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Podcast Intellectuals Panel #2 with Ellen Horne, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Barry Lam, and Julia Barton
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- [00:00]
A
New Year, New Me. Cute, but how about New Year, New Money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're gonna crush Start the year off right. Download the Experian app, based on fico's great model, offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian hi everyone, I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts welcome to the New Books Network welcome to a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities Vault podcast. My name is Robert Boynton. On October 10, 2025, NYU's Journalism Institute hosted a day long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In this second panel of the day, Ellen Horn moderates a conversation with Chenjerai Komanika, Barry Lamb and Julia Barton, three veterans who have made a specialty of working on Creative Idea Informed series. The first voice you hear is Julia Barton.
- [02:08]
B
So there's just been many ways in which I've learned from the process of working with academics and writers rather than just being like, here's how it's done. Because nobody in this business knows how it's done. It just started. You guys were all making it together, which is fun and exciting. We come from broadcasting. You're like, I have to do a job. I have to get these words to fit a certain time. I have to create the presentational style, the copy that the host needs. And when it's podcasting and it's more personality based, it's more about what is it that you want to say and how can I help you say it in this format and develop your relationship with a listener. You start often with the argument and then you backfill and prove the argument. And the issue with listening is that there's no suspense when the argument is baldly stated at the beginning of the podcast. So it's about helping people to trust this process, to kind of reverse the order of that and build up to the argument as the reward rather than the thing that you're proving. It's been very interesting to work in that process. And then also to understand for my part, that the writing is good. I need to get out of the way.
- [03:25]
A
So I'm Chenjerai, I teach here in the NYU's department and I've made a couple of podcasts. The first thing I feel is I have to just express real gratitude. The first layer of gratitude is to Robert Boynton, my colleague, and Ben Walker. A lot of creating the ability to do this is about people who are doing a lot of non sexy work to build capacities and make the argument to people who are not willing to do it so that you can make the space once you have a program. And that includes also in the institutions, I mean, Ellen and Julia, the work that they've done in radio institutions, for example, to make this happen in some of these companies. It's one thing to have the idea, it's another thing to realize it. So can we get a round of applause for that work? The other layer of gratitude is to the people in the room. The work that folks have done at Radiolab, at Pushkin, at Slate, people who really were the architects of this and have been doing it under various conditions, probably for most of the time when people were not really appreciating it. And lastly, to the people that came, because you had to make time not to do other things, to be here and to further this. But this is an extremely important movement. We say in political organizing, we have a world to win. There's so many people who want to share stories like this, so many scholars who want to do their work this way, but can't because this academic has not been set up to incentivize this. So I also want to put some respect on y' all for being here and to our students. We got students here in our audio program we call students because they've committed to study, but they're actually extremely accomplished audio producers in our NYU journalism audio program, so get to lock in with them too. I came into academia and I got a PhD in mass communication, and I was incentivized that all the work had to be done in peer reviewed articles which were read by very few people in a register of writing, which I'm potentially gonna disagree a little bit with Julia and Ben, who Ben always tries to salvage academic writing. At this point, I'm just gonna say academics have permission to be bad writers. I mean, I'm an avid consumer of academic writing. I want you to read it. I read it, I love it. And it's also just bad. I'm like, why would you do that? Violence to a sentence? You know, radio people taught me how to write. Cause they're like, we gotta write for the ear. We got people keep people glued. While I was doing my academic work, I was listening to the work of some of the people in this room. And I was constantly being told, well, that's public work. That's what we call applied work. It's not real critical interventions. But as I started having the experience of producing for an academic journal and then having the experience of working at Gimlet and in public radio with NPR and with John Biewen, I said, I'm not so sure about that. I think this is epistemology. Have you ever produced a peer reviewed article? You know what happens? You spend maybe years writing a draft, you send it off and don't hear anything for a couple of months. Then someone who may or may not have read it in like 10 minutes comes back and says, you didn't cite my work, you didn't cite this. It goes back. It's not very much feedback. On the other hand, in the podcast world, the process of revision, the process of fact checking, the process of really taking time to think about what is being said here, what is going on? How are we going to treat this sound? Earlier there was a question that was asked about why not just a lecture and audio. And I think that's a really smart question because I'm glad that some people are doing that. Cause it sometimes costs resources. But my answer to that would be, it's real epistemology. What you heard in Fanny's work when she was talking about having to go back and think about how we're gonna use this, what quotes we're gonna do that revision process changes knowledge, production. It's not simply art. I'll stop there. But that was part of how I entered in to doing this. And it's so exciting to finally have a place where these come together.
- [07:08]
C
I'll give the brief introduction of myself. I'm so lucky to have Chenjai as a partner in crime here in the audio journalism program. I'm the director of the Audio Journalism Master's program here at nyu. And one of the things I want to talk with you about is the scholar's voice in audio. And I think it's hard to hear Chenjerai whip up a crowd without thinking about the way that you balance a really authentic voice and a scholarly voice in your own work. I think, Barry, does that also ground us in the way that you approach this kind of serious inquiry in audio?
