Let’s go. 

There Are No Girls on The Internet

There Are No Girls on the Internet (otherwise known by the excellent initialism TaNGotI) captures the spirit of NPR-born tech and internet-focused podcasts. Reply All ex-pats will pick up the familiar trappings of upbeat plunky music stings being used to transition between lines of thought as a charismatic host leads them down that episode’s story. Except, instead of spotlighting tech bros as they mansplain dropshipping to each other, TaNGotI is telling the world stories that need to be heard. As the official website perfectly sums up: “digital activist and veteran podcaster Bridget Todd is chronicling what the online experience looks like for us, and the overlooked ways marginalized voices have been at the heart of technology and the internet from the very beginning.” 

Episodes around one hour but can also shrink to near half an hour. There’s no formulaic structure demanding each story need to run the same length. Todd gives the people involved the time they need to tell their story. While a powerful speaker in her own right, Todd understands the power of letting her guests tell their own story as much as possible. 

Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Website

Rocket 

If you’ve never heard of Rocket, congratulations. I’ve just given you a wonderful gift. Christina Warren, Brienna Wu, Simone de Rochefort. If you have a Twitter account for any substantial period of time you’ve likely seen one of them in passing. The last time I recommended Rocket I said its continued existence and backlog of hundreds of episodes was a “public service to podcasting.” Lofty words, and I still believe it. Three women very much embedded in internet and tech culture spend an hour talking about the week’s developments in tech and pop culture. 

What sets Rocket apart from people-talking-about-stuff chat casts is the hosts’ combination of industry experience and honesty. A big problem in tech podcasting is hosts who ride a centrist line, seemingly out of fear of ruining future partnerships or job opportunities. Warren, Wu, and Rochefort tell it like it is. They’re up for doing goofy cold opens discussing which Sonic character best fits their personalities, but they also have a track record of discussing the complicated place they have in the world. It’s not easy being informed of some of the latest bad news about Apple but also still have the innate urger to get the newest iPhone for virtue of new-thing-feel-good.

Rocket is funny, keeps to a modest one hour episode length, and tells it like it is. Tech podcasting would be a better place if shows like this were the status quo. 

Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts 

Minority Report Podcast

Minority Report Podcast (not to be confused with The Minority Report, a show that looks like the hosts say “grindset” unironically) features hosts Erik Requidan and Kerel Cooper interviewing a people of color, women, and LGBTQIA+ in the world of business and tech.

Reporting on minority members of painfully cis white industries. I’m a sucker for a solid pun name. Luckily that lead me to this unexpected delight of an interview show. The superstructure of the podcast is straightforward: a host introduces a guest, they talk, they go home. Editing is judicial with the average episode feeling very tight and coming in just under half an hour.

In a stunning twist one wouldn’t normally find on a simple tech-themed interview podcast: Minority Report is fully transcribed. Not just copy-pasted out of Otter.ai. Someone on the team is taking the time to manually edit the transcript to add in notations for moments like when the guest laughs.The bar is in the basement as far as transcriptions in nonfiction podcasting but kudos to them for going above and beyond.

Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Website | Transcripts

Well There’s Your Problem

WTYP is a podcast about tech, even if it’s not presented as one. Each episode hosts Justin Roczniak, Alice Caldwell-Kelly, and Liam Anderson hop around history to cover engineering disasters. As one might expect, the cause of the vast majority of engineering disaster deaths can be summed up with “capitalism.” Topics discussed range from your bog-standard railroad disasters brought on by corporations skimping on safety to huge almost-diaster moments like Y2K. The hosts may be two crass Philly dudes and a trans Scottish woman who plays the Soviet national anthem every time communism is mentioned, but damn if they don’t provide thorough and interesting research. Their episode on the Titanic is so long it had to be split in half purely so Roczniak’s internet could handle uploading it. 

Episode presentation is relatively simple for a video podcast. Roczniak records a Google Slides presentation consisting of slides he and/or other hosts have built for the topic. The sole reason to watch WTYP instead of listening to their audio-only RSS feed is witnessing Roczniak’s hand-drawn annotations as they appear, affectionately referred to as “John Madden-ing.” While a treat to watch him sketch cross-sections of poorly-constructed buildings, enough of an effort is made by the hosts to verbally describe the slides to make the audio-only podcast not just an afterthought. 

Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Website

Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod

An important part of a balanced tech podcasting diet is coverage of the industry from two dudes who remember life before the internet. That’s where self-identified greybeards Brad Shoemaker and Will Smith come in. Both veteran tech journalists, Shoemaker and Smith have produced a podcast so lean the premise is also the title. Three episodes a month the two hosts discuss topics pertaining to developments in the tech world, from smart devices to GPU costs. The fourth episode is reserved for Q&A, which allows the two to really go wild. 

Two white dudes in their forties might not seem particularly wizend in a world where Wozniak is still doing college speaking engagements, but consider the landscape of tech podcasting. A place inundated with 20-something white dudes who think being loud equates being correct. Shoemaker and Smith – refreshingly – understand they’re two cis white guys who’ve had successful careers writing about the newest graphics cards and making podcasts with Adam Savage. If they don’t have something of worth to say on a topic, they won’t. 

They’re also massive geeks. If left unchecked Shoemaker is want to begin discussing how a piece of tech works down to the level of what’s on the PCB inside. One could make a drinking game out of every time he mentions using a shell command in his everyday use of Windows 10. Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod, as well as its sister show FOSS Pod in which the same hosts discuss open source software, is the perfect addition to any tech podcaster’s media diet.

Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Website

Trash Future 

While not explicitly a podcast that talks about tech every episode, in my heart Trash Future counts in a holistic sense. The tagline on the TF website sums the show up perfectly: “a podcast about business success and making yourself smarter with the continued psychic trauma of capitalism.” What industry is most beset with capitalist brainworms than tech? 

Trash Future sports a rotating cast of hosts consisting of Riley Quinn, Milo Edwards, Hussein Kesvani, Nate Bethea, and Alice Caldwell-Kelly. Any given episode of TF is akin to playing around with the strengths and weaknesses of party members in Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Some bring relative order, some bring outright chaos. It’s loud, brash, and unapologetically political. They’ve been at it for so long there’s a list of in-jokes and running bits one has to tease apart and retroactively figure out, if not outright ask a fan where they started.

Every other upload is a teaser for a Patreon-exclusive episode. The episode titles are a trainwreck. TF is as lo-fi a presentation as something starring hosts with expensive mics can get. Much like Well There’s Your Problem, TF doesn’t give a shit if you like it or not. If you’re on the same wavelength as the hosts, you’ll really like the show. 

Apple Podcasts | Website 

Bonus tech podcasts

This is Only a Test

A remnant from the years when Tested.com was a tech review outlet moreso than a delivery platform for Adam Savage videos, This is Only a Test is a weekly podcast in which site co-founder Norman Chan and guest(s) discuss the week’s developments in relation to tech and loosely-tech-adjacent pop culture. A weekly commuter-friendly podcast made by people openly critical of the environmental impact of crypto is harder to find than one might think, but it exists.

While technically a video-first podcast, I can count on one hand the amount of times over the years when something happened on the video feed that genuinely left me feeling ignored. If a visual truly is important, Chan will swoop in with a description to fill in the audio listeners. Tested has created the podcasting equivalent of Old Reliable. I was a weekly listener in the mid 2010s and can confirm that – save for co-founder Will Smith’s downgrade from host to occasional guest – it’s functionally identical to this day. You can trust Tested to be there every week with a news roundup, chat about some pop culture, and talk about tech you’ll want but probably don’t need. 

Listen: Apple | Google | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Website | RSS

Tech Won’t Save Us

In a stroke of perfect personal branding, this leftist tech industry discussion podcast is hosted by Paris Marx. Take a wild guess as to Marx’s political leanings. The driest of the entries on this list, Tech Won’t Save Us discusses, well, how tech isn’t going to save humanity of its own accord. The darker sides of how technology is harnessed for inhumane motives is covered each episode as Marx interviews an expert on a given segment of the industry. From the inherently right-wing construct of cryptocurrency to the ways Australia’s robodebt scandal, you’re going to hear about some gnarly stuff. Where podcasts like Well There’s Your Problem bring granular historical knowledge or broad-strokes systemic issues, Tech Won’t Save Us shines by virtue of constantly talking to people who’ve done little except research a given niche topic for purposes of writing longform coverage of it. It’s also a rare treat to stumble across a show about the industry that will plainly name people in the industry they’re talking about. There’s no subtweeting to be found here, just depressing realities we’ll likely never escape. 

Listen: Apple | Google | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Website | RSS

Queens of the Drone Age

Angharad Yeo, Rae Johnston, Amanda Yeo, and Tegan Jones are four Australian tech-focused content creators who get together every week to chat. Consider this the come-down relaxing entry in a list peppered with depressing, occasionally anger-inducing discussions of the horrors of the industries propping up modern technology. While Queens of the Drone Age don’t necessarily sugarcoat things, the experience is far more chill. Significant airtime of one episode is dedicated to Johnston and Amanda Yeo geeking out over new vacuums. 

Being veterans of the tech sides of Mashable, Gizmodo, and the ABC (swap the A to Australia in that one, Americans), the four bring a causal expertise and access to new tech that’s exciting without veering into dry recitation of spec sheets. Not as likely to drop into uncomfortable industry realities as Rocket, but still less likely to give corporate nonsense a free pass than the average dudes-talk-about-tech chat show.

Listen: Apple | Google | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Website | RSS

Darknet Diaries

An oddity in tech podcast charts primarily dominated by corporate-minded interviews and personality-driven chat shows, Darknet Diaries stands above the rest as a hybrid interview and storytelling podcast about the “dark side of the internet.” Generally each episode involves hacking in some way, shape, or form, though host Jack Rhysider has found great success in the seemingly infinite variations of what can be interpreted as something from the internet’s “dark side.” From state-funded hacking teams attacking the Olympics to stories of geeks being paid to break into data centers, he covers every story with equal amounts of excitement and empathy. Rhysider at times reacts to developments of years-old stories with an energy akin to a children’s entertainer reacting to developments in a storybook. 

The secret sauce of Darknet Diaries lies in that empathy. Rhysider has interviewed founders of The Pirate Bay, ex-NSA employees, even the guy who guessed Donald Trump’s Twitter password. Whether he’s talking about an inarguably good white-hat hacker or someone who has committed heinous atrocities, he finds a way to resist any urge to be numb. 

