🐍 Snakes & poison ☠️ pizza pajama party 🍕 Faith Popcorn 🧵 be yourself 👩🏼‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏻

🍭 👂Relax. You’re in a Holiday Inn ballroom right now 🌈 🤸‍♀️

Bonjour.

Today is Monday, May 19 2025. I’m on my way to The Podcast Show London as we speak, come find me!

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⭐️If you’d like to see an ad for your podcast here or in Podcast Marketing Magic, fill out this form. If you’d like to advertise in Podcast the Newsletter but don’t have the money to do it and are willing to run a promo on your pod for Podcast the Newsletter, fill out this form. ⭐️

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In case this newsletter is too long, something from the archives here, a fascinating family mystery here, RIP my dear old friend Jo-Ann.

xoxo

lauren

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🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨

Selects isn’t like the other girls. It’s kind of like a mix bag or magazine or time capsule. It’s a treat box. Every month executive producer and host Mitra Kaboli releases curated audio documentaries, interviews, and discussions made by and with the best people in the business. This is the kind of stuff that feels so rare and necessary, it’s the kind of stuff anyone interested in audio should be listening to. It is stuff that has influenced the greats and the entire medium yet it’s been hard to find because there are so many podcasts hosted by Sean Hays. (I accidentally misspelled that and I won’t correct it.) There is free stuff on the feed but you have to subscribe to get it all. My one complaint is that I don’t want to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, I’d rather subscribe via the website they mention on the show but the website doesn’t work. (I’m saying all of this because, this is confusing!) ANYWAY the free piece I want to point you to, that will make you want to hear more, is “Call Now” by Sean Cole. It’s about something boring-sounding, lawyer ads, which Sean makes both fascinating and hilarious by weaving together audio from the ads, conversations with lawyers who make them (lawyers make them, complain about them, and create all the rules about them for what should and should not be allowed) and his own reflections about them. It’s weird and human and dazzling.

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notes

✨See the Tink-curated Castbox carousel all about our favorite Mental Health Awareness Month shows in the Castbox app and let me know what you think!

✨Read my latest Lifehacker, 10 Podcasts for People Who Love (and Miss) Heavyweight

✨You still have time to sign up for Growing Your Podcast with the Perfect Ad Spend, my next Radio Bootcamp I’m doing with Shreya Sharma 6/03/2025. (You don't HAVE to have extra money to spend on buying ads for your content, but it doesn't hurt if you do AND WE HAVE THOUGHTS.) Sign up here.

✨Tribeca is coming up June 4-15. Get your tickets here and if you go let me know so we can hang out.

✨As pert of Tribeca, Talia Augustidis is hosting an In the Dark performance Tuesday, June 10th at 5:30pm. More information and tickets here.

✨Arielle spotlighted Those Who Can’t Teach…Anymore in EarBuds.

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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋

Alex Goldman is the host of Hyperfixed and the former host of Reply All.

People miss Reply All. Do you?
Not really, we did our thing and I honestly can’t imagine going back to that show. I’m very proud of the work I did there and there are certainly things I miss about it – especially the budget we were working with – but I can’t imagine revisiting that show or our process or even the subject matter. 11 years ago when we started Reply All, the internet felt vast and unconquerable, and now it feels small and constricting - we have all been siloed to a couple of sites for most of our interactions, and those sites are run by pretty disgusting oligarchs. There’s been complete corporate capture of the social internet, and it’s kind of a bummer, but the byproduct is that the most interesting narratives all come from the same four sites or are locked away on private discords. The world is cast and open so I wanted to open up my process a bit.

What is your personal favorite Reply All episode?
That’s tough to say. The one I’m probably most known for is Long Distance, where I went to India. I’m very proud of The Snapchat Thief just as a piece of self-contained journalism. I learned so much from it. Two of my dark horse favs are Good Job Alex, where I get someone’s website back for them after it was stolen by domain snipers, and The Man in the FBI Hat, a weird little story about a guy who had a knack for lying and stealing that also had a hand in bringing high speed internet to the middle of the country.

