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Podcast fans from all around - come and nerd out about podcasts and discover new shows along the way!
On Podcast Book Club - a different group of podcast industry pros sit down each week to pour over an episode of a show they admire.
We're a group of podcasting professionals who spend every day scripting, producing, engineering, and promoting podcasts. And in our free time? We’re podcast fans just like you. We love to listen to even more podcasts and figure out what makes the best podcasts so good.
So tune in and join the club - listen to podcast reviews of some of our favorite gems. We’ll give feedback on podcast content but also sound design, production, scripting, storytelling, and more.
Want even more? Catch Podcast Book Club on Twitter: twitter.com/podbookclub
Podcast Book Club is produced by Alex Bennett, Head of Post Production at Lower Street. Alex is a domesticated audio nerd, who has spent the past five years learning about human social conventions via the medium of podcasting. From Edinburgh, Scotland he is an audio engineer that helps produce audio dramas in his spare time. Alex specialises in soundscapes and creative mixing. He has a deep and abiding love for sandwiches, and is the 2nd worst bowler at Lower Street.
Lower Street provides next-level podcast production services for ambitious companies: everything from podcast strategy and creation to growth. We’ve worked with companies like BCG to develop multiple podcasts like Climate Vision 2050, BCG Compliance, BCG Fintech Files, and BCG In Her Element. We’ve also helped produce: Cadence Bank’s In Good Companies; HPE’s Technology Now, Zuhlke’s Data Today, Northern Trust’s The Road to Why, Zoobean’s The Reading Culture; ICR’s Welcome to the Arena and ZeroNorth’s Navigating Zero.
Find out more at https://lowerstreet.co/ and sign up for our newsletter to keep in touch https://lowerstreet.co/newsletter-sign-up
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Alex R: [00:00:00] Hi! Season 2 of Podcast Book Club is on its way, and we've been working hard on bringing you an even better show. In the meantime, here's a bonus episode to bridge the gap. This is our pilot episode, and as a result, the audio quality isn't amazing. It was more of a proof of concept than anything else, but the show we're talking about, Blowback, is amazing.
And it was a really interesting conversation about why we love it so much. So please excuse our echoey audio, and we'll be back soon with a brand new season of Podcast Book Club. On with the show.
Alex B: Welcome to the Podcast Book Club from Lower Street Media, where we look at what makes great podcasts so, well, great.
Our day job is making podcasts, but we're also fans of the medium, and I think it can be really useful to dig into what makes the shows we love so good. Today,[00:01:00]
we're talking about Blowback, a serial podcast about the many misadventures of U. S. foreign policy and empire building. It's hosted by Brendan James and Noah Culwin. It's a documentary, but it definitely has a specific viewpoint on the events it covers. Now there are 20 episodes of Blowbackette there, and they each run for around an hour.
So we're just going to talk about episode 1 of the first series, which covers the Iraq War. The second series covers Cuba, and the third, Korea. I'm Alex, I'm the Senior Audio Engineer at Lower Street. I spend most of my time doing editing, mixing, sound design, etc. It's my turn to host. and I chose the podcast we'll be discussing.
I'm not alone, I have a coalition of the willing with me. So why don't you guys introduce yourselves, starting with Jackie.
Jackie: My name is Jackie, I am a producer at Lower Street. And Elise.
Elise: Hey y'all, uh, my name is Elise and I am also a producer here at Lower Street.
Alex B: So, let's get started with some broad thoughts on the episode.
Jackie, [00:02:00] you're up
Jackie: first. So, my first... I thought it was just like, wow, this is so cool to listen to. And obviously that has a lot to do with what we're going to talk about, which is the audio, the use of audio in this, um, any show about historical documentation, you're going to have a lot of really great rich audio, but I also think they went above and beyond and grabbed.
tons of different clips and music and uh, it just like, it made something that could have been like a textbook lecture in a university class where you're struggling to keep your eyes open. It made it super, super fun to listen to and every part, like there's one specific part where they said hard cut and then they did a hard cut and I just, they brought some music in.
