🏊♀️ Swimming lessons🌡️childish scribbles🖍️ $HAWK 🤑 Amen corner 🚀
🍭 👂Maybe you know what it's like to spend a day or two dead to the world outside the bathroom floor 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, February 10, 2025. My next Disney Cruise is in 39 days. In case this newsletter is too long, I can’t believe something that sucks so much can be this much fun, I’m grateful we’re capturing these voices before it’s too late, and Rhiannon Aywa of 5-4 has a new podcast, here, that I don’t think that many people know about???
xoxo
lauren
P.S - If you’re interested in placing an ad in Podcast The Newsletter or Podcast Marketing Magic, fill out this form
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Nicole Byer
Nicole Byer is the host of Why Won’t You Date Me?, which is back on Headgum and now shooting video episodes out of their LA and NYC studios. You can access video episodes here.
Do you remember recording the theme song? How many takes did you do?
Of course I remember recording the theme song. I did it and after listening to it back my producer was like, “hey do you wanna re-record that?” but it made me laugh so hard that we left it as a one take.
How have you changed as a person since you started podcasting?
I don’t know if I’ve changed as a person but I did learn that I have a huge capacity for talking more than one can imagine. I thought I was a yappy bitch but truly the amount I can yap is scary and impressive.
Can you give us a podcast recommendation?
Yes of course, Newcomers with Lauren Lapkus, 90 Day Bae with Marcy Jarreu and Best Friends with Sasheer Zamata.
lol. Can you remember the funniest thing anyone has ever said they were going to do to you in the reviews for Why Won't You Date Me?
Someone said they wanted to turn me upside down and fill me with clam chowder and that message has haunted me for years.
What didn't I ask you that you think I should have?
You could have asked what my favorite food is and its lasagna and once I ate it every weekend for a year, which I understand is sick as hell but I had a nice time.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Kate Downey is amazing, she’s worked on two things I’ve LOVED—Diss and Tell and Glamorous Trash with Chelsea Devantez, plus she co-founded Caveat in NYC. She is also someone who has been having debilitating period pain every month since she was fourteen. Period pain so common and so big and something nobody seems to want to talk about or research, and nobody is really trying to have fun with it. Kate is, with her new podcast CRAMPED. It’s somehow boisterous and dead serious at the same time, full of interviews, info and tips. (I learned about the correct time to take ibuprofen for period pain in the first episode.) But Kate is getting smart and funny people on the mic to actually talk about their experiences, what the fuck is really going on in our bodies and why nobody cares, and why she, for more than 20 years, hasn’t been able to get an answer from a doctor, a solution. Like, pathetically nothing. I think a fourth grader would try harder to get her an answer. After all this time you think she’d figure out how to manage her death cramps, but she hasn’t. So she made CRAMPED. I hope men listen to this thing. I am stealing these words from Kate, but I can’t believe how much fun it is to hear about something that hurts so much.
notes
✨Signal Hill is a new audio magazine that publishes audio documentaries of all kinds: reporting, essays, shorts, profiles, dispatches, reviews, and more. Issue One comes out February 17th. Listen to the trailer and follow them on Instagram. You can also sign up for updates or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!
✨Podcasthon is about to hit a major milestone—1,500 participating hosts from 45 countries! (The big event is less than 40 days away.) Learn how awesome this is and how you can participate here.
✨Entries for the 2025 International Women's Podcast Awards are now open!
✨The AARP asked me about how people can step outside their comfort zones and I said podcasting. Thank me when millions of senior citizens decide to finally figure out how to do it.
✨Arielle spotlighted LA Made: The Other Moonshot in EarBuds.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
🎙️Big Abe was a commercial fisherman in the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan who went fishing on Whitefish Bay of Lake Superior one day in 1971, knowing full well this would get him arrested, and it did, for using an illegal gill net and commercial fishing without a license. He did this in protest to defend the Treaty of 1836, which reserved Chippewa Indians treaty rights to fish in certain parts of the Great Lakes, something the state had been ignoring. Points North, an award-winning, sound-rich podcast about the Great Lakes, tells the story in full, and it is a wonderful piece of audio, perfectly capturing Big Abe as a person by speaking to his descendants. I have been listening to Points North a lot lately, if you like Outside/In you’ll like it, too. I also loved this story about Theresa Eischen, a woman who lives on the Little Grand Rapids First Nations Reservation in Manitoba and how she landed a role playing Princess Leia in the Anishinaabemowin version of Star Wars – A New Hope. Listen to Big Abe’s Net here.
How I discovered it: A producer attended a Radio Boot Camp class I taught.
