July 5, 2019 • 33 mins
Jody Avirgan from ESPN's 30 For 30 Podcasts joins Matty to talk about his journey into audio storytelling and what kinds of stories he and 30 For 30 like to tell. Also find out how potty training a cat became a great audio story and find out what person living or dead Jody would like to hear.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hi, everybody, it's Maddie. Welcome to Access podcast, the podcast
about podcast, And I gotta be honest with you. There
are a couple podcasts that I am a total geek. Four.
These are the podcasts that when a new episode comes out,
whatever I'm doing stops and I go listen to them.
One of those podcasts is thirty for thirty. So I
was really excited when I got a chance to talk
(00:31):
to Jody Avergan, who hosts and executive produces thirty for thirty.
Jody has been telling audio stories for years, including his
time at w n y C and for five eighty sports.
Coming up on the show, we're gonna talk to him
about the art of audio storytelling, plus how his daughter
became a meme seam around the world, and don't forget.
After the conversation, producer Morgan will be in and we
(00:53):
will be telling you about three podcasts that you should binge.
But right now, let's check out a little bit from
thirty for thirty. There are many levels of professional baseball.
There's the Big league's Major League Baseball, then there's Triple
A that's one step down. Then there's Double A a ball,
rookie ball, Winter League, and you keep going down all
the way towards the bottom. There are the independent leagues,
(01:16):
technically professional and that players get paid something to play baseball.
But those leagues exist several planets away from the show,
as they call the majors, and most of the players
in those leagues will never come close to putting on
a big league uniform. They'll play in tiny parts in
front of near empty bleachers until reality finally sets in
and they hang it up for one summer. Though, there
(01:38):
was someone very different among them, one of, without question,
the greatest baseball players and personalities of all time. Jody.
Welcome to Access podcast, and I have to ask you
a very important question to start. What is it like
to wake up every morning and just piss podcast excellence? Um? Well,
the first thing I do every morning is drink a
(01:59):
glass of water, Honor, and then I go to the bathroom.
So you know I can't answer that. I try and
ingest podcast excellence. First, you know you've worked at w NYC,
which I think is basically the grace Land of podcasts
and audio storytelling. What initially drew you to audio storytelling?
You know, I won't give you the fullback story, but
(02:20):
you know in college, I did uh film and I
did documentaries and film. My parents to journalists, and so
I've always sort of thought about news and documentaries and
so forth. My start in radio was not necessarily in
the documentary storytelling world. It was it was at w NYC,
but it was really in the daily talk show mold.
So I landed at the feet of Brian Larr, who
(02:43):
is the post of the Buying Larror Show, which is
on its hand every day on the is a you
know your local public radio talk call in show. So that's,
you know, really where I got my start, and I
spent seven years there as my home base. And then
I at w n y C. I was able to
sort of dip around and spend a month in the
newsroom here and there, you know, spend some time working
(03:04):
with the various shows. So I got a little taste
of the longer form stuff. But I don't know, I
really I've always liked to talk and I've always felt
like my metabolism is more akin to like a daily show.
I like making stuff and moving on and coming up
with ideas and executing on them pretty quick. And so
it's been a little of a challenge and an interesting
transition and just like really sort of a fun challenge
(03:27):
to go then now towards stuff that we're doing at
thirty for thirty, which takes months and months and months
to put together. So it's been nice to kind of
exercise those two those two years and almost come full
circle back to doing documentary stuff like I started doing
and thinking about when I was in college, and then
a couple of years thereafter when you were at w
n y C. I I've found some of your old
(03:48):
stories which were awesome, especially the toilet training method by Charles.
So I did a piece for Studio three sixty about
how Charles Mingus, one of my favorite musicians, greatest jazz
basis of all time, and one of the stranger figures
in the history of music, had toilet trained his cats.
In particular, one of his cats called Nightlife to use
(04:10):
the toilet, and he not only kind of developed a
method on his own to toilet trainer cat, but then
he came up with a basically set of instructions, and
you could throughout the sixties and seventies send effectively a
self addressed stant avelope to Charles Mingus at a p
O box, and he would mail you back his Charles
Mingus catalog for toilet training your cat, so you could
(04:32):
do this for your cats at home. I happened to
have a cat that is toilet trained. My cat was
not trained using them. Yeah I know, my cat was
not trained using the Mengus method. But it got me
interested in this world, and so I pitched this story
to a studio three sixty. They were very, very skeptical,
I would say, at first. And we worked it for
a while and we found a cat to try and train,
(04:53):
and we sort of told a story about Charles Mingus
himself throughout it, and I don't know, kind of combines
a lot of the things I like in journalism, which
is kind of sneaking your way into a serious story,
telling something that is hopefully just like engaging to listen to,
and then all of a sudden you're learning about bigger stuff,
and in this case, you know, really learning about Charles
Mingus in addition to cats psychology. I mean, he was
(05:13):
I will say he was onto something when he developed
this homespun method. It actually really does fit in to
a lot that we now know about how cats operate
and how and how to go about to treat one
thing I did love about it the most was the voice.
Ever you had Charles Mingus voice, and that's the kind
of like little touch that makes the story really it
comes to life even more. Yeah, I mean, so we
(05:35):
got a voice actor to be the voice of Charles Mingus,
I will say, you know, one of the things. And
just working with that piece and working with Studio few sixty,
it was it was very fun and I had a
kind of vision for the piece and they helped me
work towards that. But they did that through really intense editing,
and you know, it was this piece took months and
months and months. It started out as many pieces do,
(05:57):
probably like thirty minutes long, and then came down to
thirteen and tons and tons of revisions. And so to me,
it was, you know, a fun piece to work with.
It was great to work with the Studio V sixty
team and have a piece on a show that I admire.
But it was also a really good lesson for me
relatively early and doing this kind of stuff in the
editing process when you're at a place that takes stuff
(06:18):
really seriously. And I have continued to learn this lesson
and it's kind of the only lesson I feel like
I learned over and over which is the difference between
a good piece and a great piece is editing and
story editing, a line editing and then editing in you know,
in a session of the actual audio. And so that's
something I've tried to carry with me is just give
stories time and give them the sort of ruthless editing
(06:40):
because they that will that will take it to that
next level. I think that is when a lot of
folks never understand how much time goes into doing a
good podcast in audio, and I work with companies, I
work with radio talent, and I'm always amazed that, you know,
people don't understand the amount of effort that goes into something.
So when you're picking out a story, you know, you
know you're devoting a certain amount of time to you know,
(07:01):
a lot of time to something. So so how's the
process of deciding, Okay, this is a story worth me
investing a couple of months of time into. I mean,
I think you're hitting on something really important which we've
thought about a lot at thirty for thirty, which is
story selection is really huge because you know, our goal
with thirty for thirty. But I think just in general,
you want to find a story that is very specific.
(07:22):
In our case, you know, it's in the world of sports,
and we don't do like bio picks. We don't do
sort of a profile of a person. We try and
pick a specific moment that has bigger themes, and so
we really try and vet our stories on is this
something that will sustain big ideas and then does this
have a natural arc? Is there a natural evolution of
(07:44):
this story from A to B to C twod that
we can follow and then have the big ideas kind
of gloma on top of them. And I've just learned
that if you pick the right story and it's got
a natural momentum, and it's got big ideas that come
into it naturally, and it's got characters who are good talkers,
and it's got good archival, I mean, those are all
really hard things to find. But if you find that,
(08:05):
then you're almost just like getting out of the way
of the story as you're making it. You know, your
job is to just kind of collect it and let
it do its thing. Whereas the flip side of that,
and we've done that is you know, you've picked the
story and some of those things aren't there and the
whole time you just feel like you're fighting against the story.
And there's no worse feeling in the world than feeling
like you're fighting against the story that you picked and
(08:27):
you want to do but it's just not there, and
you're just killing yourself and trying to make it happen.