I just thought it was, it was so fun. Hard cut,
Clip: October 7th, 1959, you have a dashing, let's just be honest, we've seen the photos from him in the books, he's looking good, he looks really good, a dashing young Saddam
Elise: Hussein. You know, very rarely do I turn on a podcast and The audio does backflips in my mind and I stop doing whatever it is that I'm doing to pay attention [00:03:00] further and either go back and I kind of cheated here, uh, Alex had told all of us at one of our other readings about this podcast before and I made the mistake of listening to one, so I listened to almost the entire thing in one sitting, which I don't know if I would recommend listening to anything about the Iraq war or American imperialism for like 10 hours straight.
Yeah. Yeah. But that is what this podcast will do to you, you know, and to echo what Jackie's saying it was, it's such incredible effective use of, um, of sound and of music and it really puts you in time and place in a way that the vast majority of historical podcasts, I don't think they do. So using those historical clips and then, uh, narration where they couldn't get the clips, I think is all really effective storytelling.
Jackie: It was also interesting too, uh, you're saying like when they didn't have the clips they still did it with narration but there was the one part where they had like a clip from Winston Churchill and then they wanted to do another quote but they didn't have a clip and they played this like old timey music and I'm just like watching it in my head I could picture Winston Churchill on like a black and white film [00:04:00] because everybody knows that.
You know, the before times were all black and white. I
Clip: am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. Gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror.
Alex B: So my, my initial sort of broad thoughts are basically the same. One thing I'd add is I think they do...
As good a job as I could imagine them doing with tackling all of the different names and places and timelines is something that I listen to it twice now because I went back and listened to the first episode for this chat and it felt as though I was learning some things for the first time even though obviously I'd heard them before because there are large swathes of the episode where there's just so much going on but it does feel coherent despite all of the stuff they're trying to Cram in.
Let's see here.
Clip: You have the U. S. giving Iraq intelligence and arms and [00:05:00] chemical weapons so they can fight their enemy, Iran. Then you have Iran Contra, where we sell Iran arms so we can use the money to fund right wing death squads in Nicaragua. Then our ally, Israel, bombs Iraq to destroy their nuclear capabilities, but then we also give Iran intelligence to Saudi
Alex B: Arabia.
So, I think it'd be good to talk about some specific aspects of the show, and you guys have brought it up already, and I wanted to talk about it as well. is the use of sound from lots of different sources. So there's audio from television shows, movies, there's archive audio, there's music, and for me, I think it works exceptionally well.
And something for you guys as producers, I thought that I had in my head the whole time was, how much of this is cleared above the board licensed audio and how much of this is just being a bit scrappy and taking what you can get?
Elise: Probably that.
Jackie: I've been in like broadcast radio, I've [00:06:00] been in like in small independent news podcasting and every time I feel like the standard is to just kind of like go for it and then see what happens and usually it's It's fine, especially because copyright laws are so vague.
And for the most part, you're using it correctly. It's just like, you're kind of also taking that gamble at the same time. Spoken like
Elise: a true non American. As an American having worked in the newsroom, it's like, oh, let's
Jackie: double check and make
Elise: sure. But I do think you're right, that it's like, the sound is so well applied and it's not, you know, unless you're someone who's like, I really love, I really love Saddam, I'm going to take this to court.
This is slander.
Alex B: One of the. One of the interesting things, and Jackie, you mentioned this with the Winston Churchill thing, is finding a balance for using this many different sources of audio. One of the things I felt they did quite well was strike a balance between the two hosts, Brendan and Noah, talking and using external sound clips.
[00:07:00] Because from my point of view, doing post production, one of my first inclinations would be to just plaster the whole thing thoroughly with as much interesting audio. As I could find.