Describe Hyperfixed in ten words or less.
Listeners write in with problems and I try to fix them

Where should people start if they haven’t listened yet?
Hmmm. If they’re looking for funny, I’d start with Casey Wants to Believe. If you’re looking for heart wrenching, maybe Two Birds, One Hundred Stones.

What was the aha moment that was like this is my new podcast? How did we get here?
To be honest, there wasn’t an aha moment. I had a bunch of insane ideas for podcasts I was pitching people for two years and no one bit, but I always enjoyed doing the Super Tech Support segment for reply all, and this felt like a natural extension of that. If there was still money in narrative podcasting, I might have gone with a weirder idea. For a little while I was pitching people a podcast where I would violate civil law and when I got sued I would do a season that lasted however long the court case was. I was going to call it “Oops, I got sued.”

How is the result of the show different than you thought it’d be?
It is different than I thought it would be, but that’s both due to my lack of imagination and my inability to predict what my new colleagues would bring to the show.

How long do you think it takes you to make just one episode?
That’s a good question and one we’re constantly adjusting to. We have finished episodes in basically 2-3 weeks, but some have taken months. I feel like they kind of average out to be about 6 weeks each? Maybe a little shorter? Bonus episodes have been a lot looser and sillier. I know I’m talking to a much smaller group of people who have bought into what I’m making and to a lesser degree to my personality, so I find it easy to be more informal and experiment more.

How long do you think other people think it takes to make an episode?
This is a fantastic question and I would love to know what people think!

Was there anything fun about starting from scratch or has it only been frustrating?
There has been a lot of fun about starting a new show. When you start something new you get to set peoples’ expectations about what a thing should be before those expectations calcify. Finding out peoples’ strengths has been incredible. Amor is a fantastic producer and reporter - great at getting answers, booking people I thought were impossible. She’s tenacious and clever and just an incredibly positive force for the show. Emma is an amazing writer and editor and hears me give a 4 sentence summary of every interview and suddenly knows how to weave them into a story. Sari is great backup in an interview and has a million great ideas. Tony, our engineer, is a secret fourth producer who is not only making the episodes sound amazing but is also working on stories for us, which is very exciting.

What’s the hardest thing?
I don’t like being a boss. I don’t like doing payroll. I don’t like doing taxes. I don’t like being broke.

What’s the recipe for a great Hyperfixed episode?
I think the recipe for any good narrative podcast is a question, some kind of emotional investment, and some movement. A happy moment in a sad story, and sad moment in a happy story. Anything that surprises. That’s the stuff that lands.

What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
Sharon Mashihi’s Appearances. I can’t really explain it because to do so will not do it justice, but it’s a family drama if every member of the family was played by one person.

What’s a podcast you love that everyone already knows about?
I find it hard to listen to narrative podcasts because I’m always quietly editing them in my head. I think the podcast I listen to every week no exceptions is Hollywood Handbook, which not everyone knows about, but it has an incredibly dedicated following. The hosts, Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements are comedy writers in LA and play stupid, revolting versions of themselves that insult their guests and try to rewrite their projects. They’ve been described as “two smart guys who pretend to be dumb guys who think they’re smart guys.” It’s so good. (Listen to Alex on Hollywood Handbook here.)

Are there too many podcasts?
Probably. But there are also too many tv shows and records and movies and books. There’s so much out there its almost overwhelming, but it is also exciting because there are hidden gems everywhere if you have the patience to look.

What’s the best way to grow a podcast?
The only way I’ve found to meaningfully grow a podcast is a collaboration with another podcast. It’s hard and a lot of work! But I feel like parasocial relationships with podcasters are powerful and so having someones favorite podcaster endorse you is a great way to get people on board.