🎙️Impact Studios just made a 3-episode narrative called Sink Or Swim about Australia, global warming, social justice, race, access, and how at age 25, Angelica Ojinnaka-Psillakis decided to finally learn how to swim. For Australians, swimming is in their cultural DNA, the beach is emblematic of the Australian summer experience, but not everyone knows how to swim there. Lots of people don’t know how to swim there! And Western Sydney is getting like super deadly hot, it’s becoming one of the hottest places on earth. In one of the recordings we hear (this podcast has a great sense of place and feels very homespun in the best way) the audio recorder is in danger of melting, it’s 43 degrees…this is Australia, that’s celsius! So what if you can’t swim or don’t have access to pools? You die of heat or you drown? This is a beautiful series about Angelica, who pulls you along her own journey, and why her inability to swim comes from something much bigger than she realized. And it sets the scene for a place that’s really a preview of a hotter future that we are all facing. This tiny show is about a lot but everything is beautifully made, beautifully woven together, and it will make you see the world differently. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Perfect pitch letter that didn’t feel like a pitch letter because it was a nice letter in response to an edition of Podcast the Newsletter, which is something I always recommend podcasters do to podcasters.
🎙️Season 3 of LA Made, the beautifully made The Other Moonshot, puts us in the 1960s during a sliver of time that covers both the civil rights movement and the space race. Host Joanne Higgins kicks off introducing us to her godfather and friend Charlie, now 93, who was one of the first Black aerospace engineers, to tell the story of he and two other Black engineers helped the Apollo mission get to the moon. On episode two we meet the other two engineers, Shelby and Nate, and learn about the racism they endured and the fucked up way they were set up to fail which comes to head during the Apollo 1 disaster when three astronauts were killed. It is amazing to hear from these three men, who grew up in Jim Crow south and got white men to the moon. (Queue up Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey On the Moon,” which Joanne references as a reminder that plenty of Black people weren’t fans of getting to the moon when we still have so much work to do on earth.) These guys won’t be around forever, this podcast is a time capsule that holds their voices and stories. Joanne’s voice is so soothing and with her close relationship to Charlie, she’s the perfect host. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber.
🎙️Egads The Lonely Palette is back after more than a year away! I am not an art person but Tamar Avishai makes me really think about it and feel like I understand it. Her show is beautiful. Her episode about Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” is one of my favorite episodes of all time. Her first episode back opens perfectly with a conversation with her mom about artistic order and chaos and then flows into the work of “consummate scribbler Cy Twombly.” It’s an interesting history and a reminder to all artists to be vulnerable and not pretentious. (I know some podcasters who could use that message.) Listen here.
How I discovered it: Bello Collective years ago.
🎙️Rhiannon Aywa of 5-4 recently launched another podcast that I just found out about, Popular Cradle, exploring what role we have in advancing the Palestinian liberation struggle in North America. On essential episode one Rhiannon and her co-hosts Mohammed and Yara outline the show’s mission, why it’s called Popular Cradle, and a bit of history about the struggle of Palestinian people, which they say cannot be defined by Nakba (Arabic for "the catastrophe," referring to ethnic cleansing and displacement of Palestinian.) In teaching us how the Palestinian struggle has contributed to world revolution they’re teaching us concepts we can use to arm ourselves. This show is an accumulation of tactics and resources. But it’s also just a perspective that mainstream media isn’t giving us, an emotion we do not see in the news. The last episode Rhiannon, Mohammed and Yara get into why the recent ceasefire might fail, uncertainties that lie ahead, and what transactions we didn’t see that were actually part of the deal. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I heard Rhiannon mention it when she was a guest on The Daily Zeitgeist.
🎙️Uncuffed, a program that trains incarcerated people on radio and podcast skills (it's the program that gave training to some of Ear Hustle's team) has a podcast, Uncuffed, that has returned for a new season. You hear host Greg Eskridge, who was incarcerated for more than thirty years at San Quentin, talk about leaving as a free person. His freedom has been only a few feet away this whole time. (Greg also helped found the program in 2012 while incarcerated at San Quentin.) This season Greg goes back to his childhood, his time in prison, and reintegrating into society. This season, Greg will be sharing the voices of incarcerated women for the first time, from The California Institute of Women. If you like Ear Hustle, and who doesn’t, listening to this show is a no-brainer. The stories are beautiful and important and getting to hear them is a rare treat. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener.