- [07:40]
D
So let me introduce myself first. Probably not everybody knows who I am, so I am an academic. I'm a philosophy professor. I currently teach at UC Riverside. I was at Vassar for 16 years and I got tenured in academia well before I started in podcast making, I think I was tenured in 13 and I started hyphenation in 15. It wasn't released until January of 2017. That first season, that's when I met Chen, Jerai and Julia too. I didn't have any production chops. I had no journalistic experience at all. I had only written for peer reviewed journals. And philosophy is way up there in its elitism about that kind of stuff, in its hierarchy of what is good, its hierarchy of what's a good place, its hierarchy of what counts as a good scholar. I could say that because the NYU philosophy department primes itself as the best department it competes with like Oxford. So I know that world very well because that was the world that I was in. So when I started this, for me, it was seeing like a foot out the door because I was actually tired of being an academic. I was tired of all this stuff that Chenjerai was talking about. I was entirely self taught in this regard. So that very first season, which Julia posthumously listened to posthumously in the sense that she wasn't editing it while I was making it, I made the thing and then I actually, I went to change your eyes. Like, I just, I think I need a second pair of ears. Like, shit, that's Julia Barton. See, and now we're all sitting up here. It's really interesting. And Julia listened to that.
- [09:13]
B
I did listen to it, which meant it wasn't that bad.
- [09:15]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because she would be honest, kind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that you ask about voice, because I was finding one. And if you look at the space, the narrative space, the ideas driven space, there isn't a unitary voice. Maybe there was two episodes that season where if you look back, it was like, oh, you're like doing the gladwelling thing, right? So like the polemical Thing you could get on the mic and go, listen to this kid. You sound so obnoxious. Yeah, you could do that. That's one way of doing it. I like that.
- [09:48]
A
That was a good one. Yeah.
- [09:49]
D
Right, so like there is like the polemicist, right? So like, this is the editor and the producer of Malcolm show right there for many years. It turns out that that wasn't my voice. I just couldn't write in the way. But I could see certain philosophers doing that and I could see some academics being like that. Overall, I think the pattern is that that's not what the voice is like. If I listen to Jill Lepore, she's just very strongly inclined against being the person who makes an argument with the volume turned up. The content of the argument and the voice of the argument is not that. On the other hand, it's not the same as the dispassioned journalist either. They're not a reporter and they're not a lecturer either. The thing that's interesting about academics, I think, have done well in this space is that they're actually not the model that you would think somebody who is a polemicist gives, not somebody who's the reporter. It's almost like we're doing it for your students or something. I feel like it's a bad professor. If a student came in and I started saying, isn't it awful? That's not how you want to interact with your student. You're a guide to your student. You want them to develop. You're not installing your thoughts into your student. Maybe some faculty do that. I don't like them. Even if you do have thoughts, your job isn't to install them.
- [11:05]
B
Yeah, there's something about the playfulness of having confidence with the ideas, understanding the conversation and. And extending that work of pedagogy to your audience and helping them engage with the conversation through your interests. And I remember in Uncivil where there were these moments where you would react to the material and just be like, oh, fuck that. And I was like, yes, I felt that. And you articulated it. And you also told me what to feel horrible about and then you reacted to it. That was something that at Pushkin, working with academics to try to bring out that side of how should we be feeling? Or what is your take? Because it's playful and it also just helps us absorb ideas in audio form because it's really hard to absorb all this material when it's just floating through your brain that way. There's just something lovely about it. If the academic host will Go there and let that side of themselves come out, because, you know, it's there.
- [12:08]
A
I would say journalism and academia are really ambivalent about the place of the author in the storytelling, in the argument. Of course, there are traditions within both, like feminist tradition really has in academia has centered actually biography and taught us that person was political, et cetera. And in journalism, there is obviously a rich tradition of writing from the first person that has been important, but not necessarily dominant or hegemonic. The hegemonic, dominant voice has been maybe I'm sort of in the background and not putting myself in the front. I think once a particular kind of podcast gained ascendancy and visibility, the podcasts that were centering the narrator, it opened up and gave more room for us to think about the location and situation of the narrator, including the political situation. Who is this person? How am I in this? And what does that have to do with this? I hate to refer to serial, but the moment where Sarah is reacting to what's going on, and you do feel with her at this moment, when she thinks it's this, and then the next episode, she's like, oh, I think it's something totally different now. And then I'm me. All of that is knowledge production. That's important. That's not her navel gazing and making herself the story when it shouldn't be. To me, that's my argument. So people feel differently about that, but I feel like that's real. And I feel like actually it's disingenuous to act like that's not happening. So I actually think the parts of journalism that have not done that are, in a way, not really being honest. For me, being able to deconstruct the voice, too, is another thing that has happened. The voice is weird because it's become the signifier of authenticity. What could be more you than the voice? But that makes the voice seem like the voice is not constructed, not a performance. For me, thinking about the ways in which the voice is absolutely constructed, it's a performance, it's scripted. That has been also crucial to this.
