 Okay, so, thank you all for coming. I apologize about the delay. I'm shocked that we actually found each other. It was, I was like, are you near a building? And you said, yeah, I'm outside near a building. And then we found each other like two ships in the night. My name is Seth Mnookin. I'm the director of the communications forum. We have three events a semester, every semester. Do we have a mailing list sign up? Okay, a mailing list sign up will go get passed around. If you sign up, you will only get six, possibly eight emails a year from us, telling you when those events are. So if you're interested in this type of programming and would like to come, please sign up so we can keep you informed. This event is also being filmed and it will be archived later on. So if you did not get enough of it tonight, you can watch it again. Or if you know someone who's interested and could not make it, you can tell them. It'll probably be up in a couple of days as well as a summary of the event. Our next communication forum event is March 14th. It is actually a new type of thing for us. It's the stand-up comedian Cameron Esposito who will, who's phenomenal if you don't know or you should check her out. She will be doing a stand-up set and then a Q&A. So please come join us at that. And I think that's it for announcements. Now let me introduce our speakers. Cynthia Graver is an award-winning radio producer and journalist whose work appears in Slate, the Boston Globe, PRIs the World, Scientific American. And what did we? Wired. But what did we work on? What was the? But now defunct publication. Yeah, right, right. Yes, you won an award for it, I know. Yep, which you deserve all the credit for, not me. It's true, that was not. In 2014, she co-founded Gastropod, which is a phenomenal podcast about food and science and history. It has won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award and the International Association of Culinary Professionals Award. And it was named Boston's Best Podcast by the improper Bostonian. Cynthia was also a Knight Journalism Fellow at MIT, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow in 2012. And she currently teaches the podcasting and radio journalism segment for MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, which I also direct. And if you're interested in that, you should get in touch with me as well. And it says here she's fluent in four languages, which is three and a half more than me. Spanish, Hebrew, French, and English, really. Anima de Beirut, Katsati, Fritz. Al Letzin came here all the way from California, which we hugely appreciate. He is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning radio host, performance artist, and playwright. He currently hosts Reveal, which is a public radio show and podcast created by the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. It's on its fourth season. Okay, it's now in its multiple seasons. It has received an enormous amount of acclaim around the country and around the world for its in-depth investigative journalism on issues, including inmate abuse, white nationalism, immigrant detention camps, and lots of other cheery topics. The Atlantic says the experience of each episode is akin to a spoonful of sugar, even when it's telling a story about Richard Spencer's cotton farms or a man's final days as a heroin addict. Before Reveal, Al spent years on the road telling the story of America, one community at a time is the host of the public radio show, State of the Reunion, and he also hosts, co-hosts, a culture podcast, which I think you refer to as like your own personal mixtape, is that right? Ir Thang, he is a former flight attendant and writer for DC Comics. I feel like both of those are equally impressive. And after, so the way this will work, they'll have a conversation for probably roughly an hour. After that, we'll do an audience Q&A. We can either repeat the questions or hand you a mic, but if you're comfortable, please let us know your name. So if there are people watching, we can at least say vaguely who you are. All right, thank you very much and thank you too. There you go. Okay. Well, this is very exciting. It's fun to be here with all of you. Talking about podcasting is one of my favorite things in the absolute world, as some of you know. And also I am a big fan of Al's work. And so I thought that maybe we'd do a little bit more in-depth introductions of ourself and then I'll have questions for you and we'll keep chatting. So why don't you talk a little bit how you got into State of the Reunion? You know, he talked a little bit about Reveal, but not so much about Ir Thang, which is really interesting. And I wanna, you know, how you got into audio and how you kicked off your own podcast. Sure, I used to think that I'm saying that like I got into radio is kind of an orthodox path, but I think that everybody kind of takes an orthodox path to podcasting. I guess around 2007, I was watching American Idol with my daughter, and I never watched American Idol, but I was just hanging out with her. And afterwards I wanted to know if the girl that I liked won. So a couple days later, I Googled American Idol and the first thing that popped up was NPR's American Idol. And I thought it was a folk singing competition. But I like folk music, so whatever. Like I clicked on it. And they were looking, it was this competition by PRX which is based here in Boston. By PRX and the center, not the center, but the corporation for probably broadcasting. They were looking for new hosts, new shows, new ideas. And because of my time as a flight attendant, so when I was a flight attendant, I was doing like two different things. I was a flight attendant, but I was also a performing artist, spoken word artist. So I was doing a lot of poetry slams. And so I would fly to different cities and perform. And then I'd end up having to sleep on somebody's floor or couch, right? Which is not the traditional thing that flight attendants do, like usually you go to a hotel. I came to Boston several times. I think the place that I was slamming at Boston was the Cantab Lounge or something like that. Yeah, okay. So it was so long ago. I mean, this is like in 99, 98 when I was doing that. So anyway, yeah, so I, because I had seen the country from kind of the bottom up hanging out with poets and activists, I had this idea of what I thought America looked like and felt that so much of the media wasn't talking about it. So I pitched that idea, the idea, the pitch that I sent them was called State of the Reunion. I just was, I just spitballed it actually. I was like, I want to do a State of the Reunion, yes. And I ended up winning the contest. They picked three winners. It was me, Glenn Washington, and Majar Carter. And yeah, we, I went on and I, Glenn and I took really different paths to make radio. Glenn wanted to get people who didn't make radio before to come in and do it. And I had a sound that I was trying to achieve. And so I did it the opposite way. I went out and found a lot of great audio producers who were kind of young in their career, but also had a lot of potential. And everybody that got hired with State of the Reunion really believed in what we were doing. It's a really different type of show in the sense that like, yeah, like the number one thing that you could always pick with anybody in my crew at the time was like passion for the idea. Passion for the idea that America is such a rich and diverse place. And we don't talk about that enough in our news, in our storytelling, especially at the time. And also like, this is like right around the time when Obama first got in office. So we were filled with hope. Oh, the days. Yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, so that was State of the Reunion and how I got into it. When I first started doing State of the Reunion, we were primarily radio. I remember I was at a party. And what happens to me at parties when people find out what I do, they corner me and they tell me some either crazy story or something crazy that I should be doing or blah, blah, blah. And I remember this guy came up to me and he was like, dude, his name was Steve. I still couldn't see Steve in my head. He was like a big hippie with a long ponytail. And he was like, dude, podcasting is the future. And I was like, here we are. Come on, Steve. You've had too much to drink. You mean my iPod? Like what do I cast it? What is that? I didn't even know what he was talking about. And here I am. So Steve was 100% right, Steve was right. Well, so it makes me feel like, so I also had a not quite as unusual way to get into audio, but I did my master's here at BU in science journalism a long time ago. I started in 1998, and that's how long I've been in Boston. And we were supposed to, so I hadn't been an NPR listener. You know, I'd been living in Israel and there was no kind of NPR type storytelling on the radio there. And before that, I was in college or I was traveling and I wasn't an NPR junkie at the time. You know, my mom would put it on and I'd go, why are all those people talking? I wanna listen to music. Now of course I'm the one who always wants the talking people on. But so when I was in grad school, we had to take a video class. And at the time, there was no like video for the web. And I was like, well, I don't wanna do science reporting for TV. You know, it's two seconds long and you always have that B roll of pills falling off into, you know, like that's boring. And there was a radio class. And I was like, well, I did theater my whole life. Like I thought a resume was the plays you had been in. And you know, when I was seven and had my resume and took it around to auditions. And I was like, I'm gonna take our radio class because I really like microphones. And then I was hired, I had an internship at Living on Earth, which is an NPR show. And I was hired two weeks later and that was almost 20 years ago. So that was my entrance to it. But the podcasting thing is really interesting, right? I worked at L.O.E. and then I quit and I ended up at a show that isn't around anymore called World Vision Report for about seven years. And then I had started podcasting was kind of coming on and I did some, for years I was podcasting for Scientific American and then I would guest host for some other science podcasts. And I started thinking, I might be able to do my own thing. You know, like World Vision Report folded, I had a fellowship here at MIT. And I kept thinking like, I'm ready to be my own boss. Like I'm ready to come up with my own idea. My brilliant idea at the time, not such a brilliant idea. I mean, it's not a bad idea, but it wasn't really where I thought I could do the most. But I was like, okay, I'm gonna do a podcast about women in science and I'm not gonna ask them any of the stupid questions women always get asked. I'm not gonna ask them how they deal with childcare. I'm not gonna ask them anything, you wouldn't ask a guy, I'm just gonna find out what they're passionate about and what's exciting about their work. And a friend of mine, so my night year, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, really awesome journalist and she says, that's great. And then you're gonna become an expert in women in science. And I stopped and I said, well, that's literally everything. I can't become an expert on women in science. So what is the topic that I'm absolutely obsessed with? It's this intersection of food science and history. And so I started doing some market research. I'm like, okay, no one's doing this. There's cooking shows. There might be some cooking with science shows, but there's nothing that was marrying my own obsessions in the radio world, in the podcasting world. I had, after my night year, met Nikki, my co-host at another fellowship with Michael Pollan at UC Berkeley. And she had a blog called Edible Geography. And this is about a year after our fellowships. This is 2014. And I saw on, we'd become friends. We liked each other's work. And I saw on Twitter that she was having a really crappy day. And I was like, so I had just written up kind of my proposal. I had this idea that maybe I would join with a magazine. And a friend said, you need a deadline. You have to write a proposal. I did that. I sent Nikki an email. I said, it seems like you're having a bad day. Do you want a distraction? I really wanna get your feedback. You know food and media. I'm curious what you think. She said, yes, please give me a distraction. So I sent her my proposal like two seconds later, I get an email back, you need a co-host. And I was like, I do need a co-host. And then it