🚝 Mono-doh! 🚲 just ride ✏️ kilts ⛪️ $ister$ 🚂 choo-choo 👦 lost boys🗺️
🍭 👂we're going to need a bigger boat 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday June 16, 2025. In case this newsletter is too long, here’s something for the person who loves going into rabbit holes, here’s a dishy New Yorky and scandalous business story, I’m texting this to my friends but not for a good reason.
xoxo
lauren
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
For the first episode that’s been on the Cracked feed since the year 2020, you’ll find a new fast-paced, game and trivia-filled show from Michael Swaim, The Simpsons Taught Me Everything, which is taking each episode of The Simpsons as an invitation to go deeeeeep down a cultural rabbit hole. (The last episode on the feed, which I used to listen to religiously obsessively and over and over again when there were hardly any podcasts and actually, I still listen to old eps but they are HARD TO FIND and NOT ON THIS FEED anymore.) It’s perfect for the Simpsons-obsessed, but also just a tool that Michael is using to explore his curiosities about history, pop culture, humor, philosophy, and the world. It’s like…we all know The Simpsons is educational. (And often eerily prescient.) But exactly how much can we educe if we give the episodes a good squeeze? He’s starting out with a month-long series dedicated to the Monorail episode, which right off the bat gets us into the philosophy of The Music Man and how good intentions often go, for lack of better words, off the rails, old timey jokes (many of which have something to do with men seeing women' s panties,) the rise of car culture, and the history of the great depression and the traveling salesman. At the end of each episode Michael lets his guest choose between two paths…answering a fast-paced, easy set of quiz questions or one big thoughtful one. One of them is: what’s the combination of the Simpsons’ children’s ages times the age of Hans Moleman, divided by Homer’s weight before he decided to get gastric bypass? How I discovered it: Michael was on The Daily Zeitgeist and talked about it and I spent wayyyy too long looking for it because he did not indicate it was on the old Cracked feed, giving only the IG profile account, which at the time of this publication does not provide a link. I’m telling you this to remind you to make your podcast easy to find, so easy, easier than you think. Ask a random person on the street if they can find it. Most people would have given up before I did.
notes
✨What podcast episode has had an impact in your life or changed your outlook on life? via Reddit (this is so nice)
✨Arielle spotlighted Audio Maverick in EarBuds.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Jamie Feldman is a writer & producer who accidentally became a TikToker after being laid off from her longtime job at Huffpost in 2021. Before talking to the internet about debt and money, she overshared about basically everything else – both in real life and online.
Rachel Webster is a writer, documentary director, and multidisciplinary story editor known for her contributions to eclectic genre-busting film and video projects. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two kids, who Jamie helped raise.
They make Debt Heads, one of my favorite shows. Sign up for the newwwwsletter. Do it!!!
Describe Debt Heads in 10 words or less.
True crime investigation into the murder of our bank accounts.
You will like Debt Heads if you like…
having fun / sticking it to the man / $5 margaritas / dancing in the street / bottled and boxed wine / silliness / true crime without the murders / sarcasm / crying till you laugh / laughing til you cry / strong opinions, loosely held
How’d you two get connected?
Rachel needed a babysitter. Jamie needed a job. We fell in love, the rest is history.
How are you two different and how are you the same?
RW: We probably share a brain. We have the exact same sense of humor and politics. We like to eat the same food and drink the same drinks. We think life is pointless without humor, community, equity, empathy, time spent in nature, and being surrounded by (too much) food and wine. We also love to write.
JF: Our differences have helped us grow as friends and creative partners. Rachel is definitely more of a self-starter than I am, and she has helped me take myself and my work more seriously. I on the other hand am more comfortable self-promoting and schmoozing, which has pushed Rachel out of her comfort zone. She would never have considered being public facing two years ago. I forced her into the spotlight.
What inspired the sound and style of this show?
