🏍️ Tall handlebar motorcycles 🌽 rural sissies 🪵 untrammeled 🔫 Shooters Grill 🍔
🍭 👂I would love to know how the musical ended 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, August 19. In case this newsletter is too long, this show is brought to you by…unhinged charts!, this episode was like a song I listened to over and over again, this is the show that makes me laugh out loud the most. As my dad says every SINGLE time he leaves a room, have a nice weekend.
xoxo lp
p.s. Want to advertise here? Fill out this form or let me know.
~sponsored~
Ever feel like you’re fighting for every minute you spend working on your podcast
You’ve got a message to share, maybe even a business to grow, and when time isn’t on your side Alitu makes it possible to deliver for your listeners week in and week out.
With Alitu, you can:
Edit and publish episodes in minutes, not hours
Access easy-to-use tools designed for non-techies
Get responsive customer support when you need it
Don't let tech hassles steal your time. Join Laura and thousands of other podcasters who are simplifying their workflow with Alitu.
👉 Make your first episode on us, and use code 'TINK' for 50% off your first month.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
That Hoarder
“I’m That Hoarder, which funnily enough isn’t what my parents christened me. I live in the UK, I have an anonymous podcast about hoarding disorder, and I started listening to podcasts in 2008.”
Why have you chosen to be anonymous? Have you ever considered going public with your name? That might be a great PR strategy when you hit 1M listens. Congratulations on passing 250K, by the way!
I chose to be anonymous because it was the only way any of this felt possible. I have this weird mental health problem that is incredibly stigmatised, so much so that few people in my real life know I have it and I didn’t even tell therapists for years about it. So the only way I could talk openly about it on the podcast was to do so anonymously.
I’d never say never, but I really can’t imagine going public with my name. If nothing else, few people in my real life know I hoard, and so nobody knows about the podcast. So I’m currently having this very odd experience where I reached a quarter of a million downloads through sheer hard work and persistence, and can’t even tell my besties.
So maybe, rather than tell podcast listeners who I am, I need to start by telling those who love me about the podcast?
Describe the show in 10 words or less.
First ever podcast from the perspective of someone who hoards.
Where should people start listening if they haven’t already?
Definitely don’t start with the first 15 or so episodes!
I’d say if someone has an issue they’re particularly worried about, like perfectionism (episodes 29 or 129), or cleaning up in an emergency (episodes 52 or 123), or ADHD and hoarding (episodes 40, 107 or 149), then start with the episodes dedicated to those topics. If not, start with the “Where to start” episode (71).
Why are you making it? For yourself, to help hoarders, or to help people better understand hoarding? All three?
Yes, yes, and yes. I started it for two reasons. One was that I really wanted to listen to a podcast by a person who hoards, and that didn’t exist. So I created it. The other reason was that I had nowhere to talk about hoarding, nobody I could talk to about it, so I started talking into my phone, never really expecting anybody would listen.
These days, I find the podcast helpful for keeping me accountable and so I continue learning about the topic, and I get to interview specialists I’d never have access to otherwise. But knowing how much it helps other people is a big driver now. A lot of people say they’ve never heard anyone talk about hoarding like I do, and so many say they are trainee social workers or occupational therapists or mental health nurses and they’re learning far more from me than they are from their course!
But when people tell me the podcast is helping to destigmatise the condition, that’s perhaps when I feel proudest, because I’m personally so paralysed by the stigma associated with it.
I really want people to understand that this isn’t a podcast just for hoarders. I learn so much about hoarding, what people get right and wrong about it. This isn’t a question, I just want to say that.
Thank you so much <3
This is another not-question. I wanted to thank you for constantly supporting me during my year of tweeting daily Apple Podcasts rating and reviews. NOBODY WAS THERE FOR ME LIKE YOU WERE!!! Are you a cheerleader for a lot of people in your life?
Mate, I couldn’t let you flounder on your own with such a relentless task!!
I try to be a cheerleader for the people in my life. Whether it’s colleagues, friends, or anyone who needs a bit of a boost, I do try to be really expressive about how brilliant and capable and lovely people are. This is a really cruel world at times – we need people who remind us we’re fab.
What DO people misunderstand about hoarding?
People tend to think it’s a form of extreme laziness, or someone not caring about their surroundings. The TV shows do not help with this characterisation, and tend to contribute to people believing it’s essentially something ridiculous.
What hoarding actually is, I’ve come to understand, is a confused and maladaptive way of making yourself feel safer, or better, or less lonely, or less frightened, that gets out of control and difficult to manage. The vast majority of hoarders have a history of trauma and / or grief, and this, somehow, became our way of dealing with it.
