In early 2016, after occasional stints editing features for public radio, I took a call about a top-secret new podcast project overseen by Laura Mayer, who was then the managing producer of a new company called Panoply, an audio-production offshoot of Slate magazine.
I’d crossed paths with Laura years earlier while working as a temp producer at WNYC radio in New York. Then, as now, she struck me as wise (and wry) beyond her years, with more “office cool” than I’d ever have.
I soon found out about the project I was being interviewed to edit: a podcast hosted by writer Malcolm Gladwell — a show that was later named “Revisionist History.” The podcast hit No. 1 on the Apple Podcasts charts that year.
I’m not the only person whose life changed after a call from Laura Mayer. She would go on to help launch numerous podcasts including “Happier with Gretchen Rubin,” Ariel Levy’s “The Just Enough Family,” and “The Dream,” a show about multi-level marketing scams.
These were years of enormous churn and activity in the smallish world of audio production in the U.S., as new companies sprung up and drew from — or were started by — members of the previously undervalued talent pool in public radio.
Laura Mayer and I worked together only briefly. Like many executives in this chaotic era, she moved from company to company. Her social media posts would cross my feed from time to time, as she started new ventures and became a parent.
Then in 2022, Mayer’s name blazed back into industry consciousness with a podcast of her own called “Shameless Acquisition Target.” She built the six (and a half)-episode series around the conceit that she would sell it at the end of its run (which she did) and be completely transparent about the show’s profits (there were none).
The podcast was a raw and funny, if oblique, take on managing shows, budgets, and being “a trusted deputy” in a new media industry — but missing out on (or being deprived of) the stock cash outs that had benefitted a select few. The episodes featured weird asides and sometimes autobiographical songs, which Mayer wrote and hired musicians to belt out in the style of '90s-era Wilson Phillips pop ballads. If it had just been meta-commentary on the business, even I might have stopped listening, but it remained compelling and original.
Mayer’s idol, “This American Life”'s Ira Glass, shows up in the final episode. Later, he told “Bullseye” host Jesse Thorn that he initially thought the premise of Mayer’s show was ridiculous but, “She’s so funny and just like packing in a million jokes in every paragraph, and she performs it well. And then I was just like, okay, I’m in…I’ve listened to every episode!”
The key word in “Shameless Acquisition Target,” and the source of its surprising complexity, was its shamelessness. The so-called golden age of podcasting was in many ways a pressure cooker. It relied on the quiet fortitude of producers and managers like Mayer to keep the lid in place and the hit shows coming.
For that reason, the public doesn’t hear many honest voices from the ranks of mid-level podcast managers (or digital media managers in general), no matter how many complaints they utter behind closed doors. But here was one voice, not only speaking openly about the trap of being “a corporate mommy,” but composing songs about it.
The podcast has become a basis for Mayer’s memoir, “Tryhard: A Cautionary Tale of Clocking In and Spinning Out,” published earlier this year. In the book, Mayer goes much more into her upbringing in suburban Chicago, where at an early age, she assumed an adult-like role trying to fend off the chaos of family alcoholism with spreadsheets. It’s a background she admits later led her to run towards work situations often sent others running the opposite direction.
Reading that memoir made me want to go back and listen to “Shameless Acquisition Target,” especially because it features a great deal of Mayer just talking. Like me, she came from public radio, where reporters are discouraged from letting narration go on too long without tape (that is, cutting to reporting or interviews). Standards are looser in the realm of podcasts, but pulling off long stretches of monologue can be a challenge. Why did she choose that approach, and how did she make it work?
The first episode, “Turning Chicken Sh&t into Chicken Seed,” starts off with some tape via an interview with her father, who speaks about his many failed investments — including a doomed chicken-feed company. Then, after an ad break that Mayer tries brazenly to monetize, she launches into her first long monologue. The excerpt below, annotated with my interview with Mayer, starts about 8:40 into the episode.
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‘Shameless Acquisition Target’: Episode 1
Laura Mayer Script:
Around the same time as the “chicken shit to chicken seed” situation, I heard my first “podcast,” which was an episode of the radio show “This American Life.” I burned it onto a CD to listen to while shelving books at my job at the local children’s library.
“This American Life” made me feel for the first time ever that there was a world outside of the sometimes hard one of my family. Julia Barton: You write about how your upbringing created the kind of workplace person that you became. That you were either already too used to red flags, or you were like, ‘I can handle this’ — or perhaps you actually wanted those red-flag situations.Laura Mayer: Without veering into Instagram pseudo-therapist talk, I do think that people are sort of drawn to situations that feel familiar, whether that’s ‘good’ familiar or ‘bad’ familiar. And I happen to have been born into a family with two adults who were very complicated. I think by virtue of being, probably, the most self-sufficient seeming kid, I was wired as kind of the manager. I thought I could put myself into the position as a means of control; to be the manager of the chaos as a means of survival. Stable lives with narratives that had beginnings, middles, and ends. The show expanded my world, gave me a sense of who I could be as an adult.