And so we've done some of those, and you find
a way to make it happen. But I would much
rather spend a lot of time developing a story and
making sure it's one that feels like it inherently has
all those things we're looking for, so that our job
is to really just sort of help nurture it to life.
When the Beak from series came out that Julia did,
(08:47):
I was interested, but I was like, wow, is this
you know, this is pretty daring to decide to devote
a season to this story. How did that come about?
And deciding, Hey, this is something we're going to do
all these episodes on for this. So that was originally,
I mean, that was one of the first ideas we
ever had, was we should do an episode on Vicram yoga,
and in particular the sexual sought allegations against the founder
(09:10):
of Vicram. You know, good Vicram Choudry, and we and
Julia Henderson, one of our reporter producers, took it on
um and she had a background in Vicram and so
she was always interested in this story and we were
going to do it as just one episode in a
regular season. I had from the very beginning of the
show in my mind thought, well, we do this model
(09:30):
where we do two seasons a year and they're about
five episodes each. I would love to find every once
in a while a story that could just be one
season and just do a serialized story. So I had
it in the back of my head. I had set
you know, the team knew that, like we should be
on our looking out for these And a few months
into reporting Victram story, Julia sent a really long email
after after a big reporting trip and said, you know,
(09:52):
I just think there's more here. I think that this
is this could be multi part. And the specific things
that felt like, okay, this will let us, this can
sustain is one finding out about his backstory and he
has a really fascinating kind of rise and how he
came to America and became a sort of sensation in
America before he even started to you know, how he
(10:14):
accumulated his power before he abused this power was a
big one. But we also realized that there's a story
of kind of fitness in America as part of this too.
Bickram was was a craze, was a fitness craze and
one of the first fitness crazes, and it helped us
understand how those kinds of things take off and get
franchised and get a bunch of people doing them. But moreover,
we just felt like we could focus on his behavior
(10:36):
in the last ten years, last seven years and the
sexual assault allegations, but the most compelling thing is to
take our time to understand how we got there, because
it wasn't just that this was an awful person who
did awful things. It was this was a person who
built systems around him and accumulated power, a lot of
it power that was you know that he accumulated because
(10:58):
he was doing things that were really positive in people's lives.
And then once he had that power around him, why
was there a culture and why was there why was
there a sort of system him that allowed him to
abuse that power? And that's not a thirty minute story, right,
You need the time to be able to tell that.
So that's so we just kind of made the call
and said, okay, we think this is going to be multipart,
(11:19):
and all of a sudden, all of these other avenues
opened up for us. It's funny. I know a lot
of folks involved with Bickram and I did it for
a few years, and I don't think anyone was shocked,
you know, by a lot of things that came out
in the podcast. But I'm a p one, as we
say in radio. I've been listening to thirty from the
very first podcast came out. But I found a lot
of folks who I would talk to because everybody wants
(11:41):
to ask me, you know what podcast am I listening
to and and all of that, who I wouldn't say
would be somebody that would seek out thirty for thirty,
who sought that one out and just fell in love
with that podcast and also with them, went back and
listened to the old episode. So I think it was
it really was a build a bridge for a lot
of folks too. Yeah. I mean that was strategic on
our part of and something the only reason we do
(12:01):
that kind of stuff. But we realized, okay, we're ESPN,
We're thirty for thirty and thirty for thirty has always
been as a film series, and then we've tried to
sort of inherit that as a podcast series. The Bridge.
You hear all the time from people, you know, I
don't like sports, but I like thirty for thirty. I
love hearing that. You know, we always have thought of
our show as a show that is not for sports people.
It's you know, it's good stories, and our lens happens
(12:21):
to be sports. That said, I realized that, you know,
there is for some people. I have many thoughts on this.
For some people kind of block for sports and they
just aren't that interested. And we did realize that the
Bickram series might break out in that way, both in
terms of subject matter and sort of themes, but also
in terms of format. It's just kind of like, hey,
there's something interesting going on here. Let me let me
(12:43):
check this out. A five part series. So yeah, I mean,
we thought of like, some of our straight ahead sports
stories are going to get the es the core ESPN crowd,
and we're going to keep them, hopefully, and they'll stick
around to listen to the Bickerm thing. And then the
Bickerm thing is going to reach out and get some
maybe more this American life type listeners in and then they'll,
as you said, go back and listen to our stuff.
And we're just trying to kind of accumulate different audiences
(13:05):
as we go and hopefully keep them around. I think
in general, you know, sports are positive and bring people
together in a lot of ways, and sports stories have
all the elements of good storytelling that you know, you've
talked about having a story arc. A game. A sport
is a story arc from the beginning to the end,
and there's a story in every game, and I think
that's one of the things that you almost have unlimited
(13:26):
amount of content to go find and and I'm sure
it's a little overwhelming, it sounds with the amount of
stuff that you probably want to do. Yeah, so I
will say, I mean, going back to what I was
saying earlier about what we really feel like, it's a
very high bar in terms of picking a story. We
get a lot of pitches that are like, oh, that
game was crazy, and that's not enough. You know, there
are a lot of crazy games, and we go we
(13:47):
rarely do games, both on the film side and on
the podcast side. There's episodes that we do were like
it was hardly any actual game or action on the
field or on the court or whatever. You know, it's
about the people, and it's about the game cause someone's
life to change or our society to change. You know,
those are the bigger themes we're looking for now. That said,
(14:08):
to your point about the natural arc of sports, I
will say yes, obviously, Like you can point to a
game or a season or a career and kind of say, oh,
someone is going to win and someone is going to lose,
and that's always, like, you know, nice thing to have
in terms of keeping a narrative going. There's also another
thing we think about a lot. You know, any storyteller
(14:28):
thinks about steaks. There's always a moment at which you
have to ask yourself, what are the stakes of our story?
Our steaks, I think are the same as a lot
of other shows that aren't about sports. You know, it's
about someone's life or about someone at an inflection point,
or society the inflection point. But then there are also
moments where the stakes are literally like there's a big game,
someone's gonna win or someone gonna lose, or we've done
a couple of gambling stories. You just get to say,
(14:49):
there's literally a million dollars on the line, and all
of a sudden you can tell that the audience is
a little perked up or whatever. So, yes, there are
some of those nice elements in sports stories where you
just get to kind of refer to winners or losers
or steaks, and you know that that's going to be
a hook. What have liked? You know, between seasons, you've
been putting up some past audio from other documentaries. I
just feel like every time I listen there are stories
(15:10):
that I go in thinking I'll look at this show
description and I'll be like, I don't know English soccer,
I don't really care about that, And then I listened,
and then by the end of it, I love it
when I'm sad when it's over because I just I
enjoyed that one so much. And then the documentary. I'm
a w VU fanatic. I went to West Virginia University,
and I didn't know that story about the first dunk
(15:31):
happening at w VU. It's got to be fun to
be able to present those and surprise people. Yeah, you know,
I almost wish we could get to a point where
we don't have to put an episode description in because
I know some people look and say, well, I'm not
into football, I'm not into this particular athlete or team
or whatever, you know, And our goal is really the
telling a story. There is a universal appeal and is
going pretty quickly past a lot of the specificities of
(15:53):
what sport it is or what athletes it is, you know,
by three or four minutes. And I hope that everyone,
when they're listening to us, just realizes, oh, this is
a good story, and I'm invested in these characters and
I'm along for the ride. I obviously recognize that some
sports are more high profile than others, some athletes are
more high profile than others. But I've been really heartened
actually to see just in the reception and in the
(16:13):
download numbers, that people are generally listening to all of
our stories. And we hear from people all the time
and say, I don't you know, like you said, I
don't really care about soccer, I don't really care about
poker and what I was into that, And so you know,
our goal is just there's a good story almost everywhere,
and we just need to find them. Well. Great podcasts educate, entertain,
empathetic experience. I call it the three es, and that's
(16:34):
what is. It covers all of those things. The thing
I love about podcasting the most is I feel like
it is the one time in people's lives where they
actually do focus on one thing and they come out
feeling better. At least I think with a good podcast
they do. I just wanted to talk to you, you know,
how do you feel about for folks that have been
in You know, I've been in podcasting for eleven years
(16:54):
and it's just the last couple of years seeing the
surge and people listening, it makes me feel better about
society in a way. Do you feel that too? I
generally agree, and I think podcasting it's a cliche, but
it's true. Podcasting is intimate and it's empathetic. I think
it is a healthy kind of thing to to engage in,
so more people listening to podcast are generally a good thing.
