Let's go back to Bodies really quick. For people that don't know about it, tell me what Bodies is about. Oh my god, I don't want to mischaracterize it because I don't want to be like, it's about medical mysteries. And I'm sure Allison has way more nuanced take on it. Baby. I don't know. I don't know if we'll be able to do this, but we could get Allison on the show to talk to us a little bit about Bodies. Oh definitely. I mean, Allison stupendous individual, really amazing persons. Past podcast about podcast dreams really do come true. Today we're finally having Allison Barnder on the pod Club to talk all about our show Bodies, after we got that high praise from former guest every Troubleman. I love growing our little pod club family. Allison launched Bodies on our own in and it's just a testament to how honest stories can truly make a difference in p those lives. Over three seasons, Bodies has grown into this fascinating and moving collection of stories that empower people to understand their own bodies and advocate for themselves, even when the medical establishment might brush them off. Happens all the time. Beyond that, Allison is just a complete crow in the radio and podcast world, and she's an incredibly thoughtful storyteller and editor. One of the things that I was most excited to talk to her about is why it's important to tell the kinds of stories that often make people feel uncomfortable. Hi, Allison, Hey, how's it going. It's good. I don't know if your if your ears were ringing, but the one and only every Truffleman and I were just singing all of your praises about you and about bodies. Yeah, yeah, Avery's Avery is awesome. Well, let's just dive right into it. So Avery recommended Bodies as one of her go to favorite podcasts. I'm Alice and Beranger and this is Bodies. I think we often see our bodies as this independent system. I want to tell listeners a little bit about it, but then I want you to explain it, because you're definitely going to explain it better than I can. Yeah. So, when I was first talking about it, I very much was talking about it as a medical mystery show. So each episode follows one person as they solve some kind of health related mystery about their body. And I also kind of talk about it is like the anti House, like on the television show House. You know, this doctor comes in and he's like, oh, just you know, taking one look at a patient and you know, solving the health issue. And in reality, that's not how it happens. Oftentimes, it's the person who's going through the health complication who goes to ten different doctors before they get an answer, or they researched it online and get connected with the community that's similar to them and then they find the right doctor. So that's kind of the typical arc of the story. And then in each episode, we're really interested in two things. One the way that societal structures, race, gender, capitalism impact health. And then the second thing we're really interested in is a person going through some kind of health issue, the way that that impacts them personally, their sense of self, their relationships, what they're trying to get out of life. And so we kind of weave together a really intimate personal narrative, and some episodes really feel like a profile of a person, but also integrating that like kind of broader critique of the medical system. For the first episode, it was your personal story, was that always going to be the plan or did that come later? Yeah, So the first episode of Bodies is my own experience, my own medical mystery. This happened when I was in my ad twenties, but I was dating someone and all of a sudden, sex became painful. I had never had that issue before. I couldn't figure it out when to my O b G. I n was just kind of flat out dismissed. And then eventually, through a friend who told me her story, I figured out that the hormonal birth control pill was causing the painful sex. So, you know, you can listen to the episode for all the nitty gritty details, but basically ended up getting to the doctor then, you know, a doctor who really knew his stuff and started looking into like why didn't I know about how the birth control pill has all these side effects, lots of mental health side effects in addition to sexual side effects, and started looking into the history of the pill. So when that happened to me, I was like, no way am I talking about this. You know, I didn't talk about it with many people. I was super ashamed of it. And then a couple of years later, I just found myself like talking to friends a lot being like sharing my experience or talking about the side effects of the pill, or talking about painful sex, and I realized, like, this is an important information that you get out there. And I was like, Okay, maybe I should write the story or pitch it to another podcast. But the more I started talking about it, the more I started realizing that this thing that I had gone through was like a very common experience across a lot of people's experiences, particularly women marginalized genders, and I thought, Okay, I think this could be a whole podcast. So my personal story was always kind of the first episode because that's what I knew, and then that's also how I pitched the show, and then each subsequent episode is about a different person or a different community. We're going to play a little bit of that first episode because I've had so many people tell me that they had the same issue, same problem, and your show was