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- [00:02]
Megan
Hi, I'm Megan and I've got a new podcast I think you're going to love. It's called Confessions of a Female Founder, a show where I chat with female entrepreneurs and friends about the sleepless nights, the lessons learned, and the laser focus that got them to where they are today. And through it all, I'm building a business of my own and getting all sorts of practical advice along the way that I'm so excited to share with you. Confessions of a Female Founder is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcast.
- [00:38]
Jonathan Hirsch
Lemonade why does it always seem like it is just when you are reaching your highest highs that something comes along to just smack you back down to earth? It's a dynamic that Jonathan Hirsch knows well. It's where we meet him at the beginning of his new memoir, the Mind Is Losing My Father to a Cult and Domestic. Hirsch didn't set out to be an author. By day, he's the founder of a podcast network, Neon Hum, and he has worked on more than 100 series over the course of his career. In 2019, everything was coming together for him, at least on paper. His company was entering into an exciting partnership with Sony Entertainment, he had just been nominated for a Peabody Award, and he had a one year old son at home. But behind the scenes, he was feeling crushed by the responsibility of keeping his growing company and growing family afloat. And it was just at that time that another new twist materialized. And it turned out to be the biggest twist of all. His father, Thomas, had been diagnosed with dementia. For any family, this would be a devastating blow. For Jonathan, it was even more complex. He was suddenly thrust into what's known as the Sandwich generation, that group of adults who's simultaneously caring for their children and their parents. And in caring for his father, he not only had the usual set of responsibilities associated with an aging person who's struggling with dementia, he was also forced to confront, for the first time in 20 years, his family's history and his father's responsibility for entrenching them in a spiritual cult during Jonathan's childhood. This memoir is many things at once. A stranger than fiction recap of a family's experience with a charismatic cult, an intimate look at the responsibilities of caregiving and a business owner's entrepreneurial journey. I'm biased, of course, but I enjoyed the inside look into the podcast industry during the brief boom period where companies and studios were being bought and sold on a nearly daily basis basis. As you might expect from Hirsch's audio experience, his narration is pleasant and propulsive. Listeners and readers may come primarily for the juicy details of living inside a cult, especially one accused of numerous acts of financial, sexual and emotional abuse. But they'll likely find Hirsch's emotional journey with his dad more relatable than expected. Today we'll be sharing the prologue in chapter one. We hope you enjoy.
- [02:58]
Cheryl
Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed. The voice of Cheryl is recreated by an actor, Janet Metzger Prologue we came home because Thomas refused to spend the night. This email is how it began. The tone was restrained, but I could feel the panic bubbling up underneath. I knew that something bad had been brewing for a long time and that it suddenly became too much to handle. Have you ever dived into a ball pit? I remember going to one at Chuck E. Cheese when I was a kid. This bizarre, massive play arena, like a giant rectangle filled to the brim with plastic balls. I'd walk up to the ledge like you would at a swimming pool, leap off and land with a thud. I loved it. I'd crawl my way out to one of the edges, climb out of the pit and do it all over again. What kept me coming back over and over was not that relatively uneventful feeling of diving in, but the feeling that followed. This slow, sinking feeling, like quicksand or when someone buries you neck to toe in sand at the beach. You cede your power, your will, to this feeling. You let it overtake you. You disappear into the ball pit and the world falls away. The kids, the noise, the smell of farts and feet and canola oil. All gone. That's the feeling I had in that moment, reading Cheryl's email. A slow, sinking, ceding control. Immediately I knew what this meant. Cheryl and my dad were a couple, but slept in separate rooms. Hours earlier, in the middle of the night, she got up. I assumed she saw the lights on, walked into his room and found him surrounded by clutter, sprawled out across the bed, which wasn't really a bed, just a mattress on the floor. He wasn't breathing. He didn't have a pulse. She said the doctors had a name for it, but in