🎈The Balloonists’ Prayer ☁️ The Sea Witch🚢 weather forecasts 🌊 sonic branding 🎶
🍭 👂 Don’t worry I packed some juice boxes in the cooler 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, January 20, 2025. My next Disney Cruise is in 60 days. In case this newsletter is too long, a meditation I didn’t know I needed here, how an unexpected piece of audio connects people all over the world here, I cartwheel when we get to hear Blair Braverman on You’re Wrong About, here.
xoxo
lauren
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Kevin Perjurer
Kevin Perjurer is the creator of the Defunctland YouTube Series. He creates documentaries on theme parks and themed entertainment, with a focus on those that have become defunct.
He is the co-host of Where We Parked.
Describe Where We Parked in 10 words or less.
A comedy podcast that explores left-field theme park topics.
How are you two different and how are you similar? What do you each bring to the table?
We are both very similar in our opinions on theme parks and pop culture. One of the reasons we started the podcast was because we would have late-night research sessions together and they would be the highlight of our weeks, so we wanted to preserve them. We both see the world in similar ways, and we are both eager to deconstruct a topic. Where We Parked is not an opposites attract podcast, we are almost always on the same page, going full speed ahead.
Jack is funnier than me, that might be the biggest difference between us.
How is Where We Parked different from your YouTube content?
Our YouTube content requires a long gestation period, with a lot of research going into every video. Where We Parked is much more casual and spontaneous. We are often learning about the subject as we go. This allows for more humor and commentary than our documentary work.
How do you go about planning the seasons? Is everything mapped out ahead of time?
We have no idea what topics we will cover. We both have somewhat of an annoyance with podcasts that are obsessed with pumping out as much content as possible, as if the very act of someone talking is worthy of being distributed and preserved. We take a much more critical approach to the recording sessions. We throw away 90% of what we record, and are only able to produce one episode every 3-4 recording sessions. We record late at night, on a couch, with bluetooth mics on our shirts, because we want the podcast to be an authentic hangout between us, not a formatted recording. We do not plan topics or discuss ideas beforehand, and we often ditch a subject halfway through if it is not interesting to us. It takes around six months to finish six episodes. We then might move around the order so each six-episode season has a subtle evolution, both in topic and energy.
If people haven’t listened yet, where should they start?
If you had to pick one, go with Episode One: In Search of Excellence. This episode introduces a key concept of the podcast, that Walt Disney is not just a human man, but an archetype of a leader that can be found in multiple industries. In our most bizarre topics, we often will run into, as Jack says, "one of the world's Walt Disneys."
How is your thinking changing about the podcast as you make more episodes? Is the show evolving?
As we've done more recording, it has become easier to tell when a session will result in an episode. An episode has to meet some criteria for me, as I edit the episodes. One, the episode has to have consistent, big laughs moments. Two, it has to go in multiple directions and be a multifaceted discussion (e.g. Season One's The Epcot Residency let us discuss washed-up musicians, Season Two's Nachos Rios Grande Challenge allowed us to discuss competitive eating).01 And three, it has to have some informational core, so even if a listener doesn't find us funny, they will at least walk away with some interesting, albeit useless, information. The biggest roadblock we reach during recording is we will start arguing a point, and it sounds like we are trying to sound insightful or intelligent. These always go in the trash. The focus of Where We Parked is comedy first, theme park history second, and us as intellectuals last.
Are you making fun of this stuff? Because you’re definitely laughing at it and talking about how ridiculous it is but it also seems like you love it so much and actually have a huge appreciation for it.