one of the only things they could find out there that talked about it, because we don't talk about women's health enough, and especially when it comes to pain in women's bodies. So let's play a little bit of that. The first time I feel the pain. We're in Paris after the summer apart he meets me at the airport with flowers and a chocolate croissant. We've been practicing our French together all summer. That first night back together, we're having a hard time taking it slow. It's going exactly as I imagined. But then he enters me and I feel a little pain and some burning, but it also feels so good to have him inside me again, so I don't say anything he comes. I've been on the pill since I was eighteen, but Luke's the first guy that I let come inside of me without a condom. We hold each other for a minute, the pain goes away, and besides the late summer air being too chilly for my sleeveless dresses, the weekend is perfect and romantic in all the ways Paris with a lover should be. Do you have a favorite episode, an episode that, if someone hadn't listened to Bodies before, you'd say, oh my god, you have to listen to this episode and you'll you'll be hooked. Well, that's such a hard question, because I feel like I fall in love with every story and fall in love with all the participants. Um gosh. We did an episode last season about a person named Melinda, and it's her story with dangerous medical devices. So she had a vaginal mesh implanted in her and it caused all kinds of health issues. And basically the f d A doesn't regulate implanted medical devices very rigorously, so there's all these medical devices that are on the market that are actually pretty dangerous. And Melinda is just like such an incredible person. The story is about consent, basically informed consent, and it intersects also with her personal story of growing up in the Mormon Church and an experience she had where she was kind of course into giving up her baby for adoption because she had the baby when she wasn't married. Through this medical journey, she kind of has this epiphany about kind of her whole life, what does it mean to have true informed consent. One of the episodes of Bodies that I really enjoyed was the one about Reese Yes and her anxiety and that she has such a difficult time just organizing her daily life, and that therapists and doctors kept saying, oh, well, the issue here is that you're a stripper. Tell me a little bit about that episode. Yeah, So this episode is about a person named Reese, and this is kind of the most kind of classic medical mystery format that we have. But you know, the story start. She's living in New York City. She's trying to be a writer, trying to be a journalist, and she's also a sex worker, so she does stripping and dancing and she's like trying to figure out her life. But she's having a ton of trouble like getting to work on time, managing her life and just kind of feels like, as she calls it, like a mess. Like she just feels like a mess. And she thought it was maybe anxiety depression, and like kind of goes on these different routes, and then eventually she's on a Facebook group for women with anxiety and she's describing all of her symptoms, the things she has troubled doing, and someone said, have you considered a s D autism spectrum disorder? And Reese was like, what, no, that's you know, that's no way, I'm not autistic. But then she started looking into it, and it turns out that ways that autism expresses in girls and also trans people is very different from the way it expresses in boys. But the issue is that starting from when a researcher first kind of identified and categorized autism as a condition. That cohort was majority boys, and for as long as autism has been researched, the majority of the research has been on boys and men. And so what that means is that the diagnostic criteria is normed off of boys and men, but autism looks different in girls and trans people. The research has come a long way in the last ten years, so the d s M is being more inclusive of the way that it manifesting girls. So for example, boys, you know kind of the classic things like oh, lining up trucks. If you see a kid like very meticulously lining up their trucks and toys, that's a sign of autism. For girls, a lot of girls will mask their social discomfort, so you know, they might kind of memorize social scripts. So I'm supposed to look a person in the eye for this amount of seconds, I'm supposed to say these things, but they still have a lot of social anxiety or have like trouble relating to people. Again, you just took something that might make the average person uncomfortable for any number of reasons, because it's talking about autism spectrum disorder, because it's talking about a woman with autism spectrum disorder. And then because it's talking about a woman who happens to work as a stripper who might have autism spectrum disorder, that's right there. That is what I really enjoy about this show is that it's not just about the medical mystery. It's about how the mystery then impacts and changes all these other aspects of our lives. Did you think that that was what was going to happen when you first started this or did that kind of evolve as the seasons went on. Yeah, I think that's definitely part of my vision from the very beginning, Like the medical mystery was always just the hook, right, Like it's not a true crime show. It's not like a traditional medical mystery. It's more like what gets the person interested. And