turned into our baby and we launched it four months later. I love how she was like, I want a job. Well, what I didn't know. So Nikki had never done audio before. So I had to teach her everything, but I didn't. She had a full-time job that was not in writing. And she was doing a lot of writing on the side. And she wanted that to be her full-time gig. But that job that gave her the time to write was ending. So she actually had time. What she didn't know is that, one, we were getting married. And two, it was way more work than she ever, like she had no idea what she was signing up for. Which is something I think we're gonna talk about when we talk about what it actually takes to make something of quality. But so talk about, so podcasting, the dude with the ponytail, the hippie guy, was right. He's totally right. It's a big deal these days. So, Earthang is totally different from Reveal, which you host. Yep. And it's beautifully produced. And it's really fascinating and really compelling. And how this is your kind of artistic baby. Where did that come from? Yeah, I mean, so what I've always been really clear about with all the work I do is sort of like, what's its place and what does it need from me, right? And so, when I was doing State of the Reunion, what State of the Reunion needed from me was vision and hosting. I worked with such amazing journalists. As long as I set vision, they came along and they found great stories and we just made something really great together. But that was my number one job with State of the Reunion. Just have a strong vision, set for what we're gonna do and go out and make it happen and remove obstacles from the people that were making it with me. With Reveal, my role in Reveal is strictly as the host to at times play the voice of authority, but also at times to have wide open questions, to sit in for the audience. And then also because it's investigative journalism to hold people accountable. In both of those roles, in both State of the Reunion and in Reveal, there's not a whole lot of room for me to stretch out and be me. And we find little places in both shows where I can do that a little bit, but it's really constraining. And instead of trying to force me being me in places where it's not really right, where journalistically I shouldn't be doing that. And also with State of the Reunion, for me it was so much about the communities we were going to, I wanted them to have the spotlight and not me. But I'm a performer, I'm a middle kid. I'm addicted to clap cocaine. I need people to clap for me. And so when I started thinking, thank you. I started getting frustrated at Reveal that I wasn't able to tell more funny stories that I wasn't able to dive in. And also like a Reveal, I don't do a lot of production. Like every now and then we'll do an interview and I'll know exactly how I want that interview cut and I'll just tell them, like I'll cut that. But it's pretty rare. So Earthang came out of this desire to, like I had something to say, I wanted to play a little bit. And I also love, I love cutting tape. It's like one of my favorite things in the world. You know, and then like when you cut a story and you score it just right, like the thrill of like all of it coming together is such a rush. So that's how like Earthang came about. It was just me needing to stretch my artistic wings, so to speak. And you and I have had a different approach and it's gonna kind of lead into where I wanna go with this discussion. And so with Gastropod, Nikki and I saw it as a business from day one. We knew eventually we wanted this to be, I mean, we still want it to be like, you know, a big media enterprise. We run our own media company, right? Like this is what Gastropod is. And so we said, okay, we're a startup. And what do startups do? Okay, so we're gonna focus on what our business plan is, how we're gonna make money. We're not gonna pay ourselves for a year because people who do startups don't pay themselves for a year often. And we're gonna have like this vision of how we wanna handle that. And we had our logo designed and we built a website and we figured out what stories we wanna do at the beginning and find things that would be really compelling to people and have some names people would recognize on the show even before we had a name for our show. We were getting some pretty well-known folks in the business, you know, Twitter handle Facebook page. We started to reach out to people we knew in media to kind of generate excitement and really kind of build up a following even before we launched. And this is back, you know, so we started kind of talking about it in like May, June. We launched in September and I was really worried that, you know, maybe we'd only have like a hundred listeners who's gonna listen to this. And it already within the first episode immediately was like eight to 10,000. Like we were really fortunate that we had great connections and we could kind of figure out how to work that. And then because we had connections in the media world from our own work, we were like, hey, you know, check it out if you want to. And so people covered it in Fast Company and National Geographic and Boston Globe within a few months. And we also kind of, we were thinking, okay, we're gonna put out an episode every month and we'll do a little bite-sized piece every two weeks because we wanna stay in people's ears was this kind of strategy. And then we quickly realized we hated the bites because they weren't fulfilling our artistic vision for the show. And so we very quickly were like, nope, full episodes every two weeks. I mean, talk about work creep. It's like constant work creep. And so that's kind of the theme of it. But we are now paying ourselves a full-time salary as a journalistic, like fully, like really produced, highly produced podcast, which makes us kind of unicorns in that part of the world. But so, you know, when you were thinking about launching the show, what, you talked about your artistic vision that this was you and your art, but did you plan a launch? Did you think about who your audience was? What was that about for you? No. This is part of what I wanted to talk to Al about. I love this. And this is like probably the worst advice to give anybody that's going into podcasting, like the absolute worst advice, which is at like, well, okay, it's the worst advice to give to anybody that is going into podcasting with the idea of making money. I have no desire to make any money off of earthing. I just really want earthing to pay for itself. What does that mean? That means that like the first season I got a grant from a local philanthropist in Jacksonville, Florida, who I'm really, really good with. She gave me enough money to like make the first season, which meant that like I could pay Willie, I could pay Bre Burge has been my business manager since I did State of the Reunion. I could pay rent at the studio that I have, that I own in Florida. So it did all that. And that's really like all I have to do. I gave myself a couple hundred dollars, I think. But on the whole, I didn't really make, I mean taxes ate that. So, and then the second season, we did it with Radio Topia, which was amazing because Radio Topia did give us a good little bit of money, which allowed me to be a lot more ambitious. And so like when I'm thinking about the third season, I am going to talk to people about coming in and funding it because I have really ambitious plans for what I want to do in the third season, like really ambitious plans. You have a full-time job with Reveal too. Yeah, full-time, exactly. So like that's why like I don't need earthing to like make me money. And also like I do earthing, this is the number one golden rule that I break with earthing. I don't think about how often I need to come out. I just come out when I'm ready. With Reveal, if we did that, we would lose like all of our numbers. We would not be in people's ear. It is not a good strategy because what happens is that like every season, I'm like trying, I'm helping people refine this again. But also I just do it for the love of it and I would do it if nobody listened to it. Like Willie and I would geek out in our little garage band and have a good time. But this is not geeking out. I mean, these are beautifully, like this is clearly theater, right? Like a lot of that geeking out that you guys are doing, this is planned. It's planned, although like, I was talking to Willie two days ago and I was like, damn it, dude. Like every time we talk, we just need to record because the way we sound on the show is definitely the way we talk to each other. I believe that. And I also think that the show has like framed, like now that we've done the show, the way we talk kind of follows that, right? Like we're like, totally. Yeah, it's like, you know, like, you talk to each other on the microphone like this and then suddenly it becomes how you talk to each other. Well, Nicky and I are on the phone together four or five hours a day. Right, right, right. Being a gastropod, so. So yeah, so you fall into those things. But yeah, we, I had no game plan neither financially nor how to get the word out or anything. All I really wanted to do was to make something that I'd really be proud of. And so this can, I just want to jump in because this leads to something that was really funny to me when we talked on the phone before this, which is gastropods in my full time. Again, we live and die by our numbers, right? Like funding agencies aren't interested in us if we don't have an audience. Our audience isn't going to support us if we don't have enough of them to give us money. Advertisers, they care how many listeners we have. I check our listener numbers multiple times a day. So tell me how often do you check your listener numbers for anything? I haven't even looked at them for season two. Like I have not, there's like some episode, there's like, we did, I love season two in this, cause I felt like season one, like I was just figuring out what it was I was trying to say. And in season two, like I knew exactly what I wanted to say. And I crafted that whole season with that thought process in mind. And so there's like some really, there's pieces in that I just love so much. And I'm so curious, like if anyone's heard it, but then on the flip side, I'm like, whatever, let's just keep making. So no, I don't look on reveal though. I don't look at the numbers on reveal either, but everybody else does. It's not my job to look at the numbers, but everybody else is always sweating like, oh my God, we gotta think of this new thing to keep our numbers going, you know? Yeah, and that's something I was gonna ask you actually, like how on reveal, or on earthing, like how did you try it all with earthing to like, you know, how you found listeners. And on reveal, when you talk about finding new listeners, what do you talk about? What's your strategy? Yeah, so I mean, with earthing, like no, I'm honestly, I'm literally like, I'm just concentrating on the creative side of things. Recently I applied earthing for like some awards and I had to think about like how I communicate what we do, which was, I hadn't really had to do that before because I just didn't worry about it. Just worried about like creating this thing that really spoke to me. So don't think about that much. With reveal, we are constantly thinking about like how we attract new audiences. We're getting ready to work on a serial story. It's a story that, it's my story. I found this story when I was working for State of the Reunion in 2012 and it's in the deep South and it's a murder mystery. And everybody's doing murder mysteries now and they like kind of, there's some things that drive me crazy about murder mysteries and so what I'm doing is like guiding our serial away from all those things that drive me crazy. Like one thing that I hate, being a Southerner, one thing that I hate is how podcasts will come to the South and they'll take a story away and not quite understand the context. Totally. And then, and not leave the community with anything. Yes, I'm talking about Estown. So like what I'm trying to do with what we're doing is be accountable to the community that we are in but also think about how do I talk to people in the community who don't listen to podcasts? Like most of the people in the community that I'm looking at, I mean the lead characters, the lead characters passed on but the lead character's sister is my point of contact with the family and her phone number changes like at least every three months. She still has a plan where she runs out of minutes and data usage, right? And