Will Hyperfixed ever go to YouTube?
Most definitely. Not as a video podcast, but we’re working on getting our episodes up on there as we speak. I am actually kind of an internet dope these days. I’ve forgotten how to do everything. It’s a real flowers for algernon situation where I learned a ton of stuff about the internet working in tech support and making reply all and it’s done wonders for my sweet brain to forget all of it.

What excites you about audio right now?

What concerns you about audio right now?
How much corporate capture there is of podcasts. It’s stressful.

If you had $100K to spend on Hyperfixed, how would you spend it?
I would give everyone who works with me a raise. Right now, just to keep this show going, we’re all making the same rate and we’re all underpaid. It means the world to me that they believe in what we’re making, and I hope to be able to pay them what they deserve soon as the show grows.

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💎podcasts i texted to friends💎

👂On The History Podcast you’ll find a series, “Half-Life,” that was crazy before things got crazy. Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write a book about his great-grandfather Siegfried, a Jewish scientist who made radioactive toothpaste and fled Germany under the Nazis. Siegfried had already written his own (unpublished) memoir but it was extremely long and the family seemed uninterested in reading it. After he passed Joe did, however, interview his Grandma, who grew up brushing her teeth with Siegfried’s radioactive toothpaste, for the potential book. Joe still has the recordings. After finally reading the memoir he discovered something shocking about his family. Siegfried spent thousands of pages talking about boring stuff and like 13 pages at the very end talking about how he actually was working with the nazis to make chemical weapons. It is in that last section you find the words, “I confess to my descendants who read these lines I made a great error.” This sets Joe off on a mission to understand the truth about where he came from, fighting the whole time against things he has believed his whole life. This is a fantastic story beautifully made (Eleanor McDowall is the producer) that turns a fable into a truer story with captured audio picked up from Joe and Eleanor’s travels to Germany, interviews, history, storytelling and Joe’s wit. He somehow, despite the dark topic, makes this story fun to hear. Listen here.

How I discovered it: I think I heard a promo for it on another BBC show and Eleanor emailed me about it later

👂If you’ve been reading this newsletter for awhile you know how much I loved Alabama Astronaut and the sequel, Marked for Life. Abe Partridge and Ferrill Gibbs are back on the Alabama Astronaut feed with another series that digs back into someone from the Alabama Astronaut season one universe, Reverend Glenn Summerford, an infamous snake-handing preacher who drank poison, incarcerated for 129 years for attempting to murder his wife using venomous snakes and then attempting to escape from prison. But like everything else Abe and Ferrill have done, it’s about a lot more than that. They’re examining Alabama’s Three Strikes Rule (severe penalties for people convicted of multiple felonies) and whether or not Glenn would be in jail if he had not been a snake-handling preacher. It seems to be a case that lawyers in Alabama don’t want to talk about, and the journalists who have, Abe and Ferrill say, have gotten it wrong. They admit Glenn is a nasty guy but is it just that he is in jail? Snake handlers, as you can imagine, aren’t looked at with tons of empathy. Abe and Ferrill are looking at Glenn through a lens he hasn’t been afforded before. Like what Abe and Ferrill have made before, this series of Alabama Astronaut feels homemade in the best way, is twisty as a snake, unlike anything you’ve heard, full of empathy and outrageous storytelling, packed with heart and voice, and full of original music that you will want to listen to completely separate from the podcast. Alabama Astronaut is really about music, despite all the other things it’s about. It’s one of those things that breaks the rules, does things the good and hard way, and is able to make something that will really catch your ear for more reason than one. Start here.