I think also from the beginning, I obviously wanted to make a show that was centering women and marginalized genders voices. I wanted our experts to be mostly women, people of color, queer people like I really wanted to center those experiences, like I really wanted it to feel like something that anyone could listen to. And I think that it, frankly, like a medical mystery is something that anyone can get interested in. Oh my gosh, everyone wants to listen to a medical mystery. Yes, yes, tell me a little bit about how you got started in podcasting, because you've been doing this for a while now, and there's a lot of people that literally discovered podcasts exist fifteen minutes ago, but you started out with your show The Intern, right, tell me a little bit about The Intern. And as someone that lived out in San Francisco and was just immersed in tech startups, this is pretty awesome. Yeah. So I was in my mid twenties at the time, and after college, I had taught a little bit, done some nonprofit work, but really kind of also thought maybe journalism. I wanted to try your documentary. So I did this short documentary studies in Maine at a school called the Salt Institute, and so I studied writing, and after I finished that, I moved to New York with this idea of like being a long form, you know, narrative writer, which, as you can imagine, made my first couple of months in New York a huge struggle and was working for free, just like kind of trying to do anything to just like get into media or journalism or documentary. And then I saw an email from like on the alumni list serve from the Shoal Institute and was like, Hey, there's this company that wants to make a podcast about, you know, someone who recently moved to New York and is trying to like figure their life out or something like that. And I was like, great, that sounds like me. So I like contacted this company, which I would come to find out, you know, this is kind of the heyday of like tech startups in New York City and people developing apps and like that era. And so this company, Beta Works, was uh kind of like part incubator, part VC firm, and they had invested an anchor, they had invested in Gimlets. They were kind of playing in the audio podcast space, and they thought, wouldn't it be cool to bring someone in who has never worked at a tech startup, has never worked in podcasting, have them like self document this experience of like living in New York for the first time and working in tech as a way to both like experiment with the medium and as a way to like also promote the company. So that was me. I like, SA, end up for it. I don't know, you know how I convince someone to pick me. But I did, and they're like, Okay, now make a podcast, And I was like, how the heck do you do that? So it was really cool. I worked there for a year, and I think kind of the three big things that I did during that year was one just by like doing it. If you want to learn how to make a podcast, there's so much you can google on YouTube and like how to edit and how to cut the tape and all of that. So a lot of that I just kind of like learned by doing or googling. And then I also recognized early like I needed a story editor, like someone to listen to drafts, advise me on narrative, Like I just knew I needed an editor, and UM basically convinced Beta Works to let me hire an editor. So I had met Caitlin Pressed, who is the creator of The Heart. I met her and basically was like, will you be my editor? And so I learned a ton from her, like stuff you can't really learn on the internet, which is just like seeving feedback about how a story is crafted, how to bring your personal story into your work, how to report, And learned a lot of that through her just by having her as my editor and getting feedback from her. And then I think the third thing that was happening during that time was like I was just going to all the podcasts meet ups in New York and like meeting other people who were similarly like just getting started. And I think those friendships and relationships, like I'm still close with a lot of those people today. A lot of the people that I met early on um in my career, I guess are people who I'm collaborating with on Bodies or who I like reach out for support or any of that. So, yeah, that was kind of like my start to the podcast world. I love the idea of podcast meetups. Yeah, yes, So tell me a little bit about what you listen to when you're not dissecting some of the craziest medical mysteries out there. M I think that a lot of people who make audio or podcasts can relate to this. But it's like when you're in the season, you like, can't you don't have any ears left for other work that I would say when I'm not in the midst of Bodies. A friend of mine and actually someone who's an advisor on the Body's team, Kalaliah just made a really incredible show with w NYC called Tulsa Burning, and it looks into the Tulsa massacre and it's the hundredth anniversary of it, but really focusing on like what led up to it. And there's an episode that's like very Bodies in the sense that Kalia talks to someone who talks about like the long term psychological and embodied impact of having people in your family who went through the Tulsa massacre, Like what is that ripple effect on not just the black community, but just like our country. But yeah, beautiful, beautiful series. I actually haven't listened to that yet. So now I love it when guests tell me new things to add add to my list and