like “what the fuck does that even mean?” I’m here to help you understand, to ask the right questions about the future, and ultimately to find the places that you can get to work to make the future better.
How much time goes into each episode of Flash Forward?
Each episode takes me about 50-70 hours total, from conception through research, booking, interviewing, scripting, editing, all that.
Why don't you think more people don't mix fiction and nonfiction into one?
I think it’s rare because it’s hard to do and requires a pretty specific skillset. Journalists are (rightfully!) very wary of accidentally spreading misinformation and fiction producers don’t generally have the experience in reporting to make it work. It’s hard to blend the two in a way that feels satisfying while also not being misleading. I happen to have this unusual set of skills that positions me in this unique place where I feel confident that I can leverage the power of both to build something greater than the sum of the respective parts.
What's your goal for every episode of Flash Forward?
The overall goal of the show is twofold: unpack where the future comes from, and explain to you where you can get involved to shape it. Contrary to what many technologists, corporations and politicians would have you believe, the future isn’t set. It hasn’t happened yet! You and I really can make a difference if we decide to. And so the show really tries to help you understand how we got to today, the powers that shaped what we think the future could and should be, and how you can influence that future.
Women podcasters are constantly criticized for their voices. What is your relationship to yours? How would you describe your voice?
You know, maybe I’m an ego maniac but I’ve just never been self conscious about my voice. Early on I got an iTunes review of the show that said that my voice was so awful that it made the reviewer want to vomit and I just found it funny. I know that for some people these critiques really sting but for me they’re just funny. (There are other kinds of criticism that really does get to me.) It’s not that I think I have an amazing voice, but it’s mine, and there’s really nothing I can do to change it, and I think it’s just fine as it is. I think that my voice is me, it conveys my energy and enthusiasm, and if that bothers you then there are approximately eighty thousand shows hosted by men who sound bored with themselves that you can go listen to.
I always ask podcasters what show they would start if they could do anything, without worrying about logistics or whether or not anyone would listen. You kind of address this in your newsletter! Can you share some of the best ideas you've ever stumbled upon that have yet to be made?
Oh this is such a good question. I LOVE coming up with podcast ideas (hence my newsletter, Podcast Idea) and I wish people would stop saying “ugh there are too many podcasts.” More podcasts! Especially from folks who don’t normally get investments from podcasting funders! A few of my favorite ideas from Podcast Idea, that I genuinely would love to produce are Flipped, Not Dead Yet, and Fact Holes.
Why did you start Advice For and From the Future?
I give a lot of talks about the future, along with making Flash Forward and writing for places like WIRED and VICE and other publications that don't have ALL CAPS names. And since I'm out there in the world as a journalist/futurologist who seems approachable to people, I get a lot of questions from folks that really are asking for advice: should I have a kid? Can I ask my friend to turn off her Alexa device when I go to her house? Should I cryopreserve my dog? Flash Forward isn't really set up to answer a lot of those questions, and I always tried to respond with advice when I could, but I thought it would be fun and hopefully useful to create something that answered questions publicly. The show is a bit weirder than Flash Forward and will let me go in directions I can't with the original show, so I'm excited!
If you could write one rule for all podcasters to follow, what would it be?
Stop worrying about your microphone and spend more time thinking about your content. I get a lot of emails from folks who want to start podcasts, and 75% of the time they ask me about mics and setup. That stuff matters to a point, but you should really think about what your actual show is first. What can you make regularly? Is it already out there? What is special about your show? Why should anybody listen? Do you have 10 episodes gamed out? I really wish people starting out would think more about that stuff than whether they have the right mic or not, because really, if your actual show is amazing listeners will care way less about the sound quality. Early episodes of Welcome to Night Vale were recorded on a cheap Yeti. Early episodes of Flash Forward were recorded on a really cheap Edirol mic I went in on with a friend to afford to buy. Content matters more than clean audio.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Imaginary Advice is one of the most inventive shows I’ve ever heard, breaking the mold for what a podcast “should be.” Ross Sutherland is a masterful storyteller and audio wizard, and lets his own imagination be the leader of his content. Without setting rules for himself, he is able to produce the absolute best stories. I listened to part one of Sex and the City: The Return more than a month ago and was so excited to listen to part two I thought I was going to faint. I then completely forgot about it, and when I saw that part two was released, I immediately passed away once again. I then listened to part one all over again, then part two, then became incredibly sad that it was all over. It’s a whirl-wind story about a fictional character getting entrenched in a vast immersive theatre show that is part Sex and the City, part Sleep No More. It's for anyone who feels like hearing a comical adventure story set within a beyond-bizarre world, but it’s especially for people like me who recognize the brilliant Sex and the City references. They’re funny but intelligent. I was laughing but at the same time fully aware that Ross actually had something important to say about the show and how sharp it actually was. I have no idea how Ross thought of all of the SATC details. I wrote to him and asked, and hopefully I will have an interview with him soon. Truly, throw away the rest of this newsletter and listen to this ASAP. (But not really.)