It might not sound logical, but few mental health problems manifest in a really logical way.
Can you talk about your own experience as a hoarder? How does it impact your life? Does it impact your life as an audio maker?
I went from being a messy child to a young adult who had a period of poverty that meant I had no income for about six months, then very low income for another year or so after that. I was in a position where, if something broke, or if I ran out of something, or if I got rid of something, there was absolutely no way to replace it.
Not throwing things away “just in case” kind of made sense in those circumstances, but even when my financial situation improved, that sense that I had to hold onto everything “just in case” did not. The poverty had melded with various traumas to somehow convince me that safety meant being surrounded by stuff.
I’m now a middle-aged adult trying to reverse some of that messaging and change things. It’s really hard! It impacts my life in a whole range of ways. I can’t have friends over, I lose and break things all the time, and my home is not a pleasant or relaxing place to live.
It doesn’t massively impact my life as an audio maker, except for two things. One is I have to be really careful not to lose my microphone and headphones. The other is that I laugh quietly when other podcasters talk about having to put padding on their walls because empty spaces can cause echoes: that is not a problem I’ve ever had!
How have you changed since it started?
I have a much, much better understanding of hoarding disorder. At the start, I was overwhelmed with the knowledge that I had this problem but no idea what it meant or what to do about it. These days, I understand it – both theoretically and in relation to my own experiences – so much better.
Also, through talking about hoarding week after week after week, 150 times, I now find it easier to find the language for what I’m thinking and feeling, and I learn new techniques and approaches that might help.
Listeners sometimes say to me that they started listening at episode 1 and hear me change over time; from the start, where I sounded completely defeated, to now, where I apparently don’t! There’s no question that making the podcast has been healing for me, to some degree.
What’s a podcast you like that everyone knows about?
Maintenance Phase. It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s informative, and Aubrey is a god.
What’s a podcast you like that not enough people know about?
We Are History with Angela Barnes and John O’Farrell. Special mentions to Memory Lane with Kerry Godliman and Jen Brister; Like Minded Friends with Tom Allen & Suzi Ruffell; and My Mate Bought a Toaster.
If you could start another podcast, don’t worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would listen to it. What would it be? Your budget is $1M.
It would be called “Just me interviewing all the famous women I’ve ever fancied because I now have the means”, I think. The first guest would be Jodie Foster, because I’m a lesbian cliché.
What do you wish I had asked you but I didn’t?
I wish you had asked about the challenges of podcasting anonymously. While the positives are very positive – I can talk freely in a way I know I wouldn’t if my name was public – the negatives can be tricky. I can’t promote the podcast on my personal social media, I can’t celebrate the highs with someone or commiserate with them if I get a shitty review, and I can’t attend events, which gets frustrating when there’s something that would be really relevant to the podcast where I could plug it!
I don’t want to end on a negative, though. There are times I feel under pressure to get an episode out and it feels overwhelming and I feel unappreciated and I wonder why I do it. But mostly, creating this podcast has been so helpful to me. I’ve interviewed some incredible people, I’ve heard from some incredible listeners, and I’ve gained a much better understanding of this weird disorder - I’ve never read so many research papers! I can – and do – laugh at myself, and that keeps me going.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
History has been great at erasing women from it, so what if we took a look at something in history, let’s say conspiracy theories, and not just acknowledged that women were there, but made them our focus? That’s what Unladylike’s Cristen Conger is doing with her new show Conspiracy, She Wrote. She’s found that women have their lady fingerprints all over this conspiracy theory shit, and that it’s not always some angry white man screaming from a lair in his mom’s basement. Conspiracy, She Wrote is a mixture of feminism and conspiracy theories—Cristen is digging into pastel QAnon, celebrity pregnancy truthers, tradwives, Taylor Swift psyops, Beyonce’s Illuminati mess, etc. Episode one takes us back to the very beginning, a hundredish years ago, when Nesta Helen Webster, the so-called “mother of modern conspiracy theories," synthesized the Illuminati-centered evil cabal conspiracy that spread from British fascists to American "patriots," to the evangelical Christian right-wing to QAnon and MAGA-heads today. This show is a mixture of storytelling, reporting, interviews, and humor, that adds a new layer to everything we know about conspiracy theories. Before you listen, please examine the chart Cristen made while she was working on the show, posted above. I love an unhinged chart. (You bet your ass that Nesta had an unhinged chart, too.)
hell yeah
✨There’s a chance that as you read this I am on a train bound for DC to attend Podcast Movement. Please come find me and say hello. I’m speaking twice —Almost 100 Podcast Marketing Tips, with Arielle Nissenblatt, is on August 20th at 1:30pm. And I’m also on a panel on August 21st at 1:30: Stop Paying for Audience: Master The Power of Organic Marketing.
