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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
00:00 Alex B
Welcome to Podcast Book Club from Lower Street Media, where we take a look at what makes great podcasts so great. Remember the Cambrian period? Back at the start of the Paleozoic era, back in the day, 538 million years ago. Simpler times, before trees were invented, when it was just you and the other trilobites, brachiopods and molluscs hanging out on the shores of Pannotia. It was a much more optimistic time. Imagine that, going from single cell organisms all the way to reef building marine sponges. It was a simpler time, a better time. If we're going to be stuck in the current human-centred epoch, the Anthropocene, then we may as well try to find something good amongst the piercing din of our newfangled higher brain functions and oh-so-precious opposable thumbs. That's where the focus of this week's show, The Anthropocene Reviewed, comes in. It's a podcast from author and internet man-about-town John Green that reviews various facets of the human-centred world on a five-star scale. The episode we're focusing on today is called Plague. It was released in September 2020, so you can imagine the context it came out in. I'm Alex, the Senior Audio Engineer at Lower Street, and I'm not alone. Today, I'm joined by Marion.
01:34 Marion
Hi there.
01:36 Alex B
And Zoe.
01:37 Zoe
Hello there.
Both Marion and Zoe are producers here at Lower Street. So, to start with, I'd like your thoughts on the episode that we listened to. And Marion, we'll start with you.
01:45 Marion
Thank you. I really enjoyed it. I'm a sucker for sort of historical, well-written, thoughtfully edited and sound designed stories, as I'm sure we all are. And I love history that's history, not sort of political history. And he really just sucks us into this human-centred story of plague at a really incredible time. And it's interesting to look back on, like, just broadly, just to listen to someone telling this story from being right in the heart of COVID and the terror of that. Like, I think it was released September 2020. And the unknowingness before there's a vaccination and all of those things. And then to have him also read these accounts of plague from that time and just the terror of that. And so it was just really interesting, especially listening from where we sit in 2023, where it's, you know, so much less terrifying and just almost an everyday moment for us now. So yeah, I thought it was really interesting, very layered, so beautifully written and so well designed.
03:13 Alex B
Yeah. It felt somewhat like a time capsule, going back to it. Yeah. Yeah. John Green has written loads of, well, not loads, but quite a few books at this point. He's famous for, is it The Fault in Our Stars?
03:29 Marion
Yeah.
03:30 Zoe
That's right.
03:31
Yeah. And Looking for Alaska, I think. A bunch of young adult fiction.
03:36 Marion
Yeah. And I have to admit, I haven't read him. I mean, I have, I know lots of people have, and I've just sort of, you know, it was like, oh, he's a young adult. And I, you know, not that there's anything wrong with young adult, but I just hadn't, it wasn't on my radar. Yeah. I want to read more of John Green for sure.
03:54 Alex B
Zoe, what did you think?
03:57 Zoe
Yeah, I concur with a lot of what Marion said. I thought it was beautifully written, really subtle and lovely music and sound design. I actually went and listened to some of the other episodes, which is the first podcast book club. And what I really like about it is how like him as a narrator and him as a creator is weaved into the story, but not in a really oppressive way. So obviously the episode is not about him. It's about COVID. It's about the plague, but you can so consistently hear about his own life and his own experience weaved into that. And I just thought that was so good and it was so well done and it wasn't jarring in any way. And it didn't feel like someone going, actually, this is all about me. It didn't feel like that. It just felt like someone who had the ability to apply his own life and his own experiences to something in a way that was really compassionate. And I really loved that about it. And then the whole idea of almost doing Yelp reviews or out of five star reviews about things in the world, I just found it such a fun idea. And it's almost like trying to condense these massive topics, like the idea of plague, the idea of people not being able to see each other into this quite small thing. I found really humorous, but it really worked. So yeah, I really enjoyed it. I agree with a lot of the stuff Marion said.
05:23 Alex B
Yeah, I think that's a good point. It's almost like a fun wrapper to place everything in. It probably makes it feel a bit more approachable.
05:32 Zoe
Yeah, completely.
05:34 Clips
I'm John Green. And today I'll be reviewing historical outbreaks of bubonic and pneumonic plague, because, you know, I want to keep it light and fun around here.
05:41 Marion
Hilariously, at the end of it, I was like, hey, maybe like he's going to, you know, give it a high rating. Plagues are all right, brings out some good things. And then he was like one star. Three out of five. I was like, right, of course.
06:00 Zoe
Would not repeat.