that's like, that's real for her life. She's not listening to podcasts. So how do I like tell the story that's relevant to her that's about her and let her reflect in a way with media that she actually can engage in? And so we're thinking about like how to do that type of stuff because we know like that we'll get, what we sing into the choir is easy. Like I know they're gonna come. I'm constantly trying to think about like how I can bring more people into the room. Well and so then how do you, so you obviously you're on public radio stations but in terms of the podcast itself, you have this big project, you wanna get the word out more, you wanna get new podcast listeners. Have you guys talked about what you wanna do for that? Yeah, so I mean, first and foremost, like it's like if you really wanna go get new listeners, you've gotta have like a really smart PR campaign to like go out and get it. Which is another reason why I don't do it with Earthen because I don't have money to do a PR campaign, right? But you really do. I mean like there's so many podcasts out there now that if you don't figure out a way to like make yourself stand out and get attention and to get people writing about you and talking about you, then you're at a loss already, right? So you have to figure that out. So we're thinking about that too. I think so one of the ways that we're thinking about the story that I'm pitching is that a lot of the folks that we are telling the story about are poor African-Americans in the Deep South. Being that I come from the Deep South like I understand the culture in a way and because this has to do with like a young black man being killed by police, we're reaching out to like a bunch of hip hop artists in that part of the world and telling them the story and see if any of them wanna make a song to go on their album that like we don't own at all. It's their song. We give them like audio bites from the show and have them mix it into the music like that kind of stuff. Like thinking about like how to meet people where they are and hopefully if we meet people where they are, then they say, well, I wanna know more about this and they start listening to the stories. And so for us, it's like that wording I think is really something we think about too is like finding listeners where they are and obviously for Gastropod again, like I'm obsessed with our numbers. There was a big shakeup in Apple a year ago and Apple changed how they do their metrics and everybody lost about 40% of what their podcast downloads were. And nobody really want, I'm telling you this now, nobody wants to talk about it. Like no podcasts would admit how much they lost from that but it was probably about 40% mostly across the board. And we were doing really well and then all of a sudden we're like, whoa. And then there's some weird thing happening with our RSS feed now that I think is also technical that we were kind of inching back up and that we've lost a bunch now too that I don't think is just attrition. I think there's some other kind of shift going on. And so we think about this all the time and for us, the biggest way to find listeners has been to find them where they are which is where our podcast listeners listening to other podcasts. So for us, trying to find listeners is like, well how do we get cross promotions? How do we get Gastropod mentioned on other shows? And we've thrown every piece of spaghetti against the wall and we keep on trying to make more spaghetti and throw it against the wall too. And right now I'm just like reaching out to any show that might be a good fit for a cross promotion that maybe would wanna interview us about something that we've covered that's kind of quirky and weird that might fit in with their topic. I do have a cross promo coming up that's like an audience that probably hasn't heard of the show before but I meet people all the time who's like, we think our audience is everyone, like everybody eats, right? But there are people who naturally are obsessed with these topics and they'll say, how have you been around for four and a half years and I've never heard of you? So it's a really, you know, articles for us, I mean maybe more so now because people are more familiar with podcasts but the only print article that made a difference for us was when Wired named us one of their favorite scripted podcasts in their print magazine because Wired listeners, and this is a few years ago but Wired listeners, Wired readers are podcast listeners, right? Absolutely. So it's hard. Yeah, you gotta think about, it's totally hard and you gotta think about those crossovers and how you can do them. Yeah, so you know, as you said, podcasting is growing these days. What do you think about what's going on in the state of podcast world? I think we're, you know, honestly, I think we're in a bubble and I think that bubble's gonna pop really soon and I think that, you know, I think we began to see the decline of people, organizations that wanna put money into podcasts. Like you can see like, and I have plenty of judgment over this, like I think the BuzzFeed when they killed like their podcasting department is a sign of it. But also I thought it was like- They killed some good stuff. They killed some good stuff. I thought it was extremely short sighted. I do too. I think it was extremely short sighted. But yeah, I mean like you can see like there's all sorts of organizations. I think Panapoli did some stuff where they cut a bunch of their shows. No, they cut it all. They cut it all. They're gone, right? They're gone. So Panapoli only, like so they're no longer, Slate still has some Slate podcasts. Right. They're now only on marketing, like somehow a content and advertising company. So anything else they were doing is gone. Yeah, so it's like, I think in those moves you can see the industry kind of contracting a little bit. I would like to quote you, cause I think we're gonna do this. I'm gonna own it with you. So I'm not throwing you under the bus here. When we were on the phone, you said that maybe that means that some, as you call them flimsies, podcasts might go away and that you felt a little bit of a sense of superiority and I do too. So I want you to, it's okay. There is, some people should not do a podcast. Like it's just. Not everybody can do a podcast. Not everybody can do a podcast. Listen, like there are things that I would love to do that I should not do. Me too. Like I should not be an Olympic swimmer. I should not. I would drown. I should not go to MIT. I would not do well here. I couldn't find the damn building. That's common. Like that's totally normal. They're just like, no, like I just don't like math. Like it's not my thing. Like I'm clear about some things. I can appreciate it and I'm really happy to support other people who do it because you do it for me. Thank you. Same thing with podcasting. Like now everybody and their mom thinks that, everybody and their celebrity best friend thinks that they can do a podcast. And that they should. And that they should do a podcast. And I mean, hey man, go ahead. What do you think if you think that you should? But I just think that, yeah. Like the contraction means that we're going to lose a lot of flimsy ass podcasts and I'm happy about that. The sad part, the thing that I'm not happy about is that we lost some really great podcasts. We did, but so I have a couple of thoughts on that where I'm not sure as much that there's a bubble. I think there's a bubble in the thought of everybody wanting to do a podcast and everybody thinking they can do a podcast and everybody thinking it's easy to do a podcast. And as many of you out here know, because I've taught a bunch of you, it's not, I mean you can learn, like there's a learning curve. It's a skill, you can learn it. It helps if you have a trained ear for audio production and if you have a good ear for it, which obviously can be learned too, but you know, but there's writing and sound and production values and all of these things I think are really important. And I think what most people don't realize is that it's actually really hard work and it takes a long time to do it well. It takes a really long time. I mean, I cannot listen to season one and season two of State of the Reunion because I sound horrible. I can't listen to my old pieces I did for the beginning. I just like, I don't even know how they let me on the air with that. But like it took years for me to like figure out exactly like where my voice should be. It took me a long time to figure out how to write for your own voice. How to write for the voice, right? How to like, and what it is like, I think that, you know, like I've learned how I know my sweet spot. I know like when I'm telling a story, like what exactly I'm working for because I know I do that really well. But it took me a long time to figure those type of things out. And so I think, yeah, like people tend to think that it's easy. I think the other place that I think it's a bubble is that there's a lot of production companies that are making branded content now. And I think that all of those places that are doing it, they're great people that work there. I'm just curious like how long that's gonna last. Because who's listening to it. Right, because who's listening to it. Maybe they're getting good numbers, I don't know. But I just tend to think that, you know, if you're branded content, you are basically telling and making stories for a big brand company, IE, blah, blah, blah, all of that type of stuff. And they don't have the most patience when it comes to projects, right? So yeah, I just, I wonder how long that's gonna be. I think that also like when podcasting really blew up with cereal, you know, MailChimp was everywhere, right? But now you don't hear MailChimp ads that much anymore. And my understanding is that like, and I'm not picking on MailChimp, I'm just saying in general, that like when it comes to ads, advertisers are beginning to pull back a little bit because they're not seeing the return on investment that they were seeing before. So I actually, I have a little bit different, maybe slightly different insight from the ad company we work with, also some slightly different thoughts on the idea of a bubble. And you would know this way better than me because I don't. You don't have to worry about that stuff. I don't have to worry about it, I worry about this all the time. So I think that the research shows that it's still a fairly small percentage of Americans who listen to podcasting regularly and it's growing. And so there's still a huge potential audience out there. Also, podcasting only captures a small percentage of the overall audio marketing budget that people are spending. And so I think there's room, both huge room for growth. And I don't even think that the amount that podcasting captures is commensurate with the size that podcasting reaches. Now, what's going on now is that we actually have pretty high CPMs, which is how much money we get for how many thousand people listen to the show. And it's much better for online. And frankly, the ads are a lot more effective. People tend not to fast forward through ads. We try to make sure they don't fast forward through our ads. We put little bits of weird science and history in our ads to make them interesting that aren't like, they might be about, they're about a topic related to the company. They're rarely about that specific company. Because we're like, we know soon if you can't do it now, you're gonna be able to fast forward through ads and we don't want you to. But when Apple's data came out last year, I wouldn't even look at it and I made Nicky look because what they were also showing was how, what percentage of people listen all the way to the end of the show after they started. And I was like, I can't look, I can't look. Just tell me what it says. And ours was really high of people who listened all the way through to the end. It was like, I don't know, 80, 90% most of the time, which was great. And most of them, it was clear, it didn't drop out during the ads. So I think there's still a lot of room for growth in the industry. I am hoping though that it, not that it shakes out in a bad way, like what happened with Buzzfeed. I mean, I don't know, because I don't work there, but I feel like maybe people don't realize how much of a financial and time investment podcasting is and so they don't realize how much they're actually gonna have to pay people to do it well. Yeah, I think that could be it. I think also that Facebook lied to everybody and had us all thinking that video was where we need to put our