The Exchanges

Q How did you get your first story onto the show?

A Ira came to me and was like, the 10 year anniversary of Harold Washington's death is coming up. And he was like, I'm wondering if we should do something for it. Here's this book, read it and see if you think there's a story there. Uh, and so he gave me this book called Fire on the Prairie by Gary Rivlin, which was all about Mayor Washington. Mayor Washington was the first black mayor of Chicago, and he'd been this sort of like incredibly charismatic, Leader who just sort of, like, just tipped off this entire, you know, sort of, hailstorm of racist backlash in Chicago. So we started producing it together, and I just, like, would identify all these people from the book, and then we would go and interview them, and I'd sort of try to help them come up with the questions, and I remember that, like, the show came out on a Friday, and on Wednesday, We had nothing written, nothing produced, nothing cut.

AI assessment note: “Ira came to me and was like, the 10 year anniversary of Harold Washington's death”

Q Because podcasting started to really gain traction, right? Like, I started TED Radio Hour in 2013, and we were one of the, kind of, the early shows that really got a big audience. I mean, people were starting to talk about podcasting around that time as, as a viable business.

A Podcasting, just like, the numbers were just growing. And then there was people out there who were making it Who are making a business of it independently. Like, Roman Mars, who had launched the podcast, 99% Invisible, was very inspiring to me. Like, he, he was out there on his own, and he had done it, he'd been doing it for, like, a couple years prior to, prior to me leaving to launch Gimlet, and he had, like, a small staff, and he had, like, advertisers, and I remember asking him early on, like, questions about, like, how, you know, where do you get your advertisers? How does it work? And, And it was just working really well for him, you know.

AI assessment note: “Roman Mars, who had launched the podcast, 99% Invisible, was very inspiring to me”

Q And then in, in 2008, there was a, a pretty significant kind of moment where you produced an episode of the show called The Giant Pool of Money, and you did that with Adam Davidson. Who was also a public radio reporter at the time. How did that, how did that happen? How did that come about?

A Yeah. You know what it was? It was somebody at This American Life had bought a house. And I had asked her, like, well, wait, how did you, how did you have enough money for the down payment? And she was like, oh, we didn't have a down payment. We just, they just gave us the loan without a down payment. I was like, really? I was like, I didn't know that happened. And she was like, oh, yeah. And so then that started me like, I was like, that's crazy. And then there's all this credit card debt out there, and everybody I knew had huge credit card bills. And so I was just like, sort of like, I was just like casually looking at this, the story of debt in America, what's going on? And then the more I got into it, the more I sort of like started to understand the macroeconomics of it and how it, what it had, what that had to do with the Chinese Central Bank. And, and I was friends with Adam Davidson this whole time. And Adam Davidson was a, was a correspondent at NPR and he was the business and economics correspondent at NPR. And so we had been kicking around this idea of doing something on like housing debt. So we reported this whole story of like the global financial system and how it had sort of led to these conditions where people were borrowing massive amounts of money without anybody checking to see whether they could pay it back or not. And it explained this thing that was happen…

AI assessment note: “It was somebody at This American Life had bought a house.”

Q you were running into at NPR that they were a non-profit organization, and they just could not figure out how to make this work? Or, or was it more like, yeah, we're just, no one really wanted to make a decision. Nobody wanted to kind of pull the trigger, or, or no one really thought that there were legs to this, or was it like a combination of those things?

A A lot all of the above. I think I was a risky venture. You know, like, there's not that many places that are set up to, like, take that kind of risk. Even though I didn't feel like a risk, even though I felt like, well, I know how to do this, and, like, obviously I've done it before, so. But, like, no, that's not true. I've done it inside institutions whose contributions I was way undervaluing, you know. If you're NPR, that's a lot of risk to take. Um, to just be like, yeah, I'm gonna give you this money to try to start something that, like, I have no idea if you'll succeed or fail, and there's not that many institutions set up to do that.

AI assessment note: “A lot all of the above. I think I was a risky venture.”

Q Oberlin, um, and you studied political science, government. Did you, did you have a sense of what you wanted to do when you went to college? Like, did you think, I want to get into public service, like my mom, I want to do some kind of social work, or was that your plan, or did you think, I want to get into journalism, or did you not really know?

A I think I had a sense of, like, wanting to do something good in the world, like, I remember I studied Russian because back when I was in college, Russia was still the evil empire. Right. And I had this very sort of political feeling about like, you know, there, there are people just like you and me, Mr. Reagan, and I'm going to learn their language and prove it to you. Um, and I think one of the things I was, um, a big consumer of narrative nonfiction from an early age, you know, we had magazines laying around the house. Like we had the New Yorker and Harper's that was that kind of household. And, and like, I, Pick them up early and really loved them, and then as I got older, I loved them more, and then.

AI assessment note: “I think I had a sense of, like, wanting to do something good”

Q Was there excitement when you talked about this at NPR? Was there excitement? Were people like, yeah, this is great?

A I don't, there was, in some places there was, but it was like, I also knew that it was important to me that it wasn't going to be a non-profit. And the reason was, if you have a large global organization, News outfit with people all around the world. There might not be a viable business model for you. And you might need to make that work. You, you might need foundation money and stuff like that. You might need to just like go that, that route. You might not be able to actually just turn a profit, but with planet money, I was like, no, there's, you can turn a profit on planet money. That's like advertisers want to be in that show. The audience is big enough. It can be profitable. And if it can, it should be. It doesn't make sense to, to force it into a structure. That it doesn't need. And also I felt like I was creating a lot of value.

AI assessment note: “in some places there was, but it was like, I also knew”

Q Were you just being inundated with pitches? Hey, I've got this idea. I want to do this show. And I'm assuming you were. And how did you filter out? Like, how did you deal with that incoming?

A That was hard. That was one of the things that was really hard. It was like sort of like everybody had a pitch and like, okay, we've set it up to make more podcasts. And then it's like, okay, which ones are we going to launch? How are we going to launch them? Who's going to do them? And then everybody in the world is like, I want to do this podcast. I want to do that podcast. And what happened? We do. How do you, how do you do this over and over and over again with a bunch of different people in a bunch of different topic areas? And how do you not make it the same thing over and over again? Like, how do you not make it actually the planet money of blah, blah, blah? Like, how do we actually make them feel new and different? Um, and that, that was hard. That was like the part, that was the thing to figure out.

AI assessment note: “That was like the part, that was the thing to figure out.”