06:02 Alex B
I think it's interesting you said, Zoe, that he didn't place himself at the center of it. But for this episode, I think for a lot of the stuff John Green makes, it is very much centered around him. Not that it's all about him, but rather it felt as though he made this episode for the catharsis it gave him. It was almost as though he was talking through his own anxieties and concerns around the pandemic at the time and kind of getting it out of his system. Like this kind of process of maybe overthinking things and reading all of these books and finding all of these sources and writing all podcast episode about the plague was in a kind of roundabout way cathartic for him.
06:46 Zoe
So the other episode that I listened to, which was essentially about John Green getting unwell after doing this long book tour, and it was an episode of him reviewing the podcast, so reviewing the Anthropocene and giving it a star rating. And it was, I mean, as meta as you want to get, but that episode was so much more autobiographical and it was quite different to this episode that you gave us. But I definitely like take your point about the catharsis and wanting to work out those thoughts that he had about the situation. But there was also an element of he had previously been, I can't remember if he was a priest or the, he did work in a hospital in some way and worked with people and tried to ease their concerns there. And it kind of felt like he was mirroring that past experience in this episode. So catharsis for other people as well.
07:41 Marion
There's a quality to his voice that really amplifies that vulnerability and just his delivery is so interesting how there's the fragility of all of this situation and the, you know, and the pandemic and the plague itself and all of those. You really feel like you're in his world a little bit and you're feeling his anxieties like in these, not just through his words, but the way that he speaks and the way he delivers it. It's just so personal, but also this like extremely broad story that everyone gets.
08:12 Alex B
Yeah. The first thing I wanted to mention was we've all said that we liked the show and said great things about it. And I think it's interesting for me, at least I seem to have a real affinity for single host monologue shows, but I think it is something that on paper is kind of limiting or at first glance might seem limiting. Do you think that John Green is making the most of like a fundamentally limiting format or is he just kind of playing to his strengths or do you think he could do better if he had guests on or was bringing in different pieces of audio, like, I don't know, archive tape or something like that?
09:02 Marion
I feel like he's playing to his strengths certainly. And, you know, when you're a good writer, he's, you know, a comfortable broadcaster for sure. There's nothing wrong with that. And I think bringing in more sound would actually take away from the loveliness of his storytelling. I had to sort of go back and listen to it again, because I got so sucked into the story. I wasn't noticing the sound design, but I think that's how great the sound design is, is that it's like so aligned with every tone change and every shift in the story. And it was just really perfectly in tune with his writing. And so it's so spare, I guess, that you don't notice it, but also like just really supports the story as well. And so I think when you drop in sound effects, there's just no purpose to it, especially with a story like that. It would feel not genuine.
09:54 Clips
Between the years of 1347 and 1351, perhaps half of all humans living in Europe died of the related diseases bubonic and pneumonic plague.
09:53 Alex B
There's a show I listen to every now and then. It's also completely random. Fun fact is the only podcast I listen to on greater than one time speed. But it's The Fall of Civilizations, and it's one English guy who talks way too slowly. But for some of the quotes that he brings in, he has actors play some of the voices. And I actually found that when it works, it works really well. But because he needs to find such a large number of different people to voice all these different historical characters at various points in the different episodes, that the quality just ended up being a little bit too varied and something that on paper should have consistently added to the episode ended up subtracting from it a little bit, because the audio quality was jumping around a little bit too much.
11:05 Zoe
Yeah, I can see how that would be, especially if you had ropey audio quality and also like maybe not the best acting in the world. That could definitely be jarring. I mean, to answer the question about using that format to its fullest, I think it's a really, really good question. And I also have a penchant for just single voice, especially history podcasts. I love them. I know you love them too, Alex. And I think it really, really depends on the quality of the host and what kind of world that they paint. So I think with this one, you're kind of supposed to be in his head almost, in his sort of world that he's written out for you and having anything that kind of takes you outside of that. So like sound effects or other people's voices, it would just take you out of this sort of almost dreamy, even though the subject matter is really serious, this kind of dreamy space that he's put you in. And the music is very subtle. One of the things I wrote down actually is just like you were saying, Marion, that music's subtle and I didn't necessarily notice it. But when I did sit back and listen to it properly, it really added to it just because of the subtlety and building this sort of dreamlike experience. I personally wouldn't add anything else in there just because it's his mind. You're in his mind and it's his world.