we can and we can play a little clip about one episode because it also sounds really great. I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we live our home. I still see black men being shocked, Black bodies line in the street. Here, the screams have lived through the MASCO every day. That was Miss Viola Fletcher. She's one and seven years old. She was just a little girl at the time of the massacre, and a few weeks ago she testified in front of a US House subcommittee about what it was like. Country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not. This is blind Spot Tulsa Bernie, the story of a community set on fire and the scars that remain years cleaner. Um and so what else? What else are you listening to? Let's see what else am I listening to? Oh? I really like the show This Is Uncomfortable. It's all about money, but it's about how money impacts are lives, are personal relationships. I feel like it's it's similar to bodies, and like bodies is about the way that health intersects with all these other things in our lives, and it's like how money comes into play with relationships and our careers what we want. So it's very kind of like it's not like personal finance. It's just like stories about money and it's another one of those things, similar to bodies. It's like we don't really talk about our bodies, don't really talk about sex, you know, we don't talk about money either. I'm Adrie Marais and welcome to This Is Uncomfortable, the show for Marketplace about life and how money messes with it. If you're a first generation immigrant settling in New York City, driving a taxi cab can seem like a practical, decent way to provide for your family, but the reality is that for many drivers this job, being part of this industry has been a financial nightmare to drive a taxi. Thousands of drivers took out sometimes exploitative loans they could never afford. Right now, the average New York City taxi driver owes five hundred thousand dollars under taxi medallion, half a million dollars just for a permit for the right to get into a taxi and drive it. This week, we narrow in on one family story, a family that tried and tried to get ahead, only to get way down by the systems that were meant to help them. And speaking of sex and money, also, Death, Sex and Money is another one of my favorite shows. After you said this is uncomfortable and like, but what about Death, Sex and Money? Uh, do you have a favorite episode of Death, Sex and Money? Gosh, one that I liked that was kind of recent. It was about chronic illness and it was about a rock climber who was kind of navigating chronic illness and the episode, I think the end of the episode you realize that the interviews were conducted over like three or four different days, and I just think in a sales like an incredible interviewer. Yeah, I know, she is just a national treasure. Yes, she really is. And that was a mean question to ask you too, because now I'm like, wait, what's my favorite death, sex, and money episode? But the pro climber episode. We can play a little bit of actaus. It's really good. Also, Anna's voice is just the best. Mason Earle spends most of his day in bed. That's where he was when I reached him over FaceTime. Hey, Mason, how you doing. Yeah, I'm all right. How are you good? You You might notice Mason is thirty two and he has a chronic illness called myalgic and cephalo myelitis or mm E CFS, commonly called chronic fatigue syndrome. AMYCFS is a complex illness with a wide variety of symptoms, including muscle and joint pain, memory issues, trouble sleeping, and extreme fatigue. There's no known cure. Before Mason got sick, he was a professional rock climber. He climbed all over the world, was featured in major climbing magazines, and was paid by corporate sponsors, including Eddie Bauer. But today the basis means most of I really enjoyed the common thread between your show Bodies and death, sex and money, and they are all things that people are generally uncomfortable about that we're like, oh, is that icky or gross? And should I not talk about that? Yeah? I think that. To me. It's like when I find myself sharing an episode or like using it as a conversation starter, I'm like, yeah, that's I love this show kind of thing, right, Yes, exactly. When I find an episode that I like, I just want to tell everyone and that's that's the mark of a great episode. I'm like, oh, okay, yes this, everyone around me has to listen to this now so that I don't feel so alone in the world. Totally totally awesome, awesome, Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, nice to meet Slash, see you off. That's it for the pod Club today. Thank you, Thank you to Allison for coming on our little show. If you haven't listened to Bodies yet, how lucky are you to have three seasons to get to binge to go through right now to recap? Alison recommended blind Spot Tulsa burning, This is uncomfortable and death, sex and money. I can't believe we still haven't had Anna sales on the show. Can somebody again on that? Have me listening? We'll see you next week. The pod club is hosted by me Joe Pianza. Our executive producers are Me Again and Emily Maronoff. Our producers are Mary Do and Darby Masters. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip. Our theme and additional music was composed by Aaron Kaufman. Aaron Kaufman is also our consulting producer and special thanks to Nikki e Tor. He was just a wonderful human being whom I like to thank at the end of episodes.