Listen: Apple | Google | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Website | RSS

Note to Self

Note to Self is about the ever-changing world of tech and how it shapes humanity as a whole. Whether it’s discussions on transhumanism or conversations with the person who helped create Facebook’s ad algorithm, Note to Self brings a deep level of reporting and their classic WNYC sheen of professionalism. Host Manoush Zomorodi–the new host of the TED Radio Hour–is brilliant and affable, making each episode accessible to people at any level of tech knowledge.

As a note, new episodes are currently only being released via Luminary, which, well . . . but the archive is still available on other podcatchers, and is well worth checking out.

Land of the Giants

Via Recode by Vox, Land of the Giants looks into the biggest tech companies that rule the world to figure out how they got so, well, big. Its first season analyzes how Amazon got to where it is–remember when Amazon just sold kinda cheap books that took a while to ship?–and how it’s become more than a storefront. Now, it’s one of the most important tech companies in the world, and Land of the Giants explains why that isn’t soon to change.

Reset

Another tech podcast via Recode by Vox, Reset is a twice-weekly breakdown of the week’s tech news. Think of it as a tech-focused version of The Daily, a quick-ish sum-up of everything you need to know to stay informed in the ever-changing world of tech. While usually the discussion looks at the intersection between tech and politics, there are also episodes that focus on the trends in tech, apps, and AI alone.

Why’d You Push That Button

Why’d You Push That Button is a technology podcast about why we make the choices we do in tech, and how that tech shapes those choices in the first place. Why do iPhone users interact less with Android users, and does it have to do with that lime green color in their texts? Why do people want to be verified on social media sites? Why do people use exclusive dating apps? Why’d You Push That Button speaks to people who have made choices in apps and have compelling stories behind why, but often also the experts behind the design features that guide those choices.

Hunting Warhead

From the CBC, Hunting Warhead is one part tech podcast, one part journalism podcast. It’s a contained story about journalists trying to investigate the darkest corners of the internet to help save child abuse victims. While the subject matter is grisly, the CBC is known for its ethical journalism when it comes to true crime, and Hunting Warhead is no different. This podcast isn’t about the abuse the victims suffered; it’s about the investigation and the dark web themselves.

The post The Best Tech Podcasts for Cool Nerds appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

Don’t show the shark

There’s a golden rule in film horror of “don’t show the monster.” One can find dozens of variations of the phrase depending on who you’re talking to or in what context it’s being talked about. My personal favorite variation is “don’t show the shark,” referencing Steven Spielberg’s happy little accidents on set that changed what kind of movie Jaws (1975) became. The movie’s about a big-ass shark terrorizing a town full of pasty white New Englanders. Loosely based off a novel (so loosely Spielberg asked star Richard Dreyfuss not to read it during casting), Jaws on paper was effectively a gore-fest American kaiju flick but with a somewhat realistically-sized shark instead of a dude in a suit stomping toy buildings. Were it made, this version of the movie would’ve been a cheesy 70s creature feature with a particularly skilled cast, director, and composer. Nothing more.

Fortunately for the moviegoing public and unfortunately for Spielberg, the shark robots built for the movie sucked. Incredibly expensive, requiring 14 people to operate, and simply inoperable for vast stretches of time during filming, the Jaws shark puppets forced Spielberg to reframe the movie around the notion that the mere suggesting the presence of the shark could be horrifying. Instead of masturbatory hero shots of the entire shark swimming underwater, he had to use implied POV (point-of-view) shots from an underwater camera to give the shark’s perspective. Fleeting glances of a dorsal fin or barrels attached to a harpoon the audience knows is embedded in the shark got people squirming in their seats. 

Read more: Why Audio Is Great for Scary Stories

By not showing the shark often Jaws took full advantage of each audience member’s own personal fears in regards to open water. Simply knowing the shark existed and is near the characters is enough for the audience’s own personal fears of sharks to fill in the blanks and make it far scarier than any rubber robot could live up to. “The film went from a Japanese Saturday matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock, the less-you-see-the-more-you-get thriller,” said Spielberg in a 2005 Jaws retrospective for The Roanoke Times.

Jaws in script form was a horror movie in which you, the audience, are supposed to be afraid of the shark doing harm to characters. Big scary thing with lots of teeth eating people? No good, no thank you. Jaws in its finished form is a horror movie in which you, the audience, are afraid of the idea of a shark. Only having vague hints about where it is at any given time can start to play into some ancient primal fear deep in one’s guts. The same fear of the unknown one would feel when hearing something rustling just outside the light of a campfire. Moments when the shark finally kills the dead meat human in the water are actually moments of relief. A pressure is released. They’re dead, we know where the shark is, things are normal again. Thanks to Spielberg’s broken shark robots, overblown shooting schedule, and actors who disliked each other, the Jaws object of fear was shifted from a caricature of a real-world thing to a fear of having no control over one’s current situation.

Mundane versus Mars

The more basic and relatable the thing being made scary is, the easier it is for a storyteller to make it creepy. Of course, there are effective horror properties with wholly un-mundane premises. Event Horizon is effectively about a spaceship that went to hell for a few seconds and made Australian national treasure Sam Neil evil. The common thread with these more outlandish horror plots is playing to the advantages of the medium. Being a movie, things like Event Horizon or Mission to Mars can do big goofy sci-fi things and still squeeze some scares out of the proceedings with jumpscares and visual effects. 

Human minds are capable of so much when left alone with a few pieces of existing information and time to put them together. HBO’s award-bait prestige drama series Chernobyl gleefully doles out horrible events with only the faintest hints of exposition at first to catch the younger viewers off-guard, even if all they have to operate on is context clues and the idea “radiation is bad.” Chernobyl remains a fascinating case study of a piece of media that, while not explicitly horror, plays to both the average viewer and a smaller second audience for whom it’s absolutely a horror show. The latter are treated to occasional seemingly-innocent lingering shots of very specific seemingly-innocent objects and places. Things people who grew up in the 80s (and history buffs) understand the significance of. The creators know you know the significance of that one hospital room full of firefighter masks, and they know it’ll creep you out. 

Horror podcasts don’t have the luxury of Stan Winston-level effects or real-world events to crib from (often). There’s only so many times foley of someone squishing ground beef in their hands for gore can be used before it loses efficacy. But you, a horror producer, can easily meet an audience on an even playing field by, you guessed it, embracing the mundane. 

Sure, an extra-dimensional monster or two can be scary, but so can otherwise normal background foley Hartlife NPF’s gothic horror Unwell opens with Dorothy “Dot” Harper walking home from a grocery store in, as Dot establishes with a barb of sarcasm, the quiet town of Mount Absalom. The audience is swept into a warm summer in the south, crickets chirping in the darkness as Dot’s feet crunch on a gravel road. Passing greetings from what one assumes are people in town she’s walking past begin to multiply and change, warping into something disorienting and unnerving until it reaches a fever pitch with Dot barely avoiding a passing truck. Within the first minute of the series Unwell makes explicitly clear this is not a calm, idyllic place pulled from Glen Campbell’s Southern Nights. They’ve dropped a shark in the narrative waters and you immediately lost track of it. 

Generally, these kinds of op-eds are written as reactionary knee-jerk responses to trends in an industry. Given the relative balance of content in horror audio fiction over the past year or so, I’m of the opinion now is the perfect time to talk about something like this without stepping on too many toes. This piece is less motivated by a perceived glut of poorly-crafted horror and more an appreciation of those who make phenomenal horror using a particularly fascinating and efficient tool. And, to sweeten the pot beyond narrative reasons this can rock an audience’s socks off, let’s talk budget.

Less sound design can be more

Horror in audio fiction, not held down by the need for physical sets or massive server farms to produce CG environs, can easily take flight into the fantastical, the extremes. With sound design one can do anything, and frequently audio fiction does just that: anything. The trick is “anything” comes with an inherent labor and financial price tag. Even relatively simple soundscapes like Harlife NFP’s aforementioned Mount Absalom summer evening take skill and resources to craft well. The less difficult one can make the process of delivering scares on themselves, the more time can be put into making those scares effective. 

Consider Paranormal Activity (2007). One of the most profitable movies ever produced, the viral found-footage hit that spawned a franchise (with woefully diminishing returns) cost just over $100,000 to produce. A guy finds out his girlfriend is haunted, rents a film-grade camera, and starts filming the house while they sleep. Unsurprisingly, things don’t turn out great for them. The majority of scares in the first Paranormal Activity are entirely from sound design and the acting chops of the microscopic cast list. In the entire film there’s maybe three shots that have any post-production visual effects magic done, one of which is literally just moving a crop to reveal footprints on the floor. Nowadays just about anyone could take the raw footage and use a copy of DaVinci Resolve 17 to do the VFX work for Paranormal Activity in a weekend. 

There’s an efficacy to using mundane scenarios and locations that can distill pure fear out of something somebody sees every day. And, by virtue of being something mundane, is economically easier to replicate in a podcast. Cult classic The Evil Dead (1981), at the end of the day, is the result of a group of underpaid and overworked 20-somethings making a horror movie about an isolated cabin in the woods… while living in an isolated cabin in the woods. Albeit the result of Sam Raimi being an abusive dick to his cast and crew, there’s a brutal honesty to Evil Dead as a result of them basically making a movie about the conditions the crew was in while making the movie. A horror movie ouroboros (horrouroboros?), if you will. 

Creaky floorboards, ominous air conditioner hums, flickering fluorescent lights, a second set of footsteps slightly out of sync with the character supposedly alone in a room. These things are somewhat commonplace in the real world and easy to capture on a recorder so that, in the right horrorhound’s hands, they can be deployed at just the right time to scare the pants off someone who made the mistake of listening in the middle of the night. 

Audio drama that dares to try and make things we encounter in our everyday lives horrifying is a special thing and should be celebrated. Perhaps it’s a bit entry-level to discuss something as basic as “make do with what you have” mentality, a cornerstone of low-budget horror, but it feels necessary to stop and discuss why things are good on occasion. In an industry flooded with capitalist brain-worm infested corporate suits who regurgitate the same tired lies about the “low barrier to entry” producers who fought hard to get through that supposedly low barrier can achieve a hell of a lot with simple, familiar concepts.

