Laura Mayer On Her Satirical (and Sincere!) Show About "Getting Hers" From the Podcast Industry
Laura Mayer On Her Satirical (and Sincere!) Show About "Getting Hers" From the Podcast Industry
This Issue of The Squeeze Is Very Meta
Hello!
A couple of months ago I read the following show description:
After years of seeing friends (and some enemies) get rich, rich, rich selling their shows and companies to other bigger shows and bigger companies, longtime podcast executive Laura Mayer has decided to get hers. To do this, she'll speak to straight-up geniuses in the worlds of podcasting, entertainment, and business to understand what value is in media and how to make it. At the end, Laura will sell the show itself to the highest bidder. Will she make hundreds, millions, or even dozens of dollars? Will she be able to afford the gray house down the street from her rental apartment? Let’s find out together… shamelessly.
…and boom, I was hooked on Shameless Acquisition Target before I even listened to the trailer (and when I did listen, it didn’t disappoint). I was aware that Laura was an accomplished producer, having worked on several of my favorite shows (The Dream, Death at the Wing, and The Just Enough Family, to name a few), and I knew a bit about her experiences working in “Big Podcasting,” but this show still arrived as a complete surprise. When she and I spoke by phone this week, her stories were honest, compelling, and hilarious — just like her show. With today’s interview, I decided to take my voice out of the conversation and give Laura the stage.
A few housekeeping notes before we jump into it:
I’m taking next week off to virtually attend Podcast Movement and catch up on a few other things;
I’m speaking in-person at She Podcasts Live in Washington D.C. in October and would love to see you there! Use discount code skye for $200 off the ticket price. (If you’ll be there, hit reply on this email and let me know!);
I’m also thrilled to be speaking at the inaugural Multitude Podcasting Conference on September 9th. The conference is “all about making a living in podcasting” and is “for and by professional creators.” Register for the all-virtual event here (suggested donations range from zero to $50).
With that, I give you Laura Mayer, in her own words!
This has been edited for clarity and length.
I left my job last February. I'd had a baby and gotten really sick with preeclampsia; I almost died. I had a crash entry into parenthood.
There are all these clichés that I had been hoping would happen for me, where you have a kid and emerge a totally different person, and by that I mean, maybe work would seem less important to me. Which I realize is totally antifeminist, but I kind of thought — especially because I almost died and now had a kid — that I would feel less neurotic about work because I had to. Much to my chagrin, the opposite happened.
I emerged feeling sort of upset about a series of decisions I had made in my career. I basically had always ended up as the “agreeable number two” to a more well known man in podcasting or media. I realized I couldn’t go back to that; it had been making me miserable. So I entered this new phase of life with a renewed sense of like, shit, I need to redefine how I am considered in this industry and I gotta get mine.
I was constantly thinking about podcasts, talking about podcasts, listening to podcasts, and I was also doing this bit where I would refer to myself as a “shameless acquisition target” — as if I'm just out here, trying to to get someone to acquire me all the time. And one day my husband said, why don’t you make a show about that? And I thought, that’s not a bad idea!
I told my two of my closest friends, Rachel Wolther and Jesse Millward. They’re filmmakers. They’ve done a bunch of things but of course my favorite work of theirs is an online commercial they made for Fresh Step that starred my cat, Hector. I trusted them because in the past they were always honest when there was like, a gaping hole in some idea I had. They thought the concept behind the show was an encapsulation of all the stuff about podcasting that I had been talking about and complaining about for the last several years. I was like, okay, I trust your taste.
The first person in podcasting that I talked to about the idea was [Kaleidoscope co-founder] Mangesh Hattikudur. Before he worked in podcasting, he co-founded Mental Floss magazine and so he had had this whole other career in publishing. I felt like, as someone who had worked outside of audio, he was more open to what a podcast could be. To be honest, if some bizarre version of me had pitched me on this show, I probably would have said, don't do it — you’ll embarrass yourself! But Mangesh said that he liked the “rascal energy” I would bring to it; he really got the fun of it. His vote of confidence meant a lot to me.
I wrote up a treatment for the show. I knew it would be really important to get the tone right. I started by writing out what the loudest, most shameless version of myself would sound like. That became the basis for how I explained what the show was, and how I pitched people on coming on the show as guests. I wanted the pitch to make it clear that there would be this comedic bent to it, but that I would always be the butt of the joke. I wanted people to understand that this wasn’t going to be a straightforward NPR version of this show.
My brilliant plan was that I would pre-produce 80% of all of the episodes, because that’s what I had told other people to do in the past. The idea was to leave 20% for bibs and bobs and whatever came up along the way. Now I realize why that almost never works! For one thing, I didn’t have a person like me, telling me what to do. I got close to hiring a Survivor finalist who's now an accountability coach to yell at me to hit my deadlines. That was determined to be a “bad use of money,” but I think if an almost-winner of Survivor had been yelling at me this spring, my summer would have been a lot easier.
I'm tired but I think I’m having fun? I mean, during this process, I accidentally wrote an actual song, called “Let Me Be Your Rounding Error.” I laughed very hard during that process. (That song appears in today’s episode and you can also find it on Soundcloud.)
When I’m not having fun is when I'm writing the scripts and things are problematic and it’s just not working. I probably wrote six different versions of the first episode. It was a wildly inefficient process. And I just thought, well, this has been fun while it’s lasted, but I guess it’s over for me. As it turned out, I just needed to take a walk and not look at it for a while.
I will always suffer from imposter syndrome, but literally almost dying — I mean dying is not good. There are real stakes all of a sudden. That experience forced me to stop thinking as much about how I would be perceived. It took the most extreme example for me to just get over myself.
I have this theory about mid-market weather people, especially weathermen, who are like the funny guy on the network, but what they really wanna be are comedians. They’ve taken the safe, yet ego-stroking route of being the funny weather person instead of trying to hit it big in comedy or taking a real risk. There’s this weird comparison to me, in that I’ve always stayed behind the scenes, but now here I am, making this thing where I'm front and center! No matter what I do next, there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. On a slightly larger scale, people know who I really am. And that kind of stinks because you can't lie to yourself anymore; you can’t get away from it. When I released the trailer, there was no going back.
The response has been nice. A lot of people have reached out to say that they think the show is fun. A couple of people I know from the industry let me know that they’re worried about what it will do to my reputation. I think from their perspective, it could be harder for me to land another executive job. And I am worried about getting an executive job again. I’d like one if it were the right fit! But I worry that a lot of companies can be very conservative and may not want to hire someone who has put themselves so “out there,” as I have with this project.
No matter what ends up happening with the show, the most satisfying thing is that I've been able to break myself out of this rut that I’ve been in for years. It’s been a way to prove to myself that I can make something on my own as opposed to standing besides or behind someone else. That's all I could ask for.
And truly, there is still a version of this in which I embarrass myself so thoroughly that I have to change industries. We’ll just have to see!
Episode three of Shameless Acquistion Target — in which I get a chance to shamelessly plug this very newsletter — arrived in feeds today.
That’s all for me this week! See you in two weeks.
Skye