- [14:05]
B
And it's mediated.
- [14:07]
A
Mediated. That's it.
- [14:08]
B
I have many thoughts about this in my newsletter, Continuous Wave. Something that's been really interesting about reading scholarship about audio is the work of people like this scholar, Tina Tallon, who actually examined the voice band that was set up in the early days of radio. The amount of frequency that was given to commercial broadcasting was narrow because emergency services, everybody was using this band and they hadn't figured out how big it Was yet. So it was rationed by the federal government. So there was this little narrow band where spoken word radio could exist. And it was set at the place where the microphones were developed. And the microphones were developed with male voices. So they were like, this is the perfect vocal frequency band. And guess what it does to consonants of higher pitched voices. It just eliminated all the consonants. So you listen to radio recordings of women sound so frigging weird because there are no consonants in their vocalizations. The guy sounds fine, and then the woman who is talking with him sounds insane because all of her consonants are being cut off. And when I ran across that research, I was like, mind blown. Thank you, Tina. Talent. There's just so much out there that's interesting about the way that our voices are mediated. Of course, there were no black people, genuine black people, not white people pretending to be black people. There were almost no black voices on American commercial radio until the 1940s, which is also a crime. But it sets this path, dependency, in which we think certain people are normal and other people are not normal. Certain voices are normal, other voices are not normal. This is all stuff that we need to talk about because we inherited this message in podcasting. I'm working with a reporter right now who has a very high pitched voice, and we were like, here come the reviews. One star, one star, one star. Hate her voice. Hate her voice. Hire someone else to do her podcast. These are actual reviews that are on Apple and we knew they were coming because this has been going on forever. It's just now these people can leave this kind of stuff on Apple and it will never be taken down because Apple doesn't care.
- [16:20]
C
So one of our hopes for this panel was to get into the nitty gritty of craft. So I didn't want to cut you short here because I do think that unless you've engaged the criticism of voice directly, as many of us have, that may be unfamiliar. I was at Radiolab for 12 years, developed and launched it, and then went into the commercial environment at Audible, where I was consistently told, less complex, more story, more celebrity. And I don't think that that is just a commercial world versus nonprofit world. I think that's something that we all wrestle with in our own work as how much complexity can you include? Barry, I want to turn it over to you because I think in dealing with philosophy, you're often dealing with these very heady ideas, concepts. How do you manage that balance, and what are your tools of practice for managing that balance?
- [17:13]
D
Let me just connect to your work. At Radiolab, about two and a half years ago, I did a piece with Radiolab and went through the entire Radiolab production process. Basically what it took for them to make about 15 minutes. It was. So I take maybe 80 to 100 hours for every 45 minutes that I make. I may have spent 200 hours on that Radiolab piece. There was a three and a half hour brain dump that they used maybe 35 seconds, and then I had to do tracking for them and it was two and a half hours of which they used maybe 45 seconds. And I got into a long conversation with one of the producers that this is as deep as we go on this topic. What part of the deal was I get to do the HiFi Nation version? This was about the gig economy, and this was about the ethics of labor for freelancers versus contract employees, et cetera, et cetera. And we got into it very deeply in the brain dump, something that I thought should be used. And I thought maybe 30 minutes of this should be used. And the audience would really love it because it was Latif and it was Lulu. I mean, it's not like Chenjerai and I getting into Marxist theories of whatever. So it was completely understandable for the Radiolab listener, but they used none of it. And they said, this is about, as far as we think, the typical Radiolab listener. And it was a zany story about people who hacked the algorithm that paid them, and that's it. So I did the hyphenation version and it was okay, now we're going to get into various debates about the ethics and politics about paying gig laborer. We didn't get really into Marxism. We talked about what constitutes exploitation versus fair exchanges and contracts, that kind of stuff. And that's a hyphenation version. And then the seminar version would be Chenjerai and I kidding. And they go, all right, students, let's talk about the gig economy. And we assign these readings and so forth. Every single episode of Hivanadi is about this debate. This is the thing that takes the longest to consider, because a typical hyphenation episode is the story side. And the idea side, the typical one, starts with the idea side. The debate I want to get into on this episode is going to be a debate about something. And I have to decide how far along in this debate am I going to get into. Typically that's going to happen by me talking to somebody. It's going to be an interview, it's going to be some scholar about this kind of thing. And in the interview My role in the beginning is just as a learner. Even though I am one of their peers, I'm interviewing them as though they're the expert, the way a journalist would. Then about halfway through, then we start peers. And now let's actually debate your view, right? Let's get into it. We thought about this consideration, this objection, and I have, whatever it is, 90 minutes of that, and that's the starting point. Then it's, what is the thing in the world that's happening that is the perfect way to open up this philosophical question. And then who else do I have to talk to besides this person? It might be something like, what if gig workers suddenly got paid way less and they had no idea how, because it was this black box algorithm that determines how they're paid. It tracks their movement in the supermarket as they're shopping, and so on and so forth, and finds out exactly what price point below 1 cent of which they're going to lose workers and 1 cent