🥚 The mystery of the egged house 🏡 the Indiana Jones of chocolate 🍫 popped collars 🪡 a lot of scary stuff 👻
🍭 👂 You're in for a treat! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, October 31st. In case this email is too long, an adventure in chocolate here, the one time a kid legit was murdered via Halloween candy here, and listen to me in a complete state of fear here.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Jim Harold
Jim Harold is the host of a slew of spooky shows, including The Paranormal Podcast and Jim Harold’s Campfire. He is also an author. Follow Jim on Twitter here and on Instagram here.
Describe your show in 10 words or less.
Ordinary people share their extraordinary experiences with the paranormal.
Is there one story that has stuck with you over the years?
There is one that is called The Roadhouse Saloon that is Twilight Zone worthy! A woman finds herself in a bar where she and her companion are melding into a mural on the wall…it is really remarkable. Also, the place and the mural both ACTUALLY EXIST! I’ve met this caller in person and believe her 100%!
Is there a KIND of favorite story you enjoy?
Yes, they are what I call headscratchers…ones that “make you go hmmm” to quote that old song. Ones that aren’t necessarily traditional ghost stories but ones that make you wonder what the hell was that all about! For example, we had a caller who had been stranded and got help from a mechanic at a service station. The guy really went above and beyond to help her to the point of even driving her home. A couple of days later, she rode by the place and it looked to have been closed for at least 10 years. Those are the stories that get me most excited.
These people aren’t professional storytellers but you’re great at helping them out. What’s the secret to getting people to tell a good story?
Basically just sharing that this is a conversation, I reiterate that they are just telling me a story as you would tell a friend. That seems to calm most people down. After all, we are all humans and we all have stories. It is universal. So, I ask that they just relax and tell me a story like we’re around a campfire…and, guess what? We are! It’s just electronic.
What things have you done for your show that have worked in growing numbers?
I think appearing on other podcasts is key. Plus, advertising on other similar podcasts is a great strategy. Finally, I call upon my audience to spread the word to like minded people. I remind them that we don’t have big conglomerate-sized budgets and they are our best messengers. Like in any business, word of mouth is key. Also, I have been very impressed with the work I’ve done with Tink (No, Lauren did not tell me to say this). (Ed. note: 😊)
What advice would you give to a podcaster who feels they are plateauing in numbers?
Try new things and don’t give up. I have been podcasting for 17 years and full time for 10. Plateaus are natural…you just keep pushing and trying different things till you push through…that is assuming your content is good. Make sure that your product is on point and with persistence you can grow. 17 years in I am always trying new things whether it is on the marketing, production, or rev gen side. If you stagnate, you die.
What’s your most downloaded episode?
A best of show from a few years back with over 150,000 downloads according to our media host. Once or twice a year, we do these best of compilations going back to 2009 and they are some of our audience’s favorites.
What does nobody ask you that you want to say?
Jim, are you a good singer? Guess what, I am a helluva singer…a little out of practice but at one time I was good enough to be a pro. Still, these days to be honest I think the mic I need to be in front of is a podcasting mic. It is my destiny.
Why don’t you sing on your podcast?
I'm not sure that people are tuning in to hear me sing...but around Halloween I'd sing a few bars of Season Of The Witch, but no one can seem to fix music licensing in podcasts...can someone get on that, seriously? I want some cool bumper music (that people know) for my shows!
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
From Kaleidoscope comes OBSESSIONS: Wild Chocolate, an epic Indiana Jones-like adventure where the treasure is the world’s most ancient and expensive cacao. It’s part food history part immersive travelogue that puts you in host Rowan Jacobson’s backpack as he elbows his way through the Amazon, crash lands into cocaine flyaways, and evades anacondas, tagging along with modern-day Lara Crofts as they seek this stuff that you can actually buy. (Inspired by Dan Pashman’s Cascatelli.) This is one of the most fun adventure podcasts I’ve ever heard. Rowan knows his stuff, the production is beautiful, and it’s just a fucking blast. It really is a treat for your ears.
oh hey
✨Alyssa Meyers wrote a piece in Marketing Brew about how I grew Lizzy Cooperman’s In Your Hands with passion (and some marketing tricks.) Read here.
✨My recent Lifehacker piece is 12 Podcasts to Listen to in the Dark, Ranked by Scariness. Read here.