money. And I think that by Facebook doing that, they not only sunk our democracy, they also screwed up some things, because fuck Facebook. Um, you can record that, fuck Facebook. Unfortunately, like I still have to moderate the Gastropod Facebook page. Yeah, I mean, like I was off of it for like a month, or no, for like three months. And I just now came back because I had to sign into something and then automatically signed you back. And it's just like, I know, I know. Sucker me! I got it. Well, so I wanna turn to something else so that we can talk a little bit and then I'll open it up just cause we started a little late but there's a topic that I think is really interesting that we both do in slightly different ways. And it's the role of our own person in our podcast. And so, you know, you are you in our thing. And as you said, on purpose, like this is a different space for you. And I'm just like the first episode, you know, where you talk about your own stories and I won't reveal the ending, but there's a really fun crush on a public radio personality. But I know it's always a deliberate choice. So how do you decide how much to reveal, like what level of personhood and vulnerability to reveal on the show? Yeah, it just depends. It depends on like, I believe in, I believe that like to tell great stories, you have to be vulnerable. I think that, especially if you're telling stories about yourself, like if you're not willing to like be vulnerable, then why do it? Like it's boring. So that's always like the number one thing that I'm thinking about. The second thing that I'm thinking about is like how do I tell that vulnerability but also like kind of protect myself as well. And so it's a balance that you just have to like walk and think about. I have like some, when we're planning out season three, there's a story that's like really hard for me to tell and I thought like, no, I think I'm ready to tell that story and to give it justice and to really do it. But like, you know, that's a story that I've been holding for years that I haven't said anything that I don't tell. And so it's really about like just being prepared for it but also like at this point in my career, so much of my work has been autobiographical that I'm kind of prepared for all the things that can come from that. And it took me a while to get in that space where I told a story on the moth once and I have a daughter that passed away and I told a story on the moth about it and I told that story strictly because I always say my other kids' names out loud but I never say her name out loud. And I wanted to say Lauren's name in front of an audience like she was here, she mattered. But that was my only thought. I didn't even let the moth pay me for it. I just needed to do it for my own purposes. And when the moth plays it, people write to me about it and some years when they write to me, I'm totally good with like responding. And other years they write to me and I can't even look at their emails. And so it's like this thing, like that was a really good lesson for me to like really take in, like you are making like these really private things public and how you gotta control that. Like in the only way you control that is deciding when and when not to do it. And then knowing that once it's out there for better or for worse, it's there. And then figuring out how to protect yourself in that as well. So yeah, I think that like it's just, it's a journey that you have to take inside of yourself and figure it out. But also like what I'm really, the thing that I know is I don't just tell stories because I like to hear myself talk. I tell stories because I believe that storytelling is probably the most powerful force in the universe. If you think about it, everything that we all know about anything we all learn from a story. If you think about everything that has happened in our country politically, it's happened from a story. I mean, we went to war over the story that there was weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, you know. Germany put, it created the Holocaust because it was a story that these people were less than. America, you know, profited 300 years off of human bondage because they made the story that like Africans were less than. Like they were all stories. And those stories like had these really deep foundations and they've created every single one of us where we are. And our own personal story defines who we are, defines what we think about ourselves, you know. Defines like when we feel good about ourselves, like it's a story that we feel good about. When we feel bad about ourselves, it's a story that we feel bad about. It's all of those things. And so me recognizing, it's always in the front of my head that storytelling is the most powerful force in the universe. And if it is that, then I want to harness that and use it to do some good. And so when I'm thinking about like how I'm trying to make the world a better place and I'm doing it through story, if the best way I can do that is through my vulnerability, then I'm going to use that. And so those are the ways that I look at it and it's sort of like how I decide what I should do, what I shouldn't do. The thing I tell friends of mine all the time is that I can't speak for anybody else's life, but I can tell you that my life is full of magic. Like magic shit happens. I mean, I won a contest and I got my own NPR show. When I got my first NPR show, like literally 200 people in the NPR building wanted to stab me because they've been working in that industry for years and didn't get that opportunity, right? I got another really big thing that happened to me that I can't talk about because NDAs or whatever, but literally somebody emailed me and said, hey, want to do something crazy like a TV show? And I was like, sure. Magic, right? But magic has a cost. You don't get to do magic and not pay for it. Everything has a cost. And so the hard stuff, the vulnerability is at cost, but out of that cost is where the magic springs out of it. So I'm thinking about all of those things and how I engage with storytelling and what I'm willing to give and what I'm holding for myself. So that was super beautiful and profound and I'm now going to follow it with something a little more prosaic, but which is, you know, Gastropod is a journalism storytelling show, right? Like we do stories about the science and history of food and it's everything from where does the idea of school lunch come from and who does it benefit and should they all be free and what's the science of school lunch to why do American mangoes suck and how can we get them to be better to who was the first African American master distiller who actually kind of helped create the brand, Jack Daniels, a former slave. So it's kind of the history stuff and then also science, I'm in the middle. Some of you know this here. I'm in the middle of doing this horrible personalized nutrition study for Gastropod. It's two weeks of torturing myself about food, all for my art. It's really not fun, but I promise you it's gonna make a really good episode because we're gonna be able to talk about how nutrition science is done. But- The worry in my face, I'm just like, I'm sorry. You shouldn't be worried, it's really bad. I'm sorry. It's really bad, but it's only two weeks. I have another week to go. I can't believe I'm still doing this. So, but the idea of us as characters as the hosts of this show was really important to me from the very beginning and when Nikki and I started talking about it, again, she had no experience in audio but I said the only reason that people are gonna wanna come back every two weeks to spend time with us is us. Absolutely. They have to feel connected to us and not just what I didn't want, even just to trust us as like the voice of authority. I didn't want that. I wanted people to really feel connected to us to trust us, to trust that we're gonna hold their hand and take them through something super cool, really fascinating, but that also we had to occasionally reveal things about ourselves. Now, that to me doesn't mean sitting around and talking for 10 minutes before the show about what we had for breakfast. Nobody cares, I don't care. I don't like it when people do that on podcasts. I find it boring. But we drop in things about ourselves, right? Like there's, you know, if you listen to the show, we did an episode about cilantro. You'll know I hate cilantro because we tried to train me to like it. We, you know, the fact that I'm Jewish. It's disgusting. It's totally disgusting. It's so disgusting. Yes, you're like me. It's really gross. Dishwater and top of the food. So horrible. It's genetic. It's genetic. Yes. I don't know. You can't convert us, sorry. It's horrible, man. It's really gross. It's like in cilantro, like why do we have parsley? Why? Like what? Like just... So parsley in tabouleh is really good. It's like it's fashion. Okay, so like I would agree with you in that one dish. The rest, come on, we don't need parsley. I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I've lived in Israel for years. It can be a good, well, I agree. There's a lot of other things with it. I can talk about food forever. But there are things, you know, my family, my aunt got really mad at me actually because we did an episode on American Chinese food and Jewish history in New York is very closely intertwined with American Chinese food. And I talked about how my great grandparents were legit communists because they thought communism was better than the czars, right? They had been killing us. Communism looked like a better idea. And it was totally related to the story. And my aunt was horrified that she's like, how could you share it? And I'm like, it's not a secret. Those people are dead too. And like we're not dealing with McCarthy anymore. We're okay. But you know, my partner Tim comes on the show. I make him do things. Like I stick the mic in his face before he sat his caffeine in the morning for an episode on caffeine. I make him super bitter, bitter melon to make him eat it for our episode on bitter. He still loves me. It's OK. But so these things, I think that these personal bits, you know, when people come up to us and they genuinely tell us, like I can tell, they feel like we're their friends. Absolutely. And I want to be careful about that, right? Because sometimes they really think that you're their friends. But that feeling of connection is really important to us. These are people who are going to tell their friends about us. We have people who listen to our shows multiple times, which is kind of strange to me, but lovely. And you know, send us gifts and come to see us at live shows and take selfies with us and give us financial donations and all these things. And so to me, that connection with the audience and that little bit of personality is still really important, even though it's not personal storytelling like yours is. Absolutely. And I mean, like I do the same thing on reveal. With reveal, I am constantly thinking about the persona of Al that people are hearing and what I want the persona of Al to be. And what I really want to be is I don't like, because we are doing hard news, the last thing I want to do is be like anybody on cable news, anybody on broadcast news, and anybody on NPR. Like I want to be like my own separate little thing. And that may mean that some people won't really like that version of what I do, which I think like, that's fine, because you only have to deal with me for a couple minutes and then the story comes on. But then for a huge group of people that I think love the show, I just want people to feel like I'm their cool friend that we can have a coffee with. And I'm telling them something and I also listen to them. But I don't want to sound like a newsman. And so like to not sound like a newsman, like you have to drop bits of yourself here and there. And I also think that when you are very careful about what you give about yourself in an episode or in a season, when you do give your humanity there, like it has such a punch. I'll never forget like Melissa Block, who I loved on All Things Considered. I pretty much like everybody that's been on All Things Considered like some of my favorite broadcasters. I love to listen to those people. I loved Robert Siegel when he retired. I literally like wept. I was like, bye, bro. But true public radio nerd. Yeah, I am such a nerd when it comes to public radio. But Melissa Block was reporting in China just on a trip. And then the earthquake happened. And she went and she was recording these people. They were excavating this