🛹 Sk8er boi 🎸 haunted Erewhon 👻 pass it on 👍 redacted 🙅♀️
🍭 👂I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase steamed hams 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, August 5. In case this newsletter is too long, this will make you want to go everywhere, this celeb show isn’t like the other girls, I really must know where this woman is. The episode I mention in the “from the archive” section is maybe my favorite This American Life piece ever.
Have a nice weekend.
xoxo lp
p.s. Want to advertise here? Fill out this form or let me know.
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Jean Trebek and Alison Martin
Jean Trebek is a Professional Religious Science Practitioner, Reiki Master and Sound Healer. Alison Martin is an Emmy-award winning actress and writer. They are good friends and the hosts of insidewink.
Describe Inside Wink in 10 words or less.
Insightful, uplifting, thought provoking - like talking with friends about good stuff (that’s 11 - we can’t count).
What is your definition of ‘insidewink’? What does it mean to you?
insidewink is the expression of someone’s altruistic passion revealed in the world and the acknowledgment of our connections and commonalities.
What inspired you to start insidewink, first as a website and then as a podcast?
There were so many people doing so many wonderful things in the world and we wanted to share all that good with everyone. It was important for us to embrace the kindness and beauty that is innately present all around us.
What episodes do you recommend people start with?
Honestly, we are so grateful for all our wonderful guests that this is like choosing your favorite child. All our guests offer brilliant insights on a wide variety of topics such as dealing with anxiety, dream guidance, cancer support, talking with angels, and cooking with love.
What do you hope people learn from the show?
How valuable we all are. How we all respond to love and kindness. How uniquely beautiful we are - all part of a tapestry. How a small act of goodness goes a long way.
Your friendship is such a fun aspect of insidewink! Can you share how you became such great friends?
We spend a lot of time together and we talk about our thoughts and feelings knowing that we are safe expressing our vulnerable sides. We are truly seen and heard by each other - without judgment… we encourage each other… and we laugh a LOT… till we cry…
And how has your friendship evolved through this journey?
If it’s even possible - we have more respect, appreciation, and unconditional love for each other. It’s been so much fun meeting and talking with our guests, while witnessing each other’s growth and curiosity. Plus, Jean is trying to teach Alison to cook - so how could good food be bad??
Who is your dream guest?
Michelle Obama, John Oliver, Brooke Shields, Neil De Grasse Tyson
What do you do when you need reminders of the positivity in the world?
We hang around with people we love, take a walk, help a neighbor, look at a sunset, laugh… we always remember to laugh.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
When I found And Away We Go!, I set aside one episode to check it out (obviously the Disneyland episode with Ben Schwartz) and it was so good, I kept going and going until I listened to every single one. Georgia King (Amanda Snodgrass in Danny McBride’s Vice Principals!) lets guests take her to their favorite places. It seems like such a perfectly simple idea (are there other shows like this? I’m shocked I can’t think of one) and it’s so well made, sprinkled with nice audio enhancements and attention to detail when it comes to production. I loved the selection of guests, they seemed a little unexpected. (Maybe that’s why I loved them so much.) Jimmy Yang takes us to Tuscany, Emily Hampshire takes us to Montreal. I would love to know how the And Away We Go! team preps guests…they come in prepared, able to tell great stories and share minute details, even describe the smells. Jimmy’s Tuscany episode was a perfect smell-fest that made me hungry. Ben did such a good job explaining Disneyland, highlighting all of my favorite things, it made me feel like I was there. Emily’s pulled out so many things about Montreal (she’s from there—she used to snowshoe to school!) it made me want to go. These episodes fly by, they’re funny. They made me want to go everywhere.
hell yeah
✨Audio Flux is powering up their next circuit of short audio works with DC-based writer and literary artist, Jason Reynolds. They’ve commissioned four premier audio producers to create original fluxworks ($1000 each) and are inviting the public to participate through an open call. Submissions will be accepted August 1 - September 15, 2024. Each must respond to prompts directly inspired by Jason Reynolds’s writing practice and upcoming novel Twenty-four Seconds from Now. More information and submission guidelines here.