above. So I needed to find that story, right? In the abstract. That's the story that I need to find to handle this kind of debate. And then I look for that. Is there an instance in the world where people did that? And so Latif is great at this. At Radiolab, he finds that one little corner. And then you find some paper at MIT Review where there was a guy who was contacted by a bunch of freelance laborers to help them track. They sent in their pay receipts over the course of six months, and that guy ran the regression and all that and said, this is how they're paying you. And then they published it and then released it and it caused a labor action. This is a great story. So you cover that story, you do the journalism side, and then you see who else you have to talk to on the intellectual side. And then you put that together and it's a piece that no philosopher has written about yet. So this is the whole scholarly versus the new thing. The way that academics tend to think about it is I got to do my research, and then there's the output, and then the output is the paper or the book. And the way I think about it now, after having done hifination since 2016, is, no, this is the research. The research produces this 45 minute piece of audio that comes from 80 hours of work collecting all the stuff. And then if I want to do a peer reviewed thing afterwards, then I can do the peer reviewed thing.
- [21:54]
B
Can I ask a question of both of you? Have either of your podcasts been cited? Do you get citation Gold stars. Because the incentive structure, as people have alluded to, is all about paper publication. And it's really frustrating as someone who's trying to get audiobooks reviewed.
- [22:10]
D
I had a paper from 2009 in the top philosophy. This is like everybody wants to publish in that thing. Hi Fi Nation has been cited 270 times more than that paper has been cited. So.
- [22:24]
B
But do you get actual rewards for that?
- [22:26]
D
Do I get rewards for it? We can talk about that in the next panel. The next panel.
- [22:30]
B
Oh, sorry, I'm skipping ahead.
- [22:32]
A
By the way, everybody should definitely listen to hi Fi Nation if you haven't. I was literally in the class when Barry was learning how to do this. I had already seen radio people doing incredible interventions in knowledge production. But Barry is the first certified academic who's a real scholar in the field who is also making something riveting that I ever heard. And by the way, I'm just gonna do this. Allen's body of work is incredible, but you gotta listen to admissible Age of audio documentary. And by the way, Ben was being very humble. Theory of Everything and specifically not all propaganda is art was another tremendous leap forward for the thing we're talking about. So those are just some shout outs and things to listen to.
- [23:12]
C
So, Chenjerai, the podcasts that you've made are not just about ideas and a search for truth. They're also works that deeply consider the humans who are involved. And I think that is one of the great values of our medium, being able to bring the real people forward who were impacted. There's a real challenge in doing that with historical work. And I just want to ask you to talk a little bit about Empire City and how you guys approached bringing the human voices to life through history.
- [23:41]
A
You know, it's interesting, there was a great question raised earlier about how scholars tend to do our work through argument versus story. Question got me thinking. In a way, if you think about a historiographical argument, it is actually an argument about what has happened. It's an argument for a particular account of what went down. Right. Often when historians intervene, they're saying we've understood how we got here wrong. And it has these implications. In a way, that's what Fanny is doing, saying we need to understand these intersecting histories of material. So it is a kind of story. It's a story intervention. And that's what we're trying to do with Uncivil. I think what John B.1 is doing with seen on radio, what we did with Empire City, I go in with a kind of hypothesis. For example, when we were doing the Civil War, people will say, ching, how open are you really? Because it sounds like you have an argument at the beginning. And I'm like, well, you're right. I'm not gonna arrive at the conclusion that maybe whites, unlike Ezra Klein, I'm not gonna be. Maybe white supremacy isn't so bad. No. Scholars have taught us that particulars matter. And this is where journalists have really educated me. Podcast producers have educated me. Because I did come into podcasting with hardcore ideas. We're to talk about police. I had some very specific ideas. And they were like, genj, you gotta get in there and get some tape. Let's see what the tape has to say. And I'll be like, well, I know what the tape is gonna say. Police are a fascist institution. They're anti democratic, and blah, blah, blah. And they're like, yeah, but let's hear what people have to say. And then you start realizing that the problem comes. And this is why I actually think that there's knowledge production. If you're doing real revision and real radio, you realize, oh, wow. Now when I hear a person talk, the way I understand this is still different. But I think in terms of history, we chose to do a podcast during a time in which there was not any recorded sound. So one thing that's important is to think about what historical characters can come to life. Who in the history books are really interesting. I had initially pitched an idea about Border Patrol. Cause Empire City was initially gonna be episodic. Every episode was gonna be a different Empire City. We're gonna do Atlanta, we're gonna do Boston, we're gonna do New York, for example. One was like the history of Border Patrol, which seems like it could be relevant now. And I found a history of someone who was the sort of child of the Confederacy and then left the Confederacy and moved over to Texas and became one of the early Border Patrol agents. That kind of story, that's a character. When I see that, I'm like, oh, I want to learn more about now. I want to see what archives are on that character. I want to see, are there any descendants of that character? And are the descendants good talkers? Is there enough information for me to actually piece together a narrative about this character? And then I have to think about what is available to turn this into sound. If you're thinking about doing historical work, that's one of the ways that we approach that.
