Nick offers a pair of podcast picks this week. You’re Wrong About and The Ringer’s The Cam Chronicles.
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Servant of Pod BONUS Podcast Picks
Sun, 1/3 12:25PM • 4:50
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
podcast, cam, middle, week, rigor, bozo, upturned, varsity jacket, recreates, hanif, sarah marshall, saturated, podcasting, chronicles, happening, michael, boisterous, clown, coming, laughter
SPEAKERS
Michael Hobbes, Tyler Tynes, Chelsey Weber-Smith, Sarah Marshall
Nick Quah 00:01
Hey folks, Nick here. This is Servant of Pod from LAist Studios. We're taking this week off to catch some Z's. Servant of Pod will be back next week, and I'm really excited for the run we're about to kick off. Trust me, it's gonna be fun. However, I don't like taking a break and leaving you with nothing, so this week, I'm going to tell you about two podcasts I've been really enjoying. The first pick is a podcast called You're Wrong About. It's hosted by two journalists, Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes, and the show is basically them going back and re-examining something that's been largely misunderstood in the culture; more often than not because that thing was blown up in the media in inappropriate ways. The show really, really runs the gamut. They've had episodes on the y2k bug, the OJ Simpson trial, Kitty Genovese and the concept of bystander apathy, and they recently celebrated their 100th episode, which is about killer clowns.
Sarah Marshall 00:58
Let's all look up Bozo The Clown.
Chelsey Weber-Smith 01:02
You need it, because this guy is the archetype for everything scary, I think, that came after.
Michael Hobbes 01:08
Ew!
Sarah Marshall 01:09
Oh, oh, you were not kidding. [Laughter] Like, I was expecting... [Laughter] I didn't think that I wouldn't find him scary, but I really didn't think I would find him this scary.
Michael Hobbes 01:19
Yeah, that's horrifying.
Sarah Marshall 01:21
The eyebrows are really upsetting.
Michael Hobbes 01:22
Yeah.
Sarah Marshall 01:23
Sometimes they're more arched in the middle, which is more alarming.
Michael Hobbes 01:27
Oh, god.
Sarah Marshall 01:27
It's a really exaggerated, big, red, upturned mouth shape.
Michael Hobbes 01:32
Also, the lack of head hair. He has these giant, like, three foot long, almost pigtails coming off of the sides of his head, but he has no hair on the top of his head, which is really unsettling.
Chelsey Weber-Smith 01:43
Which is It.
Sarah Marshall 01:44
Yeah.
Chelsey Weber-Smith 01:45
Which is Pennywise The Clown.
Michael Hobbes 01:46
Yeah.
Sarah Marshall 01:46
Ahh.
Chelsey Weber-Smith 01:47
Ronald McDonald came out of Bozo.
Sarah Marshall 01:49
He burst out of his chest and then scurried away. [Laughter]
Nick Quah 01:53
Now, there are a lot of podcasts out there that have this premise--the debunking show is a strong genre. But the thing that I really admire about You're Wrong About is its rigor. Sarah and Michael do their research, and they attack their subjects from so many directions, that what's really happening is that they're flooding you with material. That abundance is kind of crucial to the experience and recreates this feeling of reaching the part of any research process where you can see all the angles, all the views, to a point where you're so saturated that you get to a place where you feel like you might be closer to the truth. So that's the first pick. Here's the second: The Cam Chronicles. It's a pretty short documentary series with rigor. And while I'm personally not a big football fan--I'm more of a basketball and English soccer kind of guy--I think The Cam Chronicles is a really tight, excellent character study of someone who's very much still in the middle of playing out his public story. That someone, of course, is Cam Newton--now the quarterback for the NFL's New England Patriots, and a longtime totem of the Carolina Panthers. The Cam Chronicles is about a lot of things, but it's primarily about the idea of legacy and the burdens that come with being a Black professional athlete--one who aspires to be an icon, at least at one point, in America. It's fascinating stuff. And even if you're not a football fan, you should check out the show for the strength of its host, Tyler Tynes. I love Tyler's narration. It's funny, it's energetic, it's melodic, it really highlights his personality.
Tyler Tynes 03:21
For the first 30 minutes of practices, boys run ladder drills and curl through route trees. Cam is nowhere to be seen--at his own clinic, no less. That is, until suddenly... Cam emerges, it seems, completely out of nowhere, donning green sunglasses and a matching varsity jacket, in the middle of the field. He's absolutely massive, as big as he looks on television. He's holding one of his babies, Chosen, by the hand. Then he's bouncing around from group to group of teenage boys, yelling and getting everybody hyped--an explosion of boisterous energy, dancin' to the hits by Drake and Future.
Nick Quah 04:01
There's a conversation that's been happening for a long time about the whiteness of podcasting and podcast aesthetics, and Tynes's performance is such a great example of all the different ways that podcasting can sound. So those are two listens that I've been thinking a lot about lately. And if you haven't checked them out, please do. Alright, so, over the next couple of weeks, we've got a bunch of guests I'm really excited about. We've got Roman Mars, we've got Kara Swisher, we've got Hanif Abdurraqib coming onto the show. I'm Nick Quah. I'll see you next week.
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