Let's go back to Bodies really quick. For people that don't know about it, tell me what Bodies is about. Oh my god, I don't want to mischaracterize it because I don't want to be like, it's about medical mysteries. And I'm sure Allison has way more nuanced take on it. Baby. I don't know. I don't know if we'll be able to do this, but we could get Allison on the show to talk to us a little bit about Bodies. Oh definitely. I mean, Allison stupendous individual, really amazing persons. Past podcast about podcast dreams really do come true. Today we're finally having Allison Barnder on the pod Club to talk all about our show Bodies, after we got that high praise from former guest every Troubleman. I love growing our little pod club family. Allison launched Bodies on our own in and it's just a testament to how honest stories can truly make a difference in p those lives. Over three seasons, Bodies has grown into this fascinating and moving collection of stories that empower people to understand their own bodies and advocate for themselves, even when the medical establishment might brush them off. Happens all the time. Beyond that, Allison is just a complete crow in the radio and podcast world, and she's an incredibly thoughtful storyteller and editor. One of the things that I was most excited to talk to her about is why it's important to tell the kinds of stories that often make people feel uncomfortable. Hi, Allison, Hey, how's it going. It's good. I don't know if your if your ears were ringing, but the one and only every Truffleman and I were just singing all of your praises about you and about bodies. Yeah, yeah, Avery's Avery is awesome. Well, let's just dive right into it. So Avery recommended Bodies as one of her go to favorite podcasts. I'm Alice and Beranger and this is Bodies. I think we often see our bodies as this independent system. I want to tell listeners a little bit about it, but then I want you to explain it, because you're definitely going to explain it better than I can. Yeah. So, when I was first talking about it, I very much was talking about it as a medical mystery show. So each episode follows one person as they solve some kind of health related mystery about their body. And I also kind of talk about it is like the anti House, like on the television show House. You know, this doctor comes in and he's like, oh, just you know, taking one look at a patient and you know, solving the health issue. And in reality, that's not how it happens. Oftentimes, it's the person who's going through the health complication who goes to ten different doctors before they get an answer, or they researched it online and get connected with the community that's similar to them and then they find the right doctor. So that's kind of the typical arc of the story. And then in each episode, we're really interested in two things. One the way that societal structures, race, gender, capitalism impact health. And then the second thing we're really interested in is a person going through some kind of health issue, the way that that impacts them personally, their sense of self, their relationships, what they're trying to get out of life. And so we kind of weave together a really intimate personal narrative, and some episodes really feel like a profile of a person, but also integrating that like kind of broader critique of the medical system. For the first episode, it was your personal story, was that always going to be the plan or did that come later? Yeah, So the first episode of Bodies is my own experience, my own medical mystery. This happened when I was in my ad twenties, but I was dating someone and all of a sudden, sex became painful. I had never had that issue before. I couldn't figure it out when to my O b G. I n was just kind of flat out dismissed. And then eventually, through a friend who told me her story, I figured out that the hormonal birth control pill was causing the painful sex. So, you know, you can listen to the episode for all the nitty gritty details, but basically ended up getting to the doctor then, you know, a doctor who really knew his stuff and started looking into like why didn't I know about how the birth control pill has all these side effects, lots of mental health side effects in addition to sexual side effects, and started looking into the history of the pill. So when that happened to me, I was like, no way am I talking about this. You know, I didn't talk about it with many people. I was super ashamed of it. And then a couple of years later, I just found myself like talking to friends a lot being like sharing my experience or talking about the side effects of the pill, or talking about painful sex, and I realized, like, this is an important information that you get out there. And I was like, Okay, maybe I should write the story or pitch it to another podcast. But the more I started talking about it, the more I started realizing that this thing that I had gone through was like a very common experience across a lot of people's experiences, particularly women marginalized genders, and I thought, Okay, I think this could be a whole podcast. So my personal story was always kind of the first episode because that's what I knew, and then that's also how I pitched the show, and then each subsequent episode is about a different person or a different community. We're going to play a little bit of that first episode because I've had so many people tell me that they had the same issue, same problem, and your show