the moment, she couldn't remember. After calling 91 1, Cheryl began performing CPR on him and chest compressions. I have no idea if she knew what she was doing. She said she was so forceful she thought she'd break his ribs. She was yelling at him to wake up. She slapped his face. After about six minutes, he came to. The paramedics arrived, crashing through the door and descending into my dad's room. His pulse was light, but it was there. His breath was shallow. They lifted his frail body onto the gurney and ushered him up the stairs of the apartment complex towards the ambulance. The fog rolled in from the ocean that night and as it does, half covering Mount Tamalpais, the sleeping Maiden, the mountain that looks down on the city where my dad and his girlfriend live just 20 minutes outside San Francisco. The email went on. She said he was dandy when he woke up in the er. They loved him there. He was the darling of the place. He was laughing and joking and flirting with the nurses. The CAT scan was clear. Blood tests came up negative. Vital signs good. No signs of any kind of cardiac issue. She said she wasn't about to have them put him in restraints to tie him down to a bed. So she signed him out against the advice of the doctors, who said they thought he had an episode of unconsciousness. It seemed mysterious and perhaps warranted more time in the hospital. They wanted to do a sonogram and kidney function test, but they released him without doing either. Thomas and Cheryl left and promised to go to the VA hospital the next morning and have those tests run. The doctor in the ER said he could have been dehydrated, which would make sense. The man, like a child, always refused to drink water. His blood pressure could have dropped. There was that and something else, something I was slowly becoming aware of, what she called the mysterious symptomology that defined my dad's illness. Dementia. She talked to Thomas about what happened. What if he went unconscious again? What would they do? The same thing could happen tonight while she's asleep in the other room, and he could die. Thomas, with his typical dark humor, said, well, then maybe I will die. What can be done about that? Although right now he is like Lazarus. But my dad was not Lazarus. And as much as my family wanted to believe that he would continue to perform miracles, to rise from the dead time and again, he would not. And things would get so unbelievably worse in a slow, sinking type of way, like with those pools full of plastic balls at Chuck E. Cheese. We'd all go down with him to the bottom together. After I read this email, I closed my computer, trying to shove its contents out of my mind as best as I could, which wasn't very effective. Each word lingered in my mind, echoing through work meetings and business lunches and changing our baby's diapers. It was a sweaty, exasperated string of thoughts. What am I supposed to do with this information? What if it becomes my job to take care of him? I'm barely holding it together. What does Cheryl expect me to do? By the end of the day, I'd come to grips with these thoughts. I let them in and listened to them. Caring for my dad seemed impossible with everything going on in my life, but also given our relationship as father and son. In the last year, I'd launched a successful business. I had a wife and a baby and a life. But I also had a father who was scarcely a part of any of that. For years he'd been on the margins of my world, and now his presence was so loud that it drowned out everything else. When I think of children caring for their elderly parents, I'd imagined it happened after a lifetime of love and care between them. Friends of mine who had put their lives on hold to help an ailing parent did so because the love and care had been so palpable and pervasive throughout their childhood and into adulthood that there was a clear duty to step in. They relied on them and so couldn't imagine not returning the favor if their health took a turn. My situation was markedly different. My dad was sick and he needed help, but there was no one to catch him as he fell. The next day, Cheryl admitted him to the Veterans hospital and I bought a plane ticket to San Francisco.
- [10:53]
Hasan Minhaj
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- [11:50]
Cheryl
E l-p.com I'm Hasan Minhaj and I have been lying to you. I only pretended to be a comedian so I could trick important people into coming on my podcast. Hasan Minhaj doesn't know to ask them the tough questions that real journalists are way too afraid to ask. People like Senator Elizabeth Warren. Is America too dumb for Democracy? Outrageous parenting expert Dr. Becky how do you skip consequences without raising a psychopath?
- [12:17]
Megan
It's a good question.