12:29 Marion
Yeah. There's another podcast that I listen to that is one, it's just a storytelling thing it's called. And my family and I, we all listen to it like on drives and stuff. And it's called Under the Influence. And it's just about interesting sort of stories about historical advertising campaigns. And it's really fascinating. And it's very spare as well in terms of sound effects or clips. They basically just, they throw a jingle in every now and then, but essentially it's the host talking and telling the story. And he's got a really strange sort of advertising like delivery, but it works because of the subject matter.
13:15 Clips
The Dishware Company sold bulk dishes to the theater owners at 10 cents a piece. So for example, if an owner bought 700 dishes, it would cost $70. But instead of making just $50 in slow ticket sales, the movie house could attract $300 worth of patrons seeking free dishes.
13:35 Marion
But I don't think it always works. And I don't think it always works when the person, the host isn't the writer. Because John Green wrote it, and it's totally about him. You are, as Zoe says, like brought into his mind. And it's a journey that's not just about the story, but it's about a journey through his anxieties and thoughts and fears and hope as well.
14:02 Alex B
Yeah, that's a great point. And even on just like a technical pronunciation, pacing, intonation level, you tend to be able to read something that you yourself have written far, far more easily than something somebody else has written for you.
14:19 Marion
I always tell, you know, hosts or guests or whatever, if I'm writing for them, like, please change words. If you don't feel like you would ever use that word, then, you know, you'll deliver it so much more genuinely if it's the way you would speak. And we all try and write for our hosts the way that they would speak. But yeah, that's important for sure to make people feel comfortable. And they'll deliver it properly that way.
14:40 Zoe
Just to add to that, the longer you spend with people, the more you're able to sort of mimic that in your writing, right? The first little while of actually getting to know someone's cadence and their style is, can be really difficult to work that out. But as you spend more time with someone, it's much better and you can really get a sense of what they're going to say before they say it in a way.
15:03 Clips
Your line, just say it as I said, would the detour so simple? Would the detour so simple? Would the detour so simple? Would the detour so simple? My dear boy, why do you say that? Why do you say twer? Well, you said it like I said.
15:20 Alex B
It feels as though a kind of key word in terms of the format and in terms of the music and production design and all that is efficiency. It's almost as though they've used the minimum amount of complexity for the maximum level of effect, if that makes sense.
15:38 Zoe
It does make sense. Yeah, I think like the complexity in it is in the narrative in the writing, isn't it? So as we were saying, kind of adding ridiculous, really, really dense sound design would potentially distract you from just this beautiful lilting tone he has and this wonderful writing style.
16:00 Alex B
So another thing I wanted to mention is how they handled tone in this episode. I think there was always the potential on a topic like this to perhaps over egg it and to have it feel relentlessly miserable. And I certainly think John takes it pretty close to the line in terms of how much misery and destruction you can put in an episode before you start to put a little kind of positive twist in the tale as happens in kind of the last third of the episode, I'd say. So how do you guys think they handle tone in this?
16:42 Zoe
It's a very valid question. And looking at the context of where we were at that time and the context of what the episode was being made about in COVID might give a clue about why it was so close to the line. Because I think kind of at that time, you know, this is just a theory, but our threshold for bleakness was quite high, just because we were going through something that was so strange and unknowable and bleak, that potentially the reason it does go so close to the line is because that's kind of what was going on in wider media. I'd be really interested to see what you both think, but that would maybe be why I think it is as bleak as it is.
17:27 Alex B
I think it makes sense in the context when it came out. I think they did a really, really good job of creating that tone and then letting it develop and marinate and then towards the end, just shifting off it a little bit before it might have become, I don't know, oppressive is probably the word. You know, when the story at the end talks about Eam, the village north of London, where they had their own kind of self-imposed quarantine to stop an outbreak of the plague, making it further into the surrounding communities, which even in itself is a bit dark because I think he said that like 200 of 700 people in the village died, but it was still a relatively kind of light twist right at the end.
18:17 Clips
Eam's self-quarantine held to a remarkable extent for 14 months, preventing the spread of the mortality to any nearby towns.
18:29 Marion
For me, the tone was, it was close to the edge, but it made perfect sense. I mean, these accounts that he was reading were so intense. I think, you know, if he had gone any further with it, it would have been a bit much, but yeah, the story of Eam, that's the hope. And it's this idea that we're all in it together and there's a bit of sacrifice. So as humans, we're not so terrible, we're not so terrible, despite all of the terrible aspects of what he was speaking about. That's why I was sort of like at the end thinking plague, maybe three stars, but it brings out some good, but yeah, it was bleak and it was a bleak time and he was working through that. And I think if I had listened to that during the time that it was released in September, 2020, I wonder how I would think of it. I can't really say, I don't know how I would have responded, whether I would have been just like terribly depressed and not hopeful at all, or if that little hopeful story at the end would have lifted me. I'm not sure.