✨For Podcast Marketing Magic, Shreya wrote a piece about how to start pitching your podcast for end-of-the-year Best Of lists. Read here.
✨Arielle spotlighted Twenty-Four Seven in her newsletter and podcast.
✨Call 1-844-POD-AT-ME every morning while you’re feeding your cat—and leave your own podcast recommendation at the sound of the beep. (Don’t worry, no one will answer.) We might feature it on the hotline. Listen to our Podcast Recommendation Podcast here. It’s brilliant.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Bridget Todd (of There Are No Girls on the Internet) has launched Internet Hate Machine, a show about trolls who use the internet to target and silence marginalized people, by speaking with the people who have been harassed, the activists fighting against it, and the experts who can help explain what’s really going on. Black women in particular are building the internet and our social spaces, but it often ends up being hostile spaces for them. As we learned from TANGOTI, this isn’t a bug in the system, it’s a feature that’s baked into politics and the heart of our social platforms. This is no small thing, but journalists don’t have the range to get into the nitty gritty. Bridget does. Listen to Bridget Todd, everything she says. TANGOTI has become almost a news feed for me, keeping me up to date on the most recent internet fuckery, and Internet Hate Machine is giving her another platform to tell some of the most important human/tech stories that touch upon every molecule of our daily lives. BTW on a recent episode of TANGOTI, Bridget broke down, with producer Michael Amatao, three tweets that went viral for the wrong reasons (hello garden coffee lady) and explains what our online rage really says about us. And it was really FUN. Listen now.
🎙️As you know I’m a podcast call-in girl, and have been on many podcasts. I don’t worry about them or get nervous anymore. But my segment of Outside/In was absolutely terrifying and new to me. The subject was things we fear (my thing is holes, I have trypophobia,) and I felt completely vulnerable, and out of control recording. I don’t even remember doing it. You can literally hear me screaming as Jack, the producer, and I look at triggering pictures online. Jack did a great job editing my unhinged audio, and he also did his best for me to feel comfortable. (I can remember him saying: you look sick. Do you think we should stop? I was clawing at my face and body, and just noticed I still have scratch marks on my legs.) This was hard for me to do but I absolutely loved the result. It’s a great episode. (Someone else is afraid of oven mitts, that one is more fun.) (Do not google trypophobia. If I spelled it wrong it’s because I refuse to google.) Listen here. Or check this out.
🎙️On her new season of Articles of Interest, American Ivy, Avery Trufelman has set out to determine how preppy clothing turned into what we now consider “classic” wear. Episode one talks about the history of preppy clothes by going back to a book called Take Ivy that was written in 1965 by Japanese visitors to the Ivy League college campuses. It became viewed as almost a Bible to prep culture. But what was intended to be satire set fire to people embracing that “ivy” look, influencing a "neo-Ivy" style in recent years. Avery breaks down how Ivy became cannon and has weathered so many massive mega-trends in culture, embodying an image of America that doesn’t even exist. This series is Avery’s trend report, and Avery has already unearthed a fascinating piece of fashion history that has a booming impact on the way people dress themselves and what they are trying to say about themselves when they do it. Listen here.
🎙️Anne Helen Peterson’s Work Appropriate is here, and she invited the perfect person for episode one: Josh Gondelman. The show, inspired by AHP’s newsletter, is tackling our most burning workplace questions. And Josh, one of the nicest guys in…the world? knows how to deal with people, he talks to Helen about people and feelings at work. Josh has lots of hilarious metaphors for the idea that what we want is to feel like a person at our jobs, and not a puppet or karaoke singer or cover band for the people we are working for. Listen here.
🎙️Season five of Atlanta is fucking blowing me away and I cannot watch an episode without listening to The Ringer’s Prestige TV recap of it immediately after. Listen here.
🎙️Arielle and I are always telling podcasters that they should set the listener up at the beginning of each episode and let them know what to expect. That’s good advice but also good (riskier) advice is to totally break all the rules and surprise your listener every time. (Ala Ross Sutherland’s Imaginary Advice.) Podfly’s How Does Tomorrow Sound is full of surprises. It’s a podcast about podcasting, the future of it to be specific, a mix of immersive sound, audio experiments, roundtables, conversational drop ins, interviews, and even an entire episode that is a review of the first episode, asking other audio makers about the content and listener experience. Episode one talks about how AI and natural language processing will impact podcasting (will AI generated stick?) and episode two is a deeply textured look at listeners and how what they expect from podcasts is changing. It’s for people super interested in podcast creation and the industry. You’ll agree, disagree, become more curious, get mad, be inspired, and maybe even change the way you make and/or listen to audio. I want to have a book club about this show. The show notes are pure poetry. Listen here.