(17:15):
I mean, I will say to your point about where
this industry has exploded in the last couple of years,
I think it's only been I will confess, in the
last maybe a year or so that I really feel
like the quality of work had gone to a new level.
You know, if we had been talking eighteen months ago,
my mindset was kind of like, we're in the podcast revolution,
but what's good out there? Like that? You know, I
(17:37):
felt this weird disconnect and hasn't been that long, but
in the last year, I just feel like I've been
really inspired and by a lot of new, really impressive work,
and so now it feels like a lot of other
industries were just like growing up a little bit and
most talented to people who have the most important stories
to tell, and the resources for those people to tell
those stories are finally starting to come to bear. You know.
(17:57):
I've just been especially inspired in the last six months
or a year. I tell talent when I'm working with
new folks in podcasting that, you know, the days of
two guys telling dick jokes on bad mikes for two hours.
You know, that's not the world we live in right now,
and that's not the kind of podcast people are consuming
and they really want good quality podcasts. I mean, there's
still a home for those, and man, maybe about but
(18:18):
I think there's still power in a great interview show.
It's not like, oh, we have Terry Gross and Mark
Marin and so we don't need any more good interview shows.
Still there are still a new interview shows that come
along that are the simplest format in the world. You know,
two people talking to each other, but I still love
them and they still feel fresh. And then there is
of course the whole world of documentaries and talk you know. Yeah,
(18:39):
I think if there's an understanding that there's more out
there and that it's should be thought of as almost
a different medium. And I've always thought that word podcast
is just a little unsatisfying because it can mean everything
on a really wide spectrum. I mean, you rarely hear
people say I like television, right, they go a little
further than that and they say I like comedies, or
they you know, they talk about a specific show or
the specific type of Like we're reaching that point where
(19:01):
someone says I like podcasts or I want to make
a podcast. I think that that requires a little more
interrogation and to say, like, well, there's a wide spectrum
of what that means, and all of that can be good,
but we need to develop a better language or some
more understanding that there's a huge spectrum of what a
podcast could be. I follow you on Twitter. In fact,
I would consider us Twitter friends. It's how I actually
reached out to you. About the interview. I had no
(19:23):
idea until I got ready to do this interview. How
famous you are, not for thirty, for th not for
podcasting at all, but for a picture of your daughter.
Oh god, yes, this may be my legacy. I mean really,
like no, if you look your name up, it's a
hundred articles about that picture. I tell people like, how
did that happen, and just exactly what it was. So
(19:44):
I have a daughter she just heard two actually a
couple of days ago, but when she was just shy
of turning one. You know, my wife and I kind
of came to an understanding pretty naturally when she was
born that we weren't going to really put ost many
photos of her online, or I wasn't going to talk
about her on the podcast you know that I host
(20:06):
or whatever. So we just kind of laid low. But
we obviously would take fifty pictures a day of her
for our consumption. And we were out, decided to go
get pizza, and it was the first time my daughter
had eaten pizza, and she had just this euphoric reaction
to it, and I took a photo of it, and
we were looking at the photo later and I was like,
(20:26):
this is a really good photo like this is this
is a good photo. What do you think about just
this once breaking our sort of packed and posting it online,
we agreed, we shared it with the world, and it
immediately just went like hyper viral. I mean I could
see it just happening almost in the all time I
was on the subway, and so yeah, I got like
millions and millions of views, and it became a meme,
(20:46):
and it had that sort of natural life cycle of
a meme, and we were sort of in the meme
via the storm for you know, maybe a week or
ten days, and the photo was getting ripped and used
in other contexts and people were sending us screenshots of
it and stuff, and it was it was kind of wild.
We laid low after that, like we had a lot
of decent number of offers to like do follow up
interviews or go on TV or whatever, and we just
(21:08):
kind of said, we're just gonna let it ride out.
It was an interesting experience. Well, it's also what you wrote,
You've given her pizza for the first time and she
had this ecstatic look. I saw probably five different languages
of articles too that really went large. I got to ask,
did it help with the podcast at all. Did you
see a little bump there? No, I don't think so.
Uh yeah, I don't know. I mean, on the one hand,
(21:30):
recognized that it was big, it was a legit viral moment.
I also recognized that they are like two of those
a week, you know. And I recognized pretty quickly like, Okay,
we're the like cute baby of the moment, and in
three days, four days, the world will move on. And
so it wasn't like this lasting level up in terms
of fame or audience or whatever. It was just this weird,
(21:52):
weird bum. Once she's able to tell stories, she'll have
a story to tell. It will be a fun little thing.
It might be a podcast one day, it might be
a podcast US one day. So again, like and I
was just looking at something this morning, like there's this
video of the super cute kid and it's going super viral,
and then in two days there'll be another kid, you know.
So she's one of twenty five kids that went viral
in the year two thousand eight teen. So I'm not
(22:15):
I'm not leaving myself as to just how big of
a deal it was. But you just gave me an
idea for new podcast The Famous Babies coming soon to
Apple podcast Joenny. Before we Go, I was in Everything
with my three killer questions. Okay, question number one, if
you could listen to anybody living or dead do a podcast,
who would be on the podcast? Is this a host
(22:37):
or or a round table? Whatever you want? However you
you know, who would you like to listen to sit
around the room and talking microphones. I gotta think about
this for a second. Um, Okay, I'll give you anager here.
Someone I wish we're still around is Studs Turcle. I mean,
we have a lot of audio of Studs Turcle, who
(22:57):
was a labor activist and sort of or a host
sri Um. But I think like the podcast format would
have shaken him out of a mode and I just
think he's one of my favorite characters of all time.
More contemporary, there's a musician Billy Bragg, who I think
is one of my favorite musicians last I think one
of the best storytellers in the world. And I've always
wondered what he doesn't have a podcast, And I've always
got someone should chat with him and get him the podcast.
(23:20):
So those are the two answers that are coming off
the top of my head. I wish I could reach
deeper into history, but those are the two that are
coming to find. No, that's good. I haven't thought about
stud stark on a while, so thanks for bringing that up.
Question too, What was the first piece of technology that
you got and said this right here is changing my life? Well,
I mentioned to you that I started out doing film documentaries,
(23:41):
and you know, my dad was a news cameraman for
many years, and so he always had camera equipment lying
around and audio equipment as well. And I mean this
was of a generation where there was still like real
to real recorders and good mike. So I just remember,
like in high school getting very much into the machinery
of recording both philm and video and audio on tape
(24:03):
and then audio digitally when you know, and I was
just I'm just at that age to sort of have
bridge that gap. I'm not like a super gear head,
but I've always felt like being really interested in the
gear and the technology has been really helpful throughout because
it just gives you a capacity to learn new systems
and learn new software and kind of be interested in
(24:24):
kind of new piece of equipment as they come along,
which I think is just that's the heart of it.
It's like, at some level, if you're making this stuff,
you are interacting with software hardware, and you kind of
have to have a capacity for tinkering and learning that
stuff and making it work for you. So I don't know,
there's a There was an old real or real tape
recorder that my dad would use for sinking when he
was on film shoots. And that was like the first
(24:44):
piece of equipment that I just got really like intrigued by.