The post A Case for the Mundane appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

In the interest of not spoiling the ride that is the reason this review exists in the first place I will make it explicitly clear when we’re about to cross over into spoiler territory. Until then, some background on this funky little English podcast:

The Parapod’s first season is simple two-dudes-talking podcasting, though its premise sets a rough blueprint for a more polished (and marketing-friendly) version of the idea when Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural launched effectively the same thing a year later. Though the premise shifts slightly per season, the first Parapod features comedian and skeptic Ray Peacock (stage name of radio presenter Ian Boldsworth) challenging fellow comic Barry Dodds to provide evidence ghosts exist. Dodds, somehow eternally patient yet woefully unprepared, presents a “featured haunting” each episode in hopes he will find something supernatural Peacock will be swayed by.

Spoiler: he doesn’t.

What is The Parapod?

Parapod’s premise is, at the end of it all, a farce. Boldsworth and Dodds make an acerbic duo. There’s a silent understanding reached between the comedians and the audience that Dodds, the ill-prepared, easily-flustered fall guy, will likely never bring anything legitimate to the table that can withstand Boldsworth’s lawyer-like aggressive cross-examination. The first episode spends a significant portion of its runtime making a bit out of Dodds potentially getting sued for saying true-yet-inflammatory things about a D-list celebrity ghost hunter who dabbles in possessions and cold-readings. When they finally get to the first featured haunting of the series Dodds sounds as if he’s doing ominous finger-waggles every other sentence to add gravitas to what is otherwise one of the least-exciting haunted house stories this writer has ever heard. On an island famously full of creepy locales the best Dodds can bring to the table is a cramped Yorkshire house that hasn’t had the interior updated since the 80s. 

Read more: Why Audio Is Great for Scary Stories

A massive red flag for a haunting that gets a lot of press is the existence of multiple ghosts who’ve no narratively-interesting connection to the property. Usually this smacks of a person who has a financial stake in the property making up new stories wholecloth to keep things fresh for the next TV show with “ghost” in the title. 30 East Pontefract’s star haunting is supposedly a long-dead monk, though a generic ghost girl entered the mix early on. A veritable undead Odd Couple. In a shockingly convenient turn of events, the caretaker of the house is also a medium who can see the ghosts.

What’s haunting the house?

As hauntings go, it’s the most forgettable “most haunted house in England” one could find, but 30 East Drive’s cramped quarters and mundane locale make it a perfect location for a Parapod finale. The tone of the evening is also set by a spirited discussion of a Halloween live episode of Most Haunted that featured so many clearly-faked moments Dodds floats the idea the actual ghosts were grateful to have the night off. Any notion of the house being a genuine source of investigation or haunting evaporates within minutes. The Parapod crew notice light fixtures without bulbs that conveniently make key areas dark. EMF readings – an already scientifically-dubious ghost hunting method – are rendered useless by the owner’s warnings that the house’s boiler triggers false positives in a certain room. 

Still, the pair partake of a handful of classic ghost hunting cliches. EVP recorders are deployed, Dodds has an EMF reader, questions are asked aloud to the air. It’s only by virtue of this podcast being recorded in 2015 just before spirit boes hit the ghost hunting zeitgeist that the Parapod special doesn’t feature Dodds getting frightened by random words and static. 

While not the most energetic of ghost stories from the first season, the quaint Yorkshire home of 30 East Drive benefits from both being the first covered and the location most easily accessed by the Parapod hosts for their first time out actually ghost hunting on-mic. On a cold winter evening Dodds and Boldsworth (resplendent in his £300 Ghostbusters costume) descend on the unassuming house. Immediately Boldsworth takes control of the situation by taking a specific chair at the kitchen table where their recording equipment is set up, forcing Dodds to sit with his back to the dark hallway. Dodds has a hard time finding moments of calm for the remainder of the expedition. 

The audio of Boldsworth and Dodds Scooby Doo-ing their way through the house approaches creepy at times, jumpscares coming in the form of Boldsworth making loud exclamations about seeing mundane objects to scare Dodds, which then sends the former into peals of laughter. It’s cheap comedy, but delicious comedy nonetheless. 

Moods shift as Boldsworth’s intentional scares peter out and a handful of difficult to explain events begin to crop up. The first part reacheds a cliffhanger ending with Boldsworth having disappeared into the darkness to perform a test, leaving Dodds in the downstairs kitchen able to hear nothing but occasional footsteps and the sound of Boldsworth’s walkie talkie clicking on to broadcast silence. What started as a goofy comedy podcast about two comedians’ half-assed ghost hunt evolves into a moment of scary tension. Items in distant rooms have disappeared and reappeared elsewhere. Others moved behind Dodd’s back. Dodds’ EMF reader starts spiking wildly. 

Spoilers below for Part 2. Turn back now to save this joyous moment for yourself. 

Not much is said about Boldsworth being the person operating the podcasting equipment throughout the investigation. He’s the radio presenter, it makes sense he’d be the one holding the recorder chasing a friend around a darkened house. If anything, the found-footage feel of it all adds an air of authenticity. Sure, Boldsworth is gasping randomly to scare his companion, but we’re with him the entire time. How could he fabricate things if the audience has a front-row seat to it all, including the mundanities?

The truth comes in a masterful reveal. Not unlike a Bond villain, Boldsworth reveals to a panicked Dodds everything inexplicable about the night’s events was purely improvised lies. He’d moved items while Dodds had his back turned. By some stroke of luck he’d hurled ping pong balls up a flight of stairs in such a way they landed equidistant, leading Dodds to come to his own conclusion they must have been placed there. All the while Boldsworth is there, saying noncommittal things so as not to directly lie but steer his co-host in the direction of believing what he wanted to believe. 

Every good ghost story requires some suspension of disbelief, some willingness from the audience to be receptive to a fantastical macabre reality. On that same wavelength, media attempting to spin a scary yarn has a bag of pre-approved tricks to set a scene. Ghost Adventures has an uncomfortable aggressive violin sting whenever it comes back from commercial break. Horror audio dramas use ambient drones to set audiences on edge. The Parapod special lies by omission in an environment where hosts being dishonest with their listening audience isn’t just harmless, it’s more fun. 

Future seasons of the show tweak the formula. Season two features Dodds broadening his scope from exclusively ghosts to mysterious events in general. Three takes on conspiracies. Regardless of how the other seasons vary in style and vibe, this blessed two-parter from 2015 remains one of the most memorable moments in Halloween-appropriate podcasting. 

If one hasn’t tried out Parapod season one before now, there’s never been a better time to partake of the special with the debut of Dodds and Boldsworth’s film adaptation of the podcast The Parapod – A Very British Ghost Hunt. 

The post The Parapod: The Haunted House Investigation That Lied appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

The first few months of Luminary’s life were plagued with bad PR, massive free podcasts pulling their feeds, and a glitchy app. Their $7.99 monthly subscription was a tall order for anyone who wasn’t a diehard Michael Rapaport fan in early 2019. 

It’s now 2021, the dust has thoroughly settled. Luminary has had over two years to build upon its stable of 40+ podcasts planned at launch, fix the app, and back the monthly subscription down to $4.99 a month. Also they’ve got a limited series with Dave Chappelle, and don’t you forget it. Luminary sure as hell won’t let you. 

Let’s see how Luminary held up. For a week I did my best to exclusively use the Android version of Luminary as my only podcatcher. It was more difficult than one might expect.

The App

With the gift of hindsight (and an 18-minute lecture by Ben Running, Luminary’s head of design) it’s easier to scrape away the layers of marketing guff and evaluate the product on the company’s own intended goals. Podcast pundits were right to roll their eyes at the “Netflix of podcasting” gimmick, but I can’t find evidence Running’s – and by extension Luminary as a company – interpretation of the concept being interrogated. 

A core design philosophy Running cites is wanting to “build a five star / three-and-a-half star app.” Luminary commissioned a painstaking study of every feature offered by every podcatcher available at the time, creating a snapshot of everything users currently had and, by extension, a view of which features were considered essential. The main takeaway from both their own study and others like The Infinite Dial was that most podcast apps valued power users over the average user. A five-star experience for the tech nerds of the podcast-consuming world but a middling experience for those easily overwhelmed by complex UI or tons of features. Luminary at launch intended to be a five star experience for someone who never listened to podcasts, but a three-ish star experience for power users. 

“These power features are, again, the demands of the few and they exist because of a really subpar sort of underlying experience. If you had these better management features, if you had better discovery by default, in a lot of cases you wouldn’t need some of these power user features,” Running said. 

While Running does not speak for the company as a whole, being lead designer on the app is a hell of a lot of influence, and his dismissive fake dialog for what confuses an average person on the street (.e.g “‘Pod’ sounds too techy”) speaks volumes about how disconnected the Luminary app is from the reality of podcasting. The enemy Luminary sought to fight to become popular was both the wrong one and didn’t exist.

Read more: The 5 Best Free Podcast Hosting Services in 2021

During my week of attempting to use Luminary as my daily driver, I was constantly reminded of how the app is actively hostile to users who listen to independent shows. Every episode of something like We Hate Movies or Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod served through Luminary is a wasted opportunity for them. Why? Two years ago Luminary considered manually adding an RSS feed (something anyone who supports podcasts on Patreon has done) to be something only “power users” care about. I emailed back in 2019 asking if it was on the development roadmap and got back a very polite message saying they might consider it, maybe. 

They didn’t. 

At launch the iOS version of Luminary was inundated with one-star ratings while the Android version stayed in beta for quite some time, available to the public but locked in a pre-release state where reviews only counted as developer feedback and didn’t affect the rankings. As far as the public can tell, Luminary for Android went public early 2021 with its first public review going up February 1st. As of this writing it sits at a 4.3 star ranking on Google and a 4.9 on Apple. While I fully expect there are a few people who genuinely like the app, it’s clear the majority of Google Play and Apple App Store ratings are fluffed with five-star reviews from Luminary subscribers who’re following calls to action from Luminary hosts. For every multi-paragraph negative review citing issues with the app and Luminary memory-holing content (we’ll get to that) there’s dozens of short five-stars shouting out a celebrity’s podcast.

If Luminary figured out one thing, it’s the inherent power of a charismatic podcast host. They can’t drive empty five-star reviews of the show to Apple Podcasts while exclusive toLuminary, but they can drive reviews of Luminary on the App store.

Around the anniversary of their launch in 2020 Luminary moved away from the much-criticized $7.99 pricetag to a more reasonable $4.99 monthly flat rate, though when one signs up they’re presented with a screen that displays the $34.99 yearly rate as the only option until one clicks a small line of text to reveal the no-commitment monthly fee. It’s shady, but most subscription services on the internet these days pull that same move so it’s not particularly unique to Luminary. An indication of their lack of faith in the idea users will stick around longer than seven months, perhaps, but not unique. 