was one of the only things they could find out there that talked about it, because we don't talk about women's health enough, and especially when it comes to pain in women's bodies. So let's play a little bit of that. The first time I feel the pain. We're in Paris after the summer apart he meets me at the airport with flowers and a chocolate croissant. We've been practicing our French together all summer. That first night back together, we're having a hard time taking it slow. It's going exactly as I imagined. But then he enters me and I feel a little pain and some burning, but it also feels so good to have him inside me again, so I don't say anything he comes. I've been on the pill since I was eighteen, but Luke's the first guy that I let come inside of me without a condom. We hold each other for a minute, the pain goes away, and besides the late summer air being too chilly for my sleeveless dresses, the weekend is perfect and romantic in all the ways Paris with a lover should be. Do you have a favorite episode, an episode that, if someone hadn't listened to Bodies before, you'd say, oh my god, you have to listen to this episode and you'll you'll be hooked. Well, that's such a hard question, because I feel like I fall in love with every story and fall in love with all the participants. Um gosh. We did an episode last season about a person named Melinda, and it's her story with dangerous medical devices. So she had a vaginal mesh implanted in her and it caused all kinds of health issues. And basically the f d A doesn't regulate implanted medical devices very rigorously, so there's all these medical devices that are on the market that are actually pretty dangerous. And Melinda is just like such an incredible person. The story is about consent, basically informed consent, and it intersects also with her personal story of growing up in the Mormon Church and an experience she had where she was kind of course into giving up her baby for adoption because she had the baby when she wasn't married. Through this medical journey, she kind of has this epiphany about kind of her whole life, what does it mean to have true informed consent. One of the episodes of Bodies that I really enjoyed was the one about Reese Yes and her anxiety and that she has such a difficult time just organizing her daily life, and that therapists and doctors kept saying, oh, well, the issue here is that you're a stripper. Tell me a little bit about that episode. Yeah, So this episode is about a person named Reese, and this is kind of the most kind of classic medical mystery format that we have. But you know, the story start. She's living in New York City. She's trying to be a writer, trying to be a journalist, and she's also a sex worker, so she does stripping and dancing and she's like trying to figure out her life. But she's having a ton of trouble like getting to work on time, managing her life and just kind of feels like, as she calls it, like a mess. Like she just feels like a mess. And she thought it was maybe anxiety depression, and like kind of goes on these different routes, and then eventually she's on a Facebook group for women with anxiety and she's describing all of her symptoms, the things she has troubled doing, and someone said, have you considered a s D autism spectrum disorder? And Reese was like, what, no, that's you know, that's no way, I'm not autistic. But then she started looking into it, and it turns out that ways that autism expresses in girls and also trans people is very different from the way it expresses in boys. But the issue is that starting from when a researcher first kind of identified and categorized autism as a condition. That cohort was majority boys, and for as long as autism has been researched, the majority of the research has been on boys and men. And so what that means is that the diagnostic criteria is normed off of boys and men, but autism looks different in girls and trans people. The research has come a long way in the last ten years, so the d s M is being more inclusive of the way that it manifesting girls. So for example, boys, you know kind of the classic things like oh, lining up trucks. If you see a kid like very meticulously lining up their trucks and toys, that's a sign of autism. For girls, a lot of girls will mask their social discomfort, so you know, they might kind of memorize social scripts. So I'm supposed to look a person in the eye for this amount of seconds, I'm supposed to say these things, but they still have a lot of social anxiety or have like trouble relating to people. Again, you just took something that might make the average person uncomfortable for any number of reasons, because it's talking about autism spectrum disorder, because it's talking about a woman with autism spectrum disorder. And then because it's talking about a woman who happens to work as a stripper who might have autism spectrum disorder, that's right there. That is what I really enjoy about this show is that it's not just about the medical mystery. It's about how the mystery then impacts and changes all these other aspects of our lives. Did you think that that was what was going to happen when you first started this or did that kind of evolve as the seasons went on. Yeah, I think that's definitely part of my vision from the very beginning, Like the medical mystery was always just the hook, right, Like it's not a true crime show. It's not like a traditional medical mystery. It's more like what gets the person