💎BTW💎
🎙️Outside/In’s Ginko Love is an episode that readdresses an older Outside/In episode from 2016 about ginkos. The producers recently listened to it and found that they were horrified in the way they talked about it, and bring Felix Poon on to talk about how their insensitive reporting impacted him. So it’s a bold story about journalism and fixing the past, but also an amazing story about ginkos. My eyes were widening more and more as this episode progressed, to the point where I felt like my eyelids were going to peel back behind my skull.
🎙️Another kind of meta story was this episode of Boom/Bust, which talks about the return of HQ Trivia, and the attempts of host Scott Rogowsky to capitalize on the media coverage of the Boom/Bust podcast. It’s the last episode in this series, I recommend listening to the whole thing.
🎙️I was trying to convince my husband, who loves hip-hop, to listen to This is Not a Drake Podcast, and the only thing I could think of to say was, “but really, it’s not a Drake podcast!” It’s framed around Drake, but touches upon the hip-hop scene in Toronto, mix tapes, and my favorite episode, the most recent one, feminism and hip-hop. The Rise of the Nice Guy Rapper wonders if Drake is a nice guy, and how the trope of the nice guy in rap is pretty exploitative. I don’t know why everyone isn’t listening to this show. It is truly not a Drake podcast.
🎙️There are a few mysteries brewing beneath the story of Isadore Banks, a farmer who was lynched in Arkansas in the 1950’s basically for being a Black man with money, power, and land. And by investigating Isadore’s murder for Unfinished: Deep South, journalists Taylor Hom and Neil Shea are able to tell an important American story that touches upon the history of the Delta and Black prosperity, white power, police corruption, seeing the past differently, erasure, and really just…a touching story about an man, who did pretty extraordinary things and sounded beloved. Listen to episode one here, there is a fantastic interview with Isadore’s granddaughter. She sounds so proud of him, and angry. Ready for the justice her family deserves. And all I will tell you about the second episode is that in the first few minutes I literally said aloud OH HELL NO.
🎙️Heaven Bent dropped its last episode, and it was a wonderful finale. How do you end a show about unprovable faith? You could just drop the mic, having been satisfied that you told an excellent story, and Heaven Bent did that. You could assert your skepticism, because skepticism is cool. But in The Gold Teeth, host Tara Jean Stevens pulls an open-hearted summary that made me want to listen to the series all over again. Tara is the perfect person to tell this story, because she once had faith of the people she interviewed. She can remember having that faith. We aren’t left to judge the people in this story, we are left to wonder what it is like to have faith, believe that they do, and try to understand faith’s impact on our lives.
🎙️I started listening to Plant Crimes, a true-crime show where the subject is plants (and Rose’s suggestion above) and it’s brilliant. I feel like there is a strong crossover of people who love true crime and also love plants. Am I wrong? Why would this be? Maybe because true-crime fans obsess over details of crimes, and would be equally obsessed over scientific detail of growing plants. In both genres, if you’re one millionth of a millimeter off, you could miss the whole thing. Part science, part horror, Plant Crimes offers a twisty, fun way to learn about science. Just read through the episode titles—How a Botanist Nearly Solved the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping, Miley Cyrus Versus the Joshua Tree, and the first one I listened to, The Alaskan Killer Plant Mystery…these are stories that aren’t being told anywhere else! To be completely honest, true-crime is not my favorite, and I am not even a plant fan, but I still love this show. Maybe the two cancel each other out.
🎙️You’re Wrong About released an excellent episode about Courtney Love, which fleshes out the back story of the woman who we have painted with such dirty colors. Sarah and Michael, unlike most people covering Courtney’s story, focus on the forces that were working against her, all the while honestly exploring her faults. Courtney is a complicated person, but this episode delivers the story I think she deserves we all hear about her.
🎙️Welcome to LA’s Friday Night, The Kingdom of Time felt like a bunch of tiny beautiful stories happening all at once. What used to happen on a Friday night, pre-COVID-19? This piece feels like it takes place on one Friday night in LA, going to a prom, a bar, interviewing a window washer…each vignette shining light on different people in a way that elevates their humanity, their differences, and their sameness.
🎙️Welcome to LA’s collab episode with Richard’s Famous Foods was one of the most inventive things I’ve listened to…ever? There is not a single millisecond of wasted space, each moment is somewhat of a brain tickle. David Weinberg and Richard Parks III take a maniacal car ride around LA, with Wolfgang Puck in the backseat, and the three explore the city via celebrity and food. It’s a side-splitting fever dream that feels like a mix of live action and animation for your ears. This is a podcast episode you can see in full-color cartoon.