To its credit: the app did not crash on me, worked with any Bluetooth connections thrown at it, and both the app and web versions did a good job of syncing my progress on episodes when switching between the two. The player itself has a 30 second skip-forward button and a 15 second rewind, identical to how my Podcast Addict custom buttons are set. One does have to manually press play whenever connecting a phone to a Bluetooth device. If one is in a use-case like mine where they regularly switch from a car stereo to Bluetooth earbuds, Luminary’s lack of auto-start when connecting to a new device will necessitate one taking their phone out dozens of extra times a week. Call me a power user, but the fact I can trust other apps or (change a setting to force said app) to auto-play when connecting to a device is pretty nice.

Using Luminary as a podcatcher without listening to its exclusives is like walking around a mall that only has one anchor store left. Sure, there’s a Macy’s but once you walk outside Macy’s it’s seemingly random businesses and empty places where old recognizable stores used to be. Since importing an .opml file to get my subscriptions from an actual podcatcher is a power user feature, I had to spend some time manually searching podcasts to add to My Shows. This is where Luminary’s hubris at its debut really bites them in the ass. Their original library was created by effectively copy/pasting iTunes’ podcast database, which immediately pissed off the podcasting world at large. iHeartMedia, NPR’s The Daily, and a pre-Spotify Joe Rogan all demanded their podcasts withdrawn from Luminary around the launch window. Smaller independent podcasts started sharing a form letter on Twitter to easily email a demand Luminary remove their RSS feed. 

Going forward any new shows on Luminary are there because the creator made an active effort to submit their RSS feed to the service. Any older podcasts on Luminary feel like they’re there because the creators didn’t care or don’t know. iHeartMedia seems to have done a decent job keeping itself off the service with only a staccato offering of shows made by indie producers who might not know about the ban (e.g. Jamie Loftus’ My Year in Mensa is available but Lolita Podcast and Aack-Cast aren’t). 

Speaking of missing content…

The Content

In researching this review I sat down, took a page out of Ben Running’s book, and made a huge spreadsheet of every Luminary original podcast in their walled garden. Or, at least I intended on making a complete spreadsheet. After going through their list titled “All Luminary Originals,” I followed a hunch and also went through the bespoke categories for original podcasts. There, nestled in “Great Conversations” was People’s Party with Talib Kweli, a podcast that has dutifully chugged along for 108 episodes since June of 2019, arguably one of the more productive Luminary properties. Yet, despite its size, it’s not listed in All Luminary Originals. Perhaps there are other ghost Luminary products like People’s Party that I haven’t found, but the following data is based off what the company itself claims is its entire catalog.

At launch the number thrown around in press releases was 40+ Luminary Originals. This was a bit of a marketing fib to fluff numbers in this writer’s opinion, as a not-insubstantial amount of shows in that 40+ had little “coming soon” banners on their feeds in spring of 2019. Content was thin on the ground at launch. As of late July of 2021, Luminary is in a content spiral, down to 35 total exclusive podcasts including new additions not in the original claim of 40. Only 13 podcasts in the company’s catalog have uploaded content in 2021. 

The average episode count of a Luminary original podcast is 78. If one removes the five pre-existing podcasts Luminary bought exclusivity rights to (including their substantive backlogs) the average number of episodes in a “true” Luminary podcast drops to 31. That difference in content is huge. All told Luminary has 2,754 episodes of content in that playlist (plus People’s Party). Without the backlogs of pre-existing celebrity podcasts that number drops to 997. Not an insignificant amount of podcasting, but definitely underwhelming for a startup with $100,000,000 and two years of runway. 

Most disappointing is Luminary’s tendency to, as one iTunes reviewer put it, “memory-hole its own premium content.” Without a doubt one of the most passionate defenses of Luminary’s premium content during early criticism was made by Lauren Shippen, creator of The Bright Sessions, who was debuting a spinoff series on Luminary. On a Tumblr post responding to an ask, Shippen spoke to the fact Luminary offered a rare opportunity to fully produce an audio drama with a budget that fairly paid every member of the cast and crew, an extreme rarity in independent audio fiction. “Thankfully, we’ve been able to pay everyone – guest writers, guest actors… pretty fairly, but we’ve made no additional profit off of the Patreon, ever. [With Luminary] everyone is actually being paid a fair, livable wage and we were able to get Atypical Artists off the ground, a company that we’re going to use to make more great – and free – content.”

Shippen’s defense of the decision to produce content for Luminary presented a hopeful vision for what Luminary could be. Most corporations getting into podcasting treat audio fiction as a novelty, something to stunt cast a celebrity in that will quickly sell movie rights to a studio for the actual payday. Here was a new platform launching with such offerings as a sequel to The Bright Sessions called The AM Archives (now available on the main feed of The Bright Sessions for free, along with the show’s second sequel, The College Tapes), an exclusive season of A Very Fatal Murder, and John Cameron Mitchell’s audio drama follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch titled Anthem: Homunculus. 

In March of 2020 Shippen announced Atypical Artists’ relationship with Luminary had come to a close and both Luminary Bright Sessions sequel series would be released as traditional RSS feeds. Both The AM Archives and The College Tapes have been deleted from Luminary entirely. Also gone are Anthem and A Very Fatal Murder season two, along with any notion Luminary had intentions of being a bastion of well-paid audio fiction production. Unless one counts the potentially-fabricated ghost stories on Spooked, the last fiction property on Luminary died in September of 2019 when the Team Coco audio drama Frontier Tween aired its final episode. There are likely other Luminary-funded shows that’ve been successfully memory-holed in this manner, as no website I can find thought it necessary to manually list every Luminary property. I only noticed the above three axed shows because I remember them. 

The lack of fiction seems to lead to Luminary using niche categories when deploying its much-advertised content curation. Generic terms like “Performing Arts” are used instead of “Fiction” so shows like Love and Radio and Spooked can be listed alongside The Magnus Archives and, funnily enough, The Bright Sessions. 

At this point Luminary has ceased to be the content platform it intended on becoming. From the outside looking in, it appears the current strategy is to embrace the fact the app is effectively a container for a handful of celebrity chat shows. Any focus on creating original content has fallen by the wayside to the point popular creators who did the bulk of positive word-of-mouth marketing at launch either weren’t renewed or left of their own accord. 

The true irony of the “Netflix of podcasts” schtick is, in a way, they succeeded. Netflix, formerly known for world-class original content and massive backlog, has lost a significant portion of its content to competitors and turned to churning out celebrity-driven content in a bid for relevancy. Congratulations to Luminary for succeeding in the worst way possible, I guess. If there are users in the world who swear by Luminary as their all-around podcatching app, they’re doing so because they’re stubborn, ignorant to the options available, or really enjoy the yellow app icon. 

The post Luminary, “The Netflix of Podcasting,” Two Years Later appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

As a note, this piece contains mentions of school shootings, death, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, and racism.

For the uninitiated: Alex Jones is an unbelievably angry white man from Austin, Texas who grew a local-access talk show into the multi-million dollar InfoWars media network, his multi-hour talk show syndicated nationwide on conservative radio stations. His brand involves taking headlines of articles to inject bad-faith interpretations, followed by demonstrably false claims about either the topic discussed or the article itself. Usually whatever news item grabs his ire in a given moment is conveniently also evidence of an ever-evolving global conspiracy to kill the human race (don’t take a shot every time you spot an antisemetic trope in his ramblings; you’ll run dry within the first hour). 

Jones toed the line just a little too far in 2013 when accusing the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting of being crisis actors, leading to a years-long slide from grace. While still active, Jones has lost a significant portion of radio stations and permanent bans from major social media platforms. As of 2021 it seems his primary forms of funding are direct donations from his audience and products sold on his store, ranging from water filters to a line of shady supplements. “Quality products.” Products people “actually buy.” Don’t pay attention to the fact he’s constantly running huge sales to move old stock, it probably means nothing. 

Read more: Jewish Representation in Audio Drama (and Why it Matters)

Using humor to (knowledge) fight back

Knowledge Fight host Friesen has a fascination with the world of right-wing grifters, much to the delight (and terror) of co-host Holmes. While the surface-level hook is Holmes knows nothing about Alex Jones outside of what Friesen tells him (which, four years into the show, is quite a lot), Holmes comes to the table with a unique qualification to contextualize the various grifts of far-right and religious flavor they encounter: he was born into a cult. 

That context is the first of many points at which Knowledge Fight diverges from your usual podcast about conspiracy theories and alt-right personalities, where the usual offerings at best devolve into dirtbag leftists punching down and at worst accidentally become recruitment tools. 

Knowledge Fight is unabashedly hilarious. Friesen and Holmes armed with little more than clips of InfoWars and their comedy chops, bring much-needed levity to the moments that allow it as an offset for the cesspool of racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and every other ism folks like Jones wallow in. That said, it’s also absolutely not a podcast one can run to for hyucks whenever Jones ends up trending on Twitter. If anything, one can set their watch by how Friesen will open the next episode acknowledging Jones’s latest nonsense, but also pointing out the lack of substantive material to discuss. Whether he’s harassing someone on the street or bringing a llama into the studio, generally things from the InfoWars universe that get memed ultimately serve the end goal of driving engagement to his websites and shows. 

Using facts to (knowledge) fight back

A consistent throughline of Knowledge Fight that separates it from the pack is Friesen’s dedication to empathy and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Oftentimes this ends up damning people like Jones even further as their bigotry runs deeper than any good-faith argument can excuse, but even now with hundreds of hours of InfoWars viewing under his belt Friesen does his best to meet opponents on a level playing field. Content behind a paywall is off limits and Knowledge Fight has a show policy of not digging into information on the private lives of subjects. Generally their public personas are damning enough. 

Of course, whenever their public personas bring their own lives into the spotlight, Knowledge Fight is there with a stack of research as big as the stack of articles Alex Jones keeps on the InfoWars desk as set dressing under the false pretense he’ll, at some point, discuss vital news contained within. A recent notable example, episode #407: March 5-10, 2020, covers a span of episodes which include a night when Jones was arrested on a DUI charge. Friesen takes great care to present Jones’ account of the evening before pulling up what the police report and Jones’ wife said happened that evening. As with most instances of Jones’ attempts at spinning facts to suit his needs, the truth of what happened that night is as chilling as it is unsurprising. 