✨Read Indie Marketing Case Study: This Is Propaganda in Podcast Marketing Magic.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted The Brown Girls Guide to Politics in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️I wrote about Valley Heat years ago but I have been seeing a resurgence in its popularity and, well, I know how marketing works. Maybe you saw it in five places, and this is the sixth, the place that convinces you to listen. And you should. Valley Heat is a fiction podcast about a real neighborhood, the Rancho Equestrian District in Burbank, California. Your host is freelance insurance adjuster Doug Duguay (Christian Duguay) who started the podcast to document his investigation into the pool guy (played by Billy Wayne Davis,) who he believed was using his trash can as a drug drop. That’s the entry point into his musings on his relationships with and observations on everyone in his orbit—his wife’s yoga instructor who is definitely sleeping with her, his father-in-law who hates him, the neighbor who started a installed a drive-thru car wash in his driveway, a backyard pizza parlor and brewery, and a night club in his garage, the pool guy’s wife who is always doing cannon balls in the pool…It’s literary, filled with evocative details, recurring jokes, and it has a real arc. Doug is always trying to do the right thing but overcomplicates things, and his neighbors all seem to be working against him, so he always ends up losing in every situation. We get to know him in the way we get to know a character in a 600 page novel. It’s laugh out loud absurd, I often find myself cartoonishly bursting into laughter. I would listen to it just to hear the fake, local ads. He reads ads for the driveway carwash he hates and the organization trying to take it down, his father-in-law who wants him in jail, a bunch of stuff (like Timothee Chalamet-themed baby clothes) being made by Burbank’s most renowned business person and clothing designer Jan Robinson, tall handlebar motorcycles, and more. You can listen to a lot of the music for the ads here:
I recommend clicking on “Meet You at Janthony’s.”
How I found it: ??
🎙️What was happening to rural sissies in 1955 America was hideous! I’m quoting Patrick Haggerty, the subject of the last episode of Sissy. (It was a piece first published for Short Cuts.) Gay little Patrick grew up on a farm in Texas which would have been worse than hideous if it were not for his father, who didn’t love him even though he was gay but because of it. Most queer people likely did not have fantastic relationships with their parents during this time, but this dad said, “I have to love this one special.” He supported Patrick to a) create his first wig at age 5 out of baling twine and b) create the world’s first gay country album, Lavender Country, in 1973. This episode was about Lavender Country, being gay in 1950’s rural America, but also about this dad who just loved his son so hard. Are you taking all this in? He was a saint! This man was a saint. Of course it was me, I made the first gay country album because my dad said I could. I could have quoted this entire episode, I wrote down 75% of it. For this write-up, I just bolded the stuff I transcribed. (If you’re not crying when you write a song how can you possibly expect your audience to cry when they hear it?) I listened to this episode on repeat like it was a song, it sort of was.
How I found it: Email from Thomas Curry
🎙️Emily Reeves became interested in a controversy at her old high school in Michigan surrounding an outbreak of violence and the discovery of a gun. The more she dug in the more she realized that there is a real story here that says so much about school shootings and what that has to do with Defund the Police. It’s a story she made into a podcast, Violence Week. The controversy stems from the decision to take police out of the hallways, something that happened in many places (one of them East Lansing, Emily’s alma mater) after the murder of George Floyd. Some people say this makes the schools more dangerous, but to others their dismissal is a breath of fresh air. Two things really fire people up: guns and their kids. This is a story that has both and it gets so heated that many of the voices we hear are heavy with, or more choked by, tears. It’s emotional and thorny and so complicated it’s good to have someone like Emily, who has personal connection to the story, sit down, look at everyone’s cards and help us think about whether or not police officers should return to schools like East Lansing. That’s the back-to-school content nobody wants but everybody needs.