And finally, what's the last podcast that you binged? I
listened to the latest series of Headlong. It's called Running
from the Cops. Dan to Versky's latest season. Dan Tversky
did Missing Richard Simmons, and then he did a series
and Y t U K. And now he's done a
series on Cops, the TV show. I mean, I think
(25:06):
it's stunning. I think he's someone who every project I've
heard of his gets better and better, and so I'm
just like really inspired and impressed by his work. And
this series on Cops I thought was just really brilliantly
put together and really important. And the final two episodes
of that, and I say this in a good way,
like enraged me in a way that journalism hasn't in
a while and got me really both thinking deeply but
(25:29):
just really kind of asking some big questions about justice
and policing and media and all these sort of big,
weighty things that I like to think about. So, I mean,
I you know, I can't say enough good things about
his work, and in particular this season. Speaking of seasons,
you got any tease for us of what's going to
be coming up in the In the next few weeks,
we have big series coming out and actually we're gonna
(25:50):
put it out sort of into the summer a little bit.
Um We're gonna try and hit in the in August
with that, but it's actually another multi part season, so
it is a story about sketball and real estate and
racism and sort of a soap operaty story based in
l A. Maybe listeners can put together the clues from that.
And then we are already working on our season for
(26:12):
the fall winter, which will be back to individual episodes,
and I'm like, I was doing it right before we
talked that, I'm going to go back to it. Right
we're done talking, and I'm like working on a piece
for that and cutting it, and I'm I'm at that
moment where I'm like, oh, this might be really kind
of a great story, and so I'm very excited for that.
I mean, that's still six months away, but I'm I'm
excited about some of these stories that we have coming
for the winter. So and we're already planning stuff for
(26:33):
twenty and beyond. So you know, it's a big, big
part of our job is to just try and get
a lot of stuff into productions so that we can
have vines in the fire and then you roll them
out when they're ready at Jody Abragant. If you want
to follow them on Twitter, highly recommend it. You're a
great following on Twitter. If you haven't binged it, just
go back. Listen to all the episodes of thirty on
the radio app Apple podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Jody,
(26:53):
thank you for coming on Access Podcast. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having that. Well, that was fun. Did I
sound like a geek talking to Jody, because I'm really
(27:14):
I am a big fan, a huge fan. No, it
didn't really come across that way. It's very very naturally.
You sounded not nervous at all. That's that's funny. I've
been listening, you know, since they launched thirty for thirty
and I just think Jody's amazing. It's a great podcast.
And I remember even like watching thirty for thirties in
school and like journalism class and stuff. There's so much
(27:34):
to learn from that type of journalism. You make me
feel old every time you open your mouth, young lady,
and in me to add that part in there, I
just meant to say I watch it sometimes. Yeah, no,
but Jody was great and I've tasted you. Was finding
three podcasts that if people like, they may also like
these podcast What have you found for us this week? Morgan? So,
(27:56):
first one I found is Fantasy Footballers. This one is
all about fantasy football. I've tried to play fantasy football.
Wasn't that great, so I stopped. But they break down
the whole world of fantasy football with their opinions. It's
an expert trio of three guys and they give you
this type of expert advice that you can't get anywhere else.
Let me say something about this podcast. I love these guys.
(28:16):
They've been on the show before you were here. They
came on the show and we actually sat at a
table together at the I heart Radio Podcast Awards and
they won Best Sports Podcast, so I'm really excited for them.
I love them a lot. So we support this podcast fully.
On this show, I hope you guys check it out.
But here's a clip, right, yeah, here we go. You
want to know what the fantasy footballers are about. We're
about accurate information get fantasy football picks. Right, let's win,
(28:41):
let's grin. Let it begin number two entertaining we're three
buffoons and we there's tom foolery, there's buffoonery, all sorts
of shenanigans happening, and we're all about that high quality production.
I mean, look at these cameras, Look at this. It's incredible.
They're fun guys, and man, did they have an army.
(29:02):
I mean they have an army of listeners. It's amazing.
So all your footies out there please support this podcast
as well. What else you got? Next one? I listened
to this podcast a lot, actually, parton my take so
I gotta admit I'm kind of not on the part
of my take train for no other reason that I
just never have gotten time to listen to it. But
I know people love it, especially young folks. Interestingly enough,
(29:24):
I only listen to it when I'm going to bad
so I'll put it on at night and I'll fall
asleep to it, so I never actually hear the whole episode.
Seemed like a podcast to fall asleep, it's not. It's
really not Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. That's a podcast you
fall asleep too, right, And that's another one that I've found.
But that's just something weird that I do. It says
nothing about the podcast, but is it. So it's a
(29:44):
comedic sports podcast and they released three each week, created
by Barstool Sports, and actually debuted number one. It's so popular,
especially with like the younger crowd, and they deliver what
they say is the loudest and I'll quote most wrecked
sports takes in the history of spoken word hot takes. Yeah,
all right, let's check it out. As you all know
(30:07):
who everyone who's listening to the podcast knows, Brooklyn has
the best things in the world just across the board,
correct barbecue, racehorses, big Cat. They have the best Big
Cat And hey, Kadi and Kyrie, you shouldn't have done
it because the city sucks. It sounds like, you know what.
I would not be surprised if they started their own podcast, Brooklyn.
(30:28):
That's what you have to do when you move out there.
All right, that's it. I'm gonna start listening, gonna try
it out. Don't listen to it before. But the truth,
I only go to sleep to history shows really, or
on TV or podcast I've heard It'll soak into your
brain and you get a little bit smarter. And here's
the problem. Sometimes I'll be talking to somebody about a
historical event and I'll be like, did you know? And
(30:48):
then as I'm saying did you know? I think, first
of all, did that really happen? Or did I dream
that that happen? And I also like to read like
the history of the Targearians, So I at one point
I was telling some buddy about the Targarians and I'm
listening to myself and I'm like, I sound like I
really believe that this is real history. I'm like, well, no, no, no,
the dragon you gotta do it. Yeah, So the whole
(31:09):
another world history stuff. All right, what else you got?
All Right? Finally We've got gladiair the Aaron Hernandez and
Football Incorporated. This is a Boston Globe spotlight team podcast.
They are best known for investigating the sexual abuse scandal
inside the Catholic Church. But now they're taking this podcast
to dive deep into the whole crisis that football went
(31:29):
through when Aaron Hernande's life took a turn. There are
a couple of podcasts that I will put on a pedestal.
Was like just amazing shows that you need to to
listen to. As Town is one. This is one if
you're a sports fan. This was amazing this podcast and
you learn a lot each episode they dive into, like
this whole different world of something that the news didn't
even talk about. In the case, you know, good storytelling.
(31:51):
Here we go. I was at that Super Bowl as
a sportswriter for the Boston Globe. I remember thinking, here's
another showboating foot ball player. But this wasn't just another
spectacular athlete. This was Aaron Hernandez, a man who earned
a millions as a star of the New England Patriots
and who would be accuted of murdering three people. I said, Aaron,
(32:15):
I'm hearing some things about you know you and this
murder a man who spiraled out of control. Well, good job, Morrigan,
thank you. I really appreciate you doing that this week,
of course, and thank you for listening to Access Podcast.
I'm Maddie Stout and you can reach me at Maddie
Stout m A T T Y s t A U
d T on all the social media platforms. You can
(32:37):
also follow Access podcast at access podcast one. Some dumbass
has Access podcasts and never uses it. Morgan, what if
some some people want to stock you? Anybody stalk you?
You can do that. My handle on all social media
is at Morgan Victory. Oh that's fun. Why why is
that Morgan Victory? My middle name is Victoria. Oh okay,
(32:57):
so when I got my first Twitter account to good
one though, Yeah, it's a really good one. Thank you.