- [12:18]
Cheryl
Listen to Hasan Minhaj doesn't know from Lemonada Media. Wherever you get your podcasts chapter one it all came to a head on April 9, 2019, I was in New York for what would turn out to be the most important meeting of my career. That morning I had coffee at the Freehand Hotel, this understated boutique hotel with dark wood paneling on the walls of each of its rooms. I was there to meet with a producer I was working with on a project. She didn't know it, but her company had recently expressed interest in buying my young firm. What could they possibly want? I frequently asked myself at the time. Amidst the flurry of interest, I felt like I'd caught a wave but never actually learned to surf. This was during what we now call the short lived podcast Boom. I was trying to ride it the best I could. What do you attribute all this success to? She asked me. Not sure, I said, which was true. I wasn't sure. I just keep my head down and keep working. Keep my head down and keep working. It was something I said a lot in those first few years, and to an extent I believed that's what I was doing, just putting my head down and happening upon success. I don't know if I believe that anymore, that I had some magical work ethic and drive that resulted in all these accomplishments. Now I realize there were bigger forces moving the boom in podcasting, and I just happened to have jumped in at the exact right time. Congrats, by the way. Saw the news this morning, she said. Did I mention I had been nominated the night before? This was unreal. I should have been able to enjoy this moment in the sun. After grinding it out as a show producer for several years, I'd found my stride running a company, but I couldn't stop and smell the roses. I was stressed beyond belief. My wife and I had a one year old. My days were filled with meetings and my nights were spent trying desperately to catch up on other work. I was waking up in the middle of the night in terror that I'd missed something or mulling over a grumpy email from a dissatisfied client. My mornings weren't a soft easing into the day. I jolted awake each day, convinced I remained weeks behind before work hours technically started. My anxiety ruled my actions, a disposition that made me responsive to the needs of clients and colleagues, but one that didn't bode well for my own happiness, mental health, or relationships. I'd placed so much on my back at the time that another layer of responsibility felt like it would crush me. Being back in New York City reminded me of a younger version of myself long before I became a father or started my business. My wife Val and I moved to New York after getting married in 2013. We dumped the remaining savings we had into a third floor railroad apartment in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We arrived right in the middle of an epic winter, the kind that hits the Northeast only every few years. Snowmageddon or whatever. We didn't have jobs. We trudged through the snow to interviews. A junior copywriter at Vice, a recipe editor at a food magazine, an intern at a publication for cigar aficionados. I was coming up empty. Eventually I did get a job, but it was awful. A cynical venture backed website built to own a little corner of the Internet by employing young, impoverished English grads at pennies on the dollar and ruthlessly demanding 14 hour days to manufacture content. I would have these nightmares that I was running through a building filled with countless empty rooms, frantically throwing SEO search terms into them to prove I'd done my job. Avocado, haddock, creme fraiche as I made my way through. Behind me, the building and everything in it was getting sucked into a giant black hole. I quit after a few months and got a job as a bar back. I worked at a pizzeria in Greenpoint. I got into radio in my free time and clawed my way at 30 into a career. My wife Val used to always say, to be happy in New York, you need to be really rich or really young. We're neither of those things. We lasted two years before moving back to the west coast, but back to New York April 9, 2019 I said goodbye to my friend at the freehand, grabbed my backpack and walked up Lexington Avenue towards 25 Madison. It was a crisp spring morning in the city. The MTA buses heaved loudly past the steady bird like beeping of taxi horns. I felt like a minor percussion instrument in the symphony. 25 Madison is a massive building right in the middle of Flatiron. Gray stone stretches above the trees that encircle Madison Square park and way up towards the top layers of the lower Manhattan skyline. It's home to the William Morris Agency, Credit Suisse, and Sony, where I had arrived to deliver my first pitch to Sony. Our company had been selected to pitch ideas for a new podcast project and I'd flown out to New York from LA to present the new series in person. The pitch meeting went well. I received a phone call from the coordinator of the project, telling me as much. So I returned to LA that night, hopeful that this new business opportunity would help to further catapult my company and career forward. I answered emails on the plane, bought tickets to a basketball game, scheduled a recording for another podcast in Alabama that weekend. I took an Uber late that night from LAX to my home on the east side of Los Angeles. I'd become well acquainted to that nighttime drive from the far west