While the Knowledge Fight website has a good suggestion for a starting point, I highly recommend the massive episode covering the January 6th Capitol insurrection. The early footage of Jones stirring up Trump supporters at a rally and his stand-in host/alarmingly racist protégé Harrison Smith gleefully announcing “the Capitol has fallen” makes for some delicious backpedaling as soon as the InfoWars crew realize they’re in dicey legal territory. 

Beyond Alex Jones

Alex Jones, and to a lesser extent InfoWars, acts as the primary focus of Knowledge Fight, which then allows the show to cover the wider world of conspiracy and conservative con-artists. Like a Blank Check with Griffin and David of the crackpot world, Friesen and Holmes have become connoisseurs of context for some of the most horrific conspiracies people shout from the digital rooftops. Which is to say, the kind of bologna a person willing to go on InfoWars believes in. Nick Fuentes, Andy Ngo, Roger Stone, whether through direct contribution to InfoWars or tangential interaction with Jones during public appearances, you’ll learn (and quickly regret learning) a veritable who’s-who of people who believe the truth is more of a flexible tool to be used for personal gain.

Read more: PRIDE: The Podcasts That Queered Me

Through Knowledge Fight one quickly learns Jones lives in a fascinating middle-zone of the right-wing media world where he’s big enough to have a fleet of hangers-on demanding screentime while also being small enough he’s forever chomping at the bit to get back on The Joe Rogan Experience again. His current narrative involves him getting “downloads” from God that give him information to aid in his fight, as the Knowledge Fight hosts reiterate regularly: the literal Christian devil. Which makes things all the more hilarious when he also gets on a high horse about Qanon followers being misguided. The surface artifice of goofiness people with solid critical thought skills bounce off of is stripped away to reveal the ghastly underlying beliefs that drive a lot of the narratives people like Jones peddle. The kind of shit that leads to moments where Alex Jones, a grown man, spends several minutes screaming racist nonsense at a still image of Ilhan Omar as if she’s in the room directly insulting him. 

Friesen and Holmes do their best to be fair and find the humanity in the people they cover, but sometimes all one can do in the face of unimaginable hate is laugh. Each episode opens with Holmes asking what Friesen’s “bright spot” has been since they last recorded, ensuring each episode starts with lighthearted genuine celebration of the small stuff. A tradition has formed with onboarding new Patreon subscribers with using joke names. Recently Friesen pulled a hilarious soundbyte of Jones saying “giving someone life is giving someone death. [five second pause] You could say… life is death,” and has started using it as an intro to a segment of birthday announcements for Knowledge Fight fans. Every effort is made to use humor and genuine enjoyment of life to shore up against the tidal wave of hate they’ll be covering.

There’s also a subtle acknowledgement that they’re playing in the same waters Jones wants people to be playing in. Memes using clips of Jones shouting nonsense about Obama turning the frickin’ frogs gay are all well and good, but the image of someone like Jones being a harmless crank works in service of making him more palatable. Friesen’s deployment of soundbytes comes combined with vital context that strips one’s ability to argue he was taken out of context. Even the bombastic Knowledge Fight intro using heavily-edited clips of Jones and Trump presents a mini-narrative of the Alex Jones experience: shouting, random noises, creepy behavior, and begging for money.

Social media deplatforming does wonders, but Knowledge Fight is essential listening to begin a journey to understanding just how conspiracies created to profit folk like Jones can be refined down to something one might hear a relative say in passing after learning it on Facebook. There’s an ecosystem of hate online, and places like InfoWars act as a wellspring. 

The post Knowledge Fight: A Vaccination to Conspiracy appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

The half-joking headline of this was originally “podcasts did a gender on me,” but–twee millennialisms aside–that’s a fair summation of what happened. When not doing podcast-related things for an internet job, I spend an obscene amount of time driving a big van through long, lonely overnight shifts. For whatever reason the summer of 2019 coalesced into me spending those multi-state drives in starlit introspective funks with only podcasts and vibes to keep me company. My identity was challenged in a van-shaped pressure cooker of my own creation until I asked the dangerous question:

“Am I… y’know?”

Turns out, a lifetime of saying “I’m a mostly straight guy” in conversations about sexuality and gender feelings was foreshadowing! I write to you now, a nearly two-year queer person in podcasting who has podcasts to thank for both coming out and continuing to feel pride in that decision. 

Fair warning, it gets horny in the middle.

Trans Questioning

When not falling down a rabbit hole of becoming a Homestuck fan fiction author (with over 200,000 words penned since April 2019, which isn’t relevant here but still an impressive achievement), video essayist Sarah Zedig has a podcast about the trans experience. The original scope of the show was distinctly personal, functioning as effectively an audio vlog of her own transition. As time passed, however, the sheer amount of ground covered by both Zedig in her own life and the experiences shared by the show’s many guests causes Trans Questioning to evolve into being about transness in a more holistic sense. 

While not its stated purpose, Zedig has crafted a fine-tuned egg-cracking machine (Editor’s note: if you know you know). Every podcast on this list has a fair bit of overlap when it comes to my big gay journey, Trans Questioning is without a doubt the hammer that dealt the final blow. The statement “if you ever question if you’re trans, you’re trans” might seem self-evident but her delivery and regular responses to audience members worried they’re not trans enough were invaluable. You don’t know what you don’t know, Trans Questioning helps alleviate some of that in a frank and caring manner.

Listen: Apple | Google | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | RSS

Transcripts not currently available

Caravan

Samir has a problem: he’s in love with his best friend who’s blissfully unaware and about to get hitched. Oh, and Samir also has fallen into a canyon that serves as a liminal space between Earth and Hell, populated with lost souls and supernatural creatures. That’s pretty high up on the list too. Sporting a cast packed with a who’s-who of audio fiction character actors, Caravan is an excellent entry in the underserved weird west corner of audio fiction (love you too, Desperado). 

Caravan swept me into a mindset where having a broader sexuality wasn’t just a possibility, I felt confident in owning it. The show may not be as on-stage explicit as full erotica, but you wouldn’t know that if you just went off the Twitter presence and word-of-mouth mentions of the show. Caravan thrives in living in that aether of anticipation for an act actually happens (which is to say: incredibly horny). Things which might induce horniness don’t simply happen in Caravan, horny is baked into the very DNA of those scenes. You don’t need to have a vampire kink to get what monsterfuckers like when encountering the earnestness of a later episode’s feeding scene.

Listen: Apple | Google | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Website | Transcripts | RSS

Dreamboy

A flagship Night Vale Presents outing. One could barely move for coverage and advertisements for Dreamboy back in late 2018. Musician Dane Terry wears many hats in adapting a play of his into a fantastical story about a burned-out musician (also named Dane) waiting out winter in a small Ohio town. There’s songs, there’s bonkers characters, there’s gorgeous music, there’s dream sequences that come unstuck from reality, there’s hardcore sex. It’s very much a creative mind taking a story limited by its original format and giving it life in podcast form. Terry plays with themes of not belonging, of ennui. 

Read more: A History of Night Vale Presents

Which is to say: themes that might burrow into the brain of someone going through a bit of an identity crisis and ever-so-kindly opens the door to shout, “Welcome to the gay spectrum, kid.”

It was August. I was on my way back home from Podcast Movement, trying out Dreamboy as I walked between gates at ATL, a pair of cheap wired earbuds transporting me to Pepper Heights. I was passing an Auntie Annes when the first sex scene hit. Dane looks out a window to discover some guy getting absolutely railed. The next day I’d hit the (literally) climactic finale featuring a scene that necessitated, as creator Dane Terry joked in a behind-the-scenes episode, “butt foley.”

Listen: Apple | Google | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Website | RSS

Transcripts not currently available

Fuck Humans

In the fantastical world of Fuck Humans, the superpowers live in an uneasy peace. A massive wall divides a city of monsters from a city of humans, with strict laws forbidding any intermingling between the two. Given the show’s artwork is a humanoid dragon hand clutching a human one with cartoon hearts and sex-onomatopoeia floating in the air, I’m guessing you can see where this is going. An uptight human ends up over the wall at the house of a government employee dragon? And they’ve a history of being angry-horny for each other? Sublime!

Fuck Humans is the erotica embodiment of the old meme “while you were partying, I was studying the blade.” Except swap out the blade for erotica. As a former erotica reviewer I’ve waded through the oddly-sanitized swamps of the Kindle marketplace, the porn version of exclusively reading novels from Dollar Tree. Unlike what I saw in that accursed place, showrunner Chelsea Chelsey has taken a handful of LGBTQIA+ erotica tropes and honed them to a razor’s edge. The energy radiating off her characters is enough to make one giddy with excitement as they bounce from scene to scene, alternating between dealing with their various problems and having… just the gayest sex. So much boning. 

(Editor’s note: Because some podcatchers are cowards, you may have to search for this podcast as “Screw Humans.”)

Listen: Apple | Google | Pocket Casts | Website | Transcripts | RSS

Null/Void

Speaking of being eternally tired: Null/Void. Protagonist Piper Lee (Winona Wyatt) is going through one hell of a funk. She works a dead-end corporate job, she lives in an uncaring city, nothing’s going right for her. Then a mysterious figured named Adelaide (Danyelle Ellett) convinces Piper not to get on her usual bus, saving her life. What follows is an anti-capitalist sci-fi adventure with a hefty helping of found family goodness on the side.

Showrunner Cole Burkhardt created a protagonist who hurts in all the right ways (Disclosure: Burkhardt is a Discover Pods contributor). In the first episode his writing and Wyatt’s performance deliver a monologue from Piper about the restless and depressive fog that hangs over her life: “I forget a lot these days. It might be the weed. It

might be the depression, maybe it’s just boredom.” I may not be qualified to speak to the state of audio fiction involving depression/garbage mental states in general, but I can point to Null/Void as an example of something that absolutely speaks to personal experience.

Also Adelaide rocks, but that’s besides the point.

Listen: Apple | Google | Pocket Casts | Website | Transcripts | RSS

Less is Morgue

In an alternate version of Tallahassee, Florida where monsters and the supernatural are a part of everyday life, a ghoul runs a podcast out of their mom’s basement with a ghost. Riley (Alexis Bristowe) finds life less-quiet after eating the corpse of Evelyn (Meg Molloy Tuten), an eternally-chipper alt rock fan who died unexpectedly during a Nickelback concert in 2004. Whenever her ghostliness isn’t disturbing the electronics, the two co-host a podcast interviewing anyone who’ll venture into the basement.

It feels reductive to just say “Riley is gender goals” but damn if they’re not a role model for those of us who’re eternally tired. They do have a propensity for unhinging their jaw and eating people, but who among us is without our vices? 