interested. And I think also from the beginning, I obviously wanted to make a show that was centering women and marginalized genders voices. I wanted our experts to be mostly women, people of color, queer people like I really wanted to center those experiences, like I really wanted it to feel like something that anyone could listen to. And I think that it, frankly, like a medical mystery is something that anyone can get interested in. Oh my gosh, everyone wants to listen to a medical mystery. Yes, yes, tell me a little bit about how you got started in podcasting, because you've been doing this for a while now, and there's a lot of people that literally discovered podcasts exist fifteen minutes ago, but you started out with your show The Intern, right, tell me a little bit about The Intern. And as someone that lived out in San Francisco and was just immersed in tech startups, this is pretty awesome. Yeah. So I was in my mid twenties at the time, and after college, I had taught a little bit, done some nonprofit work, but really kind of also thought maybe journalism. I wanted to try your documentary. So I did this short documentary studies in Maine at a school called the Salt Institute, and so I studied writing, and after I finished that, I moved to New York with this idea of like being a long form, you know, narrative writer, which, as you can imagine, made my first couple of months in New York a huge struggle and was working for free, just like kind of trying to do anything to just like get into media or journalism or documentary. And then I saw an email from like on the alumni list serve from the Shoal Institute and was like, Hey, there's this company that wants to make a podcast about, you know, someone who recently moved to New York and is trying to like figure their life out or something like that. And I was like, great, that sounds like me. So I like contacted this company, which I would come to find out, you know, this is kind of the heyday of like tech startups in New York City and people developing apps and like that era. And so this company, Beta Works, was uh kind of like part incubator, part VC firm, and they had invested an anchor, they had invested in Gimlets. They were kind of playing in the audio podcast space, and they thought, wouldn't it be cool to bring someone in who has never worked at a tech startup, has never worked in podcasting, have them like self document this experience of like living in New York for the first time and working in tech as a way to both like experiment with the medium and as a way to like also promote the company. So that was me. I like, SA, end up for it. I don't know, you know how I convince someone to pick me. But I did, and they're like, Okay, now make a podcast, And I was like, how the heck do you do that? So it was really cool. I worked there for a year, and I think kind of the three big things that I did during that year was one just by like doing it. If you want to learn how to make a podcast, there's so much you can google on YouTube and like how to edit and how to cut the tape and all of that. So a lot of that I just kind of like learned by doing or googling. And then I also recognized early like I needed a story editor, like someone to listen to drafts, advise me on narrative, Like I just knew I needed an editor, and UM basically convinced Beta Works to let me hire an editor. So I had met Caitlin Pressed, who is the creator of The Heart. I met her and basically was like, will you be my editor? And so I learned a ton from her, like stuff you can't really learn on the internet, which is just like seeving feedback about how a story is crafted, how to bring your personal story into your work, how to report, And learned a lot of that through her just by having her as my editor and getting feedback from her. And then I think the third thing that was happening during that time was like I was just going to all the podcasts meet ups in New York and like meeting other people who were similarly like just getting started. And I think those friendships and relationships, like I'm still close with a lot of those people today. A lot of the people that I met early on um in my career, I guess are people who I'm collaborating with on Bodies or who I like reach out for support or any of that. So, yeah, that was kind of like my start to the podcast world. I love the idea of podcast meetups. Yeah, yes, So tell me a little bit about what you listen to when you're not dissecting some of the craziest medical mysteries out there. M I think that a lot of people who make audio or podcasts can relate to this. But it's like when you're in the season, you like, can't you don't have any ears left for other work that I would say when I'm not in the midst of Bodies. A friend of mine and actually someone who's an advisor on the Body's team, Kalaliah just made a really incredible show with w NYC called Tulsa Burning, and it looks into the Tulsa massacre and it's the hundredth anniversary of it, but really focusing on like what led up to it. And there's an episode that's like very Bodies in the sense that Kalia talks to someone who talks about like the long term psychological and embodied impact of having people in your family who went through the Tulsa massacre, Like what is that ripple effect on not just the black community, but just like our country. But yeah, beautiful, beautiful series. I actually haven't listened to that yet. So now I love it when guests tell me new things to add add to my list and