My conclusion in discovering this wonder was that I needed to work in radio. People who come out of radio bring a certain sensibility into podcasting. I’m thinking about your time at WNYC and working with hosts there, all radio people. There are a lot of things about that experience I think I can hear in your own podcast.To the extent that I’ve ever learned anything in my life, I think it was while I was at WNYC. Obviously learned how to read and stuff when I was in school. And I went to journalism school (Medill), which I called my ‘vocational English’ program. But in terms of coming into some place not knowing anything and then realizing that I needed to get with the program of learning how other people made this thing that had been called only ‘radio’? You know, having to write and make sure that things stuck within a clock, or thinking through what an intro should or shouldn’t be. The practice of having to basically follow and learn a bunch of tips and tricks that I still use, to learn a bunch of practices of how you, quote-unquote, ‘make’ radio. It is kind of the only thing I’ve ever learned. I imprinted on this path like a feral kitten to an older duck in one of those viral, interspecies friendship videos. This is to say, from teenagehood forward, I had every ounce of determination focused on my career, on this particular career.
So when I was 22, I did something that no one else in my family had done in 100 years. I’m curious if the podcast, telling a more cryptic version of your life, helped or actually made it harder to go there in the book?I think writing about this stuff sort of obliquely in the podcast was for me personally to see how my parents would respond to it. Because my parents are both still alive. There’s been a lot of good change in terms of how my mother shows up in the world and our relationship with each other. But I did spend, I’d say, starting around this time last year up until the book came out, terrified that my mother was never going to speak to me again. I moved east of Indiana. I moved to the big city, New York City, to be precise.
Why did I make that move? Was it to get on Broadway? To be like Carrie Bradshaw in the censored TBS version of “Sex and the City”?
I moved to New York because two radio shows I loved were in New York, “This American Life” and “Radiolab.” That’s right, in 2009, I moved to the big city to make it big on the radio. As some investment banker told me, as I waited for him to buy me a drink, “You want to work in radio? Isn’t that like working in VHS?”
He did not buy me a drink. Your voice is so well established early on in the podcast.After there were a couple of episodes, my first instinct was to be like, ‘I’m so sorry you had to listen to all of that.’ Just in terms of there being so much of my voice. But I think that I was trying to make the decisions that felt ethically fair in terms of not dragging anyone down with me...a big reason why I spent so much time talking myself, was because then I’m the only one to blame. I was wearing a tube top.
Things in radio and podcasting were different in 2009. And specifically at WNYC, New York Public Radio, where I started as an intern. When I arrived there during the hard depths of the Great Recession, the station was in the process of shutting down almost all of their podcasts.
At that time, there was lots of talk about the podcast bubble having burst. That was okay with me, because I had $3,000 and very cheap rent. I got a bonafide sort of job as a permalancer assistant producer at WNYC. At this period of time, ‘Radiolab’ had really broken through, and Ira Glass was really championing narrative. There were more popularized discussions around craft specifically at ‘This American Life,’ and this idea of a story, like, ‘turning’ — when the ‘turn’ was. I had a spreadsheet and I listened to every episode of ‘This American Life’ going back to my Chicago days when I would burn them on CDs and listen. I went through and marked when the ‘turn’ happened, time-wise. I don’t remember the percentage point, but I was able to mark that by and large, they all happened at a certain percentage runtime. ... I remember thinking, there is so much art behind this, but there’s also, there’s a very specific science.
How do you define ‘the turn’?The turn is the pivot or twist in a ‘TAL’ story where a second layer of unexpected depth is revealed, that is either truly surprising in its own right, or gives deeper context to the original stakes of the story. ‘The turn’ is part of every (or most!) ‘TAL’ stories.
Things were young and wild. When I wasn’t working on the radio, I was trying to get people to buy me drinks in the meatpacking district. Has anyone ever been so young? I remember how, especially during COVID, interviews were falling apart. There was no field tape. And hosts were like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we should do that episode.’ I was like, ‘Let’s do it, man. Just write the f---ing thing!’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, I can do that?’ It would be great, and audiences didn’t care (about the lack of tape).Yeah. And what was interesting to me, too, is I don’t really consider myself a good writer, but I do write the way I talk. I’ve cobbled together how to do things in the way that I write and talk.
Five and a half years passed. I took on other jobs at the radio station. The first season of “Serial” came out.
Suddenly, podcasts were back, baby. No, they had never actually left, but we’ll get to that. Long story short, “Serial” opened up new financial conversations in podcasting.