rubble and trying to get this kid out. And this family couldn't find their kid. And they were crying. And then she got choked up. And you could hear her fighting it. And, oh, god, I sat in my car and wept. Like, it just, it got me so. And then when I saw her, I met her for the first time. Like, I hugged her so hard. She was like, I don't know you. But it was totally like that moment of like, you know, like it is like the most, it is such an intimate art form that like I am sitting in my car at wherever I was going, in part just listening and weeping. And I felt like I had this moment with Melissa. She recently followed me on Twitter. And literally, I like screenshot it. I was like, she's following me. I say that a lot, though, when I'm teaching is that audio is the most intimate medium. You're in people's ears. You're in their bedrooms. You're going with them as on a run. You're hanging out with them as they cook. You are. And when you use the word you, they feel like you're talking to them. Right, absolutely. Because you are. You are. Because like every time that I am like doing any kind of recording, I'm always thinking about that one person that's listening to me. I'm not thinking about a whole lot of people. If I thought about how many listeners reveal has every time that I did it, I think it would freak me out. So instead, I think about the one listener that reveal has, the one person that I'm just trying to tell the story to. And whoever's listening to it is that one person. Right, yeah. So I could keep asking you lots of questions, but we do have time, almost an hour, for audience questions. If you guys have them, please feel free. Yes. Thank you for sharing. I have a lot of questions, so I'll start with you said that there's a bubble, but in some ways, there seems to be these mini explosions, I think. So recently Spotify bought Gimlet. Yeah, they all pay attention to that nice. Yeah, and Spotify is trying to redefine itself as an audio company, not just a music company, probably because they can own the podcast and more things they actually own, especially for their business, whatever. What impact do you think that has on access and just on the industry at large? It's a pretty big shakeup. Yeah, so the question, if we need to do it again for the recording was that there are these kind of big shifts in podcasting and Spotify bought Gimlet for a huge sum of money as we all looked on, jealously. And Gimlet is a podcasting company for, I imagine this audience knows that. So there's a lot of questions about that, right? I mean, and I've read people like thought pieces about it. I talk to my friends in podcasting, obviously Nikki and I talk about this all the time. One of the worries we have is, as I said, we're kind of a unicorn, right? Like we're a relatively financially stable, I'm never sure, year to year, but independent journalistic, highly produced podcast that takes us a crap ton of time. Most shows at our level of research and production have seven to 10 people on staff, we have two. But we're still independent. And we do have our first intern, so that's very exciting. But so the question is, can we still be able to go it alone with this kind of big money trying to centralize things? We don't know, and we're worried about that. The other question people have, and this is kind of what you're getting at, is will things go behind paywall? And that's a big question. We were in talks with a company that wanted to give us money to come on and put us behind a paywall, but they expected a very small conversion of our listeners and we weren't willing to give up our listeners and we just weren't willing to do that yet. That might end up happening. I hope not, because one of the great things is that anybody can listen to it. That said, the fact that it's free and anyone can listen to it makes it challenging to sustain. NPR has its own model, it's its own model, right? And that's not what we're all doing. So I think the answer is that nobody knows. And everyone's kind of asking the same questions you're asking, what does this mean? What's gonna happen? What are we gonna be able to listen to? Where's the money going? Is it all gonna be networks? Is it gonna be behind paywalls? Is it, you know, who's gonna be determining what, like what types of things get made? Oh, that type of access, not access to the show. Well, so I actually think, so Spotify just put out a show that I thought was really fascinating. It just came out in February. That is called Dope Labs. Dope Labs, Dope Lab. It's two young African-American women doing a show about science. It's great. It's fun. They're, you know, two buds who've known each other for a while, they are, you know, they have some producers working with them, but this was their pitch. And that was Spotify. You know, you can find it on any, it's called like Spotify shows or something. But Spotify and Google I think are all, I think everybody's concerned about the diversity of voices in podcasting. I mean, this has been an issue in public radio itself for a long time and certainly it's still an issue today. Podcasting started out as like kind of a people in the techie know thing. So it was two dudes talking, white dudes talking, right? Like that's what it all was. So even women in podcasting is still smaller. And certainly if you're going to non, you know, people who aren't white, then that's like its whole other thing. So I mean, I think clearly Spotify's trying to address that. What it means? I don't know. What do you think? Uh, I worry about all of it. I don't know, I don't, but I think that the jury's out and we'll see. I think that the thing that scares me in America is that like, you know, big bank is constantly taking little bank and then big bank becomes too big to fail and then we all get caught up paying for big bank. And then everybody fails. Right, and then the people fail but big bank seems to keep making money. So I am generally, I'm, it's a weird mix, right? Because like I know Alex, he's, we're friendly, we've worked on things together before Gimlet and I'm super excited for Alex. Like I'm personally like, he's such a good dude and his wife is, Nazanine is like freaking amazing. I've met Alex, but I've only met his wife on the show. Yeah, so it's like, yeah, and she's, she's great, she's great. So like for them personally, like I'm super happy for them. Like this was his dream. For the industry, I'm a little bit like, you know, we'll see, you know? And also like, I just think that like, you know, journalism is just at this bad place right now. You know, when you think about like, figuring out revenue streams, when you look at like newspapers across the country that are being decimated, when you look at like, what happened at BuzzFeed? Like BuzzFeed had like a ridiculously talented young group of reporters that they just gone. And so it all scares me. And so I don't, I can't really give you any hope other than like, I'm hoping, but I have no. Nobody knows. No solid thoughts about how it's all gonna land. No one knows. Yeah, too soon, too soon. I think that like, you know, the thing is with diversity, like what's interesting about the idea about diversity now is that like, in a lot of ways, we can now shame companies in a way that we couldn't before and bring and make them pay attention to things that they didn't care about before. Some companies will never listen, but some good, I think a good majority of them will pay attention. And so there's that, there is now the opportunity for people to like speak up and be heard and can make change. So I'm hopeful for that, but we'll see. Other questions? Tom? That was Seth. Or yours? Somebody's? I had nothing. Not mine. That was Seth. But it's, I have sort of kind of interconnected questions. What kind of radio is podcasting? Or is it when you say radio when you say podcasting, do you guys mean somewhat different things or slightly different things? I think they can be slightly different things, but I think they can be the same thing as well. I think if you listen to like, you can find pretty much a podcast about anything. And these are things that maybe wouldn't necessarily be played on terrestrial radio stations, but then also like a lot of podcasts are being played on the radio as well. So for me like, I interchange the term left and right. And then also like, I definitely think of reveal as both a radio and a podcast. I think of earthing as a podcast. Although we have been played on the radio, like my primary thing is like with earthing, like I don't bleep out fuck. Like I say it, if we did it on reveal, we bleep it out, you know? And then it sounds kind of funny. Right. Which is why I like not bleeping things. I do too. I like, I don't believe in bad language. I believe in inappropriate places to use language, but I don't. So like for me, like the, I tell my kids this too, and it's like totally inappropriate to use that language in front of me. But, but no, I, yeah. So like for me, like it's, you know, those terms kind of just go depending on what we're talking about, but I could talk about something like it's radio and it could be a podcast too, you know? But I think there's space for doing things a little differently. You don't have to hue to the public radio hour in the same way that you do when you're on a public, I know, seriously. There's so many public radio shows that would be better as just podcasts if they didn't have to feed the beast. But I can tell you from a news organization that has to put out an hour every week, we got to feed the beast. I think that like the strength of reveal is that we collaborate with so many different people that we usually have a lot of strong hitters. But sometimes, man, we put out an hour and we're like. And our show, and the same thing with our thing, but like our show, one episode could be 35 minutes, one episode could be 50 minutes. And we have a, you know, we come out every two weeks, like we're saying, you know when you're gonna find us, but it doesn't, but we, you know, and they can be different tones, they can be different topics. We're not, you know, there's no expectation. So I think that, but I wanna kind of flip that around a little bit, which I think is something you'll appreciate. And it's that, you know, this question of like, is podcasting doing something new? You know, when serial came out, everyone was like, this is breaking the mold. And I was like, I'm sorry, nothing against serial. I'm not about to, but like, I was like, okay, this is serialized storytelling about crime. This is the, like radio, early days of radio. People would lie under their radios and listen to serialized storytelling about crime. So it happens to be a podcast, spun out of this American life, done in a different way, but it's like, it's not new, right? It's old. No, it's a remix. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's taken old stuff. And that's great, but it's old. No, it's great. And they did an amazing job with it. They did an amazing job with it. But yeah, absolutely. It's not new. It's, the context is new now, but it's not new. It's just new forms of audio, ways to use audio. Yes. Have you had any journalism training or audio training before that? You were a poet and you were a performer, but so what was that? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I think one of my greatest strengths is probably that, like, I recognize that I need people. And I'm in this area, I think in other areas, maybe not so much, but in this area, I'm really good at putting my ego aside and saying, I need your help. And so I went around and I, in the contest, we, our last thing that we had to do, our last challenge was that we had to make the pilot for State of the Reunion. And they gave us an old, not an old, sorry, Taki. They gave us a radio hand, somebody that had done radio for a while. Not an old person. Not an old person. And I'll never forget, like I had like five different people to choose from and I, at that point, knew a few people in radio and I showed them like the list and they told me like, you should choose Taki Telenitas because he'll tell you no and you need somebody that'll tell you no. And they were 100% right. Like I chose Taki, we worked on the pilot together. It was, I'm sure I drove him crazy because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was in the field by myself. I didn't know about room, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was just kind of winging it. And we put together, we made this hour that was actually fun and it worked. And in that process, I really fell in love with what it was. And so when State of the Reunion got green lit, the first thing I did was I hired my best friend to help me run the business side of it. I hired him because he's the most honest person I've ever met and I knew I could trust him. He didn't know what the hell he was doing either but we also like, we were so tight at that point that like I knew that we'd figure it out. So I hired him, which was a great hire and then I hired Taki because Taki knew radio. And then I went out and I looked for a journalist that I opened it up and let people apply and the people that I decided to hire were the people who showed a passion for the idea and also like showed me some good journalism chops. And so they became the core and they learned from me and I learned from them. I think that like everything that I know about journalism I learned from working with really great journalists. But no, I knew nothing about journalism at all. I knew nothing about how public radio was made. I think that benefited us because we were doing our first season, we did some things that, we were just trying all sorts of different stuff and we tried it because I didn't know any better. And I'm so glad we tried it because it made the show, made me better, made us sound different. But yeah, it was just a matter of like surrounding myself with people who understood it and people that I trust. Other questions? Yeah. Yeah, so cross-promotion stuff does work. We need more of it. Anyone? Anyone? The second just from the two of you, when you listen to podcasts, what podcasts really impress you and make you feel, wow, that's something that's a really great use of the media and more or something I wanna do or just something that I really love listening to. So, Nikki, my co-host didn't, I'm gonna answer that question with a little story. So my co-host came from the world of print and had never done audio before. I knew that she was a good public speaker, that our voices sound different, that we have a very similar sense of humor. Apparently, I grew up in D.C., but my parents are from New York. And apparently like sarcastic New York Jew works really well with British sarcasm. So like the two of us are kind of like the dry thing works really well together. But she didn't know anything about it. And I taught her everything from the ground up. And she didn't know how she messed up with like levels and room tone and stuff at the beginning, man. But so what Nikki says is nobody told her that when she started podcasting she wouldn't ever be able to listen to podcasts again. So when I listen to things, I edit them all in my head. And then if I'm not editing them, then I think about what they're doing. And I think, oh, why did, oh, that was a really lovely piece of writing. Oh, that was an interesting use. Oh, I wonder why they chose to put that there. So it's really hard for me actually to listen to things in the way most people listen to them. So I try to listen to things that like, it's not a podcast, it's public radio show. Like I can hang out with Peter Segel and all the other people there all the time. Wait, wait, don't tell me. That's what I go running to. Cause I don't edit like they're them. And I've been listening to that forever. You know, there's an interview show called Nerdette. And it's, you know, they like nerd out in their interviews, young feminists interviewing cool people and like I can kind of listen to that and it's fun. But I'll find things and I'll listen. And then from there I just kind of pick in shoes. Oh, I want to listen to my friend Rosa's podcast, Flash Forward, or oh, you know, there's this new thing Spotify did called Dope Labs. I'm going to listen to them. Oh, that's pretty cool. Like that's great that they're doing that. I wonder how that's going to continue and where they're going to go with it. You know, I'll dip in here and there to different people's podcasts and projects. And I have, you know, I have a long list of things that, or it's something where I'm like, oh, you know, that would be a good fit for Gastropod. I should listen to a bunch of their stuff and see if maybe there's opportunities to work together. So that's not a good answer. The answer is that it's like, it makes listening totally different experience. Agreed. I don't listen to podcasts. I don't even listen to my own. You separate like the 10 times while you're mixing it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm talking about reveal. Like, I don't listen to, I don't know. Like people come up to me talking about stories from reveal and I'm like, yeah, that war, man. That intro I did took a lot of time. No, no, I mean, so I love podcasts, but because I work in it, like I tend to like feel like I just can't. In the next couple of months, I'm actually like doing things like this where I'm interviewing some people with podcasts and so I'm gonna have to spend some time listening to those. And I'm actually looking forward to it because everybody says they're really great podcasts and I just haven't had time. Yeah, I tend to like listen to audio books. I listen to a lot of audio books. Like my audible cue is ridiculous. And that kind of satiates my need for podcasting. But I, you know, I dip in every now and then, I listen to the daily occasionally. A producer from reveal who I absolutely love, left reveal and went to the daily. So I kind of listen to support Ike because I just love Ike so much. Yeah, yeah, right. It's kind of, yeah, exactly. So I listen to that every now and then. I listened to a few podcasts that they tried to hire me and I said, no, just because I want to see like, thank God I didn't do that. But it's such a ego thing. It's like, I was just telling you like, I have no ego. Oh no, no, wait, we, you know, we, that's the ego. We talked about the superior, anything like, we got some ego, it's okay. Right, there's some ego there. But regularly, no, I don't really listen to podcasts. Asking podcasters, you know, their recommendations is probably like the worst way to find other podcasts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that like, I haven't, okay, you know what? I did listen to, in the dark season two, which I thought was a revelation of a podcast. The work that Madeline Beren did and the people that were with her, they just, they killed it and they did the thing. I think like, you know, I was just talking about how we're doing a podcast that's set in the south of a serial podcast. And my issue with a lot of both reporting and podcasts, when they go in and they tell stories about the south, they just kind of parachute in. They get a lot of people saying y'all, and then they go out and then they're like, to all their- Like those are such interesting people. Right, right, then they spin whole like, did you hear the way they said y'all? Did you see what was on there long? What does it mean? Yeah. And it just really irritates the fuck out of me. Like it really, really makes me mad. But also like the idea, if you have like a great, if you have a great story in a community and then you leave with that story and don't actually do anything to help that community with that story, then I feel like we're just taking and not giving back. And I think that it's something that journalism has done for a really long time. That journalism has taken from communities all over the world and not giving back anything to it. Taking their stories and not giving people that are in those communities, understanding what the story means in the larger context and how they can use that story to advocate for themselves. I think there's a humbleness that really should go along with reporting in communities that I mean, I've certainly been reporting in communities that weren't my own, but I would hope that the final product does something of benefit to the world. And certainly that I always feel like I'm being given a gift by their time. And I think that's really important when you are, cause you don't wanna, as a reporter, you don't wanna just stay necessarily in your own community. But I think that you have to really think that these are their stories and their time and their lives. And a lot of them probably don't listen to the media that you create, right? So like if you're creating media about these people and sharing with the world, but they're hearing it secondhand, like with Estown, I know that like reporters just started showing up who are reporting on that story. And like a lot of the people had no idea what was in the podcast because they don't, they're not tuned in the podcast, right? What I loved about in the dark season two is that they were very active with that community. And they figured out that the way that they, the best way to communicate with the community was through Facebook. And so they have a very active Facebook forum with like many people like in the community commenting on it. Like I just love like the whole, I love the holistic approach of that journalism has a responsibility, not just to tell the truth, but has a responsibility to, for the people that they are actually telling the story about, like we owe them something. You know, they gave us something and we need to give them something back. So I can't recommend that podcast enough. Serial season three, I did not like season two, but serial season three, I haven't heard it yet, but I've heard really great things about it. I have, but I couldn't get into it. Yeah, you didn't like it too much. No, it's just that I couldn't get it. Like I think it's just, these are really talented storytellers. Sure. It's not my thing and it's a little too slow for me. Yeah, yeah. And so I try, my co-host really loved season three and I tried and I was just like, mm. Yeah. It just wasn't. And I talk about this a lot in general that there's such a variety of sounds and stories and ways of telling stories and podcasts out there that they're not meant to, you know, obviously, I would love everybody in the world to listen to Gastropod, but, you know, not everybody likes every style. Not everybody likes every topic. Not, and you know, I genuinely am not a true crime person. There are certainly stories about crime that I find incredibly compelling, but it's not something that I'm gonna search out and there are some people that that's like the only thing they wanna listen to. Great, okay. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I don't like true crime for the sake of true crime. I like true crime when it's telling me something larger or it's speaking to something bigger, you know. Totally. That was a long answer, sorry. Yeah. Yeah? I talked to the first time in the past fall on the first night of class about five days. First night of class I asked everybody in class about 18 students, how many of them were rated in their podcast lessons and 17 hands went up. Then I asked them, all right, of you guys, whether it was ones that you were regular listeners of. And majority of them didn't say narrative or storytelling podcasts. They were things like the audio equivalent of like a sports highlight show. It was recordings of stand-up comedy sets, entertainment news, you know, things like that. And I realized that, like, you know, I had 30 podcasts that I subscribed to on my phone. Every single one of them has some kind of narrative structure your guy shows, for example. And I knew nothing about any of these ones that they were listening to. So, do you guys keep those kinds of audiences in mind or are they just people that you write off? Yeah, no, it's funny, I went to this. Have you ever been to the podcast movement? No. There's a conference called Podcast Movement. And I had to go one year, I don't like going to conferences in general. I met you at a conference. I was the only time I went to that conference. And that's probably the last time I was there too. That was a really long time ago. It's a good conference, but I'm just like, I'd rather be in my hotel room watching bad TV. Cause I'm an introvert. But I went to Podcast Movement and I was like blown away at all the different podcasts there are and how really small, such a small little section the narrative was that like there's all this different stuff out there. So yeah, I think about like, how do you bring those people in? It's a question that like we have been wrestling with at Reveal, I can't talk about the story, but someone pitched a story that was based in the, basically it was a story that the Latino community would be really interested in. And we started going down the road of figuring out like how to do this like separate podcast. I'm really just, I wouldn't be the host of it, like cause I'm not bilingual. But one