- [26:29]
B
I just wanted to jump in from producing Joe Lepore's podcast, the Last Archive. There was a Lot of reenactments of voice actors and even, like, staged sort of mini radio dramas and so forth. A lot of the actual episodes thanks to her producer, Ben Nadifrey, who now hosts the show. He was fascinated with, you know, the history of radio, and he kind of infected me and how. I am also fascinated. But it was really interesting to see the listener reactions because the blending of straight narration and interview tape and historical reenactments, people were really mad at us for doing that. They were like, I love this show, but the voice actors are terrible. And we were like, what? So it's really fascinating to me how much tolerance American listeners have for voice acting now, because it used to be all voice acting. This is one of the mind blowing things I've learned about, and I'm going to be writing about it next week, is everything was voice acting on US network radio until 1948. There was no tape. It was actually banned from the major commercial networks. All of this stuff that we consider authentic was considered inadmissible, and listeners didn't like it. And now it's the reverse because we stopped exposing our ears to dramatic reads. We know everybody on TV is acting, even on reality tv, they're reenacting themselves, and we accept that. So the show continued to use voice actors, but kind of toned down the dramatic acting juiciness of it. I'm curious if you also encountered that.
- [28:01]
A
Yeah. I'll briefly say we actually had internal resistance. We used a lot of voice actors at one phase of production of Empire City, and then we were kind of like, this sounds corny and terrible and corny.
- [28:11]
B
That's what people say.
- [28:11]
A
Yeah. We just didn't like the way it sounded. And that prompted us to a new level of questioning, because for a minute it was a default thing. We have a transcript of the Lexile Commission. It's an incredible transcript of the first trial where the whole police department was put on trial. Let's reenact it. It was default. But then when we heard it, we said, hmm, this sounds. This is kind of bumping is a term they say. It's not hitting, it's taking us out of the narrative. And the other thing is, it also made us say, what do we actually need to do here? Is what we want to feel just a reenactment of the script or is there something else we're after? We had an incredible sound designer, Axel cocutier, and there were some moments where we were reading things that the NYPD has said, either in their statements or different things, and we sort of together with Axel and the lead formed this way of making the voice sound kind of metallic, and it increasingly becomes metallic over the course of the series, and it appears in different kinds of constructions. And we were like, this delivers what we want people to feel. We want to feel an institution that's becoming cultural. But the intervention actually wasn't a voice actor. That was one example. There was other times when we need to hear the right kind of descendant or just someone else, or there was rewriting that happened. I think that those moments where you have to find a solution do sometimes become deeper moments about what kind of knowledge needs to be produced. And that's where I think it relates to the scholarship.
- [29:33]
C
I want to open up the floor to questions while we're getting ready for that. I know personally that once, twice a week, I'm having a conversation with someone who is podcast curious and unprepared for the amount of work that goes into it.
- [29:45]
A
Say it again.
- [29:46]
C
And so I wanted to ask each of you, what do you do when you get that call? My friend wants to have a podcast, and particularly if there's someone who's interested in sort of serious intellectual work. What are your talking points in that conversation? Barry, do you want to.
- [29:59]
D
I always take the call, and for eight years, I've been giving the shame spiel, and I think it's still applies today, even though we're not at the peak of podcast funding and so forth. Is starting your own show is like starting your own magazine. So if you want to start, I suggest writing for other magazines, making stuff for other people, and starting from there instead of making your own thing. If you insist on making your own thing, what's the ratio of how much time you want to produce to how much you want to output? So if it's an hour, do you want to go, I want to work an hour to put an hour out. Do I want to work three hours to put an hour out, or can I work 80 hours, 100 hours to put an hour out? Be realistic, and if your answer is anything closer to three to one or one to one, you don't want to make a narrative show. You want to do something completely different from that. And if that's not cool enough for you, then you can't do it.