🎙️Jessie and Clare Stephens are funny Australian twin sisters who have been hosting Cancelled for almost four years. Each episode they roast a dumb celebrity who has done something dumb and they dole out sentencing and treat their episodes like a court room. In the hands of someone else this show could be blah, but Jessie and Clare are very, very funny. Over the years they started calling themselves lazy, sharing “lazy girl” stories (“I made my husband bring me a cup of water and toothbrush to bed because I didn’t feel like getting up”) and calling their community “lazy girls.” This always kind of bothered me because I doubt they are lazy and there is nothing more annoying than really successful people being like “i dunno i just woke up like this.” But whatever, I love the branding, have identified as a lazy girl and now feel bad for the lazy girls because Jessie and Clare have cancelled Cancelled. This is bad news for them, good news for you if you haven’t listened yet because there are like 200 episodes. The final episode was a funny farewell (they use chat GPT to write them…this sounds unfunny, you guys, but it is funny!) and explain why Clare, it is Clare, who is stepping away.She revels in the fact that according to Malcolm Gladwell’s thing and after 1,000 of making this podcast she is “one tenth of an expert of whatever the fuck this is.” I guess it’s good to go out on top but I’m really going to miss them. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Chelsey Weber-Smith recommendation from years ago.
🎙️Jamie Loftus has been slaving away on a complete Haliey “Hawk Tuah” Welch investigation over on Sixteenth Minute of Fame, what have you been doing with your life? In many ways, Haliey is the ultimate 16th Minute guest. (We learn that she might have even liked to steal the name of Jamie’s podcast.) She is the poster child of someone who blew up over absolutely nothing and skyrocketed to a fame faster than you can say spit on that thang, so studying what happened to her next is worthy of a five-episode deep dive that took Jamie to places that no journalist has been before, including watching every single episode of Haley’s podcast Talk Tuah with Haliey Welch. Jamie sees a story that nobody else sees, and this series puts a new lens over the Haliey. Jamie compares Haliey to the Girls Gone Wild craze of the 2000s (with an interview from your Podcast Bestie Courtney Kocak) and walks us through every step of Haley’s journey from being leeched on by a bunch of guys with a camera to being scammed by a bunch of crypto bros and scamming her fans right back. There is a full episode that kind of makes sense of Haliey’s crypto scam where Ed Zitron of Better Offline explains how it’s an egregious rug pull that shows how desperate people are. (Especially helpful if you know littler or nothing about crypto.) Peeling back all of that you see a sweet, normal woman, a woman more normal and sweet than most of us, who loves her grandma and was fine working in a spring factory and had no chance of making it out of this mess on top. I don’t think anyone could have predicted the negative consequences of this story. Rolling your eyes over Haliey is easy, she’s become a punch line, when really she just tried to capitalize on something we are all taught: that often the only way to die above the class you were born into is for something extraordinary to happen to you. What Jamie has done is hard. And you have to admit Talk Tuah with Haliey Welch is a great name for a podcast. Start here.
How I discovered it: The technical answer is that Jamie Loftus caught my attention in 2016, back when I worked in book publishing and before Jamie started podcasting, for eating a copy of Infinite Jest over the course of a year. And I’ve followed her stuff ever since.
🎙️I was on an episode of Care and Feeding to talk about Disney World, which was dreamlike because Care and Feeding is the best parenting podcast (I’ve been listening to that show forever, before I was a mom, back when it was called Mom and Dad Are Fighting) and getting to talk about Disney is my favorite thing to do. Two of the co-hosts Elizabeth and Lucy are pretty big Disney nerds like me so it ended up being a really fun conversation I got to be part of. Zak (also a co-host but you may know him and love him from The Best Advice Show) is so not a Disney parks fan and I can’t tell if we made him hate them more or less. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber.
🎙️I love you!
❤️ Podcast Tink Loves ❤️
HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, a groundbreaking television sitcom that ran for 208 episodes on CBS from 2005-2014, unfolds entirely as a flashback, using a time-bending narrative structure that spotlights the lives of five friends navigating love, friendship, dating, careers, failure, and success in New York City.
For the new podcast How We Made Your Mother, JOSH RADNOR (who played “Ted Mosby”) has teamed up with series co-creator CRAIG THOMAS to explore, episode-by-episode, the mystery at the heart of what has made this show so durable and beloved. It’s time – much like the older, wiser narrator Ted does in the show – to look back on this adventure that occupied a pivotal decade of their lives: how the show changed them, how it changed its fans, and how it changed the culture.
With plenty of special guests joining us along the way, this podcast will use HIMYM’s trenchant themes as jumping-off points for larger discussions about life, loss, and love.
This is HOW WE MADE YOUR MOTHER: A flashback podcast for a flashback show.