we can and we can play a little clip about one episode because it also sounds really great. I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we live our home. I still see black men being shocked, Black bodies line in the street. Here, the screams have lived through the MASCO every day. That was Miss Viola Fletcher. She's one and seven years old. She was just a little girl at the time of the massacre, and a few weeks ago she testified in front of a US House subcommittee about what it was like. Country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not. This is blind Spot Tulsa Bernie, the story of a community set on fire and the scars that remain years cleaner. Um and so what else? What else are you listening to? Let's see what else am I listening to? Oh? I really like the show This Is Uncomfortable. It's all about money, but it's about how money impacts are lives, are personal relationships. I feel like it's it's similar to bodies, and like bodies is about the way that health intersects with all these other things in our lives, and it's like how money comes into play with relationships and our careers what we want. So it's very kind of like it's not like personal finance. It's just like stories about money and it's another one of those things, similar to bodies. It's like we don't really talk about our bodies, don't really talk about sex, you know, we don't talk about money either. I'm Adrie Marais and welcome to This Is Uncomfortable, the show for Marketplace about life and how money messes with it. If you're a first generation immigrant settling in New York City, driving a taxi cab can seem like a practical, decent way to provide for your family, but the reality is that for many drivers this job, being part of this industry has been a financial nightmare to drive a taxi. Thousands of drivers took out sometimes exploitative loans they could never afford. Right now, the average New York City taxi driver owes five hundred thousand dollars under taxi medallion, half a million dollars just for a permit for the right to get into a taxi and drive it. This week, we narrow in on one family story, a family that tried and tried to get ahead, only to get way down by the systems that were meant to help them. And speaking of sex and money, also, Death, Sex and Money is another one of my favorite shows. After you said this is uncomfortable and like, but what about Death, Sex and Money? Uh, do you have a favorite episode of Death, Sex and Money? Gosh, one that I liked that was kind of recent. It was about chronic illness and it was about a rock climber who was kind of navigating chronic illness and the episode, I think the end of the episode you realize that the interviews were conducted over like three or four different days, and I just think in a sales like an incredible interviewer. Yeah, I know, she is just a national treasure. Yes, she really is. And that was a mean question to ask you too, because now I'm like, wait, what's my favorite death, sex, and money episode? But the pro climber episode. We can play a little bit of actaus. It's really good. Also, Anna's voice is just the best. Mason Earle spends most of his day in bed. That's where he was when I reached him over FaceTime. Hey, Mason, how you doing. Yeah, I'm all right. How are you good? You You might notice Mason is thirty two and he has a chronic illness called myalgic and cephalo myelitis or mm E CFS, commonly called chronic fatigue syndrome. AMYCFS is a complex illness with a wide variety of symptoms, including muscle and joint pain, memory issues, trouble sleeping, and extreme fatigue. There's no known cure. Before Mason got sick, he was a professional rock climber. He climbed all over the world, was featured in major climbing magazines, and was paid by corporate sponsors, including Eddie Bauer. But today the basis means most of I really enjoyed the common thread between your show Bodies and death, sex and money, and they are all things that people are generally uncomfortable about that we're like, oh, is that icky or gross? And should I not talk about that? Yeah? I think that. To me. It's like when I find myself sharing an episode or like using it as a conversation starter, I'm like, yeah, that's I love this show kind of thing, right, Yes, exactly. When I find an episode that I like, I just want to tell everyone and that's that's the mark of a great episode. I'm like, oh, okay, yes this, everyone around me has to listen to this now so that I don't feel so alone in the world. Totally totally awesome, awesome, Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, nice to meet Slash, see you off. That's it for the pod Club today. Thank you, Thank you to Allison for coming on our little show. If you haven't listened to Bodies yet, how lucky are you to have three seasons to get to binge to go through right now to recap? Alison recommended blind Spot Tulsa burning, This is uncomfortable and death, sex and money. I can't believe we still haven't had Anna sales on the show. Can somebody again on that? Have me listening? We'll see you next week. The pod club is hosted by me Joe Pianza. Our executive producers are Me Again and Emily Maronoff. Our producers are Mary Do and Darby Masters. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip. Our theme and additional music was composed by Aaron Kaufman. Aaron Kaufman is also our consulting producer and special thanks to Nikki e Tor. He was just a wonderful human being whom I like to thank at the end of episodes.