We want to thank everybody at I Heart Radio, Will Pearson,
Conad Burne, Darren Davis. Let's thank Bob Pittman today. Bob Pittman,
Thank you, Bob, thanks for just being you. Access Podcast
is a production of I Heart Radio. Thanks for listening.
Hi, everybody, it's Maddie. Welcome to Access podcast, the podcast
about podcast, And I gotta be honest with you. There
are a couple podcasts that I am a total geek. Four.
These are the podcasts that when a new episode comes out,
whatever I'm doing stops and I go listen to them.
One of those podcasts is thirty for thirty. So I
was really excited when I got a chance to talk
(00:31):
to Jody Avergan, who hosts and executive produces thirty for thirty.
Jody has been telling audio stories for years, including his
time at w n y C and for five eighty sports.
Coming up on the show, we're gonna talk to him
about the art of audio storytelling, plus how his daughter
became a meme seam around the world, and don't forget.
After the conversation, producer Morgan will be in and we
(00:53):
will be telling you about three podcasts that you should binge.
But right now, let's check out a little bit from
thirty for thirty. There are many levels of professional baseball.
There's the Big league's Major League Baseball, then there's Triple
A that's one step down. Then there's Double A a ball,
rookie ball, Winter League, and you keep going down all
the way towards the bottom. There are the independent leagues,
(01:16):
technically professional and that players get paid something to play baseball.
But those leagues exist several planets away from the show,
as they call the majors, and most of the players
in those leagues will never come close to putting on
a big league uniform. They'll play in tiny parts in
front of near empty bleachers until reality finally sets in
and they hang it up for one summer. Though, there
(01:38):
was someone very different among them, one of, without question,
the greatest baseball players and personalities of all time. Jody.
Welcome to Access podcast, and I have to ask you
a very important question to start. What is it like
to wake up every morning and just piss podcast excellence? Um? Well,
the first thing I do every morning is drink a
(01:59):
glass of water, Honor, and then I go to the bathroom.
So you know I can't answer that. I try and
ingest podcast excellence. First, you know you've worked at w NYC,
which I think is basically the grace Land of podcasts
and audio storytelling. What initially drew you to audio storytelling?
You know, I won't give you the fullback story, but
(02:20):
you know in college, I did uh film and I
did documentaries and film. My parents to journalists, and so
I've always sort of thought about news and documentaries and
so forth. My start in radio was not necessarily in
the documentary storytelling world. It was it was at w NYC,
but it was really in the daily talk show mold.
So I landed at the feet of Brian Larr, who
(02:43):
is the post of the Buying Larror Show, which is
on its hand every day on the is a you
know your local public radio talk call in show. So that's,
you know, really where I got my start, and I
spent seven years there as my home base. And then
I at w n y C. I was able to
sort of dip around and spend a month in the
newsroom here and there, you know, spend some time working
(03:04):
with the various shows. So I got a little taste
of the longer form stuff. But I don't know, I
really I've always liked to talk and I've always felt
like my metabolism is more akin to like a daily show.
I like making stuff and moving on and coming up
with ideas and executing on them pretty quick. And so
it's been a little of a challenge and an interesting
transition and just like really sort of a fun challenge
(03:27):
to go then now towards stuff that we're doing at
thirty for thirty, which takes months and months and months
to put together. So it's been nice to kind of
exercise those two those two years and almost come full
circle back to doing documentary stuff like I started doing
and thinking about when I was in college, and then
a couple of years thereafter when you were at w
n y C. I I've found some of your old
(03:48):
stories which were awesome, especially the toilet training method by Charles.
So I did a piece for Studio three sixty about
how Charles Mingus, one of my favorite musicians, greatest jazz
basis of all time, and one of the stranger figures
in the history of music, had toilet trained his cats.
In particular, one of his cats called Nightlife to use
(04:10):
the toilet, and he not only kind of developed a
method on his own to toilet trainer cat, but then
he came up with a basically set of instructions, and
you could throughout the sixties and seventies send effectively a
self addressed stant avelope to Charles Mingus at a p
O box, and he would mail you back his Charles
Mingus catalog for toilet training your cat, so you could
(04:32):
do this for your cats at home. I happened to
have a cat that is toilet trained. My cat was
not trained using them. Yeah I know, my cat was
not trained using the Mengus method. But it got me
interested in this world, and so I pitched this story
to a studio three sixty. They were very, very skeptical,
I would say, at first. And we worked it for
a while and we found a cat to try and train,
(04:53):
and we sort of told a story about Charles Mingus
himself throughout it, and I don't know, kind of combines
a lot of the things I like in journalism, which
is kind of sneaking your way into a serious story,
telling something that is hopefully just like engaging to listen to,
and then all of a sudden you're learning about bigger stuff,
and in this case, you know, really learning about Charles
Mingus in addition to cats psychology. I mean, he was
(05:13):
I will say he was onto something when he developed
this homespun method. It actually really does fit in to
a lot that we now know about how cats operate
and how and how to go about to treat one
thing I did love about it the most was the voice.
Ever you had Charles Mingus voice, and that's the kind
of like little touch that makes the story really it
comes to life even more. Yeah, I mean, so we
(05:35):
got a voice actor to be the voice of Charles Mingus,
I will say, you know, one of the things. And
just working with that piece and working with Studio few sixty,
it was it was very fun and I had a
kind of vision for the piece and they helped me
work towards that. But they did that through really intense editing,
and you know, it was this piece took months and
months and months. It started out as many pieces do,
(05:57):
probably like thirty minutes long, and then came down to
thirteen and tons and tons of revisions. And so to me,
it was, you know, a fun piece to work with.
It was great to work with the Studio V sixty
team and have a piece on a show that I admire.
But it was also a really good lesson for me
relatively early and doing this kind of stuff in the
editing process when you're at a place that takes stuff
(06:18):
really seriously. And I have continued to learn this lesson
and it's kind of the only lesson I feel like
I learned over and over which is the difference between
a good piece and a great piece is editing and
story editing, a line editing and then editing in you know,
in a session of the actual audio. And so that's
something I've tried to carry with me is just give
stories time and give them the sort of ruthless editing
(06:40):
because they that will that will take it to that
next level. I think that is when a lot of
folks never understand how much time goes into doing a
good podcast in audio, and I work with companies, I
work with radio talent, and I'm always amazed that, you know,
people don't understand the amount of effort that goes into something.
So when you're picking out a story, you know, you
know you're devoting a certain amount of time to you know,
(07:01):
a lot of time to something. So so how's the
process of deciding, Okay, this is a story worth me
investing a couple of months of time into. I mean,
I think you're hitting on something really important which we've
thought about a lot at thirty for thirty, which is
story selection is really huge because you know, our goal
with thirty for thirty. But I think just in general,
you want to find a story that is very specific.
(07:22):
In our case, you know, it's in the world of sports,
and we don't do like bio picks. We don't do
sort of a profile of a person. We try and
pick a specific moment that has bigger themes, and so
we really try and vet our stories on is this
something that will sustain big ideas and then does this
have a natural arc? Is there a natural evolution of
(07:44):
this story from A to B to C twod that
we can follow and then have the big ideas kind
of gloma on top of them. And I've just learned
that if you pick the right story and it's got
a natural momentum, and it's got big ideas that come
into it naturally, and it's got characters who are good talkers,
and it's got good archival, I mean, those are all
really hard things to find. But if you find that,
(08:05):
then you're almost just like getting out of the way
of the story as you're making it. You know, your
job is to just kind of collect it and let
it do its thing. Whereas the flip side of that,
and we've done that is you know, you've picked the
story and some of those things aren't there and the
whole time you just feel like you're fighting against the story.
And there's no worse feeling in the world than feeling
like you're fighting against the story that you picked and
(08:27):
you want to do but it's just not there, and
you're just killing yourself and trying to make it happen.
And so we've done some of those, and you find
a way to make it happen. But I would much
rather spend a lot of time developing a story and
making sure it's one that feels like it inherently has
all those things we're looking for, so that our job
is to really just sort of help nurture it to life.