RW: I am a film editor so the style of Debt Heads is entirely influenced by my work in film. I have been working at the intersection of documentary, narrative, music video and comedy for 20 years. The show’s tone comes from that, and of course our actual friendship dynamic and combined sense of humor and rhythm.
Jamie…why were you (and so many other people) so comfortable sharing, like, everything about yourself online but were hesitant to talk about your own friend about money?
Let me consult my therapist! There is a disconnect between what I logically knew, which is that credit card debt is pervasive in the US, and what I felt, which is that I had failed at money. Money is one of those things we’re just supposed to know. Unfortunately in our culture, it also represents our feelings of safety and security. And I had deep wounds and fears around my sense of safety, and shame around my money ignorance. I was so disconnected from the origins of this shame and fear, that I could compartmentalize my dysfunctional relationship with money and continue to be delusionally confident in every other way.
What was the eureka! moment where you were like, oh this is a podcast?
JF: We joke that Rachel has slowly radicalized me over the years, but the truth is that she has been thinking about our dysfunctional economy for much longer than I have. I didn’t mean to become a debt “influencer”, but once I started getting some attention for talking about it publicly, a few people suggested that I think about making a personal finance podcast. At that point I’d been making videos and putting myself in front of the camera for a long time, but I knew I had no business offering personal finance advice – and I didn’t want to.
RW: I’m really grateful to the people who suggested Jamie make a podcast, because it’s what got me to imagine how something like Debt Heads could work. It was definitely a eureka moment when I thought: Instead of talking about personal finance, we can make a podcast investigating why there is a thing called personal finance in the first place, because I don’t believe finance is personal. I could hear what it would sound like immediately and then we launched into a brainstorm. We have the original sketches of the idea on our studio wall from that very first day, and they are still very much our thesis.
How is the show different than you thought it’d be when you started?
At first, we thought we’d pitch the idea to somebody who would take it and run. We made a trailer and a TWENTY SEVEN page deck. LOL. God bless anyone who even looked at that thing.
But the tone and writing and thesis has been there from the beginning. The entire process has just been a lot longer with more stops and starts and surprises than we thought it would be. In hindsight, DUH!
What’s something you learned about yourself making it?
JF: This has been years in the making, but I have really learned to take myself and my work seriously. I spent many years not really believing that my work was worth committing to. I did not believe that staying home to write was enough of a reason to decline a social engagement (hence my debt) and I was surrounded by people who reinforced that feeling. I am much more committed to getting it right now and believing that I’m worth investing time and effort in.
RW: Putting myself out there was not as scary as I thought. The world needs us to be brave and share our ideas. I’ve always known that we are stronger together, but actually putting that idea into the world has made me feel stronger than I ever imagined.
If I gave you $500 right now what would you do with it and how is the answer to that question different than it would have been if I asked you before you made the podcast?
We would probably use it to submit our show for a few of the pricey podcast award opportunities that we didn’t realize cost money 🙃
If you had 100K to spend on the show, how would you spend it?
When we were pitching our pilot, everyone told us that our podcast was really good, but the subject was too boring and depressing, and the style was too expensive. But we’ve made this whole thing work with just the two of us working nights and weekends, and during long stretches of unemployment. Our $20k grant paid for materials and contractors. If we got $100k we’d consider paying ourselves for the first time, but … we’d probably just use it to make more ideas come to fruition.