How I found it: Email from Emily Reeves
🎙️Lauren Boebert, the congresswoman made famous for getting kicked out of a Broadway Beetlejuice show for vaping and jerking off her date (she also booed Biden at his State of the Union speech and ran on a campaign of “I don’t understand Congress at all, and that’s why I should be in it!”) is one of those politicians who makes following politics really fun if you’re able to forget for one second that her presence and power is incredibly troubling. I don’t know how she got to Congress, but she’s one of those people who fails up, up and up. That’s the premise of Lauren Boebert Can’t Lose. City Cast Denver’s Bree Davies and Paul Karolyi have been covering Lauren Boebert’s antics for years, but for this show they talk to her former supporters, people she has let down, people who love her, people who don’t get her, and even people who have eaten at her restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, called Shooters Grill. (Waitresses wore holsters on their hips.) There’s really a huge spectrum of people to talk to to get an idea of who this woman is, what she believes, if she’s…smart?, and what her rising power says about Americans. It’s not good. But the podcast is, it’s a really fun, personal exploration that makes you feel like you’re in the backseat with Bree and Paul’s driving/riding shotgun on this road trip across Colorado, from Lauren’s former third district to her new home in the fourth. (Why did she have to change districts? It’s a good story.) They actually interview her at the end, and it’s an interview that I really wish was harder on her. But hearing this woman speak is really something. If you squint your ears and don’t listen too hard, you can see how some people might fall for her. Still I loved the mission of this podcast—to try to understand Lauren Boebert so we can understand the future of American politics. I also just really enjoyed the style of this show, the spirit. I’d like to see more like it. That last episode, the interview, ran June 25, 2024. On June 26, she won the GOP primary. Again.
How I found it: Cat Jaffee recommended it.
🎙️I’m making my way through season two of Resurrection, which is focusing on the history of the early AIDS epidemic told through the stories of the people who shaped it. This is a subject that interests me, I have read a lot about it and listened to a lot of podcasts about it, but the story in episode one was one I did not know: it talks about Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a physician in New York's West Village who was the first person to spring into action when gay men were starting to show signs of a new illness that people thought was a rare cancer called Kaposi sarcoma. Joe was ringing the alarm way before the New York Times wrote an article that published July 3, 1971. Imagine…literally imagine…yourself reading the headline—Rare Cancer Seen in 41—as a gay man experiencing the same symptoms described. Many of these gay men were on the ferry to Fire Island. I’m sure they were terrified. When they arrived they spent the fourth of July checking lesions on one another. I can’t get that image out of my mind. Anyway, Joe was pissed but let his anger fuel him to do something about it. He actually spent quite a bit of time fighting with a Dr. Anthony Fauci about how to handle this new scary disease. That’s a fun fact that illustrates just how recent all this was. The question that Dane Stewart is seeking to answer in this first episode is: why did Dr. Joseph Sonnabend even care? The first episode is amazing and is followed by what is really a three-parter about Michael Callen, the guy who pretty much invented safe sex. My ears were glued to all of this. I have not yet mentioned that this is an indie podcast made with a lot of love, care, and great production. I actually asked Dane to tell me about the cover art, which I love, and I’m glad I did.
Here is what he said:
The two people in the cover art photo are Michael Callen (L) and his romantic and musical partner, Richard Dworkin (R). Michael Callen was one of the most impactful AIDS activists from the early years of the epidemic. Originally from smalltown Ohio, he moved to New York in the late 1970s with big dreams of becoming a singer. He was diagnosed with AIDS in early 1982 and rose to prominence by inventing safe sex (!!). Along with his writing partner, Richard Berkowitz, Michael co-authored the pamphlet How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, which was self-published and shipped worldwide and is largely credited with inventing the modern safe sex movement and saving many lives.
The cover art features a photo of Michael taken in 1983. Credit for the photo goes to Michael's romantic partner, Richard Dworkin, a jazz drummer who still lives in NYC to this day.
Michael died from AIDS-related illness in 1993. When he started getting sick, Richard worked with him to record 48 songs in order to preserve Mike's musical legacy. Episodes 2 & 4 of our new season tell Mike's story and feature a bunch of his music—I'm very, very proud of those two episodes.
How I found it: Was a fan of season one (and wrote about it) but Dane also emailed me.
🎙️The same week Democrats adopted 'weird' as their main attack line against Trump and Vance, Cool Zone Media launched Weird Little Guys, a weekly show hosted by Molly Conger that feels a like a cousin of Behind the Bastards. The point of this show is hilarious: that a lot of the worst people in the world are just huge fucking losers. Molly says that if you worry about the monsters under the bed, you’ll miss the monsters sitting at your dinner table. That seems to be the difference between Behind the Bastards and Weird Little Guys. Robert is taking down the big guys, Molly is more interested in the guys who attended their grandma’s Sunday dinner, tried to start a race war and failed, so went home to jerk off to Pokemon. I think episode two should have been episode one, it was a blast, or as much of a blast as a show like this can be. It’s about scorned Confederate re-enactor who left a bomb at a Civil War reenactment in 2017 and tried to get everyone to believe it was done by antifascist activists out for revenge after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Gerald Leonard Drake was a weird little guy, and Molly does a ton of research (that must have sucked to do) tracking down all sort of stuff about him that feels both important and not, and it’s very fun to listen to. (Like his online reviews of Burger King and bullfighting.)