That is a key component of Where We Parked as well as our respective YouTube content. A lot of people approach theme parks primarily with reverence and respect first, especially a lot of Disney Parks fans. In our opinion, theme parks are these ridiculous spaces that are a bizarre result of capitalism and art and society and humanity. They are absurd. At the same time, we are fascinated by their existence, and like many, we have fond memories of our time visiting them and still enjoy going today. We both have a hard time simply enjoying something and moving on. The way we show our love is by engaging with it, dissecting it, and often, being critical of it.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Drifting Off with Joe Pera has returned for a new season. I know it’s technically supposed to be a sleep aid (?) but I think it’s one of the funniest, best written shows out there and I cannot imagine falling asleep to it. In this episode Joe starts talking about wind but meanders slightly to wheat and then we go up in an airplane-shaped hot air balloon with Joe. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure thought exercise that really asks you to use your imagination. And I know I said I couldn’t fall asleep to this podcast, but thinking creatively like this does work against feelings of anxiety, you can’t be anxious if you’re creating. So if you can’t fall asleep because you’re anxious, this episode could help with that. “If you need something solid to hold on to, I’ve got just the thing,” he says, before reading the Balloonists’ Prayer, which is a real thing. This whole episode felt like something solid to hold on to. It’s a beautifully soundscaped escape to the skies with Joe and his calm voice and his earnestness and this feeling that everything might not be fine but everything is fine right now. This episode is a meditation.
~sponsored~
How did he end up with a rebel belt buckle and a Union hat? This investigation of a Confederate statue in the bluegrass of Kentucky uncovers why. Some say his ensemble perfectly fits a border state that was both pro-Union and pro-slavery. Others say he’s racist. Still others say he’s a monument to courage. Over seven sound-rich episodes, Rebel on Main chronicles this statue’s bizarre birth, the protests that threaten to topple him, and the haunting story of the community that now decides his fate.
notes
✨Tink is hosting a TWO-DAY Podcast Marketing Radio Boot Camp at the end of January. We are bringing the whole team to share everything we know about audience growth. Learn more here.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Un (con) Trolled in EarBuds.
✨REVOLT announced its winter 2025 podcast lineup, which includes The Danza Project, Behind The Mic, Those Wrestling Girls, Situationships, and more.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
🎙️The Shipping Forecast is a functional radio broadcast on BBC Radio 4 that provides weather reports and forecasts specifically for the seas surrounding the UK and Ireland. But it’s also known for its poetic, rhythmic delivery of location names and weather conditions, making it a beloved British institution beyond just sailors. Illuminated had an episode about The Shipping Forecast that collected little vignettes from listeners describing exactly why it means so much to them. This episode was an episode of Soul Music, if The Shipping Forecast was a song. And it kind of is. There are so many things that draw people to hear it, and the image of all of these people, all over the world, listening in for comfort, is beautiful, isn’t it? Listen here.
How I discovered it: Heard a promo for it on another BBC show.
🎙️Some of my favorite episodes of You’re Wrong About are the ones with Blair Braverman (a long-distance dogsledder who also was a contestant on Naked and Afraid.) Last week she talked to Sarah about Aron Ralston, the climber who became famous for having to cut off his own arm when a boulder fell on top of him. It was made into a film 127 Hours starring James Franco, and I had always kind of thought it was just a survival story that didn’t mean much. But Blair always proves that survival stories ask big questions and are rich with meaning (one of them is that what happens to us usually doesn’t have anything to do with us.) Blair talks about hedonistic traps (people pursuing new things, expecting those things will make them feel happier than they actually do,) takes us through the five stages of hunter development which can apply to almost anything in life, inducing podcasting, and forces us to rethink the Aron Ralston story if we hadn’t thought about it very much already. It’s a story about suffering. Who do we expect to suffer? People go through terrible things like this all the time, but when it happens to Aron, someone who was out for a fun cool little hike, it turns into a huge story. This is the story of the person who shouldn’t have expected great suffering, yet it happened anyway. It’s a story that pulls us into all sorts of uncomfortable places, between many rocks and hard places, and as Sarah puts it perfectly, “we can only believe that we could possibly end up in such a horrible position if we could also believe that we are able to get ourselves out of it.” Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber
🎙️Elizabeth Rynecki has a father who used to work ship salvage and a son, Owen, with ADHD, and she made a podcast, That Sinking Feeling, connecting the two. Every episode tells a story of one ship salvage, mines it for lessons and finds that as improbable as it may seem, these stories become metaphors that help Elizabeth understand her son. The first episode tells the story of the crash of The Sea Witch, which required a multicell buoyancy assist module (it’s like a giant pool floaty) to save her, and Owen’s classroom and teachers and her desire to save him. It ends with this beautiful image of the two of them peacefully floating through the sea with a giant floaty for their lives—a customized steel framed buoyancy assist module with inflatable rubber membranes. Or the perfect learning and development plan for Owen. This is a beautifully made podcast. (Stories are interwoven with a chorus voices from people dealing with ADHD in many ways.) And, as you know, my favorite kind of podcast is one that makes me say, “I didn’t know that could be a podcast.” I didn’t know this could be a podcast. I do want to know more about ship salvage, see ADHD through a new lens, and learn about motherhood from Elizabeth. Here she is dreaming up this multicell buoyancy assist module for Owen, so entrenched in helping him that everything she sees is a metaphor for his struggles. I am a new mom and I thought to myself, this is how a mother’s brain works, this is how they dream. This is what being a mother is. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Podnews
🎙️The Hole Truth is a three-part anthology series investigating how conspiracy theories captured the American imagination—how online conspiracy theories wreak havoc in real people’s lives and how radical ideas are being spread in local communities. Marnie Duke guides us, with beautiful soundscape, through storytelling and interviews, down the rabbit hole trying to make sense of how we got there. The first episode features Lauren Ober, host of We Live Here Now, who was actually a juror in a January 6 case, which for reasons Lauren gets into, is a very unlikely scenario.. We get to hear what it was like to be in Washington DC that day and what it was like to sit on a jury for a man who chose to defend himself despite the fact that there was tons of video that he took of himself in an act of domestic terrorism. Lauren had a lot of conflicting thoughts, it’s a fascinating story in itself. But Marnie finds that by putting these people behind bars, isolated from other people who have committed crimes, essentially putting them in a "fraternity house under lock and key” the men became radicalized even more. It might not be something we could realize at the time, but Lauren and Marnie are asking, is there something else we could have done ensure that nothing like this ever happens again? Listen here.
How I discovered it: An email from Marnie Duke that I initially didn’t really read, then I was talking to Talia Augustidis and she was like “did you get an email from Marnie Duke she’s working on a really good show” so I opened it.
🎙️Switched on Pop celebrated ten years of podcasting! And the fact that, for ten years, they’ve been using the same theme song that Charlie whipped up rather quickly, a theme song not many people like, including, it seems, them. Charlie and Nate actually talk to music experts about it, and the consensus is that it sounds like an annoying video game for children or a bad game show. But it also just doesn’t capture the vibe of what Charlie and Nate are doing. So they decided to rewrite the theme song. This episode is kind of a tribute to the old theme song (Charlie tracks down the woman who sang the “Swiiiiiitched Onnnnn Popppp!”) but it’s also a walk-through of what it takes to write a theme song. We even get a lesson from Dallas Taylor of 20K Hertz about sonic branding. So congrats to Charlie and Nate for 10 years and the new song. And if you don’t like it, at least now you know how it was made. And maybe, after this exercise, you’ll think about what jingles are trying to tell you about the people who made it and its values. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener
🎙️When I found The Mother of it All I felt like clicking with a friend at a party where I had nothing else in common with most of the guests. It’s a parenting show, I guess, but it’s more about the culture of modern motherhood. It’s not about how to get your baby to stop throwing her food on the floor, something I could use help with, it’s about much bigger questions that don’t have a simple hack or resolution. I stumbled upon an episode from last January about disabled parenting that stopped me. Yes, it’s about what it’s really like to be a disabled parent, but also about how as parents, we become disabled. That can be frustrating for someone like Jessica Slice, who became disabled later in life. Jessica is perfectly poised to explain this idea of seeing and experiencing the world differently as someone in charge off caring for a kid. Parenting in general, she says, is in some ways less frustrating to those who have been experiencing a world not built for them. It’s something that seems obvious but the conversation was really eye opening. (Also eye-opening, how Jessica became disabled. It’s a story that involves a pack of wild dogs in Greece.) Listen here.