- [30:49]
B
Julia, this is the whole reason why I started a newsletter. And one of the central paradoxes that we face in this profession is people are very wedded to the fallacy which, you know, we kind of are responsible for as producers, that this is all just talking. That talking naturally occurs in this beautiful way. And that musicians show up like that Portlandia skit. Cause we hide our tracks. We're more susceptible as listeners to falling into illusion that this is natural and not constructed. We also don't like to talk about our craft as much because it's sort of like magician guild secret stuff. Generally, people are more like, what does an editor do? And I was thinking about it today. It's like, do you wear sweatpants to your friend's wedding? If you do, then you don't need an editor. You wear sweatpants when you're sitting around the house watching a game and your friends drop by. You don't change into a tuxedo when your friends drop by. So, like, also, you don't need an editor, but if you want to dress up and look like a grownup in this world, then your editor can help you with that. So get an editor. Dress up, wear big boy clothes. I wouldn't say it like that, because the people would be like, I want an editor, but not her. Not that lady. She scares me. That's what it is. It's about, what venue are you in, where do you want to be, and how much effort do you want to put into your presentation? How much awareness do you have of your venue? And we just have this blurring of all the venues as one thing, because chat shows and narrative shows are all called podcasts. So it's very hard to explain what an editor does. But I think one of the interesting things that scholars can do is look at some of these paradoxes, and especially Americans. Why do we have this willed ignorance? And why do we listen to everything like five year olds and just think, yeah, it's just people talking. They're my friends. They're just talking. Tell me more for free. Don't put any ads on it either.
- [32:41]
C
Tundra, do you find yourself in the space of trying to persuade people or use.
- [32:46]
A
Yeah, I mean, one thing I want to say is before I was a podcaster and a scholar, I was a rapper. And so as a rapper, I know that some of this is our fault. It's podcast's fault, too. I said this before talking to Rob Rosenthal. We intentionally make it look like the stuff was easy. The rappers do that, too. I used to stay up all night when I was in 8th grade writing a rap and then come like it was right off the top of the dome the next day at school. Podcasters do that too.
- [33:08]
D
It's a genius.
- [33:09]
A
And then later we're like, oh, you don't appreciate our work? You Know what I mean? Cause you made it sound so good. My answer has become something that I used to hate. When it was done to me when I pitched Empire City and when I pitched Uncivil, I was put through a process of development. In those cases, it took almost a year of figuring out what really this show is going to be. And you determine a lot of things. You determine the size maybe of the staff, what it needs, how many episodes. You do a little preliminary digging into these stories. Because if you're like me, you can get super excited about an idea, which actually there's no there there. Once you get into it, you're like, oh, yeah, this actually wasn't that interesting. I get instantly excited about ideas and it's like, yo. Then he's like, nah, you talk to or you're the person. You're like, I found a person. It's like, yeah, but did you hear the person? They're like, you know, we don't want to hear from that person ever again. So when companies used to be like, I would be like, yo, I got the illest idea. We're going to do this and this and that. And they'd be like, let's, let's do a little development. Now. There was a good reason why I hated that one was because I felt like it was capitalism's way of, of offloading the work back onto me. They were like, yeah, you do more work to figure out if it's a good economic bet for us. Does that sound fun? You can do a lot of work and then we might still say no. So that's why I hated it. But I've come around to it now because what I've seen sometimes is people who don't really do any development and pre thinking get way into the woods on something that they don't have the resources to figure out. Maybe the idea wasn't really that good. So I'm like, commit to this first phase of development first. And two places you can go to do that are here at our newly formed thing. And also I'm working with a company called Row Home in Philadelphia. They have development packages that they can help you work through those things. And so I find myself referring people to that.
- [34:50]
C
That's great. Let's start with Ben Walker here.
- [34:54]
A
There's so much overlapping ecosystems from the commercial world, Ellen, you were just talking about, to the academic world, to the public radio world that a lot of us come from. But this thing, Barry, that you said about ideas almost coming first almost connects with what you were just talking Chandra, that that's almost not an option in a lot of these ecosystems. And I almost feel that it is almost corny in some instances to say, okay, what makes this a scholarly podcast versus a non scholarly podcast? But I almost feel like there is this commitment to the idea. I'm not saying there shouldn't be development, but there is almost like this battle between ideas and stories that sometimes the idea might just have to come first. And I'm wondering what you think of that.