Jackie: That's interesting, because I think, yeah, if you go that far, you have to be intentional about it. I'm thinking Bill Wurtz, any of his videos are just plastered with audio and just random stuff.
But yeah, if you're not doing it intentionally, it definitely starts to feel like an audio scrapbook that is very hard to pay attention to. Yeah, I think it's really easy
Elise: to tell too, like when you're looking, when you're listening to that episode is really seeing how they develop the script as well. Like taking that narrative and the answer, the questions that they wanted to answer, doing that very thoroughly and then very intentionally choosing bits of audio to supplement where they could have been talking.
Or using pieces of audio to more thoroughly illustrate a point, as opposed to just a random spattering of, well, this sounds cool. Let's see how we can tie them together. Um, so yeah, you can absolutely hear the, the intentionality and the depth of scripting and the number of times they must've had to rerecord to make it sound as natural as it, as it
Alex B: does.
Well, see, that's an interesting point, [00:08:00] actually, because I totally agree on, there must've been so much thought that went into it, but to my ears, the editing of the two guys talking is almost like. borderline breathless. I think there's kind of like a scrappy quality to it, which in some ways makes the show more interesting, but in others you get the feeling that they are just chucking As much information as they can in those sections as possible.
Well,
Elise: it could be, too, that, like, they're so familiar with the topic, having done all of that research on their own, that they can kind of shoot from the hip and know that they're hitting all the points. Because it's not like it's a voice actor coming in and, like, being familiar with this information for the very first time.
Like, they know it front and back, and they know exactly where
Jackie: they're going. That's actually, uh, something that I had written down when I was listening to it is really, like, I really love that talk style of storytelling. I do think it's intentional in that way, too, because I listen to, I've listened to a lot of other podcasts where it's pretty similar and it's, it's mixing that this is a lecture, but this is also a conversation and you're learning something about it.[00:09:00]
I mean, I think the most famous one that people would recognize is Stuff You Should Know. where they're kind of having this conversation, but you know that they have all of this, like, completely planned out and they know all the information that they want to share. They're just sharing it with you in a way that makes you feel like you were in a room listening to these incredibly intelligent people who, for some reason, know all of this information and want to share it with you.
Elise: I think one of the things that really helps with it as well is they lay everything out for you right in the beginning of the episode. So it's not like they just start you off on this journey and you're like, have this sound, have this information. They tell you like, these are the big questions that we're setting out to answer over the next 10 hours.
Come on this journey with us. So it's really an invitation to have a conversation with you as opposed to just let me tell you some
Jackie: stuff I know. That was my, that was actually my favorite thing right off the bat was that they said, Hey, this is what you're going to learn. And then it was like such an effective intro that I was like, okay, let me learn it.
And then when they got to the introduction of the hosts and then, you know, they, they kind of talked more about their ideas and it's like more low key way. I was like, yeah, I'm sold already. I'm already convinced that you're going to deliver. So I'm [00:10:00] okay with this being a little bit more quiet. It's the Kurt Vonnegut method of tell everything that you're going, that's going to happen in the story as soon as you can.
How exactly
Clip: did Rumsfeld get from his coffee with Nixon in 1971 to his consultation with Saddam in 1983 to his showdown with Saddam in 2003? That story is part of a much bigger one, namely how and why did Saddam ever get to be a friend and ally only for us to then nominate him as global
Alex B: supervillain?
It kind of raises an interesting point about doing something factual that is more for entertainment than it is for like nourishment. It's like the the reverse of the BBC's founding principles of educate, inform, entertain. It's like the other way around.
Jackie: Which is kind of
Elise: how it needs to be, right? Like the more crowded the space gets, you need to be able to make, like, yes, it should always add value.
It should always be informative, but entertainment should be the very first thing. What does it carry a deal? It says like to hold someone's [00:11:00] attention is like the most important thing that you can do in any form of marketing. So, and no matter what you're doing in marketing, so might as well make it entertaining.