How I discovered it: An old colleague was a guest on it and I saw her promoting her episode on Instagram
🎙️ I love Phonograph, the podcast that is meticulously running through and analyzing audio pieces (90% of what they review is from This American Life) because hosts Rob McGinley Myers and Britta Greene pick out pieces in journalism or narrative storytelling and, taking us sometimes line by line through the piece, comment on the words, phrases, and moments in the piece that made it work or not. They intertwine their own comments with the actual audio and bring up outside resources to tell the story of the story, and how the story was made. Listening to it has warped my brain a little, reshaped the way I listen to things. In a recent episode Rob and Britta unpack the This American Life episode with reporting from Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Problem We All Live With” and end up talking about story structure and what audio makers are building and how they can bring their listeners there. All this time I just thought I was listening to nice stories on This American Life, but Phonograph is revealing the brilliant craftwork that goes into something that sounds so effortless you don’t notice. They do a really good job pointing out the master moves Nikole makes to get to the heart of this heart breaking story about desegregation. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Twitter DM from Rob.
🎙On season one of Nobody Should Believe Me, Andrea Dunlop told the story of her older sister, who was investigated for Munchausen by Proxy abuse, getting deep into the criminology and psychopathology behind it and trying to really understand the harm her sister caused. Subsequent seasons featured other cases, and season five tells the story of Sophie Hartman, a young, white midwestern evangelical missionary who adopted two Zambian girls. One of them was plagued with a variety of alarming symptoms—chronic vomiting, seizures, and full-body paralysis. Everything Sophie does is confusing and suspicious, and Andrea and her team are trying to make sense of her actions. They read her self-published book which is not so much a true reflection of Sophie’s story as it is a puzzle to solve. She’s lying, but what about and why? This is a phrase I’m starting to overuse and I’ll have to retire it soon, but this podcast feels very handmade, textured, and upclose in the best way. Andrea is the perfect host, she notices things about these cases that we wouldn’t notice on our own, she is able to empathize with the families involved in these stories, and she reports with heart. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber.
🎙️Little Devils is an upclose, jaw-droppingly well-crafted show about our little devils, the things we consider flaws about ourselves. I wrote about it when the first two episodes were out but there are two more in the feed that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. In one, Jazmine (JT) Green tells us exactly what it likes to finally to feel at home in her body after realizing she was trans, and how when she started dancing alone she found she could finally embody herself, uninhibited. It was a piece so intimate I felt like I was a private observer and that it would be rude for me to try to tell you about it. In the fourth episode of Little Devils, Jasmin talks to her sister and her mother, cracking her family open and putting it underneath a microscope, to reflect on doing things for for sense of duty or for love. I cannot stop thinking about these pieces. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Met Jasmin at RESONATE!
🎙️I love you!
SPOTLIGHT: THE BLACK PODCAST COALITION
Contributor: Adell Coleman
The Black Podcast Coalition is an initiative to make sure that brand safety & suitability tools are working equitably for Black podcasters, while giving brands a streamlined process to reach Black audiences at scale. BPC is a large collective of influential networks and independent shows that cater to black audiences. The coalition sells ad inventory for the shows and helps facilitate cross promotional marketing opportunities between members.
Meet a member: Lisa Woolfork: Host and creator of STITCH PLEASE / Black Women Stitch
“I believe that anyone can make anything!”
To know Lisa is to know someone who is truly amazing and impactful in the podcast community. Creator of Stitch Please and Black Women Stitch both or which centers and celebrates Black women, girls, and femmes in sewing. Black Women Stitch is the sewing group where Black lives matter. We practice the principles of Black liberation, radical self-love, and social justice. Getting knowledge from podcast spaces such as Black led organizations like Afros and Audio, Black Podcast Collective, Black Podcasting Association. She has gained a meaningful perspective in forward thinking and new relationships like her newest one with Fermata.
Though 2024 had a lot to offer her and her podcast like being featured in Apple for Black History Month, winning an Ambie award, three Black Podcasting Awards, and two Signal Awards. She was also featured in the NYTimes (CONGRATS AGAIN 🎉!) There’s no telling what 2025 has to offer! We can’t wait to see!
Fun Fact: Lisa composed the Stitch Please theme song using her sewing machine, an iPhone, and GarageBand. Lisa is writing two books about Black women's sewing.
Brand she’d like to work with: “Sewing machine manufacturers and larger corporations in the craft and art space.”
Would you like to advertise to over 500K Black podcast listeners? Would you like to add your show or network to the Black Podcast Coalition? Email us at sales@dcpentertainment.com