- [35:35]
D
Well, one thing I can say is I've never had a team. I've never gone through development. It was always me. So I actually had to learn this lesson personally of going three months into production of an episode and then I don't know if this works. You gotta make it work. This is episode four of season two or whatever. And then actually having to make it and then put it out there and see what the numbers are, and maybe not feeling very happy. There are lessons there if you are an indie producer, like I am at Slate now and my Slate Bosmia is here, but like, it's still independent in the sense I make the thing. And then what Slate has provided is like pair of ears over the years, like a Julia. And that's been great. But I had to make all of those mistakes. And sometimes those mistakes are not really mistakes. Towards the end, there have been episodes where I've not been happy with. And it turned out to be the most. Last season, everybody was talking about Sam Bankman Fried. So this is like two and a half years ago. I had this real allergy to thinking that if everybody else is talking about something, I don't want to talk about it. And at this time, it was effective altruism. And it wasn't just everybody in the media, but everyone in philosophy was talking about it because it came out from our world. These philosophers at Oxford who just came up with this thing and all of a sudden is like this big thing. I know that debate so well because we've been arguing about it within my field. And I was like, I don't want to make an episode about this. My editor at the time, Alicia Montgomery, said, if everybody's talking about it, that's a reason for you to do an episode as opposed to not do. And I said, okay, I'll do it. She goes, all right, then what are you going to do? And at this point I'm like, shit, like, what am I going to do? Am I going to cover Sam Bankman Fried? I'm not going to cover Sam Bankman Fried. Somebody who's way better storyteller than I am was covering Sam Bankman Fried. So it was the commitment to having that debate over what is effective altruism. Should we be effective altruism? What were their arguments for? And all that I was resisting along the way.
- [37:29]
B
That's color.
- [37:30]
D
Yeah. And the thing that I came up with was I found somebody who I knew who had to give away $10,000 a year because his dad was rich and wrote him a check. And he decided it's wrong for me to spend this. So I'm going to give this away to charity. So I said, on this episode, I'm going to bring in people who advocate for and against effective altruism to convince this guy to give his $10,000 away to a charitable cause. And he's going to decide at the end which charitable cause he's going to give it away. And that structures like the first person who's like, effective altruism 1.0. Give it to malaria victims and then those anti effector. No local community and mutual care. And then the 2.0 guys, which is like sandbag when no, you give it to the AI and then they give you all these reasons. Give it to the people who will suffer a thousand years from now. So they had all this argument and the guy at the end was like, you know, I was convinced for this reason, this reason. And that was the highest downloaded episode of the season because somebody pushed me. You got to do that debate. You know that debate better than anybody else, but try to find a way to make that into a 50 minute thing. So that's a storytelling way of trying to answer your question.
- [38:43]
B
Ben, can I talk about how I think about ideas real quickly? As an editor, you gotta get this emotional momentum going. And then while that momentum is going, you can slip some ideas underneath it. That's my favorite part is building the permission structure to have ideas in a plot driven show. If you listen to Chinatown Sting, I think it's episode four. There's a character who's in hiding in Hong Kong and he's being extradited by the US government. And I'm like, ooh, let's talk about the handover of Hong Kong. And that was in there just for me because I was like, I want more on that. But we had to build enough permission and I don't know if we achieved
- [39:22]
C
it before we run out of time. I want to take a couple more questions. So let's go here.
- [39:27]
A
Academia tends to be incredibly solitary. I'm like Barry, in all of the audio work I've done, it's just been me because my colleagues in academia don't know shit about this. And that raises the other question, Empire City, how many people worked on that? A lot. A lot. And where did the funding come from? Big, large companies. So in academia you can get a grant and you don't need that much money. I wrote my dissertation with a grant from the State Department to go to Russia for a year.
- [39:55]
D
Maybe it was $50,000.
- [39:57]
A
But for me as an outsider, and I'd love to be proven wrong, the gatekeeping around audio is even higher because you can be solo like me or Barry and get lucky, but you don't have the funding and the resources to do the levels of production that say, an Empire City has. And some of the other ones, particularly the ones that are being recognized with awards. And I'm wondering how, as academics who are doing this audio work, how do you deal with this issue? I mean, I've felt at times like a fraud going to people who are doing their independent podcasts and then they get me to come and talk and I'm like, I'm making a podcast that had a six figure budget. It is important to think about and recognize the ways and the forms of podcasting to not create a kind of thing where only the most polished things get recognized. But I want to say two other things. One is that the collaborative component of podcasts is really important. It's one of the things I love. One of the reasons why I like to do my scholarship this way is because I like working with other people. I like the debates that happen when you're revising a script. And I think that that's part of what makes this stuff land differently. Even though people like Barry and others who are doing it on your own have also figured out how to do it in wonderful ways. The second thing I want to say is that it is true that it takes some resources to make a podcast like that. I got to cite my colleague Diane here. Diane often points out that a lot of that pressure for it to cost a lot, it's like the good, fast, cheap circle. I think I just have to say this now at this point, Wondry Media, which now has been reorganized as a subsidiary of Amazon. Wondry was like a factory that wanted everything fast. They needed stuff to happen a particular way and they forced a lot of immiserable working conditions. And the reason why stuff costed was because of time. In part, if you can spend more time to do something and you don't have to do it under the conditions that a particular set of people are going to extract a whole lot of money out of it, because all the money that was being saved by doing it fast, that's not going to the people who made it. That's going to somebody else. So I actually think it is possible to involve people, to have richly produced stuff. And I actually think that's one reason why the work Ellen has been doing and Rob and Ben here in the Academy is one place where you can create a different set of conditions. Those economic realities are always present, but we don't need to fool ourselves that this capitalist, extractive way is the only way to do it.