of the things that came up from the people of Latino background in the office is that mostly the type of narrative storytelling that we do does not cross over. So what we need to do is we need to do like basically like a talkie podcast that would be kind of a separate podcast that talks about our podcast to get people, our podcast, our separate podcast. So we would be doing like two different podcasts. A podcast about a podcast. A podcast about a podcast. And then the podcast. Right, and then the podcast. And that podcast about the podcast would all be completely in Spanish because we're trying to reach out to that audience that normally would not listen to it, but this content is made for them. It's just made with the narrative structure that maybe they're not used to. So we are at reveal definitely thinking about that. I think when I'm thinking about Earthang season three, so a lot of African-American podcasts are the same way. They're talkies, they don't have the narrative structure. And so I'm thinking about how do I cross over into the African-American community that doesn't listen to it. And one of the ways that I've been thinking about doing that is being a host. Like I'm friendly with a lot of hosts of those talkie shows. So being a host with one of those shows, doing a segment with, I have this idea, who knows if this will be in season three. But there's a podcast host that is really adamantly like against the NFL for a bunch of different reasons. And I'm not really a big NFL fan at this point either. I used to be a huge NFL fan, but when the concussion stuff started coming out, I felt really uncomfortable. And so my idea is for me and him to sit down with two other African-American hosts who host like sports things and for them to try to win us over. But the way we're gonna try to win each other over is with stories of like why we love football. So I'm gonna get these guys to think about narrative. And then hopefully I cross over on all of their podcasts and I get what I want out of it. I love that. I'm gonna hire you to like help us figure out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's an idea. So I do think about those people. Yeah, so I mean, so I wanna, I think there's some interesting points in there, which is even kind of what is narrative, right? So we run up against that in Gastropod where we were in talks with a network and they were like, we love what you do. Like one of the bigwigs there had tweeted, we love Gastropod. We should be doing what Gastropod is. Maybe we should bring Gastropod in. And we were like, okay, we'll talk to you to be unnamed. And then when we talked to them, they're like, okay, yeah, we really like what you're doing, but why couldn't you make it like 25 minutes instead of 45, come out once a week and only tell a single story or a single narrative where like that traditional idea of a narrative, one person does one thing and something changes, right? And we're like, but that's not what Gastropod is. Like we create these narrative structures around a thing or an idea or sometimes a person, but rarely one person usually is a mini narrative within the structure of the show. So actually, sometimes I feel like we have to argue with people about what even is narrative structure, right? Like that I think that Gastropod has a narrative structure but that other people think that it doesn't fit. I think that there's this obsession with the word narrative and what it means and that it only means the storytelling whereas I think it can apply to other things as well. Obviously then we're not like a talky show, right? Like if you just listened to Nikki and me shooting the shit for an hour, I don't know, we think we're kind of funny, but really we couldn't possibly cram all the like cool information and stories and science and history and stuff we wanna cram in without being very deliberate about what we're doing. Do I think about all them? Yeah, I mean, one, I think that different people are looking for different things when they listen. Two, I think it's just kind of breaking out of your bubble and trying new things. Do I think I'm necessarily gonna win all of them over? I'm not sure, maybe it would take a while, maybe they'd need to listen to a few episodes. I'm not, frankly, I think the biggest thing for me is I don't know how to reach them. I would be happy to, I'd be happy to be like, and it would be kind of a thing, like you listen to all this stuff, try these. In the same way that I think that the people who only listen to a very specific type of narrative structure should try listening to other things as a way of kind of breaking out of that idea of like what is the way that a story progresses, you know? So, yeah, I think about it, I don't know. Questions? With a kind of reverence, like your voice changes just a tiny bit, is the word sound? And you've talked around, but you haven't talked directly about both the craft process and you sort of hinted at the craft pleasure you get in building the world of the podcast as opposed to telling a story. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and maybe talk about the process. You know, put some flesh on the bones of, it's so much work to do this. Sure, oh yeah. Actually, that was on my list of like, I have this list of like, you wanna know what it takes? Here's a list of everything we do, but yeah. So, for me, like when I'm working in, when I'm working at Earthing, on Earthing, what I'm primarily thinking about is like, I don't wanna lose you as a listener. So like, I need to think every step of the way, like how I can keep you involved in it. And so that comes from the storytelling and the sound design as well. And so when I like lay out a story, I think about like, I imagine the way a musician thinks about composing, right? Like, you know, you do this for eight measures, but now you gotta do something to keep their ears hooked and you do something else. And I love the build. I love to like, you know, start people off on this thing where I'm like here, and then the story goes up, story goes up, story goes up, and boom, explodes. And then like, the descending action, and then the story goes up, the story goes up, boom, explodes. And so I'm thinking about that the whole way. And so I'm thinking about that in the storytelling. A lot of times when I do Earthing, and I'm telling my story, it's just me in the studio, I have my computer open to the script, I have the mic in front of me, and I know what the script is and I say it, and then I look and think, ah, now I'm gonna freestyle it and do it this way. And then I keep going back and going back and going back until I find the sound in my voice that feels exactly right. Then I go through and I begin scoring it and I think about like the music that like swells. I never want music to lead. I always want music to be a really great bed behind it. But then I think about like also like the best advice that I ever got in radio was from Hilary Frank. She does the longest short time. And that was like podcasting is the most visual medium there is, because yeah, like people like close their eyes and they build the world around them. And so if I want people to build the world around them, I gotta give them all the tools to do that. So the very first episode of Earthing is called Big Brother Almighty and it's about my brother who's a psychopath. And what I did was it was a story that we were kids. And so I went out and I recorded a bunch of little kids saying like, you know, your mama wears combat boots, like that kind of thing. Then I went out and I recorded like the sound of this area, just the sound and dropped it in quietly behind there. Then I thought about like the music score that would work just right. And I, at one point my brother is, there was this big bully that would always mess with us. And my brother was going to, he was about to hit him with a brick while the dude was facing me. My brother was coming up to hit him with a brick. And I was like killing myself, trying to figure out what music. And I was like, ah, Jaws. Because it brings that like, ah, ah, like the audience has no idea what's going on. And then I revealed like he's got a brick in his hand and he bashed him in the head. And then like you hear like all the kids go, oh, you know, like, and every like little audio thing that I built around it brings people in. But every single one of those things took a lot of time. Like I went out and got little kids saying it. And I was like, oh, these kids suck. So then I went back and I, and I did my own voice. I was like, your mom, she's so fat. I like that kind of stuff. And then I would speed it up or change the pitch so it didn't sound like me. And then I deepened the pitch so it didn't sound like me. I do weird accents and change them. It takes time. And then you've got to layer it in and slide things just the right way. I know like it's so much fun. It's like, it's total audio gigs. Like you freak out when like suddenly you put it in the right place. And you're like, oh. Yeah, like it's an amazing feeling. It is an amazing. It is the most geeky, nerdy ass thing I do besides click-on books. And it's amazing. It's thrilling. And so I don't use much music for two reasons. One, I don't have the rights to do it. And it's just not something like from the beginning we didn't really think about that. Two, it's not where my particular audio skill set lies. Is I think it's really beautiful in what you do. I think it's often overused and especially in journalism shows where you're like, why is there music when it's just somebody talking about linguistics? There's no, that music isn't doing anything to move the story around. I don't really care about music under a linguistics professor. So we don't use much music, but the show is music. So like the beats between when, so Nikki and I record ourselves separately in our closets and then I mix everything together. And I do all the technical stuff for the show. And the beat between when a guest ends and one of us comes in, how much we're talking over ourselves just a tiny bit to make it sound like we're in the same space to give it that more of that natural feel. But when I hear it and when I get it just right, I hear the rhythm of like the music and then like that metronome almost in my head and they're like, okay, where do I want that person to come in? Oh yeah, that's the split second where I want that voice to come in. And we do use a lot of not sound because we'll either be doing field reporting. So most of it ends up being from field reporting and everything I can layer from that and then it'll be multiple. Sometimes we'll have different people talking and I'll pull to tighten it. I have the laugh here and then the person ducked under here when they actually were talking here and crafting those scenes. But then also we'll play with sound like we were doing an episode on the ways that plants can actually hear in a way insects on them and respond to those sounds. And so scientists have made recordings of the insects and this is, when I'm doing it, it's theater, right? Like you know, I'm not out there. Like those are recorded sounds of the insects. We're talking about it. The scientist is talking about it. You hear the sound of the insect munching on the plant get louder and louder and louder and louder. And then we used Night of the Living Dead to talk about that kind of fear. Or we were doing something about the way sound influences your perceptions of freshness and crunchiness and taste. And so somebody talked about a metronome and breaking glass and all these things and I could mix those in and it's, I mean, it's fun but it takes a lot of time. And even us recording, the whole process of the show is we choose a topic. We go out and do deep research on the topic. We figure out who a bunch of experts are. We look and try to find examples of them speaking either on BBC, NPR, YouTube to see if like they're halfway decent speakers. Sometimes we have to interview them anyway because they're the expert on the topic. Then we wanna make sure we don't just interview a bunch of white guys so we think about the diversity on the show of our voices. Then we do the interviews. We prep for the interviews. Sometimes we read multiple books. We write up questions. We transcribe all the interviews. We go through the transcriptions and we have like an online, an app that we use but then we clean it up. We go through, we highlight the things we think we want. We write a script. I pull the cuts. We do a read through with the cuts to see if it works. We edit it. I mix it. We listen to it. We record it in