🎙️Reveal has finally launched its series American Rehab, which focuses on a rehab at a place called Cenikor, which was a huge deal when it started in the 50s, even though it was really turning its members into an unpaid labor force. Cenikor rages on today, and American Rehab interviews a woman who sent her brother there and found it harder to get him out than it was to actually cure his addiction. This is one of those “how did I not know about this?” stories.
🎙️If you haven’t gotten into improv comedy podcasts yet, The Neighborhood Listen might be a great way in. It has real structure, which might be something you might feel like you need if you’ve been hesitant to embrace improv shows in the past. Paul F. Tompkins and Nicole Parker explore their hometown of Dignity Falls via posts from a neighborhood social networking app. So the show starts with posts from the neighborhood, then unravels into zany improv that explores the characters involved. Paul F. Tompkins is undeniably hilarious, and The Neighborhood Listen is a show that sets him up for success. The episodes I listened to provided me with an hour or so of pure comedy, the kind that improves my day and makes me a little happier to be alive.
🎙️I recently discovered Immmigrantly, a collection of Immigrant stories, and it’s truly a gem. There isn’t a single mediocre episode in the bunch, but I especially enjoyed Raise Your Hand if You’re a Racist. Regina Jackson and Saira Rao talk about their project Race2Dinner, a dinner party that white women hire them to throw to talk through their own racism. It’s radical and pushes boundaries, and if you aren’t able to have dinner with Regina and Saira, the next best thing is getting to listen to them talk on Immmigrantly.
🎙️Latino USA’s I’m Not Dead tells the story of Miguel Angel Villavicencio, who in the 80s decided to work for Bolivia’s most powerful drug cartel in order to fund his musical career. This decision puts him on a long path of self-destruction—it’s one terrible incident after the other. We get to hear the story from Miguel and his family, which allows us to empathize with Miguel and the difficult, terrible decisions he had to make. He was wronged and betrayed by so many, including our own witness protection program. (I learned a lot about what to do/not do if I ever need to go into witness protection.) But he manages to cling to his dreams of becoming a singer, and find hope in his faith, despite all of the hardships (like becoming paralyzed) he endured to get there.
🎙️Rachael O’Brien is the host of Be Here For A While, which I love because Rachael is such a gentle, natural interviewer—it’s always clear she is invested in the stories she is telling. Her new show, Seven Deadly Sinners, is way different, a storytelling show about sinners. Season one uncovers the seven deadly sins of preachers, and it starts out with a gruesome villain, Warren Jeffs. I learned a lot about Warren, and Rachael’s treatment of him in this framing (the sin of this episode is lust) forces the story into a completely unique direction. And despite the horrifying details of the story, Rachel’s storytelling style is casual and she feels like a friend delivering the bad news. It doesn’t feel like she is reporting about something from afar. We think we know Warren, but have we broken down his sins? Is lust even the right word to describe his heinous deeds? I don’t usually get bothered by sensitive material, but this was rough to listen to. But a good one if you want a new take on true-crime.
🎙️This episode of Snap Judgment, Chasing Thunder, was such a wild ride. Peter Hammarstedt is the leader of a vigilante group called the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which is like a band of pirates who hunts down poachers. This story in particular is about Hammarstedt’s crew aboard the Bob Barker which spent 110 days spanning 10,000 miles in frigid Antacrtic waters, trying to take down the Thunder, one of the most-wanted poacher ships. (The Thunder was illegally using gillnets to capture tons of toothfish, also known as Chilean sea bass.) It’s a riveting, jaw-dropping story that was so well-told I felt like I was watching it happen from a ship floating several hundred yards away. (And I kept thinking, I can’t believe what I am watching happen.) Spoiler alert: only one ship makes it home. This episode also sent me on a deep dive Google search of toothfish, and oh my god.
🎙️Here’s another crime show for you if you think you don’t like true-crime: Criminal, Phoebe Judge’s beautiful storytelling podcasts which just so happens to always be about criminals. (Although in this case, the protagonist of the episode, Julian Betton, is the victim, and the police are the villains.) Knock and Announce is an aggravating story that’s important to hear right now, which interviews Julian Betton, who was shot 9 times by 10 officers for $100 of weed, without knocking and announcing their arrival. (They actually unloaded 57 bullets on Julian. Six weeks after the incident, Julian woke up from a coma, paralyzed.) You get to hear audio of police lying through their teeth (they actually refer to Julian as “the bad guy,”) Julian’s completely opposite account of events, and Phoebe’s painful interview with Julian. I mean, what do you say to someone who has been through this? I was holding my breath the whole way through this story.