How I discovered it: I first discovered Alabama Astronaut on Reddit years ago

👂”Who Killed Jo-Ann” isn’t a true crime series, it’s an episode on Clotheshorse about the death of Jo-Ann Fabrics. Let’s get this out of the way: I’m biased and this story is near and dear to my heart. I have fond memories of Jo-Ann Fabrics, none of them fabric related. My mom would take me there before my birthday parties to buy party favors. On a sick day she would go and buy me a craft kit to keep me busy. We would fill our carts with decorations for every holiday. I can smell the place just thinking about it. (My hometown gets a shout out. The Hudson, Ohio location was the headquarters and first real store that wasn’t located in a mall.) OK but who cares about that, this was a great episode for so many reasons. I think all private equity disaster tales are interesting but this one doesn’t go the way they usually do. It’s reflective of culture and the pandemic and feminism and crafting and sewing, too. You get the history of Jo-Ann Fabrics plus mini private equity disasters and some great business story asides, like a mini biography of someone named Faith Popcorn, a brilliant marketing consultant and consumer behavior analysis forecaster I’m now obsessed with. This was the history I didn’t know I wanted. Listen here.

How I discovered it: Don’t remember how I found this show, longtime subscriber

👂Madeline and Charlotte of The Sports Gossip Show (“if Bravo and ESPN had a baby”) are all over the Bill Belichick and his 24-year-old girlfriend Jordan thing, going as far to travel to Portland, ME to watch Jordan compete in the Miss Maine Pageant. Bill was in attendance, along with a goofy-sounding security guard named Chad. Madeline and Charlotte do a good (funny) job reviewing the show though they’re not making fun of it necessarily. They say that Jordan was good! And actually an afterthought to everything else that happened. (They are partially there to find out what the competitors and their families think about all of this.) Jordan’s failure, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this “story,” is that her communication skills were weak. Because she does OK in round one she gets to answer a contestant question, which leads to her making some passive aggressive statements to her haters and an odd speech about fishermen. The best part was picturing Bill having to say goodnight to his girlfriend so she can attend the mandatory “pizza and pajama party” the contestants were having that night. Listen here.

How I discovered it: Reddit

👂The new season of Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah tells the story of Sarah Cavanaugh, a woman who started out as a social worker at the VA, kind of fell in love with the community, and ended up telling everyone she was a decorated veteran. But she couldn’t stop lying once she began. (I wrote in my notes: While You Were Sleeping but darker sadder worse!!!!!) Sarah also said she was deaf, injured, and that she had been sexually assaulted, that she had had cancer, and she lied other brazen things both huge and small. She even plagiarized her character reference letter when accused of doing all the other things!!! The Truth About Sarah comes from someone you can trust to tell a good story, Jake Halpern. Investigative journalist Jess McHugh is joining Jake to unravel it. Jake is at his best, his voice, to me, has become synonymous with edge of your seat, jaw dropping drama that makes you lean in close so you get it all. Jess is a fresh new voice for this season and a perfect compliment—she’s is the one who found the story and the two have a bit in common. Jess likes Sarah. She understands her. The reason this is worse than so many scam stories is because Sarah steals from people she knows, war heroes, people she loves. And so brazenly. You can’t help but google her and look into her eyes and wonder what kind of person could do this. Jake and Jess don’t actually have answers, but as Sarah sits in jail, neither does anyone else. During the trial her own lawyer claims to have had an out-of-body experience listening to one of the victim statements. He listened not as Sarah’s lawyer, but as an “observer of another man’s pain.” There is something wrong with Sarah, and this story is reported with the most empathy for her Jake and Jess can muster. Jake points out that you can’t hold someone accountable if they seem lost in a fog. But if Jake and jess have learned anything reporting this story it’s that Sarah will take that empathy and weaponize it against you. Start here.