Big companies suddenly saw that there might be money in these podcast hills. Gimlet Media started. People were making livable wages, getting good healthcare benefits, acting strangely optimistic.
People were finally buying me drinks. So when I was approached to be employee number one at a podcast startup called Panoply, then a part of Slate Magazine, I was like, yeah, I’ll take that job. I’ll take that job like crazy. Your voice is one that just wasn’t heard publicly — your kind of voice. The people that you heard from would be the bosses who would say all the things during publicity rounds. There would be the hosts. And then if you ever heard from the producers or the managers, it would be like, you know, being allowed to say thanks during some awards ceremony. But usually not.But usually not. I was in an extreme, for me, position of power and privilege, just getting into this these gatekeeper-y roles. I mean, privilege literally — like, I made money for the first time in my life. But I was always to the side of the people actually making the decisions. Which, if I think back to a younger version of me, made it riskier for me to use my own voice, because the main value that those positions of ‘solid deputy,’ chief operating officer, have is discretion.
I had access to that information not necessarily because people thought I was particularly good at anything, but because it seemed like I was someone who would not do anything with that information.
And I worked like, well, crazy for two years. I didn’t take a weekend off for the entire time I was there. I got married at Staten Island Borough Hall on a Thursday and went into work the next day to record a podcast pilot.
Once I took a meeting from the hospital. When I later revealed my whereabouts, I was scolded for not attending in person. Also at that time, I was simply poisoning myself with your Leans In, your Girl Bosses.
Eat, sleep, work, repeat. Were you kind of numb to the amount of pain you were actually in?(I used to) think of myself more as like a brain in a jar. Like, go through whatever level of work chaos, which compared to what I had growing up was not that big of a deal, and so I was la little inured to it. Prior to (having a) kid I would be like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna play The Sims for 18 hours, and then sleep a lot,’ essentially create my own sensory deprivation tank at home. And then go back to work for more. But as the demands on me to be more of a person in the world — especially, you know, with something I really care about, which is making sure I can tend to my child as best as possible, I just lost the entire coping mechanism that, that kept the dysfunctional cycle afloat. I thought if I only wrung out every little bit of myself possible, I’d get to where I needed to go. By hook or by crook, or by book, et cetera.
My hair started falling out. I bought these hair growth vitamins made out of actual shark that I heard about on — you guessed it — a podcast. Did you have like any kind of drafting process? Did you change your copy before you tracked it, that kind of thing?(With ‘Shameless Acquisition Target’) I had three note cards for ‘this is the thing I’m interested in in this particular episode.’ And then I would try to write it, and get really frustrated. And then I would take to the streets in my Crocs, and with my phone with the voice memo. And I would just kind of talk through whatever I was trying to write, trying to get to like whatever those specific topics were. And there would be some things in there; I’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s actually something.’ Then I would transcribe that by hand. I still have a transcription pedal. May or may not have stolen it from WNYC. They worked, but they tasted like what actual shark must taste like.
Like fish and blood. As I was watching my hair fall out, my identity slip away. As I rose and ground my head into the sand, I did some good work.
I hired the entire editorial team for the company. So you made this podcast, it came out, and then you got a book contract. How did that happen, and what was the different mission that you were assigned?I’ll tell you what the plan was and then what actually happened. I got a book agent, this wonderful woman named Danielle Svetcov, because (podcast critic) Nick Quah had been working with her and said, ‘You should listen to her podcast.’ I wrote a book proposal — we’ll just call it ‘Lean In, But If You’re An Idiot.’ It was out in market, and I started at ABC as the executive producer in charge of all their podcasts....then I got a full offer from HarperOne. And I spent, like, six, eight months writing this book that I shouldn’t have been writing. Then my agent was just like, ‘Put the book proposal to the side. Just write what you want the book to be.’ We launched a veritable shit-ton of shows. I became invaluable, rather than valuable, to the operation.
An operation I felt so loyal to. All with a team that I felt very personally responsible for. This was, if you can’t already tell, a big mistake. I’m curious of what you make about the advice not to burn bridges.I’m of the opinion that the bridges I burnt in the book were already burnt. I did sort of do the thing that I had always been told never to do, which was to be nice, be quiet, be ‘efficient.’ I don’t think I was mean to anyone. I think I was accurate. But it has definitely put me in a position where I’m like never going to be seen as that reliable number two ever again. But I shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place.
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Julia Barton is a longtime audio story editor and author of a newsletter about broadcast history, Continuous Wave. She’s worked with nonfiction authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Jill Lepore, and Michael Spector to create original podcasts and audiobooks. Barton completed a Nieman Fellowship in 2024. Her work can be found at RadioWright.com.