What brings Less is Morgue to this list in particular is more of a vibe generated by the sum of its parts, rather than something printed on the tin I can point at and say, “There’s the gay.” The cast and crew are smattered with LGBTQIA+ people, sure, but it exists more as a podcast that is queer rather than A Queer Podcast, and that gives me the warm fuzzies. In addition, the crew are tireless in shutting down bozos on Twitter who misgender Riley, the official show account tweets in-character as if Riley and Evelyn, and they even do occasional AU fanart. LIM is a full package deal of a feel-good (if occasionally unnerving) show. 

Also before anyone asks: no, I haven’t gotten to the horny episode yet.

Listen: Apple | Google | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Website | Transcripts | RSS

Conclusion

Thus ends our Innerspace trip through parts of my brain and the podcasts firmly lodged therein. They might not have made me a newly-minted queer with a side of trans, but they sure as hell opened some doors that’d been firmly shut my entire life. 

Given the distance of a decade or so I’m sure I would write this with more literary flair to dissuade folks from reading this as a public admission shows like Caravan and Dreamboy were horny in just the right ways they unlocked my queerness. Future-me is a coward.

Here in my second Pride I’ve come to the understanding we’re all hot messes. Everybody is at different levels of understanding themselves and getting their shit together. It’s through intimate, relatively un-gatekept mediums like podcasts where we can express that messiness in a way that brings a sense of belonging. 

I never felt a connection with a character in fiction as a kid. I used to think that was just how fiction worked. These podcasts (and tons more) gave me the gift of getting even a fleeting moment of seeing myself in something. That flash of understanding that there’s someone else out there who has felt these weird things that I’ve never seen discussed before. Expressing raw emotions and thoughts is not easy and I can never fully express my gratitude for these artists for putting themselves out there for all to see. 

Happy Pride, y’all.

The post PRIDE: The Podcasts That Queered Me appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

S-Town came out, a lot of people listened to it, and then we all had to sit in its dank humidity and process what the hell just happened without a storm in sight. The Reception section of S-Town’s Wikipedia page claims reception was “mixed” yet the best the original author could find for positive reception was half-hearted praise inside of otherwise negative reviews. This spawned a year-long game of Wikipedia telephone between three users, all trying to figure out how to not be one-sided in the page’s coverage. User Sdkb ends the conversation with a proposition that they “may get around to revising the section” in October of 2018. Nothing has changed since.

Much like the podcast-listening public, Wikipedia power users haven’t really looked back at the legacy of S-Town since the dust settled. The movie rights were sold and currently sit on a shelf. Some of the residents of Woodstock attempt to make a documentary about McLemore and suicide prevention that crowndfunded 2% of its goal just as the U.S. entered lockdown. 

Well, I’ve just listened to this s-show of a s-cast twice-over, giving it every opportunity to surprise me with hidden depths I hadn’t noticed in 2017 when I was a younger, straighter person. The headline might betray how that little adventure went. 

Here’s why S-Town sucks s-, actually. This article will discuss suicide, homophobia, and ableism.

“S-Town” is a coward’s name. 

John B. McLemore’s pet name for Woodstock, AL of “shittown” stuck in host Brian Reed’s craw for some reason, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Serial as a company didn’t have the guts to actually name the podcast feed Shit-Town. The show attempts to have its cake and eat it too by having Reed introduce the podcast as Shit-Town, but no mainstream coverage of the show would be able to call it Shit-Town, and they knew that. Nobody at Serial or This American Life had the fortitude to put a swear in the podcast title. It’s a pointless act of rebellion against oneself to even attempt to imply the real name of S-Town is, in fact Shit-Town. 

In a way, their cowardice and non-commitment saves the show, because “Shit Town” is… not a winning title, while “S-Town” comes with a free little mystery. 

Nobody knows what the hell that means and will naturally be curious. Reed deploys footage of John B. McLemore in the first chapter, listeners buy in to the spectacle of this odd Alabama man, then the title-drop happens.  A masterful setup and payoff that uses the same amount of interview tape as would’ve been necessary if S-Town had lived out its original life of a This American Life segment (likely with a quirky TAL title like “A Different Kind of Woodstock”). 

Read more: The 20 Best True Crime Podcasts (Beyond Serial and S-Town)

S-Town is overcooked mush.

Flash back to July 2015. Serial is about to start its second season in December, during which the production will quickly discover the most popular podcast in the world had far more people in the United States Army fandom than previously expected. The Bergdahl season becomes the Halloween 3: Season of the Witch of the Serial-verse. A not-well-received new direction in a franchise that, ironically, was originally constructed to go in new directions. 

To the five people who got that reference: you’re welcome.

Alongside season two, a joint venture between Serial and This American Life has begun work, with a crack team of journalists all putting their heads together to massage a story out of a messy situation. As S-Town comes to fruition two important things happen: 

1. Serial 2: Buy Other People’s Interview Tapes-oogaloo confirms that even a meh season of Serial can carry season one’s momentum. 50 million downloads in four months’ worth of momentum.  
2. The 2016 election brings slice-of-life stories from the south back with a vengeance.  

Left-leaning outlets the country over love a good story that quote-unquote humanizes people who live in a place that is considered low-class, and the South fits that bill. They either dig up somebody who breaks so many molds it boggles the mind (“check out this kid, he’s Black and gay and is campaigning for Trump!”) or they find somebody with a thick accent who dispenses nuggets of down-home wisdom. 

John B. McLemore ticks both boxes, and the Serial and This American Life crew see that. This is it: Serial will have its Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

There is little reporting as to who did what specifically on S-Town, but the credits betray how many distinct cooks are in the kitchen. The first episode has two credited producers, four editors, and a fleet of staff. A stark contrast to Serial season one’s three producers and seven other people name-checked in the credits in total. 

Annual video game franchises these days tend to sacrifice things like music in favor of output. Where productions that have one person with a distinct voice tend to have memorable soundtracks, the good tunes are outliers in homogenized media gauntlets like Assassin’s Creed. S-Town’s editorial voice is the Call of Duty soundtrack of podcasting. It’s there, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it five minutes after turning it off. They threw the stylistic choices of The Mystery Show, This American Life, and Serial in the teleporter from The Fly and what came out wasn’t human.

Brian Reed isn’t a reporter; he’s a character.

Setting aside the Deadspin-inspired snark for a moment: it would be disingenuous to approach S-Town from the perspective This American Life reporter and Sarah Koenig surrogate Brian Reed chased this story in hopes of shifting a metric ton of Blue Apron subscriptions. In media res he appears to have just been a doe-eyed little journo ready to host Serial: Alabama Nights, in which we learn the legal system and cops can also suck outside of Baltimore.

(Editor’s note: Rest in peace, Deadspin, and godspeed, Defector. We love you.)

Koenig got Adnan Syed and a murder case to pick apart.  All he’s got is a captivating motormouth with a thick accent and opinions by the bushel. The audience quickly comes to understand what McLemore’s whole deal is because, arguably, there’s more than enough tape of him talking about himself. 

I’ve listened to S-Town twice in two weeks and have poked around the internet a fair bit. All I can tell you about the guy is he’s an award-winning journalist who occasionally visits conferences, uses he/him pronouns, is monogamous, and straight (maybe?). There’s two versions of Reed at odds with each other throughout the podcast, yet they rarely reveal any actual information about him that adds to his own case. They seemingly exist just to fight. 

There’s post-production Reed, with a script and gift of hindsight that allows him to project a This American Life host persona. Confident in everything, sounds like he has a stack of papers in front of him. 

Then there’s boots-on-the-ground Reed. This version of Reed has a singular goal of talking and pursuing talking to people. He’s armed with the tools and practice of a seasoned journalist, yet seemingly unaware of how his actions are visible to other human beings. At one point in the story Reed walks past one of the Florida Cousins at his hotel. Time freezes as post-production Brian explains that, at the time, he has realized who the cousin was too late to initiate conversation without seeming creepy. He specifically cites a worry about coming off as stalking her. 

We’re then told boots-on-the-ground Reed decides the best way to not seem like a stalker is to get the cousin’s room number from the front desk and then slip a message under the door. Y’know, the exact thing a stalker would do. 

At one point he makes the comment “I don’t like to judge the way people live, and so I hadn’t the few days I was there with Mary Grace and John.” A hell of a statement to make in the middle of a highly-edited podcast in which every clip, every morsel of information provided, exists because it was judged to benefit S-Town. I don’t judge the way people live (until we’re in the edit bay). 

S-Town tells the story of a queer disabled man through a straight(?), abled lens. 

Thousands of words have been written on how S-Town monumentally fucked up reporting the story of a queer neurodivergent man who takes his own life. Twitch streamers who see a video game character kill themselves and stop the stream to give out suicide prevention resources and talk about what just happened do more due diligence than Reed or anyone on his team did in S-Town.  

There’s a lack of seeking outside sources and perspectives that’s so pervasive it feels… intentional. Like an episode of television filmed during COVID lockdown that has a marked lack of side characters or extras due to on-set limitations. Reed crams all of McLemore’s personal experiences with sexuality into the show without onboarding anyone to act as a liaison for the queer experience. No bisexual people from similar upbringings (and there are many) are brought on to speak about being queer in the south. We instead get a kindly old gay man who has only seen a fraction of himself represented in media through Brokeback Mountain. A man who Reed only found accidentally. 

If the story of John B. McLemore must have been told, there’s so much more to contextualize and discuss about him. More people could have been interviewed. Real discussions about queerness and mental health could’ve happened. S-Town could have actually said something. 

Instead it’s a bland nothingburger. A journalist pokes around a small town long enough to force a vague narrative out of effectively nothing. He gets to have his big Sarah Koenig’s Best Buy phone booth moment by revealing his decision that McLemore’s mental struggles are all wrapped up in a neat bow labeled “mercury poisoning,” despite mountains of evidence to suggest there’s more at play. 

This show’s approach to mental health is so backwards it’s embarrassing. Doubly so when one reminds themselves this only came out four years ago. 

Read more: Ripped from the Headlines: A Review

The reveal of the B in John B. McLemore is such weak sauce they serve it at Fazoli’s.

After several years of reporting and trying to figure out how to land the S-Town plane, someone somewhere has the idea to wrap everything in a bow by having Reed recite a particularly Berendt-esque monologue to act as a button on John B. McLemore’s life. After seven hours of tomfoolery, the one thing left to do is explain what the B. in his name meant.