19:39 Alex B
The first time I listened to it, I don't think it was exactly when it came out, but I don't think it was that long after it did. And to be honest, it just felt validating more than anything. It's just, oh, someone else feels similarly.
19:54 Marion
Right. Yeah. And also that we've been through this before, I suppose, and we're going through it now. And that whole, I loved his little moment about unprecedented times and we should stop saying unprecedented.
20:08 Clips
We often hear that we live in unprecedented times, but what worries me is that these times feel quite precedent.
20:17 Marion
We went through a hundred years of not really having much struggle, I suppose, and just things improving generally for the world. And then this thing happens and you tend to forget that we're not invincible. And we're not on this path to healthfulness and protection. And everybody's got the right to 80 years of living or 90 years of living or whatever. So it's interesting. I just loved how he sort of in some way just brought it down to this universal experience that has spanned seven or 800 years.
20:53 Zoe
I really like the point about validation as well, like not just personal validation, maybe Alex, of what you were feeling when you listened to it sort of close to the time. But that story about Eam right at the end, when I was listening to it, I almost thought about during COVID, there were so many things that were just being done. Like we were quarantining, stuff was shut down. And I almost felt like him saying, look, people have done similar things in the past and it worked. So it was almost like a comforting thing as well to know that, as you say, Marianne, we've been through it before and things did work that we're doing now. And we're implementing that. So yeah, felt like a comfort as well.
21:39 Clips
I think it would have been far more comforting during lockdown to be able to leave heavy silver coins for delivery, like in a stone outside the house.
21:48 Zoe
I love it.
21:50 Alex B
That sounded great.
21:51 Clips
A stone boundary marker, which can still be seen, marked the line that villagers would not cross. Eam residents would leave coins and holes bored into that marker to pay for food and other supplies, which would then be left around the marker by people from nearby communities.
22:09 Alex B
So I have a couple of small points. The first one is a question, actually, were you guys served an ad when you listened to this?
22:18 Zoe
Yes, I was.
22:19 Marion
I was not. And then I was like, is this the ad? And it was so subtle that I didn't hear it. Is this like another like, and then I listened to it in Spotify and then on Apple, and it wasn't there either. So
22:33 Alex B
Interesting. So when this first came out, it had a mid-roll ad for life insurance, also written and hosted by John Green, which was pretty great because the transition or the throw to the ad was John saying, and now here's an advert that hopefully won't feel like a sharp tonal twist or something like that. Matthew 28.00
22:56 Clips
But first, here's an advertisement that won't feel at all like a tonal shift.
23:01 Alex B
Then he goes on to tell a story about his grandfather's will and all that sort of stuff, life insurance kind of things, which I thought was a bit of a tonal shift, but because it was still written and presented by him, it made sense to me. However, today, when I went and listened to it, I was served a dynamically inserted mid-roll ad for Duolingo, which just felt very, very surreal and also kind of a shame that they went from a really, really solid, solidly integrated ad to dynamically inserted ones.
23:38 Zoe
Yes, I had the same Duolingo one, and even with the kind of, this is going to be a real tonal shift, it was incredibly jarring still, and that often happens, I think, with these dynamically inserted ads, like, especially some of the stuff that I listen to is quite serious, investigative journalism podcasts, and it will just be like they're talking about something really serious, and then it will suddenly be like a really bright and chirpy almost radio ad, and that's definitely the experience I had with this. But having said that, I did laugh because I knew a big tonal shift was coming because he said it was going to come, and just that big jump, it did make me laugh, I have to admit, which is probably not what this podcast was trying to do, but still.
24:22 Alex B
Yeah, I appreciated the handoff, even though they switched the ads, it was nice to have that in there as an acknowledgement. I think it helps. It also gives me enough time to grab my phone out of my pocket and hit the fast forward 15 seconds button a bunch of times on Spotify.
24:38 Zoe
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
24:40 Clips
Now, here's one of our favorite Duff beer commercials from the early 1950s. Duff beer commercial Only Duff fills your queue zone with pure beer goodness.