How I discovered it: Email from Jake Halpern

👂When I first saw that Cristen Conger was doing a series on “gender war games” on the Unladylike feed, I didn’t quiiiiite get what she meant. It’s such a huge question, and honestly, I sensed that often the guests seemed a little unsure where the conversation was going at first, too. But after listening to all of them together I get what Cristen was going for. It might have been a mistake to call it a “war game,” that that’s the kind of language that got us here in the first place. (So maybe it was GENIUS and attention getting.) The topics all got there in different ways, led by a SUPER star list of some of my podcast crushes—the hyper-commodification of feminism with Diabolical Lies co-hosts Caro Claire Burke and Katie Gatti Tassin, purity culture with Cadence Dubus, the language that drives this with Sounds Like a Cult and Magical Overthinkers’ Amanda Montell, and the activation of white feminism with Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosman of Material Girls. One thing they all agree upon is that that masculinity isn’t IN a crisis it IS a crisis. The most interesting thing was noting the themes that popped up in all of them. There were so many specifics, like details about the Suffragettes, that I couldn’t remember which episode they were discussed, that’s how cohesive this series was. Start here, do not skip.

How I discovered it: Looooongtime subscriber, I saved all the episodes to listen to at once and recommend you do the same.

👂Helen Zaltzman’s The Allusionist is back with a season about four letter words and kicks things off with fuck, a word that is far more fascinating than I knew. She talks to lexicographer and editor Jesse Sheidlower, who JUST SO FAR has written four editions of a history and dictionary of The F Word. There’s a reason it’s so special. It’s versatile it can be every part of speech there is, you can throw it in the middle of words and closely looking at the way we use it closely tells us a story about ourselves. This is an academic, almost delightfully clinical look at the word. Jesse and Helen are really putting it out on the operating table and picking apart fuck’s insides. Helen is one of the best hosts of all time, she says everything so poetically and with such warmth and humor. (I would listen to her ad reads, or her talking about the tea towels she made to sell at her live shows for days.) Listen here.

How I discovered it: Looooongtime subscriber

👂There Are No Girls on the Internet is back! Bridget Todd talked to Kiandria Demone, creator of the #SquareUpForJustice campaign that she launched after a white woman in Minnesota called a 5-year-old Black child a racial slur and then raised nearly $1 million online for some reason that is too dumb to get into right now. Listen to the episode. Kiandria is holding the payment platforms accountable for letting this happen. This is totally a story about tech accountability but it’s also about an organizing movement, mutual aid, and it’s a reminder that it takes regular people using their skills for good things to make a difference. Kiandria was just a normal but mad person who wanted to do something and did. I mean she was an incredibly smart woman in tech who knew that free speech isn’t protected the moment you monetize, and she knew how to code so she was able to figure out who was processing the payments and break into the code. But we all bring something to the table, right? (Kiandria has been approached by women with all sorts of creative skillsets figuring out things they can do to help, saying “I knew I had this skill I didn’t know where to use it.”) Unfortunately this ugly story is a perfect episode for TANGOTI, a sickening reminder that the internet is built by people it’s exploiting. Listen here. Support Kiandria’s campaign here.

How I discovered it: Looooongtime subscriber

👂Holly Brown and I were on an episode of Sex Ed with DB (for her Rom-Com Vom series, which unpacks problematic rom coms) to talk about one of my favorite movies, Just Friends. Having a conversation about this movie with two smart women made me think about it in new ways. I went in thinking it was peak toxic and left finding it off-the-charts toxic, an incel film, really. A very funny incel movie that deserved a different ending and less fat/homo-fobia. Danielle is a whip smart person (we have interviewed her TWICE on Podcast Marketing Magic I’m obsessed with her) and a very dynamic host. I’ve always thought that but seeing her in action was really something. (Check out the rest of her episodes for smart, fun science-based sex education.) Listen here.

How I discovered it: Danielle emailed me about working together or something and we became friends and met up in Chicago at Podcast Movement.

👂I love you!

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~sponsored~

The Takeover takes you inside a conservative conference where powerful politicians, influencers, and billionaires are openly plotting to dismantle climate policy and spread disinformation. It’s a global movement, it gets weirdly religious at times, and it’s all happening behind closed doors. Want to hear what they’re really saying? Find The Takeover wherever you get your podcasts.