🎙️I loved this little episode of Cautionary Tales, The Village of Heroes, which takes us to the English village of Eyam during the plague in the 1600s. Eyam was devastated by the plague, but records indicate that the people self-quarantined themselves so as not to infect neighboring towns, which were delivering food to them in an effort to support their self-quarantine. The people of Eyam are considered heroes, and host Tim Harford draws comparisons to our current pandemic, when people are unwilling to make the smallest sacrifices in the name of public health. He also mentions that later, it was discovered that there was a security team guarding the border of Eyam, which makes us wonder if this is a true story of a fable about what we wish had happened. If the people of Eyam were committed to self-quarantine, why was there a need for guards? This is a multi-layered story that’s interesting for so many reasons.
🎙️If you like shows like The Dropout, The Gateway, or Heaven’s Gate, unbelievable crime stories about cult leaders who take advantage of normal people in the name of saving them, you’ll love Guru. (I do.) It tells the story of James Arthur Ray (Oprah-endorsed self-help teacher) who ran a very fucked up self-help retreat in 2009 that killed 3 people and hospitalized many more. This is one of those stories that I kind of know, but really loving hearing the details get filled in. A story this tragic and strange leaves people with many unanswered questions, and I think that’s why this show will be a hit. We’re all hoping to hear any new things the host has hopefully unearthed, and want to listen really hard to figure out what happened, on our own. Because we all want to be Nancy Drew. (I think at the beginning of this newsletter I said I don’t love true crime, but there is no way to fact-check that so I’m moving on.)
🎙️Robert Evans’s Behind the Police tackles the history of police violence. It’s a great show, because it actually disproves a lot of common myths that are floating around in the whole “defund the police” conversation. (On How The Police Declared War On All Of Us, Robert talks about how it’s not really a lack of police education that is the problem, and that the more education police have, the more dangerous they are.) How Police Unions Made Cops Even Deadlier dives deep into the history of police unions, why they don’t make sense, and makes the bold claim that the police haven’t just always been corrupt, they essentially invented corruption. This is heavy, sad, troubling stuff, and I have no idea how Robert Evans is able to present it in a way that makes me laugh aloud, but he does.
🎙️The Sporkful’s Writer Kiese Laymon Wants To Be Heavy talks about Kiese’s weight loss memoir, which ended up being very different than he originally envisioned. The conversation he has with Dan Pashman is about black bodies, shame, eating disorders, and telling the truth. The book was written to Kiese’s mother, and it sounds like a unique, beautiful story.
🎙️A few months ago, Nick van der Kolk (Love + Radio) tweeted: "If I were @annasale, I'd be asking my listeners how they're coping with a lack of physical touch in their lives." And Anna listened! With a two-part series on Death, Sex & Money about Skin Hunger, or the longing for physical touch, which during quarantine, isn’t something we are all granted. By interviewing a spectrum of people, we hear about a kind of unspoken pain that COVID has thrust upon us. Not necessarily sex or companionship, but simply the ability to touch another human. What does human touch do for us? Have we been taking it for grated? Follow up with this interview with Julia Bainbridge (The Lonely Hour) speaking about it on Telescope. (Get a sneak peek here.)
🎙️One of my girl crushes, Shawna Potter, (also a Tink client) was on Reply Guys, talking about why we must stand up to street harassment, and not just being a feminist, but doing the work, in no matter what job you do. This conversation was recorded before the death of George Floyd, but it’s more relevant than ever. Shawna talks about bystander intervention, and how white people can use their privilege to de-escalate unfair encounters against people of color so that nobody has to call the cops, since calling the cops almost never makes things better. Even during the time of COVID, when we need to be careful about our spaces and social distancing.
🎙️Kerning Cultures released an episode, Outcast, about how women feel excluded in certain places because of hijab, and how people perceive veiled women. This story totally changed my perspective on veiling, in the sense that it made me think I don’t even really deserve to have an opinion at all. To veil or not to veil is such a personal decision that causes so many people to be attacked. For the first time I saw hijab as not just a personal choice but a radical, feminist statement that women exercise when choosing to veil.
🎙️In the same way that we try to silence women by telling them not to be veiled, we use language to silence people about their own identities. In Survival: Bequest, Helen Zaltzman takes us to New Zealand to discover how colonization caused Europeans to force upon the Māori people the idea of cisgender monogamous heterosexuality that was foreign to them. Helen goes through the history of Māori language to discover the sexuality of a tribe that was systematically erased when Europeans came to New Zealand.
🎙️Shortcuts has looped together three beautiful, random audio stories for an episode called Remix. The third vignette is one of my favorite things I’ve listened to in a long time, by Arlie Adlington, a melodic ode to the anxiety-ridden feelings trans people experience when using public bathrooms.
🎙️I love you!