When the Beak from series came out that Julia did,
(08:47):
I was interested, but I was like, wow, is this
you know, this is pretty daring to decide to devote
a season to this story. How did that come about?
And deciding, Hey, this is something we're going to do
all these episodes on for this. So that was originally,
I mean, that was one of the first ideas we
ever had, was we should do an episode on Vicram yoga,
and in particular the sexual sought allegations against the founder
(09:10):
of Vicram. You know, good Vicram Choudry, and we and
Julia Henderson, one of our reporter producers, took it on
um and she had a background in Vicram and so
she was always interested in this story and we were
going to do it as just one episode in a
regular season. I had from the very beginning of the
show in my mind thought, well, we do this model
(09:30):
where we do two seasons a year and they're about
five episodes each. I would love to find every once
in a while a story that could just be one
season and just do a serialized story. So I had
it in the back of my head. I had set
you know, the team knew that, like we should be
on our looking out for these And a few months
into reporting Victram story, Julia sent a really long email
after after a big reporting trip and said, you know,
(09:52):
I just think there's more here. I think that this
is this could be multi part. And the specific things
that felt like, okay, this will let us, this can
sustain is one finding out about his backstory and he
has a really fascinating kind of rise and how he
came to America and became a sort of sensation in
America before he even started to you know, how he
(10:14):
accumulated his power before he abused this power was a
big one. But we also realized that there's a story
of kind of fitness in America as part of this too.
Bickram was was a craze, was a fitness craze and
one of the first fitness crazes, and it helped us
understand how those kinds of things take off and get
franchised and get a bunch of people doing them. But moreover,
we just felt like we could focus on his behavior
(10:36):
in the last ten years, last seven years and the
sexual assault allegations, but the most compelling thing is to
take our time to understand how we got there, because
it wasn't just that this was an awful person who
did awful things. It was this was a person who
built systems around him and accumulated power, a lot of
it power that was you know that he accumulated because
(10:58):
he was doing things that were really positive in people's lives.
And then once he had that power around him, why
was there a culture and why was there why was
there a sort of system him that allowed him to
abuse that power? And that's not a thirty minute story, right,
You need the time to be able to tell that.
So that's so we just kind of made the call
and said, okay, we think this is going to be multipart,
(11:19):
and all of a sudden, all of these other avenues
opened up for us. It's funny. I know a lot
of folks involved with Bickram and I did it for
a few years, and I don't think anyone was shocked,
you know, by a lot of things that came out
in the podcast. But I'm a p one, as we
say in radio. I've been listening to thirty from the
very first podcast came out. But I found a lot
of folks who I would talk to because everybody wants
(11:41):
to ask me, you know what podcast am I listening
to and and all of that, who I wouldn't say
would be somebody that would seek out thirty for thirty,
who sought that one out and just fell in love
with that podcast and also with them, went back and
listened to the old episode. So I think it was
it really was a build a bridge for a lot
of folks too. Yeah. I mean that was strategic on
our part of and something the only reason we do
(12:01):
that kind of stuff. But we realized, okay, we're ESPN,
We're thirty for thirty and thirty for thirty has always
been as a film series, and then we've tried to
sort of inherit that as a podcast series. The Bridge.
You hear all the time from people, you know, I
don't like sports, but I like thirty for thirty. I
love hearing that. You know, we always have thought of
our show as a show that is not for sports people.
It's you know, it's good stories, and our lens happens
(12:21):
to be sports. That said, I realized that, you know,
there is for some people. I have many thoughts on this.
For some people kind of block for sports and they
just aren't that interested. And we did realize that the
Bickram series might break out in that way, both in
terms of subject matter and sort of themes, but also
in terms of format. It's just kind of like, hey,
there's something interesting going on here. Let me let me
(12:43):
check this out. A five part series. So yeah, I mean,
we thought of like, some of our straight ahead sports
stories are going to get the es the core ESPN crowd,
and we're going to keep them, hopefully, and they'll stick
around to listen to the Bickerm thing. And then the
Bickerm thing is going to reach out and get some
maybe more this American life type listeners in and then they'll,
as you said, go back and listen to our stuff.
And we're just trying to kind of accumulate different audiences
(13:05):
as we go and hopefully keep them around. I think
in general, you know, sports are positive and bring people
together in a lot of ways, and sports stories have
all the elements of good storytelling that you know, you've
talked about having a story arc. A game. A sport
is a story arc from the beginning to the end,
and there's a story in every game, and I think
that's one of the things that you almost have unlimited
(13:26):
amount of content to go find and and I'm sure
it's a little overwhelming, it sounds with the amount of
stuff that you probably want to do. Yeah, so I
will say, I mean, going back to what I was
saying earlier about what we really feel like, it's a
very high bar in terms of picking a story. We
get a lot of pitches that are like, oh, that
game was crazy, and that's not enough. You know, there
are a lot of crazy games, and we go we
(13:47):
rarely do games, both on the film side and on
the podcast side. There's episodes that we do were like
it was hardly any actual game or action on the
field or on the court or whatever. You know, it's
about the people, and it's about the game cause someone's
life to change or our society to change. You know,
those are the bigger themes we're looking for now. That said,
(14:08):
to your point about the natural arc of sports, I
will say yes, obviously, Like you can point to a
game or a season or a career and kind of say, oh,
someone is going to win and someone is going to lose,
and that's always, like, you know, nice thing to have
in terms of keeping a narrative going. There's also another
thing we think about a lot. You know, any storyteller
(14:28):
thinks about steaks. There's always a moment at which you
have to ask yourself, what are the stakes of our story?
Our steaks, I think are the same as a lot
of other shows that aren't about sports. You know, it's
about someone's life or about someone at an inflection point,
or society the inflection point. But then there are also
moments where the stakes are literally like there's a big game,
someone's gonna win or someone gonna lose, or we've done
a couple of gambling stories. You just get to say,
(14:49):
there's literally a million dollars on the line, and all
of a sudden you can tell that the audience is
a little perked up or whatever. So, yes, there are
some of those nice elements in sports stories where you
just get to kind of refer to winners or losers
or steaks, and you know that that's going to be
a hook. What have liked? You know, between seasons, you've
been putting up some past audio from other documentaries. I
just feel like every time I listen there are stories
(15:10):
that I go in thinking I'll look at this show
description and I'll be like, I don't know English soccer,
I don't really care about that, And then I listened,
and then by the end of it, I love it
when I'm sad when it's over because I just I
enjoyed that one so much. And then the documentary. I'm
a w VU fanatic. I went to West Virginia University,
and I didn't know that story about the first dunk
(15:31):
happening at w VU. It's got to be fun to
be able to present those and surprise people. Yeah, you know,
I almost wish we could get to a point where
we don't have to put an episode description in because
I know some people look and say, well, I'm not
into football, I'm not into this particular athlete or team
or whatever, you know, And our goal is really the
telling a story. There is a universal appeal and is
going pretty quickly past a lot of the specificities of
(15:53):
what sport it is or what athletes it is, you know,
by three or four minutes. And I hope that everyone,
when they're listening to us, just realizes, oh, this is
a good story, and I'm invested in these characters and
I'm along for the ride. I obviously recognize that some
sports are more high profile than others, some athletes are
more high profile than others. But I've been really heartened
actually to see just in the reception and in the
(16:13):
download numbers, that people are generally listening to all of
our stories. And we hear from people all the time
and say, I don't you know, like you said, I
don't really care about soccer, I don't really care about
poker and what I was into that, And so you know,
our goal is just there's a good story almost everywhere,
and we just need to find them. Well. Great podcasts educate, entertain,
empathetic experience. I call it the three es, and that's
(16:34):
what is. It covers all of those things. The thing
I love about podcasting the most is I feel like
it is the one time in people's lives where they
actually do focus on one thing and they come out
feeling better. At least I think with a good podcast
they do. I just wanted to talk to you, you know,
how do you feel about for folks that have been
in You know, I've been in podcasting for eleven years
(16:54):
and it's just the last couple of years seeing the
surge and people listening, it makes me feel better about
society in a way. Do you feel that too? I
generally agree, and I think podcasting it's a cliche, but
it's true. Podcasting is intimate and it's empathetic. I think
it is a healthy kind of thing to to engage in,
so more people listening to podcast are generally a good thing.