- [42:17]
C
So let's have more conversation about collaboration and hopefully start some collaborations later today. And let's take two more questions before we pass this on. I'm curious how you engage with your
- [42:30]
B
listeners and if you can think of
- [42:33]
C
an example or a time when that
- [42:36]
B
engagement has either inform the way you
- [42:39]
C
make your podcasts or maybe revealed something
- [42:43]
B
about the medium of audio storytelling.
- [42:46]
D
There's positive stories, there's negative stories. So one positive story. There was a lying captain in the Houston Police Department that listened to an episode that I did on the fourth season, which was about criminal justice, and decided that she was going to do something differently in the way that she was assigning beats to her officers on the basis of something. I thought it was undergraduates at universities listening to my show, but it was interesting. So that was a positive. There's always the people who say, I can't listen to your show because there's music in the background. And I say, sorry. Then there's the people who want to fight with you about certain things, and that happens. It's the Internet. So there was a men's rights activist guy who started calling my office regularly. This is so. And so I just want to come back to this thing. And then I was like, oh, thank you. You know, and then just hang up and stuff. It's like anything else you put out on the Internet.
- [43:42]
B
I think of myself as the advocate for the person who's in the car with the guy who wants to listen to the podcast. I edit a lot of male hosts. I'm there for the person who's just in the car. I want them to also find this interesting. There's always the main audience, and then there's the eavesdropping audience. And Ira Glass talks about this. Everybody who listens to this American Life is older than they think the main listener is. So he's broadcasting and podcasting for a middle 30s hipster audience, but he knows his actual audience is, like, in their 40s and 50s. Eavesdropping is a part of the pleasure. And podcasts allow us to eavesdrop on conversations that we might not feel like we could actually be a part of. I think that's actually an important role of it. And then the nuance is to acknowledge both audiences, the eavesdropping audience, and invite them in. It's very subtle, but that's why you need an editor.
- [44:37]
A
One thing that people have discovered, I think, across media institutions, is that audience communities are really important, including they can be important economically if you have a strong membership base who supports stuff, and you're in relation to folks that are the hardcore fans, and they actually can help you endure some of these funding cuts that are out here. Another thing to go into the nerdy weeds is that audiences are often wielded in ways I think we've heard about a little bit here as a sort of tool in the editorial process, the imagined audience. So people don't say, I don't like that. They go, well, I don't think our audiences will like this. And there's some imagined audience that they're using as a way to edit, which is real. I'm not trying to attribute only bad intention to that. But it functions in weird ways. It gets into who you think is normal. And the last thing I'll say is that the engagement with the audience in real time. You know, I'm a big fan of the Brian Lehrer show, and I think it's actually something that podcasting can't quite do the same way. But there have been podcasts that have brought in those listeners. We did on Uncivil. We would have, like, calls in and hear the listeners in real time and try to include. But I love when podcasts do that. I think it brings the radioness of podcasting back in. And so on my soon to be released new project, we're gonna be hearing from the callers. We have a hotline already.
- [45:49]
C
Well, as a. As a former Brian Lehrer call screener, my mind went two places with your question. The first is that with Radiolab, we started convening these live shows and in 2010, started touring the country and seeing our audience in person. It was incredibly powerful, and we raised millions of dollars through live shows. And I recently have been convening conferences in China and have learned a lot because there's been this explosion of podcasting in China and the technology that most people are using to listen to podcasts in China is this one podcast that allows people sort of a combination of social media and the listening Boy, I'd love at some point to create something like that here because I think there's a lot of power in convening the audience to speak directly. We're seeing a lot of dynamic interaction in Chinese podcasts with the audience that way. One more question.
- [46:39]
A
I come from a print and digital journalism background and one of my questions is I've talked to sources before where I've heard this and I'm like, oh, this conversation's great. This person's ready, articulate. I would love to have this raw interview out there, but sometimes I've had sources where I've had to do the job of asking follow ups, getting that sense. And then in my article I'm able to paraphrase. So with audio journalism, I'm curious how you deal with that when your source is knowledgeable but isn't necessarily the most articulate or eloquent person.
- [47:11]
C
We approach that in two ways. The first is as part of the interview skills in really working with somebody, re asking a question, telling them, I'm asking this again for clarity or I would like a briefer answer, please. And then there's narration, which is, you know, an incredible tool that chat shows are denied but is basically to use writing to help make something clear and concise.
- [47:33]
B
And then also cutting a lot of tape descript makes that really easy.
- [47:38]
C
All right, thanks so much. Let's take a five minute break.
- [48:05]
D
Sa.