🎙️The first season of The Last Archive was a whodunnit—who killed truth? Season two was about doubt. Now Jill Lepore is turning her attention to common knowledge, what it is, and how technology has been a driving force in the way we get it. Episode one is a throwback to the days of encyclopedia salesmen who persuaded families (mostly housewives) to buy expensive, leather-bound volumes that would have to be updated. Information was hard to get but it was a static, one-stop shop for knowledge. The internet changed that, and Jill wades into the waters of Wikipedia, “the worst encyclopedia except for all the other ones,” and in part one of “Trial by Teenager,” she tests an idea to solve the spread of fake news by enlisting a group of teenagers to act as jurors, deciding which kind of political ads should be allowed to be run. If this were really to happen, it could change the world. This season is Jill’s tribute to the people stitching together the fabric of what we know and believe. Listen here.
🎙️There has been so much talk about rainbow fentanyl and how children are absolutely not being poisoned or drugged via Halloween candy despite what the media is telling us, and that they are much more likely to be hit by a car on Halloween than finding a razor in their apple. Cautionary Tales has one (and please let’s be clear, the only) story of a little Texas boy who was outright murdered via candy, specifically a pixie stick. It was a tainted candy incident, but it’s much weirder than you think, it’s a very fucked up story. And as Tim Hartford says, our brain prefers story over statistics, so this is what we glom onto and remember. This is an urban legend that encourages kids to fear their communities, but in this story, the danger was coming from inside the house. Listen here.
🎙️Left Handed Radio produced two funny shots perfect for the horror-loving, podcast-obsessed weirdos out there: Fresh Scare with Sherry Disgusting (with guest Naomi Ekperigin and a review of Netflix’s “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” from The Cryptkeeper) and The Nightly With Michael Barbaric, where Michael speaks with Freddy Krueger. Listen here.
🎙️On Women’s Running Stories, Cherie Turner lets women runners from around the world tell stories about their relationship with the sport. I love it when the host steps back like this, offering a direct line of intimacy from the storyteller to the listener. I’m sure these episodes are very hard to make but when well done they are beautiful. A recent storyteller, Alison Mariella Désir, author of Running While Black, tells her life story and how running has impacted nearly every part of it, how she loves it despite the fact runners don’t usually look like her. As a Black woman in running, she’s noticed that is is a very white, very male sport. I’ve dabbled in the running cult community and it can feel like a very open and welcoming place, if you’re white. If runners understand how white their sport is, I’m not sure many of them wonder why, or how they can make running a sport for everyone. This episode was a striking soliloquy about a woman who has found love in a sport that she was required to push herself into (literally, she met her husband running and named her son after the word for “to run”) and how she can blaze a trial for other Black women runners to follow in her path. Listen here.
🎙️I’m devastated that Spotify cancelled Crime Show, the best crime show, and I listened to the previous two episodes with awe and sadness—a volunteer attorney from the NAACP opts to represent the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, an family in Ohio is getting mercilessly egged and nobody can figure out where the eggs are being launched from. The stories the team chooses always have some sort of twist, and they rely on the narrative instead of gore or awfulness. Each story hinges on a mystery, something that makes your brain do a little more work. It’s one of those shows that is about people first, and then the genre is really the subcategory. I’ll miss this show. If you haven’t listened, I’m jealous because you have a whole archive of new stuff to go back to. You’ll like every single one. Listen here.
🎙️Dope Labs, the show that mixes science with pop culture, has also been axed, and to bid adieu, Titi and Zakiya looked back to some of their favorite episodes and resurfaced the topics with updates from past-guests. I’ll miss hearing Titi and Zakiya together—they had started to feel like friends. There wasn’t another show like this. Listen here and here.