(17:15):
I mean, I will say to your point about where
this industry has exploded in the last couple of years,
I think it's only been I will confess, in the
last maybe a year or so that I really feel
like the quality of work had gone to a new level.
You know, if we had been talking eighteen months ago,
my mindset was kind of like, we're in the podcast revolution,
but what's good out there? Like that? You know, I
(17:37):
felt this weird disconnect and hasn't been that long, but
in the last year, I just feel like I've been
really inspired and by a lot of new, really impressive work,
and so now it feels like a lot of other
industries were just like growing up a little bit and
most talented to people who have the most important stories
to tell, and the resources for those people to tell
those stories are finally starting to come to bear. You know.
(17:57):
I've just been especially inspired in the last six months
or a year. I tell talent when I'm working with
new folks in podcasting that, you know, the days of
two guys telling dick jokes on bad mikes for two hours.
You know, that's not the world we live in right now,
and that's not the kind of podcast people are consuming
and they really want good quality podcasts. I mean, there's
still a home for those, and man, maybe about but
(18:18):
I think there's still power in a great interview show.
It's not like, oh, we have Terry Gross and Mark
Marin and so we don't need any more good interview shows.
Still there are still a new interview shows that come
along that are the simplest format in the world. You know,
two people talking to each other, but I still love
them and they still feel fresh. And then there is
of course the whole world of documentaries and talk you know. Yeah,
(18:39):
I think if there's an understanding that there's more out
there and that it's should be thought of as almost
a different medium. And I've always thought that word podcast
is just a little unsatisfying because it can mean everything
on a really wide spectrum. I mean, you rarely hear
people say I like television, right, they go a little
further than that and they say I like comedies, or
they you know, they talk about a specific show or
the specific type of Like we're reaching that point where
(19:01):
someone says I like podcasts or I want to make
a podcast. I think that that requires a little more
interrogation and to say, like, well, there's a wide spectrum
of what that means, and all of that can be good,
but we need to develop a better language or some
more understanding that there's a huge spectrum of what a
podcast could be. I follow you on Twitter. In fact,
I would consider us Twitter friends. It's how I actually
reached out to you. About the interview. I had no
(19:23):
idea until I got ready to do this interview. How
famous you are, not for thirty, for th not for
podcasting at all, but for a picture of your daughter.
Oh god, yes, this may be my legacy. I mean really,
like no, if you look your name up, it's a
hundred articles about that picture. I tell people like, how
did that happen, and just exactly what it was. So
(19:44):
I have a daughter she just heard two actually a
couple of days ago, but when she was just shy
of turning one. You know, my wife and I kind
of came to an understanding pretty naturally when she was
born that we weren't going to really put ost many
photos of her online, or I wasn't going to talk
about her on the podcast you know that I host
(20:06):
or whatever. So we just kind of laid low. But
we obviously would take fifty pictures a day of her
for our consumption. And we were out, decided to go
get pizza, and it was the first time my daughter
had eaten pizza, and she had just this euphoric reaction
to it, and I took a photo of it, and
we were looking at the photo later and I was like,
(20:26):
this is a really good photo like this is this
is a good photo. What do you think about just
this once breaking our sort of packed and posting it online,
we agreed, we shared it with the world, and it
immediately just went like hyper viral. I mean I could
see it just happening almost in the all time I
was on the subway, and so yeah, I got like
millions and millions of views, and it became a meme,
(20:46):
and it had that sort of natural life cycle of
a meme, and we were sort of in the meme
via the storm for you know, maybe a week or
ten days, and the photo was getting ripped and used
in other contexts and people were sending us screenshots of
it and stuff, and it was it was kind of wild.
We laid low after that, like we had a lot
of decent number of offers to like do follow up
interviews or go on TV or whatever, and we just
(21:08):
kind of said, we're just gonna let it ride out.
It was an interesting experience. Well, it's also what you wrote,
You've given her pizza for the first time and she
had this ecstatic look. I saw probably five different languages
of articles too that really went large. I got to ask,
did it help with the podcast at all. Did you
see a little bump there? No, I don't think so.
Uh yeah, I don't know. I mean, on the one hand,
(21:30):
recognized that it was big, it was a legit viral moment.
I also recognized that they are like two of those
a week, you know. And I recognized pretty quickly like, Okay,
we're the like cute baby of the moment, and in
three days, four days, the world will move on. And
so it wasn't like this lasting level up in terms
of fame or audience or whatever. It was just this weird,
(21:52):
weird bum. Once she's able to tell stories, she'll have
a story to tell. It will be a fun little thing.
It might be a podcast one day, it might be
a podcast US one day. So again, like and I
was just looking at something this morning, like there's this
video of the super cute kid and it's going super viral,
and then in two days there'll be another kid, you know.
So she's one of twenty five kids that went viral
in the year two thousand eight teen. So I'm not
(22:15):
I'm not leaving myself as to just how big of
a deal it was. But you just gave me an
idea for new podcast The Famous Babies coming soon to
Apple podcast Joenny. Before we Go, I was in Everything
with my three killer questions. Okay, question number one, if
you could listen to anybody living or dead do a podcast,
who would be on the podcast? Is this a host
(22:37):
or or a round table? Whatever you want? However you
you know, who would you like to listen to sit
around the room and talking microphones. I gotta think about
this for a second. Um, Okay, I'll give you anager here.
Someone I wish we're still around is Studs Turcle. I mean,
we have a lot of audio of Studs Turcle, who
(22:57):
was a labor activist and sort of or a host
sri Um. But I think like the podcast format would
have shaken him out of a mode and I just
think he's one of my favorite characters of all time.
More contemporary, there's a musician Billy Bragg, who I think
is one of my favorite musicians last I think one
of the best storytellers in the world. And I've always
wondered what he doesn't have a podcast, And I've always
got someone should chat with him and get him the podcast.
(23:20):
So those are the two answers that are coming off
the top of my head. I wish I could reach
deeper into history, but those are the two that are
coming to find. No, that's good. I haven't thought about
stud stark on a while, so thanks for bringing that up.
Question too, What was the first piece of technology that
you got and said this right here is changing my life? Well,
I mentioned to you that I started out doing film documentaries,
(23:41):
and you know, my dad was a news cameraman for
many years, and so he always had camera equipment lying
around and audio equipment as well. And I mean this
was of a generation where there was still like real
to real recorders and good mike. So I just remember,
like in high school getting very much into the machinery
of recording both philm and video and audio on tape
(24:03):
and then audio digitally when you know, and I was
just I'm just at that age to sort of have
bridge that gap. I'm not like a super gear head,
but I've always felt like being really interested in the
gear and the technology has been really helpful throughout because
it just gives you a capacity to learn new systems
and learn new software and kind of be interested in
(24:24):
kind of new piece of equipment as they come along,
which I think is just that's the heart of it.
It's like, at some level, if you're making this stuff,
you are interacting with software hardware, and you kind of
have to have a capacity for tinkering and learning that
stuff and making it work for you. So I don't know,
there's a There was an old real or real tape
recorder that my dad would use for sinking when he
was on film shoots. And that was like the first
(24:44):
piece of equipment that I just got really like intrigued by.