Jackie: I mean, I would say that entertainment is probably more effective education anyway. Like, we learn a lot from watching the people that we are entertained by or the shows that we're entertained by. How many people know a lot more about, you know, World War II from the History Channel than they do? Grade 10 history class.
I hope that that doesn't speak anything
about me. It's a pastime with my grandfather, okay? You can't make fun of me for it.
Alex B: I think it's interesting how they say from the start, you know, in the show's description, it's a podcast
about American empire, which in of itself could be a provocative thing to say, because, you know, America maintains it does not have an empire, but they have a point of view and From my point of view, when I was listening to it, it didn't feel as though [00:12:00] that took away from the content of the show, kind of enhanced it,
Jackie: really.
You have to be confident in what you're saying. And, yeah, like, they are kind of honest about their bias a little bit, but when you're a little bit too focused on finding that middle ground, I feel like you lose the ability to tell a compelling story. And also, like, the idea of a middle ground is kind of made up because that's assuming that each side is, is equal.
right and wrong, and that's kind of just not right. So, yeah, I think it makes sense that they, it would be better if they were able to lean into their own thoughts a bit more. Another
Elise: thing too is that they're able to use actualities from people of that time and of that era. They're not being conspiratorial and saying, oh, can you imagine like this is what they said?
It's like, no, no, this is actually exactly what Winston Churchill said. He said bomb them. Like, let's gas them, it's super easy, that sounds great. Yes, it's their opinion, but also, yes, it's a direct, like, it doesn't, yeah, it just doesn't feel conspiratorial at all. It doesn't feel like it's too left of center to be outrageous or, like, unlistenable.
Jackie: Yeah, it's, it's a, [00:13:00] when I worked in, in news radio in the past, I, It was kind of like there were some more opinion shows and one of the things that really bothered me was that sometimes people would craft a story and then find the facts to back it up, which is always going to be possible. There's like a wealth of information and whatever you want to back up, whatever is going to exist somewhere.
So I think they did a good job, though, at. Finding the story after brought the facts in and there's lots of examples of like clips and stuff that just like perfectly proved that throughout George
Alex B: HW Bush, who was on the campaign trail to run as Reagan's successor at the time when he was approached about what had just happened.
He was how he described his attitude on the on the situation. Quote, I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are. I wonder from you guys perspective as producers what you think when you look at something that's kind of this great big confection of a show with all these different elements because to [00:14:00] me I love listening to it but it's like anxiety inducing to think about reverse engineering something like that.
I,
Elise: I love it. I, I absolutely love it. I love listening to it and I hear the structure in it and Figuring out what elements seem really successful, like taking a through line of music and picking it up halfway through a dialogue and carrying it through an entire narration and like fading it out so it's like they're, with the exception of the few times where they do say like hard cut, you know, like, it really isn't hard cuts like it's all really cohesive and Like as a producer, like those are my favorite kinds of shows.
It's like using that effective audio to be able to really like tell the story and kind of mold things together in that way. Granted, I don't know how they had the time to be able to do any of that or how long it took them to make, bring them on so we can talk to them about this. Cause I have so many questions, but you know, from a production standpoint, uh.
I love it. Throw me in the fire.
Jackie: Put me in a coach. I could take the pain. Nah, I'm with you, Alex. I love it. I absolutely love it and I would love to make something like it, but I listen to it and I'm just like, oh my gosh, [00:15:00] there is so much going on here. There is so much work. I can't even imagine that audiophile.
Alex B: As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a bathist.
What did you guys think about having a sense of humor in something like this? I think it's really interesting and adds a kind of morbid layer to the whole thing, not necessarily in a bad way. Whereby it's obvious that there's two people who are, in a way, having fun making something like this and joking amongst themselves.
And it is, on paper, almost like offensively at odds with the content of the show, but it felt as though it worked more often than it didn't. No,
Elise: that's the thing, right? Is it like, we are hit over the head day in and day out about like, horribly tragic things happening in real time in our personal lives and globally, right?