✨I’m speaking twice at Podcast Movement in August! Almost 100 Podcast Marketing Tips, with Arielle Nissenblatt, is on August 20th at 1:30pm.
✨I’m also on a panel on August 21st at 1:30: Stop Paying for Audience: Master The Power of Organic Marketing
✨Making the most of your time when you’re launching a podcast. [Podcast Marketing Magic]
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted The Bachelor of Buckingham Palace in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️If you haven’t listened to Madeleine Baran’s work at In the Dark, go straight there and do not pass go. The first two seasons are maybe the best true-crime audio content out there. Now they have something new: a story about 24 unarmed civilians who were murdered by a group of U.S. Marines in Iraq who were never punished. People compare it to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, but this incident seems even more shrouded in secrecy, buffered by lies. And the series, so far, takes us to the people and places that make the story come to life for the first time so that we can all find out, or get closer to finding out, what happened that day, and why the people who did this got away with it. The thing I loved the most, other than the fact that this is a story that really needs to be told, and deserves to be told well (and it is) is how thorough this reporting was, that Madeleine and her team threw themselves into this project for four years. It’s easy to see how this story almost didn’t happen, they reached so many dead ends. When they finally got their hands on some records that have been hidden from the public for years, tens of thousands of pages of them, Madeleine spent days taking notes and reached the max limit in her Google doc typing them, something I didn’t think was possible. (In case you’re interested, it’s 1.2 million characters.) This feels very different than old In the Dark seasons, but the dedication and thorough research hasn’t gone away. Listen here.
🎙️My family is probably very sick of picking me up in Cleveland and hearing me rant about the dozens of absolutely sinister-looking “Pass It On” posters I have to walk by leaving the airport. They seem like something you’d see in the TV show Evil. (Anyone?) These posters are generic looking and seem to mean nothing but they have to mean something because they’re everywhere, right? Who is paying for them? It’s gotta be nefarious, right? God bless Tess Barker for looking into it, into ittttt! for her show Pop Mystery Pod. Tess discovers it’s all tied to a group funneling money in political committees that donate millions of dollars to conservative causes, even though they claim to have zero affiliation with any religious or political viewpoint. (The posters just look exactly like whatever the combination of bland, white, right wing Christian conservative looks like.) Her extensive research brings her to Foundation for a Better Life, the group in question, which is funded by a conservative billionaire. (Foundation for a Better Life sounds like a worse version of George Constanza’s “The Human Fund.”) The purpose, I guess, is to encourage people to have optimism or something, which is fine if you think about it for .5 seconds only. Tess thought about it a lot more than that and talks about how this kind of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” messaging is really trying to get people who are suffering under capitalism think that all they have to do to fix it is be optimistic and smile, and that it has nothing to do with billionaires, like the guy funding the posters. To quote someone on Reddit, it’s basically like “hey guys, don’t be angry about your society utterly failing you in every way, just have a better attitude! Pass it on!" Wow it was capitalism all along, again. Couldn’t they have tried a little harder to make the posters less creepy-looking? Listen here.
🎙️When you think about it, it’s really fucked up that all these ghost story podcasts are hosted by alive humans. Representation matters. Haunting is a new show with real-life paranormal stories told by those who experienced them first-hand. But the host is a dead person/influencer named Therésa, who can bring some honesty and much-needed dead-person perspective to ghost stories. And oh! Therésa is Lauren Lapkus. This is a quirky premise but the stories have been good and well produced. Episode three includes two stories. The first actually reminded me of something that has happened to me, and the second freaked me out so much that I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep. (I have just moved into a big house, there are boxes everywhere that, in the dark, keep appearing to me as intruders in the night, and my husband was away, I might have had nightmares, anyway.) But really, the storytellers do a really good job, the producers make it a nice listening experience. If this is your kind of show (Spooked, Radio Rental) you should be doing a victory dance right now. I texted this show to my mom (who loves this kind of show) immediately, but here is what will happen: She will not listen to it but in 8 months will text it to me telling me she discovered this amazing show, have I heard of it? Mark my word. I’ll be back with an update. Listen here, MOM.