⭐️Podcast Tink Loves: LEAD⭐️
After a routine check-up reveals elevated lead levels in her nine-month-old son, Shannon sets out on a quest to find the source of the exposure and keep her son safe. Finding herself powerless against the devastation lead is wreaking on her son’s body and brain, Shannon goes back to school to obtain a nursing degree. Armed with knowledge, science, and everyday angels, the family begins to unravel the mystery. True recovery and healing begin when mother and son discover the power in sharing their story, working together, and advocating to end this perfectly preventable disease.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
👂Jessica Rothschild made something last year that I loved so, so much—Finding Fire Island. And now she has something new and just as New Yorky. Cult of Body & Soul is telling the story of SoulCycle, something that I didn’t think would interest me for some reason. (This is despite the fact that I was living on West 70th Street, blocks away from the first SoulCycle, months after it opened, and can remember the PRESENCE of it. I can remember rolling my eyes at people taking cabs, this was before Uber, to their cycling classes before work.) In fact I might not have listened if I hadn’t liked Finding Fire Island so much. But I had no idea how dishy this story was. And so New York City, and so early 2000s. Jessica is talking to instructors, studio managers, front desk staff, and corporate insiders who built the bones of this cult that was plagued with so many of the things that too fast-growing companies are plagued with—fighting and pettines, poor leadership, crashing of servers, the blurring of ethics and waste of money, sex and cheating scandals with married riders, an acquisition and a hurricane and a political scandal. That’s a lot, and there is still one episode left. This isn’t a story of a business fail, it’s a soap opera. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Jess was interviewed on a queer podcast I listen to and mentioned it.
👂For Liberty Lost, TJ Raphael is reporting on the “Godparent Home” at Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s evangelical Christian university,) where expecting girls between 12 and 21 are locked inside during their pregnancies to hide, avoid shame, and I guess atone for sins. I’ve heard of this happening in like, the 40s? The Godparent Home is worse and it’s not just because you’d have hoped we’d have evolved past the baby scoop era. It’s more evil. The girls are strongly urged to place their babies in homes with adoptive parents, and they’re rewarded with a full scholarship to Liberty U if they do it. WHO R U LIBERY U, URSULA? (If you get that “joke” please know I love you.) Anyway, TJ is talking to young women and their partners who have emerged from this program. Pick something about this story, there is something for you to get mad about. It’s one of those stories. I think at the end of the day I get the most mad about how Un-Christian this is! Jesus would never, how daaaaaaare they. These stories are heart-wrenching and we can hear it in the voices of Abbi and Nathan, a young couple who were in love, raised so religiously they were told not to even kiss, and then completely manipulated into separating, Abbi going to the Godparent Home, and placing their baby with a “more deserving” family. There is a tone of evil in this show, an evil presence. I imagine all of the crazy adults (so far there have been only a few sane ones) like Rohald Dahl’s witches in The Witches. This show is well written, full of good descriptions and really emotional interviews. I wish it were dystopia. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Press release
👂Did you know you have to pay off your debt before you get to be a nun or a priest? On This is Uncomfortable, Reema Khrais talked to Claudette Powell, a woman who spent years joining the priesthood and what it meant for her finances, and her financial fears about the future. I didn’t know the thing about clearing debt and I also didn’t realize how thinly covenants are protected. Even entering this world that is supposedly above material things, mobey is a huge worry. If funding doesn’t go through, these women won’t have health insurance. And they have given up everything to enter this community, so they will have nowhere to fall. Like all TIA episodes the money piece was fascinating, this could have been a series. It makes you think about poverty, put simply by Claudette, “buy little and take very good care of it.” (Why is that comforting???) But it’s also just interesting to hear what goes into becoming a nun. I studied the life of the historical Jesus for years and really thought about becoming a nun. (A very old nun who wanted me to take her place was borderline stalking me in 2007, but that’s another long story.) Thank the GOD I questionably am not sure I believe in anymore that I didn’t do that. Part of the allure was always feeling safe, these women are not safe. Turns out Claudette felt like everyone was singing the “How do you solve a problem like Maria” song the whole time she was in training, except about her. She was too loud, too this and too that. Jesus christ, I wound’t have lasted a day. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber
👂I missed Hunting Warhead when it was released in 2019 and even though I have heard great things about it (it pops up in podcast Reddit alllllll the time and it’s coming BACK later this year!) I avoided it, not so much for the disturbing factor but because the title Hunting Warhead sounds like something that’s going to stab me in the face. I actually think it’s important to make and listen to this kind of stuff because as pointed out in one of my favorite This American Life episodes “Tarred and Feathered,” avoiding it with a ten foot pole just makes it worse because it means we aren’t researching it or trying to help pedophiles overcome their desires. Nobody wants to make this stuff or talk about this stuff so this stuff doesn’t get made. Looking back I wish I had listened before I had a daughter, though I’m not sure it would have made a difference. Hunting Warhead is stomach-churning for all. Host Daemon Fairless tells the story of the international investigation into a massive pedophile site on the dark web, talking to the group of people who infiltrated it, people who covered the story, people who were impacted, a bunch of experts, Benjamin’s ex girlfriend who he was probably just dating so he could get a job in a PD sex crime unit, his family and even Benjamin Faulkner, AKA Hunting Warhead himself, from jail, where he will remain for the rest of his life. Daemon does a good job explaining why this is so hard and scary to investigate, the complicated ethics that are involved when police are inside these rings. The details he captures are incredible. There is a moment of a mother describing seeing pornographic photos that were taken in her own home, of her own children. Someone mentions that when they think about Benjamin they can only think of one thing—his forehead and eyes, because he was always on his laptop. Maybe because so much of this show is too awful to really imagine, it’s moments like that that stuck with we most. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I’ve seen it everywhere
👂Radiolab threw a “Week of Sharks” party last week (we’re calling it that for legal reasons,) the week that JAWS celebrated its 50th anniversary. We’re introduced to the series with an interview with a guy who was almost killed by a shark, he should be dead right now, and worked on the JAWS film but always hated how JAWS portrayed sharks in a negative light. After all he went through, he still loved them and wasn’t afraid. So then why are we? This sets up the series to explore all sorts of facets of the shark, from sharks you should know (full of so many interesting facts! Did you know sharks are older than the rings of Saturn and more than twice as old as dinosaurs—think about what they’ve had to do to survive!,) and how sharks, the things we are SURE are going to kill us, might just save us by helping us find a cure for cancer. The series goes full circle, ending with a story about sweet little baby sharks that urges us to think of sharks as creatures just as gentle as butterflies. Maybe one day kids will collect them, too, and watch them grow before releasing them to nature. Start here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber
👂Diabolical Lies did a thorough investigation into SkinnyTok through the lens of Liv Schmidt, a content creator being accused of promoting eating disorders,mthat did not go where I thought it would. Liv Schmidt is a problem and her social media accounts get banned all the time, but this discourse reveals the much larger problem lurking behind her and all of the inconsistencies and backwardness of what happens when diet culture and the internet clash. Liv is being banned by platforms that benefit from her message. (“If not for women’s insecurities, Mark Zuckerberg would be homeless.”) And Liv is open about what other influencers hide—the fact that she just doesn’t eat. The tricky thing is that Liv is right about some stuff. Her getting deplatformed for doing what everyone else is doing (what technically Meta should consider the Lord’s work) because of the way she is saying it is hypocritical. And skinny women are more likely to be valued so following her advice is in a way technically empowering. This academic, rigorous, trippy conversation starts to unravel everything you think you know and believe about this kind of shit. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber and Patreon supporter
👂Avery Trufelman popped back on the Articles of Interest feed for a history of school uniforms and how they shaped the American educational system that had me taking soooo many notes. Yes, it’s a story about uniforms (something I had to wear when I was 15 through 18,) but also a story about Catholicism (something I am,) where uniforms found their footing. Avery takes us through the history of public schools and explains the tiny twists of events that made uniforms survive all these years looking basically unchanged. I mean, the Catholic school uniforms I see at the playground aren’t that different from the uniforms I had to wear in high school*, or even the uniforms that kids rocked in the 50s. (Although Avery takes us back to uniform fashion much earlier than that.) We put kids in uniforms to prepare them for the priesthood, make them better Americans, set them apart, and to fight communism. So do we still need them now? It’s fascinating to see how they still serve a purpose but for totally different reasons. Avery brings it home at the end to talk about how school uniforms can be “laboratories for speaking up,” giving kids something to rebel against.** Listen here.