The fact that the B in his name is a vestigial connection to the lineage is pointless fluff in comparison to the fact Reed seemingly has testimony that McLemore’s mother literally prayed for “a genius.” 

If there ever was a smoking gun on an environmental influence for what might have fucked up McLemore, a mom obsessed with having a “smart” child and zero idea what undiagnosed neurodivergencies look like is a goddamn just-fired Howitzer. Much like the pre-thunderstorm heat wave analogy at the beginning of this piece, the one thing S-Town does best is establish a concept before swiftly abandoning it for something else. S-Town begins as yet another murder mystery. It then discovers there is no murder to be found. It then continues for five more episodes, for some reason. 

Neither fiction nor responsibly-reported nonfiction, S-Town now exists as this nebulous thing that few remember fondly. In short: it’s shit.

(Editor’s note 5/19/21: This piece has been updated to correct the spelling of John B. McLemore’s name.)

The post Why Your Podcast Sucks: S-Town appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

The road to podcasting hell is paved with good intentions and complacency, neither of which should be left unchecked. Reporting facts is a difficult job. Even before misinformation became easily weaponized in recent years, the most seasoned of journalists were not immune to reporting false information. A fair few podcasters are fulfilling a pseudo-journalistic role with little to no experience vetting sources, quick turnaround times, and a lackadaisical approach to deciding what websites qualify as a valid source. The end result is an environment where, inevitably, said podcasters will have to deal with the aftermath of publishing bad information. 

Unfortunately, the podcasting public has fallen into a bad habit of cosplaying as a warped, outdated imitation of a seasoned journalist when owning up to mistakes. I genuinely believe the intentions of most podcasters who have done this were motivated by the idea they were doing the right thing, but how information is communicated has evolved and it’s time to evolve with it.

Speaking of old journalism, I want to briefly clarify a term used in this piece as there’s a bit of gray area for what it can mean to different people. I will be using the journalistic definition of the words contraction and retraction as defined by the Digital Media Law Project (DMPL). Their definition lines up with what I learned in my five years tinkering around collegiate newspapers, and also partially because their page on corrections and retractions is a good resource for someone starting out. To paraphrase the DMLP: correction and retraction tend to be used interchangeably, but generally a correction tells one’s audience about a factual error that’s tangential to the main point of a piece, while a retraction corrects an error that impacts the main point.

What you’re reading now is attempting to address how podcasters sloppily handle corrections in podcasting. Rarely do we hear about retractions, and if they do occur it makes waves. The New York Times having to essentially throw Caliphate under a bus and giving back their Peabody award is the most scorched-earth example of a full retraction in recent memory. It (hopefully) will be a long time before anyone fucks up as royally as NYT did with Caliphate. (Update: this paragraph originally claimed Caliphate was outright deleted based off speculative reporting done when the controversy first broke. It has since been updated, and this is me telling you that in a 21st century manner).

But what about the smaller gaffes? A slip of the tongue, a source that outright lies, or a simple misremembered fact all turn an episode into something that can potentially use one’s platform to cause damage. The current go-to strategy for most is identical to the one recently laid out in Dr. Sydnee McElroy’s chapter of the podcast how-to guide Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You). In said chapter, she recalls an early episode of Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine in which she didn’t notice multiple sources she found in her research were themselves sourcing one older, much-debunked source. The Sawbones audience pointed out the error and she deployed what is now the de facto response to mistakes on Sawbones: “Often, I will start our next episode off with a correction, so that the misinformation does not persist.”

Read more: My Podcast, My Guide Book, and Me: The McElroys Venture Into Podcasting How-To

I’m singling out Sawbones and quoting Dr. McElroy instead of being vague for three reasons:

1. Sawbones is a successful venture that has proven itself to be operating in good faith, and I can be confident any critical commentary made here won’t have an actual impact on the show. The same cannot be said for if I were to directly name a smaller podcast. 
2. Both in her chapter of Everybody Has a Podcast and passively on Sawbones, Dr. McElroy has made a point of stressing that she takes great strides to use quality sources and directly address whenever a concept or source isn’t concrete. A vital goal for a podcast that frequently debunks pseudoscience grifts.
3. Dr. McElroy’s explanation of why she publishes a correction directly addresses the flaw in handling corrections like this in the podcasting age. 

The goal of filing a correction since the first time a newspaper made a whoopsie has been to preserve the integrity of the publication and stop any lies that might be spread. Except, when podcasts do this, the misinformation still exists. In May of 2020, episode 323 of Sawbones, “Cabin Fever,” opens with the McElroy couple correcting a misrepresentation of how COVID-19 social distancing measures were handled in Sweden. They crack wise about the volume of response they received from Swedish listeners, clarify the point they attempted to make with the bad info, and move on. 

When a newspaper prints a correction in a future issue, it’s done so because the physical limitations of printing something mean it’s impossible to recall the version already purchased by readers. Pre-television newspapers could also operate under the safe assumption that the majority of those who read the previous issue would also see the correction. Given their turnaround time, any copies of the erroneous issue are themselves a non-issue as they’re quickly disposed of to make room for the next paper. 

In the digital age infinite copies of the erroneous issue can sit on the shelf for years, are free to consume, and it’s likely a random person finding it might not go read the next issue in chronological order. Print media, especially newspapers printed on cheap paper that ages like milk, is ephemeral. Podcasts are functionally infinite as long as the hosting fees are paid every month. The Sawbones episode just before Cabin Fever, “COVID Lies, Darned Lies and Statistics,” still remains as-is when originally uploaded, as does the transcript and episode description. There is nothing to indicate “COVID Lies, Darned Lies and Statistics” has a slip-up besides a brief aside in a later, unrelated upload. 

Modern journalists have moved on. The “so about last time…” correction method does still exist in print form, but the digital version of the article is where the misinformation rubber meets the road. While podcasters are still LARPing as if it’s the 1920s, modern journos can just go update articles. It’s too easy to edit articles at this point. Back for its second appearance this article, The New York Times is so edit-happy they change article content, headlines, or even the url slugs after publication to future-proof the piece. There’s a Twitter bot dedicated to posting every instance of NTY editing an article on their main page. It posts a lot. 

Even the fuddy-duddiest of podcast hosting services allow some form of hot-swapping the .mp3 file of an episode that has already been uploaded without having the re-publish. There’s all sorts of dark ethical corridors this function can lead to, but in this specific case it means one can simply put the correction in the episode that needs correcting. There are too many tools at a given podcaster’s disposal now to justify the sole “fix” for misinformation being a shrug and chaste apology in the next episode. 

Podcast audiences are spoiled for choice and limited in how much time they can spend listening in a given day. The next-episode apology operates under the assumption the vast majority of people who listen to one episode will also listen to the next. Multi-episode coverage of a single topic can safely assume anyone listening to episode two will move on to three. Fiction podcasters with long arcs can also make this assumption. Podcasters who make episodic talk-about-a-topic shows akin to Sawbones, 99% Invisible, or Twenty Thousand Hertz cannot. Audiences faced with a huge backlog can and will cherry-pick what they listen to based on title alone. 

We live in a time when there’s an episode of Welcome to Night Vale dealing with multiple realities that uses dynamic ad insertion software to serve random ending to the episode each time a listener downloads it. Even if the average podcaster never gains access to magical dynamic ad insertion abilities, we all have the ability to edit out bad information and hot-swap the file. Failing that, we have the ability to suck it up, admit fault, and re-upload from scratch. It’ll screw up statistics, for sure, but a weird download bump and some confused comments on Reddit is a small price to pay for integrity and doing the right thing. 

It’s time to recognize that while admitting one’s mistakes is a good thing to do. Podcasters with an educational or journalistic slant to their programs have a responsibility to combat the spread of misinformation as much as humanly possible. 

The post Retract the Podcast Correction appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

Life with LEO(h) follows Jeanine Bell (voiced by series creator Octavia Bray), a no-nonsense lawyer specializing in robotics intelligence kept on retainer for Penelope Lane (Beth Eyre), owner of Lane Robotics. The first episode opens with a court case in which Bell flawlessly destroys the case of the plaintiff attempting to sue Lane Robotics for releasing a dangerous unit. We learn this far future has strict laws governing what androids can and cannot do, that Lane plays fast and loose with those laws, and Bell continues to work for Lane regardless because the pay rocks. A protagonist in a rom-com who hyper-focuses on their career at the expense of a fulfilling personal life?

Buckle up folks, methinks there’s endearing character growth on the menu. 

Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Website | RSS | Transcripts

The true hook of the show kicks in when Jeanine finds LEO(h) (Maximilian Koger), a Loving, Empathetic, Optimistic, and (h)elpful android companion prototype in her apartment. He turns out to be a gift from Penelope, sent as thanks for the recent court victory and to spice things up for Jeanine. Apparently Lane Robotics discovered the special sauce to making the perfect robotic romantic partner was the inclusion of free will. A super illegal thing to do.

Staying true to a long tradition upheld by romcom films (back before Gerard Butler killed studio romcoms in 2009), Bray sets up a juicy premise with a potentially dangerous twist: can a programmed being give consent? While most movies play with questions of consent so carelessly one has to say “it was a different time” and turn off the DVD, Life with LEO(h) puts the problem front-row center: What do you do when the person in love with you is programmed to love you? 

This new show has a veritable aural Avengers assembled behind the scenes by Atypical Artists. As any number of sad teens on Tumblr can attest: executive producer, editor, and engineer Lauren Shippen knows her way around handling characters in complicated relationships. The project’s sound designer is podcast veteran Julia Schifini, fresh off creating underwater terrors in Primordial Deep. Then there’s director Shenee Howard’s own work with the phenomenal Fan Wars: The Empire Claps Back, which has had me excited for every Patreon notification since pledging in mid-2019 to get more TECB.

 Read more: The Case for a Star Wars Audio Drama

LEO(h) himself is the key to everything. The show lives or dies by whether the audience falls in love with him, and Maximilian Koger nails delivering loveable LEO(h). His performance walks a razor’s edge between being charming and intentionally tweaking his delivery just enough to mimic the flatness of Google Translate-style artificial speech. All while delivering Bray’s script, which gives LEO(h) the perfect lines to make him hot as hell. He’s smooth as oil when speaking, unfailingly affectionate, and he can’t be left alone for two seconds. The lights are on but nobody’s home.  If you’re in the market for a new fictional crush with the energy of Kronk from The Emperor’s New Groove, do I have an android for you. I’ll even be bold enough to say all signs point to there being explicitly horny fanart and/or AO3 posts about LEO(h) before July. 