🎙️Actors/comedians start podcasts all the time, but they don’t always put tons of thought into the concept or production. Fin Argus and Chris Renfro did. Their new show One Of Us contains interviews, improv segments, rich sound design, and tons of creativity. (It sounds like what the cover art looks like—90s Nickelodeon-esque, the kind of kind of silly, fantastical, and weird that makes silly, fantastical, and weird people feel very seen.) Each comedian that comes on as guests joins them in their rocket ship to travel to a new, imagined universe—a haunted Erewhon, a clothing-optional hot spring, Miss Frizzle’s asshole—to see if they’re willing to join Fin and Chris’ intergalactic Best Friend Force. Underneath the silliness is this really nice idea that we can build the kind of world we want to live in, and that even dreaming about it is really something. This show refuses to be categorized, and it isn’t following the rules that so many shows follow, the rules that end up watering everything down. Listen here.
🎙️Season two of Snafu, a podcast about history's greatest screw-ups, is focusing on J. Edgar Hoover, who somehow found himself leading the FBI and turning it into an anti-democratic agency set on harassing/attacking/illegally surveilling progressives and leftists and driving them out of public life. How he went unchecked for so long is astounding, and a podcast about that would be important but quite a bummer. This season of Snafu is a lot of fun and leaves you with a triumphant feeling, because it focuses on a group of people known as the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, who stole explosive documents from an FBI office and sent them to Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger. The first episode of Snafu was good but the second one, about the risky things this group of regular people did to fight for democracy, got my eyes popping and my heart racing. It’s also interesting to hear how low-tech a heist like this had to be in the 70s. We can’t just dress up like teenagers and wear fake glasses and break into a federal office to steal highly classified information, anymore! The people involved are amazing, and oddly chill about the cool things they’ve done. Listen to this show, at least two episodes because that is what took me from “good show, I’ll check in later” to “I have to listen to more episodes now.”
🎙️Here’s another show that kicked things into high gear in episode two, IMHO—Where’s Dia? tells the story about a rich, white woman who mysteriously disappears. I know, there are a lot of those. Hear me out. She is surrounded by so many people who would benefit from her death/disappearance, and they all sound so believable, so it’s a real “who’s lying” mystery. In the two episodes that have been released I’ve changed my mind several times as to who is to blame. Maybe I should give a weekly update. (Right now I’m going with the son.) I love the host, Lucy Sherriff, who at one point says she kept on trying to drop this story but would find herself at her desk in the middle of the night going “wait, what?!” and that is the kind of anecdote that keeps me invested. The good news about all those ads for Malcolm Gladwell’s branded podcast? There were so many that I stopped hearing them. Listen here.
🎙️Mission Implausible (a conspiracy theory podcast hosted by former high-level CIA operatives John Sipher and Jerry O'Shea) invited Bill Oakley and David Silverman on to explore the theory that The Simpsons either predicts the future or causes the future, perhaps in cahoots with the CIA. Bill was a writers/producer and David, an animator, have been accused of being CIA agents, in the illuminati and skull and bones, who telegraph secret message through Homer (who some consider an all-knowing omnipotent predictor of the future.) You may wonder why the CIA would want comedy writers on their payroll, but obviously none of this has to make any sense, and this conspiracy is a lot of fun. I mean, the fact that people think this is true speaks to how dumb we are, which is really what The Simpsons is all about. One thing Bill and David say they can predict is terrifying: that we are getting stupider. And today we are as dumb as people in Springfield were 30 years ago. Listen here.