24:50 Alex B
One final thing, which I really liked, and I would just love to see more and more shows do, is the use of personal stories from the host to advance the narrative. I really, really liked the way that John Green used stories from his own life to start the episode, to link sections together, and to kind of keep things moving along. I thought this episode is a really, really good example of using that as a device. I don't know what you guys think.
25:22 Marion
Coming in cold, completely never listened to this podcast and didn't know a ton about him as a writer. But to start it off with this prescription, and immediately you're aware that he's managing anxiety, I think the prescription was for. And so right away, this is the state of mind that we're in. I thought it was really effective. And it's a funny story as well.
25:48 Clips
Anyway, in the end, I was able to pick up the prescription the following afternoon. And when I did so, the woman behind the counter pointed at me and said, It's the perfect world guy.
26:00 Alex B
We’d all like to be known as the perfect world guy.
26:04 Zoe
I loved that, Alex. I really loved that aspect of it. And I think that's probably a reason why it gets away with being so minimal in its other elements. So not having other voices in there, not having huge amounts of music is because his own narrative is weaved into it. And it really paints a picture in a way that potentially you couldn't do with those other things. It really paints a picture of him and his own experience and how he relates to the subject matter of the episode. I just, yeah, I think it was beautiful. I really, really enjoyed that. And interestingly enough, you know, also going into this cold, I didn't have an impression that that's what I was coming into, you know, looking at the descriptions of the episodes, the artwork, that kind of thing. You don't necessarily know that you're going into almost like an essay of this man's story and also the subject matter sort of smashed together, but in a really lovely way. So it was really surprising. And I thought it's lovely as a technique.
27:03 Alex B
I also wonder if by putting himself in his own experiences out there and being somewhat emotionally vulnerable himself, if that makes us as the listener a little bit more open to slightly darker or more emotionally taxing topics. If we feel as though it's not just somebody being like, oh, this stuff sucks. But instead somebody saying, you know, I've tussled with this stuff myself and now I'm sharing it with you. It certainly doesn't feel like somebody's, I don't know, dispassionately chronicling like the history of the plague.
27:44 Marion
Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that's a great point. And it made me think about the other episode that you shared with the Icelandic hot dog and the signing your name 250,000 times. And the second story about signing your name 250,000 times is so wonderfully written. And he just brings you into his entire experience of having to do this task for months on end. And he starts to have this sort of discussion about what goes through your mind. And one of the things is he speaks about the relationship between the writer and the reader and how they're sort of in this dance together. And one relies on the other. And it's so wonderful the way he describes that and how the writer is voicing things the reader has always thought and in some ways it's the same, you know, it's back and forth. It's this amazing exchange. And when you hear that and that sort of his approach and his philosophy about being a writer and being a reader, and then you listen to this episode on the plague, it's a wonderful insight, I guess, to how he approaches telling these stories and how he connects with people and tries to, you know, relate his own experience, but also voice the listeners experience as well. It's pretty amazing.
29:11 Clips
The first thing to know is that it's going to take a while. If you rush, you can maybe sign 700 sheets an hour, but you're not a machine.
29:21 Alex B
So that's everything I wanted to discuss. Is there anything else you guys want to touch on?
29:25 Zoe
Yeah, I had actually a connecting point just about what Marion was saying. So I think it's telling that both of us have done our extracurricular reading and have gone and listened to other episodes because I think, you know, sometimes with podcasts, you can dive into one episode and you'll have an experience of that one piece of audio and you don't necessarily need to go and listen to the rest of the catalogue to have a richer experience, right? But I think with this one, because of the nature of it being so personal and having the kind of narrative that it does, for me personally, going and listening to another episode was really helpful in understanding what I just listened to because it feels like there's almost a narrative thread running through it and the narrative thread is John Green and his experiences. So if you've listened to it, you find out that he has OCD and that's something that he's taking that medication for, right? And that will add more to the experience of what you listen to in that episode, right? So I think that was just a really interesting thing that this, it almost invites you and it really adds to the experience if you listen to a few or all of them in the series.
30:36 Alex B
And if you guys want a really tear-jerking listen, there's a podcast called People I Mostly Admire and John Green was an interviewee on that and he goes into much more detail about his time spent as a chaplain in a hospital. It's very upsetting but very, very interesting to listen to. So what did you think about The Anthropocene Reviewed? What did you think about what we thought about The Anthropocene Reviewed? Hit us up on Twitter at podcastbookclub and I'll be sure to tell you what I think about, what you think about, what I thought about the show. Bye!