our closets. We do it twice. We wanna make sure that just start, we hit our tones right. Then we say to each other, that's not the right emphasis. Emphasize that word instead. We mix it. We listen to it. That sounds really weird and awkward. We do some edits. That was wrong. We missed that. That messed up. We mixed it again. I'm out of breath just telling you all. It's a lot. It's a lot. But it's also like, if you love audio production, it's hugely rewarding. I mean, the second season of Earthang, the first episode, 808's in three heartbreaks, it took me like a good three months before I could finish that piece because I couldn't, I just, it wasn't right. Like I was like so close, but there's just something not landing here. And when I figured it out, like, oh God, like I was running, my kids were looking at me like, what is wrong with you? Cause I was just like, hey, how you doing? They're like, why are you so sunshiney? Like it finally worked, you know? Yes. This media kind of has to navigate any unique way. I was wondering if you could dig a bit more into that. Has there been a time when you felt like you went too far and then learned from that boundary? Or is it been something that you kind of worked into over time? What has that been like for you personally? Well, I think it's, I mean, Al's work is much more personally vulnerable overall than mine tends to be. I come from a more traditional journalistic background. I published a few personal essays back in the day about dating. Those are kind of embarrassing to have out there a little bit. Also because your thoughts on the topics change and your thoughts on relationships change and there are things I wrote. It's not like they're very much a snapshot of who I was and what I was thinking about at the time. And I don't feel like they're poorly written or anything, but it's like a little weird. One was in the Boston Globe magazine and one was on an online Jewish magazine. Actually the editor of that was like, the one thing that came out of the one time I went to Third Coast was I met a print editor on an online Jewish magazine and wrote a print story for her, weirdly. I'll bet you. So those I kind of regret, I mean, I think it's really interesting because I think in traditional journalism you don't use yourself a lot in what you're writing. And I think in, and this was actually something we were navigating when I worked for World Vision Report, we had some very old school, like literally a guy came out of retirement to work on the show and he was a news broadcaster from Dallas who had interviewed a lot of presidents and he's like, you can't talk about yourself, you can't use the word I. And I'm like, but this is this intimate medium and people actually, they hear your voice. It is literally you. It's not even just your voice on the page, it is like your voice. So to not be present in your piece is almost harder. Like it's hard not to be present in your piece. So for us, I mean, I don't regret any way that we're ourselves in gastropod and I think that we're very careful about how we do it and it feels very, those moments of vulnerability on the show as part of our journalism feel very important to me. Yeah, I am constantly diving into that end of the pool and I don't necessarily have regrets but I think what you were saying is that stories are always snapshots of where you are and not where you're going necessarily. And so you tell a story like one day and it feels like really true and the next day you may be like, God, that's not really, I didn't have all the information at the time when I said X, right? So I have stories out there like that where I feel like, mm, you know, I was trying to get at something and maybe that felt right at the time but doesn't really feel right now but I also feel like I'm a human being and I'm gonna grow and I just leave it. Like I have podcasts in the first season of Earthling that I've been tempted to take down because I don't feel the same way I did when I recorded it. But now, but the more I think about it, the more I'm just like, you know what, just let it live, like it was a snapshot of where I was, you know? But I do think, you know, like you, it's like, I think vulnerability is important but I think, you know, also like protecting yourself is just as important, you know, and holding on to your own stories as well that are important to you. I also think it's important, I know some of you out here and right there are kind of early career journalists and I think it's important to think about what you're willing to have out there as you're embarking on a journalism career and people have access to, I mean, we talk about this a lot in terms of what's on Facebook or what's on Instagram or Snapchat and theory disappears but does it really, you know, and how much of yourself is out there in the world and you know, do you really want, thinking about is the stuff you want employers to be able to see. But I think even in terms of your writing, I think it's important to always think about, you know, in my next job application. Is this something I want out there? Absolutely, and you know, I'm coming from a place of complete privilege in the fact that I am the host of a national show that is doing really well. I've hosted another show that did really well. I've got a bunch of shiny things, awards or whatever that ultimately if I leave reveal, like I'll be able to find a job and the things that I've written, nobody's gonna hold against me because there's a long track record of what I've done. When you are coming from a different position than where I am right now, it may be really different how you think about like the things that you share. Especially we live in this time when like, you know, just let's be real, like the president of the United States labels us as enemy of the people. Totally. And so like, I get so many emails every week about people calling us fake news and being mad about the reporting and all of that type of stuff. So I know that- You sometimes respond to it on Twitter. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I respond to them sometimes. Although like, the last one I responded to, I wrote him yesterday and I said, you know what dude, like, let's start this conversation over again because I was really dismissive of you because I was thinking, because you're wrong. Of course. But we can have a civilized conversation. But anyway, so no, I think that like you have to think about all of that type of stuff. And it's just to be really honest, like it's a lot easier for me to say that like ideal invulnerability because like ultimately, like I'm at a different space in life. You know, I've got the accolades and the resume where, you know, at this point in my career, like finding another gig or being able to get funding to do my own thing is a strong possibility. I couldn't have done that same type of, I couldn't have been as vulnerable and open with the type of stuff that I say, this type of stuff that I say now 10 years ago when I was first breaking into the industry, like no way I could have done it. No, I mean like I've written stuff for NPR that like I don't think is wrong at all on their code switch blog, blog things that I totally stand by. But I think that, you know, if you write a personal story about like how you've been victimized by the police, so I did that like, you know, years ago or whatever, but like I can imagine like being a young journalist trying to get in somewhere and then someone reads that piece, well written, but also like definitely has a point of view. I can see that being used against young journalists. So you have to think about those type of things. Yeah. So storytelling and the part that it has and also about how journalism and news. And so I know that many communities force this. I'm thinking of like one specifically, can you do this in Boston that reached out to a few students at MIT and saying we're tired, be portrayed this way, like we want to create something ourselves. And so those students went and did a podcast with them over the summer and it was very participatory. So they like interviewed them, asked them questions and they co-created the podcast. It then was finished and produced. And of course, as you guys were saying, the podcasting was not easy and it wasn't the most beautifully like well-polished podcast. But I met these students in class now. I'm working with them. I have some media background and they're bringing in an audio person. We're going into this again and trying to have this like participatory co-design podcast and something that's created. You guys have spent a lot of time talking about how much of a craft it is and how much each of you put so much time into it individually. Do you see this as something that could possibly be participatory? Absolutely. But I think that you have to like, if it's participatory, I think that you have to think you have to think about clear roles, right? Like, do you love like cutting tape? Do you love like doing all of that type of stuff like getting in the weeds? If you love doing that, then that's your part of the show and they're bringing you content and helping you put it together and telling their story. But I think it's like literally you just need to decide like who's gonna handle that side of it to make it well-crafted and just dive in. But you like, the thing is is that like what you'll find is that maybe some of the people you work with fall in love with radio and they can do it, you know? But maybe not. Maybe they just wanna like, you know, there are plenty of hosts in public radio who don't like cutting tape. There are plenty of hosts who just like come in, sit down, cut the mic on, do their thing, you know? When it comes to reveal, like, I read background material on whoever I'm interviewing, I game plan with producers. I mean, I'm all in in so many different ways, but I do not, I've cut tape there maybe four or five times in the four years. Right, that's not what I do. And so like if the people you're working with, if that's not what they do, you need to find someone that does that. So that way you can create something that's really beautiful. So you can have someone tell you like, that's not gonna work. Like, I think earlier I told you guys, I said that like I hired Taki because Taki would tell me no. The other side of that is that Taki would tell me no, say like that's not good audio, but I see what you're trying to do and what if we do it this way? Cause that'll make, that'll give you what you're trying to do, but it'll also make great audio, right? And so you need somebody like that who can like take people who don't work in this world and explain to them how this world can work. But treat them with respect as in like, I see what you're trying to get at. So let's get at it, but do it this way. Yeah, I would say, I mean, I totally agree with everything I said. And I think that one of the challenges with, everybody can make a podcast is everyone thinks like, I've literally heard somebody say like, everybody's voice should be heard. And like, I'm not sure that every single person's voice should be heard, but maybe there's a reason that particular person's voice should be heard. And the important thing to me is that if somebody's going to embark on a project, they should be given the tools to do it well. Because otherwise I think you're kind of setting people up for failure, right? Like you're engaging with a community is great, but not if they're gonna make a crappy product that nobody's gonna wanna listen to. So is it training for them? Is it workshops at the beginning to help give them all the tools and then they can sort of help figure out what they actually enjoyed and maybe dig a little bit deeper so that one person is like, oh, I really like being on mic. And one person's like, wow, that was a really cool hour long session on editing we did or wow, that writing, like I really took to the writing. And so I wanna partner on sort of more of that aspect of it. And I think if you don't help set people up for success that way with people who are really talented, who have the experience, can help guide them, then what you're gonna end up with is where people feel like they have buy-in, but then don't create something that anyone's gonna listen to. Yeah. So I know we basically, do we have time for one more? I mean, it doesn't seem like that. If there aren't any more questions, we can wrap it up. If there are more, we can take one more. It's already up to eight. We good? Great, let's wrap it up. Thank you guys for coming out. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you.