And finally, what's the last podcast that you binged? I
listened to the latest series of Headlong. It's called Running
from the Cops. Dan to Versky's latest season. Dan Tversky
did Missing Richard Simmons, and then he did a series
and Y t U K. And now he's done a
series on Cops, the TV show. I mean, I think
(25:06):
it's stunning. I think he's someone who every project I've
heard of his gets better and better, and so I'm
just like really inspired and impressed by his work. And
this series on Cops I thought was just really brilliantly
put together and really important. And the final two episodes
of that, and I say this in a good way,
like enraged me in a way that journalism hasn't in
a while and got me really both thinking deeply but
(25:29):
just really kind of asking some big questions about justice
and policing and media and all these sort of big,
weighty things that I like to think about. So, I mean,
I you know, I can't say enough good things about
his work, and in particular this season. Speaking of seasons,
you got any tease for us of what's going to
be coming up in the In the next few weeks,
we have big series coming out and actually we're gonna
(25:50):
put it out sort of into the summer a little bit.
Um We're gonna try and hit in the in August
with that, but it's actually another multi part season, so
it is a story about sketball and real estate and
racism and sort of a soap operaty story based in
l A. Maybe listeners can put together the clues from that.
And then we are already working on our season for
(26:12):
the fall winter, which will be back to individual episodes,
and I'm like, I was doing it right before we
talked that, I'm going to go back to it. Right
we're done talking, and I'm like working on a piece
for that and cutting it, and I'm I'm at that
moment where I'm like, oh, this might be really kind
of a great story, and so I'm very excited for that.
I mean, that's still six months away, but I'm I'm
excited about some of these stories that we have coming
for the winter. So and we're already planning stuff for
(26:33):
twenty and beyond. So you know, it's a big, big
part of our job is to just try and get
a lot of stuff into productions so that we can
have vines in the fire and then you roll them
out when they're ready at Jody Abragant. If you want
to follow them on Twitter, highly recommend it. You're a
great following on Twitter. If you haven't binged it, just
go back. Listen to all the episodes of thirty on
the radio app Apple podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Jody,
(26:53):
thank you for coming on Access Podcast. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having that. Well, that was fun. Did I
sound like a geek talking to Jody, because I'm really
(27:14):
I am a big fan, a huge fan. No, it
didn't really come across that way. It's very very naturally.
You sounded not nervous at all. That's that's funny. I've
been listening, you know, since they launched thirty for thirty
and I just think Jody's amazing. It's a great podcast.
And I remember even like watching thirty for thirties in
school and like journalism class and stuff. There's so much
(27:34):
to learn from that type of journalism. You make me
feel old every time you open your mouth, young lady,
and in me to add that part in there, I
just meant to say I watch it sometimes. Yeah, no,
but Jody was great and I've tasted you. Was finding
three podcasts that if people like, they may also like
these podcast What have you found for us this week? Morgan? So,
(27:56):
first one I found is Fantasy Footballers. This one is
all about fantasy football. I've tried to play fantasy football.
Wasn't that great, so I stopped. But they break down
the whole world of fantasy football with their opinions. It's
an expert trio of three guys and they give you
this type of expert advice that you can't get anywhere else.
Let me say something about this podcast. I love these guys.
(28:16):
They've been on the show before you were here. They
came on the show and we actually sat at a
table together at the I heart Radio Podcast Awards and
they won Best Sports Podcast, so I'm really excited for them.
I love them a lot. So we support this podcast fully.
On this show, I hope you guys check it out.
But here's a clip, right, yeah, here we go. You
want to know what the fantasy footballers are about. We're
about accurate information get fantasy football picks. Right, let's win,
(28:41):
let's grin. Let it begin number two entertaining we're three
buffoons and we there's tom foolery, there's buffoonery, all sorts
of shenanigans happening, and we're all about that high quality production.
I mean, look at these cameras, Look at this. It's incredible.
They're fun guys, and man, did they have an army.
(29:02):
I mean they have an army of listeners. It's amazing.
So all your footies out there please support this podcast
as well. What else you got? Next one? I listened
to this podcast a lot, actually, parton my take so
I gotta admit I'm kind of not on the part
of my take train for no other reason that I
just never have gotten time to listen to it. But
I know people love it, especially young folks. Interestingly enough,
(29:24):
I only listen to it when I'm going to bad
so I'll put it on at night and I'll fall
asleep to it, so I never actually hear the whole episode.
Seemed like a podcast to fall asleep, it's not. It's
really not Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. That's a podcast you
fall asleep too, right, And that's another one that I've found.
But that's just something weird that I do. It says
nothing about the podcast, but is it. So it's a
(29:44):
comedic sports podcast and they released three each week, created
by Barstool Sports, and actually debuted number one. It's so popular,
especially with like the younger crowd, and they deliver what
they say is the loudest and I'll quote most wrecked
sports takes in the history of spoken word hot takes. Yeah,
all right, let's check it out. As you all know
(30:07):
who everyone who's listening to the podcast knows, Brooklyn has
the best things in the world just across the board,
correct barbecue, racehorses, big Cat. They have the best Big
Cat And hey, Kadi and Kyrie, you shouldn't have done
it because the city sucks. It sounds like, you know what.
I would not be surprised if they started their own podcast, Brooklyn.
(30:28):
That's what you have to do when you move out there.
All right, that's it. I'm gonna start listening, gonna try
it out. Don't listen to it before. But the truth,
I only go to sleep to history shows really, or
on TV or podcast I've heard It'll soak into your
brain and you get a little bit smarter. And here's
the problem. Sometimes I'll be talking to somebody about a
historical event and I'll be like, did you know? And
(30:48):
then as I'm saying did you know? I think, first
of all, did that really happen? Or did I dream
that that happen? And I also like to read like
the history of the Targearians, So I at one point
I was telling some buddy about the Targarians and I'm
listening to myself and I'm like, I sound like I
really believe that this is real history. I'm like, well, no, no, no,
the dragon you gotta do it. Yeah, So the whole
(31:09):
another world history stuff. All right, what else you got?
All Right? Finally We've got gladiair the Aaron Hernandez and
Football Incorporated. This is a Boston Globe spotlight team podcast.
They are best known for investigating the sexual abuse scandal
inside the Catholic Church. But now they're taking this podcast
to dive deep into the whole crisis that football went
(31:29):
through when Aaron Hernande's life took a turn. There are
a couple of podcasts that I will put on a pedestal.
Was like just amazing shows that you need to to
listen to. As Town is one. This is one if
you're a sports fan. This was amazing this podcast and
you learn a lot each episode they dive into, like
this whole different world of something that the news didn't
even talk about. In the case, you know, good storytelling.
(31:51):
Here we go. I was at that Super Bowl as
a sportswriter for the Boston Globe. I remember thinking, here's
another showboating foot ball player. But this wasn't just another
spectacular athlete. This was Aaron Hernandez, a man who earned
a millions as a star of the New England Patriots
and who would be accuted of murdering three people. I said, Aaron,
(32:15):
I'm hearing some things about you know you and this
murder a man who spiraled out of control. Well, good job, Morrigan,
thank you. I really appreciate you doing that this week,
of course, and thank you for listening to Access Podcast.
I'm Maddie Stout and you can reach me at Maddie
Stout m A T T Y s t A U
d T on all the social media platforms. You can
(32:37):
also follow Access podcast at access podcast one. Some dumbass
has Access podcasts and never uses it. Morgan, what if
some some people want to stock you? Anybody stalk you?
You can do that. My handle on all social media
is at Morgan Victory. Oh that's fun. Why why is
that Morgan Victory? My middle name is Victoria. Oh okay,
(32:57):
so when I got my first Twitter account to good
one though, Yeah, it's a really good one. Thank you.
We want to thank everybody at I Heart Radio, Will Pearson,
Conad Burne, Darren Davis. Let's thank Bob Pittman today. Bob Pittman,
Thank you, Bob, thanks for just being you. Access Podcast
is a production of I Heart Radio. Thanks for listening.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.