🎙️I finished The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi and it was nothing at all like I expected it would be. At the beginning it introduces you to Anthony, a man from one of New York City’s crime families who claimed to have had a part in murdering the pope in 1978. He’s so chock-full of yarns, he starts to seem a little Forrest Gumpy. Like, it would be hard to believe that all of these things happened to him but also very hard to fact-check, because he seems to know weird details or be aligned in odd ways to things that are undoubtedly true. These stories are stories he’s heard, been adjacent to, or been present for. That’s the whole point of this podcast. Marc Smerling (The Jinx) is fact-checking Anthony. Which is hard because is such an unforgettable subject and fantastic storyteller, it’s hard to separate truth from fiction in the stuff he’s weaving. I joked on All of It with Alison Stewart that I didn’t care if the stories were true or false. Anthony is entertaining and the podcast is wonderfully made. Tell me a story, Anthony! But as the show evolves it gets more complex. And sad. Well first, there’s a long (a little too long?) investigation, mid way, into the relationship with the mob and Vatican City, and why the mob might have wanted the pope dead. It’s interesting but feels like a different podcast. I started to really miss Anthony. But when Anthony returns at the end of the series, we are meeting him with all of this information about what was absolutely not true, and we realize that he had a kind of sad childhood that led to a lot of shit he should have gone to therapy for, instead of building up all these fantasies to help him get by. So the question is thrown to us. What do we believe? What is he lying about and what is the source of each lie? We are the value of our stories, and as we get closer and closer to death, we want our time here to mean something. I was really excited about this podcast when I first heard it, and it wasn’t anything like what I expected. It was better. Listen here.
🎙️Who Replaced Avril Lavigne? is a great example of one of my favorite podcast genres—silly things taken with the utmost seriousness. The silly thing is that many people believe that Avril Lavigne was replaced by a body double in 2003, a woman named Melissa, because Avril didn’t want to be a super star. Like most conspiracy theories, all the extremely likely explanations for all of this pale into comparison to the idea that this has actually happened. And host Joanne McNally explores all of these things with the vigor of a spy on a mission to save the human race. Seriously, every angle is dug into and tested. Joanne even sees if she can find her own body double, goes to the town where Avril grew up, devil’s advocates all of the theories out there. There’s also an episode about how all of this started in the first place, and I actually think that’s the most interesting part of all. I want that podcast—tracing the first Redditor to write it or whatever. Listen here.
🎙️I was talking to Danusia Malina-Derben recently. She is one of those people who confuses me because I have no idea how she does everything she does. She has ten children, a business, and makes great podcasts, one of them is one she makes with her daughter Serafina, the award-winning Serafina Speaks. She’s a good interviewer and for awhile had a solid show called School for Mothers. But I think Danusia is one of those people who gets bored doing things other people are doing so she kind of challenged herself with a new format and name, Parents Who Think, where she hosts month-long, spicy parenting debates with people who disagree. (Should parents let their underage kids drink alcohol? Should they hit their kids? Is it okay for them to have a favorite child?) She interviews them separately, so I think you get a really clear sense of their belief systems. They don’t have to talk over other people or feel defensive. And she weaves the interviews into several episodes. The last episode of the series is always the whole thing uninterrupted, so you can listen to that if you prefer a good old binge. It’s a lot of work and sometimes I worry too smart for its own good. People like simple and easy to understand, they want comfort, they want to listen to something that follows formats are familiar to them. They don’t always like to think (I sure as hell don’t), but Parents Who Think…requires thinking from the listener, too. Danusia is the circus leader, here, making things civil and fascinating. People say things you don’t think you’d ever really hear people say. I hope to see this format copied in the future. (In some way, I mean…it’s so much work it’s actually an unreasonable model as it stands, if you ask me.) But if you do, credit Danusia. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From August 3, 2020] This American Life takes us to amusement parks across the country in a time we cannot go to them ourselves. The first story in this series is I story I can see myself re-listening to every day—it’s sweet and hilarious. Cole Lindbergh is a 25-year-old who has been managing teenagers in the games department at Worlds of Fun for eleven years. His passion for his work is endearing—he cares more bout it than most people care about anything. He inspires his team of teenagers to have so much fun working they blow through 16-hour shifts without a break. (Is this legal?) I cannot imagine that even the best business people could do a comparable job making money for Worlds of Fun’s games. But how long can this go on? A grown man working at an amusement park. Can Cole carry his skills onto a more adult job? Is everything downhill from here for Cole? I recommend you join me in watching all of the nerdy-adorable training videos Cole has made for his employees. The rest of the episode is equally delightful—Jane Marie (of The Dream) shares listener letters that seem mythological, and Storytelling Connosoir Jonathan Goldstein (of Heavyweight) tells a story about working at Wildwood in New Jersey.
Where's Dia is a masterclass in whodunnit storytelling!