*I identified with the woman at the beginning to taught herself to rebel within her school uniform—I had my kilt tailored to be way too short and paired it with a boy’s tie or a sexy black shirt, big black combat boots, a loose motorcycle belt, and a dog collar—things technically against the rules that nobody could do anything about.
**I think the fact that I was voted “rebel with a cause” “rebel without a cause” and “eternal kindergartener” my senior year can be attributed to my uniform adjustments.
How I discovered it: Subscriber
👂Andreea Coscai was just telling me how much she missed Lizzy Cooperman’s In Your Hands, one of my favorite shows of all time, that was so good partly due to the fact it was completely ridiculous and unsustainable to keep making and nearly ruined Lizzy’s life. (It almost led her to being set on fire and it did led her to working at Victoria’s Secret for six months.) I could not agree more so was thrilled to see her on Podcast But Outside, a show where Andrew and a guest (his previous cohost Cole stepped down) set up shop in public and give a dollar to anyone who will talk to them about anything. It’s a little Beautiful / Anonymous and a little Strangers on a Bench but wayyyyy more chaotic and lively. In this installment Andrew and Lizzy are at the Fullerton Metrolink Station in Fullerton, CA, and meet, amongst others, an eccentric guy named George who is at first hesitant to talk to them but then won’t really go away. (Podcast But Outside is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get, it’s an interesting study of people.) Andrew and Lizzy are so funny they make every conversation worth hearing. This is also a recommendation for Lizzy Cooperman’s In Your Hands, if you have not yet listened go directly to episode one, do not pass go. Lizzy we miss you! Listen to Podcast But Outside here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber
👂We need to talk about Lost Boys, Scott Galloway and Anthony Scaramucci’s podcast about the plight of young men, the podcast that I technically am texting to my friends but not for good reasons. I love talking about it to smart people, even though it can’t be good for my blood pressure. This show is enraging. Every time I talk to someone smart about it they usually point out something WILD that one of the hosts said that I missed. It’s really a firehose situation going on, here. I can’t even catch it all. I like Scott Galloway, I think he’s smart and he says things that are technically true (men aren’t going to college as much! girls are kicking ass!) but the podcast exists in a vacuum where women do not exist. They do not examine anything past these surface facts. Scott kicks off saying that he’s worried that boys don’t have the same advantages he had when he was young. (That’s a really good thing for a hell of a lot of people.) He feels bad for guys on dating apps because girls won’t match with guys who haven’t been to college. (Let’s not compare the dating experiences of men and women on dating apps!) He wants credit for how far society has advanced because we let women be plumbers? (That surely don’t get paid as much.) Scott and Anthony want more male teachers and for teachers to be paid more. (Sure! But can we talk about why we couldn’t pay them more when it was “women’s work?”) I could go on and I have. I want to start clubs of people who discuss it. Let me know if that’s something you’d like to do because until that happens, the club is just me harassing my friends with it (My friend Alex said, “I can’t listen to this anymore.” She also called it a “pity party.”) The last episode is called “Raising Modern Men: A Mother's Perspective” and the description is “Anthony and Scott explore a mother's perspective on how best to help young men thrive, with a very special guest.” For a second I was excited. Finally, we hear from a woman! SPOILER ALERT the woman is Scaramucci’s wife. Technically a woman but this is a tone deaf move. Very on brand for Lost Boys—technically true and tone deaf. By the way, I wonder, I wonder…every few minutes while listening, why Scaramucci is even present. Listen, I love this show. It’s also killing me. Send help. For me, but also for these boys. They sure are lost. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Was it in Podnews??? Maybe that was it.
👂I love you!
~friend of the newsletter~
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also i love sharks. ask me to show you my shark collection next time we're on a call
Lost Boys makes me CRAZY. I feel like I'm in an alternate universe while I listen to it.
I'm constantly at war with myself about people being too mean about men (jokes about bi women being upset that they're sadly also attracted to men? please stop. [*i am bi don't come at me about this comment]) but then they do things like this... Not All Men but this is a bad look.