How I found it: It’s everywhere (specifically in feed drops of a lot of things I listen to.)
🎙️In 2021, when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, Afghani citizens had to make a decision overnight, to stay or to go. On Inside Kabul, we are intimately introduced to a woman who stayed, Marwa, and a woman who left, Raha. Both have so much in common but their lives were thrown in completely different directions. The contrast there is rich with storytelling gold. Especially because we get to hear it straight from Marwa and Raha, who is sending French journalist Caroline Gillet voice memos as they flee, find themselves in refugee camps, lose contact with family, break the law, and resist in the tiniest ways, like driving a car. You feel like you have Marwa and Raha on the phone, they’re calling from the middle of the night, when they’re hopeful lonely and sad, everything. The story is so specific but the feelings it conjures are universal—loneliness, fear, hope, friendship, bravery and the meaning of home. Pack One Bag illustrated this stay-or-go conundrum perfectly (and I think the phrase “pack one bag” came up a few times in Inside Kabul.) Leaving might seem so easy, but in Pack One Bag, and in Inside Kabul, we really see and feel and hear what that really means.
How I found it: Heard about it in Podnews
🎙️Don’t Drink the Milk, the podcast that tells the curious stories of everyday things, is back for a new season. There are podcasts like this one, technically. But this one is made with lots of research and great interviews, and it takes you far beyond the others, and to more unexpected places. Episode one is a sweeping ride through witch hunts, and it gets into history and religion and crime and power, but also witch hunting in the future, how Scotland is fighting for justice (public awareness, proper memorial sites, official acknowledgements) for people who were accused of witchcraft (and executed) hundreds of years ago. Hey if you know why this show is called Don’t Drink the Milk (it is explained on an episode somewhere, but not frequently enough if you ask me) email me, lauren@tinkmedia.co. I’ll send the first person who gets it right a gift. Answer will be in the newsletter next week.
How I found it: I listened to season one and still subscribe, also heard about season two in Podnews
🎙️Season one of Nobody Should Believe Me was quite a ride. Andrea Dunlop took a sharp and personal look at Munchausen by Proxy by telling us the story of her own sister, who she believes is guilty of making her niece and nephew sick. (She still thinks this but is entirely powerless in doing anything about it.) After that show ran, I enjoyed Andrea’s episodes criticizing the popular Netflix documentary Take Care of Maya, which gave a completely different (and needed) fact-check/rebuke of the documentary’s story. Her new season is focusing on Jordyn Hope, who was a victim of Munchausen by Proxy at the hands of their mother. Andrea goes back to Jo’s religious hometown to talk to friends, family and teachers, to hear just how hard it is to be a bystander to this kind of abuse if you actually want to do something. Jo is grown, so Andrea is able to see what it’s like to survive this. She’s taking notes, aware that Jo’s trauma will be similar to that of her niece and nephew once they are grown, too. This story is personal, shocking, eerie, and a really thorough look at Jo’s life. We follow them from early childhood memories to the death of their mother, and the trauma that comes with mourning the person who was harming them for so many years. Andrea’s complete heart is in this. The way she is with Jo feels like a different level of reporting.
How I found it: I don’t remember, I have been following it for three seasons now.
🎙️How are you celebrating the 100th anniversary of the world’s first designated wilderness region, the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico? Not to brag but I celebrated it by listening to How Wild, a new show from KALW about what wilderness really means. The first episode, Untrammeled, is about whether or not we should intervene to save wilderness areas, especially when global fucking (that is what I’m calling global warming now) is making some of our most precious natural places extinct. Host Marissa Ortega-Welch takes us to Sequoia National Park to talk to two people who have very different opinions of what to do. I think I align with the people who are like “intervene and save the Sequoias!” but I kind of get the argument that says “you’ve done quite enough, thank you.” It’s like if a waiter spilled scalding hot spaghetti all over your lap and offered to help but instead started just rubbing your legs with scalding hot spaghetti. You know? Anyway, it will make you wonder if there even is a wilderness anymore, and how the lack of it will change us as people. Plus you get to learn a beautiful new word: Untrammeled.
How I found it: Press release (two, actually)
🎙️I love you!