The one place Life with LEO(h) comes up short is purely due to it being recorded during quarantine. Quality at-home recordings are quite common, as even evidenced by many characters in episode one. But most of those characters are voiced by VAs like Felix Trench, Julia Schifini, or Josh Rubino who’ve refined their setups over many many gigs before and during lockdown. For all the work Schifini’s sound design does to make the actors sound like they belong in that scene, Bray’s audio for Jeanine does not pass muster on anything other than a car stereo that destroys all nuance with bass and tire noise.

Jeanine has that classic muffled recorded-in-a-box sound heard on many an indie podcast. If anything, the quality of sound design highlights the fact her audio isn’t as crisp as the other actors she’s interacting with. 

A cruel irony for it to happen to the biggest human character in the show, given muffled audio can easily be masked if it’s meant for a synthetic character. As things currently stand, Bray’s performance is great even if her audio is meh. If you listen on a decent pair of headphones or have experience making podcasts, you’ll notice the juxtaposition of her character having reverb added in a larger room while simultaneously sounding like she’s in a closet. It doesn’t damn the show by any means, but if Life with LEO(h) sees a positive enough response to greenlight further production I’d love to see a remastered season one with Bray’s lines re-recorded in a better space. 

Read more: An Atypical Love Story: Lauren Shippen’s “The Infinite Noise”

Audio hiccups aside, the first episode is littered with fantastic performances that should not be missed. Even side characters as simple as a robot android can steal a scene. Near the end of the first episode LEO(h) accidentally claims to know Jeanine’s favorite cocktail, similarly to how he was pre-programmed to know her favorite foods. He doesn’t and makes the next logical move: sample one of every possible cocktail available at the open bar. All the while he vents to Bardroid, a robot bartender stuffed full of preprogrammed generic bartender-responses. It perfectly highlights just how new an android like LEO(h) is to this world while simultaneously playing with the classic “down in the dumps at a bar” trope of, well, most movies ever, let alone romcoms. Bardroid’s cowboy-adjacent drawl with a sprinkling of Schifini’s sound design magic adding a synthesized layer to his voice dares the listener to realize he’s voiced by quarantine pub quiz host and Wooden Overcoats star Felix Trench. 

Life with LEO(h) has a staggeringly good first episode. So good I almost wish it’d eschewed the standard audio fiction-as-television weekly format. I want more of LEO(h), and I want it now. There’s only so many times one can re-listen to the supercut of Margaritas & Donuts without taking a break. I missed out on Octavia Bray’s writing by letting The AM Archives slip by while it was locked in Luminary’s yellow walled garden, but I am automatically on board for whatever podcasting work she pursues after curtains drop on Life with LEO(h)’s final episode. Hopefully in which LEO(h) gets a happy ending. (Note: The AM Archives is now available for free on any podcatcher.)

No, not like that, Atypical Artist’s press kit for the show stresses LWL is safe-for-work and will only delve into “clean but mature jokes.” Unlike me. 

The post Life with LEO(h): Atypical’s New Fiction Podcast About Living With a Sexy Robot appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

Writing a podcast book like this is a sisyphean undertaking in an industry where something as big as Spotify entering the field changes things overnight. EHaP is effectively joining a subgenre of how-to books primarily full of e-books promising the secrets to podcasting success that’re rotting on digital shelves, their advice outdated weeks after publication.  It’s clear the McElroys are aware of this and great effort is made to thread that needle, giving personalized advice while also trying to keep the book evergreen enough to survive long-term. 

It’s goofy.

In their promotion campaign for the book, the McElroys have made great strides to sell Everybody Has a Podcast as being entertaining as well as informative, promising they’ve made it as funny as possible. Funny enough, they urge fans, it’s worth buying even if one isn’t interested in podcasting. Oodles of callbacks are made, both to classic MBMBaM bits (e.g. Travis obliquely references the “Mango Cult” bit as evidence of how funny he is) and running bits from the book itself. Justin cautions the reader to not prematurely shop for a yacht with the money they’ll make from their new podcast during his intro to the monetization section. This opens the door for all three to make an absolute meal out of yacht jokes for multiple segments.

Readers of The Sawbones Book will be familiar with the comedy layout of EHaP, as the Sawbones house style of co-authors popping in via an infobox with a cartoon of their face is continued here. 

As far as the jokes themselves: It’s all solid McElroy goof fare. Good enough that I occasionally would stop reading to show my fiance a particularly funny bit. I’d argue the comedy writing serves to make dry content palatable moreseo than make the book a must-own McElroy product on its own merits, but your mileage may vary. 

It recommends okay equipment. 

Woe is the person tasked with making microphone recording patterns and discussing the pros and cons of XLR vs. USB entertaining. The section specifically about equipment and audio recording is solid, with easy-to-understand descriptions of how sound bounces around recording spaces, great advice (e.g. moving blankets deaden more sound than $100+ mic isolation shields), and personal anecdotes. 

Except for Travis’ Blue Yeti recommendation in the section on USB microphones, citing, “It’s a really versatile mic and very easy to set up.” 

Read more: The Essential Podcast Equipment (for any budget)

He’s not wrong in that it’s physically easy to plug in, and it does have several recording patterns that make it a great all-purpose microphone. The issue with The Mic That YouTube Built is more that people new to having sensitive microphones aren’t given proper descriptions of the use-cases it’s best and worst at. YouTube is filled with tutorials showing new streamers and podcasters how to fine-tune the Yeti so it can’t hear their neighbor’s refrigerator thinking.

With great power comes great responsibility to give specifics when recommending microphones. I didn’t go in expecting an up-to-date recommendation of something like RØDE’s Yeti-killer (the NT-USB Mini), but it would’ve been nice to have a smidge more detail about what the Yeti is good at, similarly to what the Shure SM58 gets in the XLR section. 

It defers to experience.

In an unexpected twist, the term “first family of podcasting” carries a double meaning in that there’s three bonus McElroys brought on for a topic the three brothers are less-equipped to speak to. The section “Research” is written by as Teresa, Sydnee, and Rachel McElroy, who handle the bulk of the research in their podcasts Shmanners, Sawbones, and Wonderful. 

Podcasters with shows “about” a given topic, from beginners to chart-toppers, have a bad habit of basing an entire episode on one article (usually not properly sourced), occasionally going as far as to just read the relevant Wikipedia article line-by-line. Any big podcasters normalizing the concept of pre-production in general for newer podcasters is a great first step. Big podcasters normalizing the idea of responsible research and avoiding plagiarism? A godsend.

Examples of establishing research goals, strategies to find reputable sources, and personal anecdotes on how the McElroys have screwed up (including how they fixed their habits to ensure those problems don’t reoccur) bolster a section full of solid generic research advice. This is the closest EHaP comes to feeling textbook-like in a good way. Genuine, actionable advice.  

It’s not for fledgling fiction podcasters.

Everybody has a Podcast is written from an old-school perspective: the platonic idea of “a podcast” is a chat show akin to terrestrial radio’s morning commute shows. Anything else in the industry is “a podcast” with extra steps or effort added. This creates a bit of a hurdle when it comes to fiction podcasting, which shares very little DNA with chat shows. 

The Adventure Zone (also often called “TAZ”) is one of the most successful actual play podcasts for the better part of six years, yet this book by the producers of that show never uses the term actual play (or audio drama for that matter). As far as EHaP is concerned, TAZ is “a podcast” in which the hosts play a tabletop RPG, not an inherently unique product in a different genre requiring different creative and workflow requirements.

This distinction might sound like nitpicking the semantics of genre differences, but it’s worth noting there is no specific advice in regards to making a fiction podcast in this how-to book by the hosts of a wildly successful fiction podcast. The closest it comes is an offhand comment from Griffin mentioning how large the multitrack for a TAZ finale was. Something along the lines of K.C. Wayland’s Bombs Always Beep: Creating Modern Audio Theater would be more of use for those looking to get into the storytelling and sound design side of podcasting.  

It doesn’t discuss their bigger mistakes.

Anyone as active and successful in the industry as the McElroys will experience their fair share of missteps. It also makes perfect sense why they would avoid printing intimate details of gaffes that are hyper-specific to already having a full time podcasting job. There’s not much actionable advice in a blow-by-blow account of whatever happened to sour the launch of The Sawbones Book. That said, there have been a few notable past instances that could’ve facilitated some good real-talk advice for new podcasters.

In an aside during the chapter detailing social media etiquette, Justin cautions discussing usage rights with the artist making your podcast artwork, and to get an agreement in writing. “We’ve never done formal signed contracts or anything, but if you wanna be extra careful, go nuts.”

On August 31st, 2020 The Adventure Zone had to post a formal apology after several artists revealed First Second, publisher of the bestselling TAZ graphic novel adaptations, had severely underpaid for commissioned fanart in all three extant TAZ novels. According to their public statement, the McElroys were wholly unaware of how First Second was handling things and by all accounts the brothers made good with direct cash payments and a promise of more oversight for future adaptations. 

With that event under their belt, one would think there’d be a warning in their how-to guide urging podcasters to keep a watchful eye over their own IP and make sure all involved are fairly compensated. The closest Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You) comes is Travis saying to always pay for artwork and saying he has paid “anywhere from $100 to $500 for album art, depending on how complicated the project is.” 

A dark shadow cast across certain sections if one knows about previous controversies. The aforementioned social media chapter also specifically urges new podcasters to not create Facebook groups for their own shows. This hits different if the reader knows about the implosion of the Still Buffering Facebook group. Addressing the power imbalance of operating in a fan space for a podcast as the creator of that podcast is extremely good information for new podcasters (though, the lack of addressing the concept of parasocial relationships is felt). Strategically not mentioning how they learned that lesson when the McElroys have gained a lot of cultural cache off publicly taking their lumps feels off.

It’s a solid starting point.

A good jack-of-all-trades guide for a hobby should give the reader the tools they need to be able to ask further questions as they continue learning. For all its small faults, EHaP’s codification of key terms and specific advice in areas that would otherwise be difficult to look up advice specifically-geared to podcasting (e.g. research or social media strategy). Though someone with no podcasting experience will benefit most, there’s plenty of useful nuggets to justify the $23 USD price of admission. 

Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You) is on sale today, January 26th 2021, via Harper Collins. It is available at all major, and many indie, booksellers.

The post My Podcast, My Guide Book, and Me: The McElroys Venture Into Podcasting How-To appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.