side of LA, crawling across the four lanes of the 105, hanging a left at the 110 junction, then right at the 10 to the 5, the downtown cityscape splashing across the sky in a blurry underslept view from the backseat. The long, slow grind of traffic propelled me forward and eventually spit me out at my front door, the lights off, my wife and son asleep inside. I squeezed into my bed, my dog sprawled over my side of the comforter, exhausted but also energized. This was our moment. This was my moment. That night my phone rang many times, but I did not hear it. When I woke up in the morning, there was an email from my dad, Thomas's girlfriend. I'm calling her Cheryl. The title of the email read. 2:10am I quickly sat up in bed and began to read it about a week after Cheryl reached out with that alarming message. It was my son's first birthday party. We hosted it at our home. Our friends and family were scattered across the loosely landscaped backyard of our 1920s El Serino house. I mingled with our guests, but in a way I felt like I wasn't really there. Our friend Gabrielle commented on how big our kiddo was. We reminisced about collaborating on projects in New York together. By then, the world of my early career felt like it was miles away. I remember crawling into the closet with a microphone to record my first podcast arrivals in between jackhammers on my Brooklyn city city street. It felt like a struggle then, but seemed to be part of a mission now. Another friend, Rachel, brought a gift for my son. We talked about the pains of being business owners. She was running a podcast company too. There was just so much work to be done and everything filtered through me. I was always the last line of defense and anytime something went wrong, it was all on my shoulders. And sometimes I worried about what it would take away from my family life and my relationships. And then, as if on cue, I got a phone call from the agent of one of our podcast hosts. It was urgent. I walked down the two stories of steps to the street to take the call the host was unhappy, which I already knew. They'd sent me a note earlier in the day saying they wished to reconsider our relationship. Apparently, the word had now got around to the agent. I spent the call frantically trying to convince them to encourage patience with their talent. They'd never done a podcast before, and some of the things they were asking for simply weren't possible. I feel less bad about it now, knowing that this person blazed through several producers before the publisher ultimately canceled the show. But at the time, I was panicked. Our reputation was everything. Not only that, I launched the business without a dime of capital. Every dollar mattered, and we were building something without a safety net. One wrong move could unravel the whole thing. I lived in that state of high anxiety practically every moment of every day. I hung up with the agent and looked down at my phone without realizing it. An hour had passed. I'd missed most of the party. People were waving at me from down the street as they headed home. This was a moment that I'd flash back to over the next few years, a lingering memory that acted as a panic light inside of me. Don't forget the most important things in your life. I managed to talk the host down from firing us for another tempestuous month, long enough to be asked to go to their house on the west side in late May and set up a home studio for them. The host wasn't there, but their assistant let me in. As I positioned the microphones on the host's desk and marveled at the thanklessness of this particular relationship, I got a text message from my agent and said to call him. There was big news. Now, this should come as no surprise, but if a Hollywood agent tells you they have big news, it could be good news or very bad news, which in recent months I'd come to expect. Everything in the industry at that time felt breathless. Accelerated money never seemed to be an issue, and everyone wanted the next podcast. Now all these companies, like mine, were firing on all cylinders, struggling to keep up with demand. I'll give you the supercut montage version of events as I remember them. Before, serial podcasting was growing, but mostly in the indie community. By the time I had started my business, major brands, media organizations, even agencies were getting into podcasting. Foreign companies, major corporations. Everybody wanted a piece of what appeared to be a unique place to reach audiences for long periods of time. Unlike digital programming, which was beginning to rely on short form content, there were new executives popping up left and right, people who had never made audio in their lives. With millions of dollars to burn. One of these guys showed up drunk and two hours late to my office, making lewd remarks in front of my staff and bragging about how he'd met Snoop Dogg. Then there was the major media company that briefed us on their plans to make 300 shows that year. Completely unfathomable to anyone who knew how to make a podcast, but said with a straight face, I could barely breathe from the shock of the idea. When I walked out of that room, there was the convicted felon whose reputation management company Cold called us and asked if we could make a promotional video for their client, and they wanted it ready by tomorrow. Fast and out of control doesn't even begin to describe