🎙️Josha Rae of AMP, one of my most trusted-sources for podcast recommendations, pointed me toward Forever Ago, a joyful kids show hosted by a woman named Joy, who gets into conversations with kids to explain things like dinosaurs, air conditioning, and money. He sent me the episode The Joy of Swimming, an explainer why some Black people, who used to be among the most adept swimmers in the world, don’t feel at home in water and are more likely to drown than white people. There is a whole cultural explanation that a) Joy breaks down nicely in a way I wish was available to me when I was a kid and b) hits on a lot of the stuff covered in a show I love, Into the Depths. More suggested listening: Forever Ago’s episode Who Was the First Lifeguard?. Listen to The Joy of Swimming here.
🎙️The Nocturnists is running a fascinating series on shame, a word that kept popping up when they were talking to doctors during the pandemic. It’s a tiny word that many doctors are hesitant to admit they feel but it feels like a disease, causing them to feel guilty, completely responsible, or inept when things don’t go perfectly. These stories get doctors on the mic to express their failures and vulnerabilities about failing when the stakes are sky high. An episode about getting sued adds a new level of terror to the profession. It’s fascinating to hear if you’re not a doctor and probably cathartic if you are. Listen here.
🎙️Jordan Runtagh and Alex Heigl must be around my age, because their episodes of Too Much Information always hit me straight in the nostalgia, particularly on this episode about Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? Jordan and Alex give a history of the show, its salty, misanthropic creator, and all the ways Are You Afraid of the Dark? was ahead of its time, offering roles to a diverse bunch of kids. (Never hiring kids who looked “too Disney.”) And the darkness of the content. Are You Afraid of the Dark? wasn’t allowed to show the Midnight Society lighting the fire (which could bring out tiny pyromaniacs from the woodwork) but were allowed to show kids who were kidnapped and starved to death, drowned, and whose lives were ended in other creative, gruesome ways. The show was just the right amount of scary (to this day I have never been brave enough to finish the Nosferatu episode) and its timing was perfect—it was on when kids too old for bedtime and too young for date night needed something to watch. This episode will take you back to those special moments you had in front of the TV on Saturday nights and explain why this show had you hooked. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Chris Olin, whose background includes working at KCRW, Marketplace, KPCC, the SoundsLA project, Wondery’s first daily sports podcast, The Lead, and more. Today he runs his own business AngelenoAudio where he is working on an anthology podcast that explores stranger-than-fiction crime.
The app you use to listen: Google podcasts. (My nostalgic heart rests with WinAmp, but I’ve got my eye on Pocket Casts.)
What speed do you listen to podcasts? 1.2, but I script edit in 1.3.
How do you discover new shows? I ask people! For me, a great happy hour activity is listening to others talk about the podcasts they love. I literally could give two shits about dragons on HBO. Instead, give me your worst, give me your best, give me the weird shit from the crates in the back - remember My Dad Wrote a Porno?
One show you love that everybody loves. Psssh… the Daily? Yesiknow. While I have NO idea how terrible (or wonderful) the work-life balance is over there, I believe it’s the gold standard for a daily podcast show. Not so much in the stories they cover, but how they put together the episodes and the choices they make (or don’t make). It’s a study on watching the leader of the pack and that study has lots of useful information just behind the veil - amiright?
One show you love that most people don't know about. Ologies by Alie Ward. To me, it’s a perfect representation of what podcasting is, what it can be, and what it often should be. It is a full-hearted venture into what someone loves but it’s equally in service to building a community of people who are fulfilled after every episode. It’s also made with love. THROUGH AND THROUGH. Plus, host Alie Ward built the thing from the ground up in 2016. BADASS.
Anything else you wanna say? I carved 4 jack-o-lanterns on October 15th this year because I wanted to “get organized” about Halloween. All of them rotted within five days. I’m out of design options. Anyone have any good stencils?
Hot take: When you bounce a file, you can use that 5-10 minutes to do a supported hand-stand or alternatively sit inverted on your couch (so that your head is at the floor and your feet are in the air). The exercise increases blood flow to your head for a few minutes. The unusual position is a mental palette cleanser (the ginger in your sushi plate). When you return to your workspace: Yes, your file is bounced. But you’ve also just done something ridiculous. Or is it?
*consult your physician before trying this at home. I’m not a licensed doctor and results may have dangerous consequences… like falling into your coffee table
Self-care tip: Walk. It’s good. And while you are walking, be sure to pull your earbuds out and smile at a passerby. Warmth from a stranger can change someone’s entire outlook.