Like, just precedent at times would be great, but they're always unprecedented. So here we are. And so then to have to, or to want to dedicate time [00:16:00] to something important and historical, you know, meet your audience where they are and, and entertain them, get them to understand and absorb this information.
Because I don't think anyone podcast would ever mistake it for something that's like, Light or humorous, the weight of every single thing that happened is so deeply ingrained in it that you cannot escape it. But to be able to use the humor as a vehicle to internalize it, I think makes it a really effective storytelling piece.
And there's harmony in that antithesis there. I call
Clip: this segment, um, what the Christ is wrong with the Kurds, Bob?
Alex B: Um, What's something that you feel is that you can take away from having listened to this episode? You first, Jackie.
Jackie: I think really, it kind of reminds me of the practical uses of audio, whether or not it's like adding to the actual content or not.
Sometimes, like, the clip itself isn't saying the same thing and that's moving the story forward. Sometimes, though, it's just a clip of a TV show or sometimes it's just [00:17:00] an audio clip of an explosion. And you're thinking, okay, well that's not necessarily telling me anything. But it's creating that mood, it's creating that atmosphere.
The like reality of things like you're talking about bombs, but then to hear a bomb go off, it's different. And it just adds to the severity of the issue. So I think that, yeah, like that just like really, really intentional use of audio to support a general story and then make it not boring because it could just have been a lecture and you could have got the all the same information out.
But really, it's just about how do you creatively use all of the pieces with the given medium that you have and create something that's just like. You don't want to turn off. He
Clip: said his dad saw a friend of his or an acquaintance of his at like the market one day back in the sixties. And the guy was like, uh, yeah, Hey, I actually just joined the bath party.
And you know, these are people who are members of the ethnic minority. And so his dad was like, What, what the fuck? Why would you do that? They're, they're nationalists. They hate us. And he went, well, I did it cause I'm getting a [00:18:00] stipend from the CIA now.
Elise: I think really what, what speaks to for me is not being afraid to lean into your beliefs and your personalities and really letting them shine through and authenticity in a way that, um, it comes across again, in every single layer of, uh, from storytelling to.
Choice of audio and they very much knew their audience. And they're not trying to make this for somebody else. Like they're very intentional, but also knew exactly who they're making this for. And so in that regard, their choices seem fairly succinct. And so I think that's, that's a key takeaway too. It's like, know your audience, know yourself.
See where the two come together and run through a wall. Go straight
Jackie: for it. I already made a Kurt Vonnegut reference, but I have to do it again. In his rules of writing, one of his rules is that you write for, with one person in particular in mind. And, uh, I think that that, like, I think about that all the time.
And I think something that Harry, our CEO says a lot is we want to make podcasts for like a hyper specific group of people. And the more [00:19:00] understanding you are of like who your audience is and who's actually going to be listening and you know, you have that idea of the person on the other end. I think the better the podcast is going to be.
People
Alex B: love that story. They never get sick of it. So my key takeaway for me is kind of doing post production editing and mixing and all that, that scruffy is quite good actually sometimes. The pauses don't all have to be natural. The content doesn't always have to flow nicely from one piece to another.
The aim of the game can sometimes just be to make things snappy and exciting and rough. I'm not convinced that that was always an intentional choice on their part, but it still works. So I think it's something to bear in mind. That's
Jackie: just like that hard cut moment. You know the fun thing too about that is, uh, when you have those, like, very snappy, kind of out of the, like, not doesn't feel natural, out of the way things, is that it resets your attention, like, immediately.[00:20:00]
Alex B: If you've listened, what do you the listener, think about blowback, let us know. You can berate me on Twitter at Bennett underscore FN double N double T. Hit follow in Apple Podcasts or Spotify and we'll see you in the next episode of Podcast Boot Club with a new show. And you host. Bye.