the climate around the industry at that time. But in this case, it turns out my agent had good news. I called him in the car on my way to another meeting. Hit me, I said, they want in, Jonathan. This is huge. That company I met with in New York, they wanted to buy my company. The agent floated what he thought they would pay for it. The number seemed to hang on the line in a cavernous space between me and him. It floated there, unreal, like that emoji with the angel wings on the dollar bills. This, amidst a litany of unbelievable things that had happened to me in recent months, was by far the most unfathomable. That night I told Val about the conversation over dinner, and we just laughed. We were sort of like, sure. I mean, anything seems possible right now. After my wife and son went to bed, I worked until the early hours of the morning. Caught a flight to report a story in Texas. The grind remained relentless, but now it felt like I had a target, something to work towards, a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I just keep doing what I'm doing and we could really sell this business. I thought about it on the short flight to El Paso, as the plane made its descent over the mountain range that hugs the west side of the city and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, I saw the endless terrain of brush and rock of the Chihuahuan Desert. I'd come to really love this work, the creative part of it. Connecting with people, telling their stories, traveling to far flung locations to bring one of our documentaries to life. I didn't necessarily want it all to go away just as it was getting going. But then again, I also couldn't imagine having the kind of financial stability a deal like this would suggest, especially given how I grew up. My parents moved 17 times in 18 years. My childhood was defined by instability, going into debt to make ends meet, abrupt changes to our living situation and a life that existed on the margins financially, but culturally too, I always felt like an outsider. All I ever wanted as a young person was normalcy and stability. And now my most sincere desire for my son was the same. I was deeply motivated and remain deeply motivated to offer my family opportunities to lead a normal, comfortable life. The resentment and heartache I felt because of the life I was set up for because of my parents, those tears oiled the gears of my ambition. But a lesson many before and after me have to learn and relearn was what the price of that kind of ambition really is. I became increasingly scared that with the demands of the job, my home life as it was was incomplete. Until this offer, I was drowning in work with no end in sight. I loved the work, but a big part of me wanted a way out too, and a sale that could be my ticket to peace. There was no question I would take the deal if it was presented to me. The conversations about the business began to escalate. There were now several interested parties. Out of the pack emerged an opportunity to go into business with Sony in their budding podcast division. After much deliberation, it felt right. An executive there named Charlie was a great connector to this big corporate giant I had no idea how to approach a brilliant behind the scenes leader who saw something in me I didn't even see in myself. So I now had another full time job negotiating the biggest deal of my lifetime. But none of this bright, optimistic energy could drown out my worry about my dad's health. That summer sped by and looking through my emails and texts and calendars from that time, I scarcely had contact with my dad or Cheryl. When the Peabody Award ceremony took place in New York, I got a note of congratulations from her. Thomas had good days and bad days, but they were hanging on. If I don't have the patience and feel sorry for myself as just a caretaker, cook and maid, well, I forgive myself better the next day.
- [30:57]
Jonathan Hirsch
Ready to hear the rest of the story? Go to YourNextListen.com Copyright 2025 by Jonathan Hirsch. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon Schuster Audio from the audiobook the Mind is Burning by Jonathan Hirsch Read by Jonathan Hirsch. Published by Simon and Schuster Audio, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon and Schuster, Inc. Your next listen is a production of Lemonada Media and Simon and Schuster Audio. I'm your host, Jackie Danziger. I produce this series with Lizzie Breyer Bowman. Isara Acevez is our associate producer. Bobby Woody is our audio engineer. Music by APM Executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Whittles Wax. Production support from Lara Blackman, Tom Spain, Sarah Lieberman and Lauren Pierce help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
- [31:59]
Megan
Hi, I'm Megan and I've got a new podcast I think you're going to love. It's called Confessions of a Female Founder, a show where I chat with female entrepreneurs and friends about the sleepless nights, the lessons learned, and the laser focus that got them to where they are today. And through it all, I'm building a business of my own and getting all sorts of practical advice along the way that I'm so excited to share with you. You Confessions of a Female Founder is out now. Hear new episodes each week ad free on Amazon Music. You can also ask Alexa Alexa, play Confessions of a Female Founder with Megan on Amazon Music and she will.