October 13, 2016

Gimlet 22: You Can't Wear a Suit Here

by StartUp

Background show artwork for StartUp


The Story Growth. It can be exciting, it can be motivating, and it can be really stressful. In this week’s episode, we take a look at the tensions that Gimlet’s growth spurt is creating. We speak with the team producing one of our upcoming shows to see what it’s really like to build a podcast from the ground up. Each of them is being asked to step up to the plate in a way that they never have before, and some are realizing that the support they expected, it just isn’t there. People are pushed to their limits, emotions run high, and things that have remained hitherto unsaid are finally aired. 

 


The Facts David Herman mixed the episode. Our theme song was written and performed by 

Mark Phillips. The special ad music, Microliters, was written and performed by Build Buildings. Our logo was designed by Elias Stein. Additional music from Bobby Lord, Golden Gram, Marley Carroll, and hotmoms.gov.   


Where to Listen

Transcript

MOLLY: So tell me where you are?

NGOFEEN: So I am outside of the Gimlet offices. I just got off the subway and I am getting ready to go in for my first day of work.

 

ALEX: From Gimlet this is StartUp, I’m Alex Blumberg. And a few months back, StartUp producer Molly Messick set out to document something that’s happening a lot here lately. A first day of work for a new hire at the company.

 

MOLLY: What’s your name?

NGOFEEN: It’s Ngofeen Mputubwele.

MOLLY: Well, welcome.

NGOFEEN: Thank you! So I think I’m about to hit the buzzer and be buzzed into the building, so…

MOLLY: How are you feeling?

NGOFEEN: I’m nervous but very excited so... this will be a cool new adventure.

MOLLY: Okay, here we go.

NGOFEEN: Alrighty, so I’m pushing the button.

[RINGS]

 

[STARTUP THEME]

MOLLY: If no one answers I can let you in.

NGOFEEN: Okay. Sounds good. I assume that’s the buzz.

 

ALEX: Ngofeen is coming to Gimlet to work as a producer. And this isn’t only his first day at a new job. It’s his first day in a completely new career. Up until a few months ago, he was an attorney at a big corporate law firm in Pittsburgh. Audio storytelling was just a side project. But then he spotted a job posting at Gimlet and sent off a cover letter. He stood out for his research experience and editorial insight. And after rounds of interviews, we hired him.

 

In this season of StartUp, Season 4, we're spending the first few episodes talking about what's happening here at Gimlet. I can sum it up in one word: growth. But what growth really means is people like Ngofeen. New people doing new things. We're launching a ton of new shows this fall. And a lot of people are doing jobs that they've never done before.

 

And so on today's episode, we’re going inside one of Gimlet's newest shows and we see what it feels like to be the growth that’s happening here at Gimlet. To be the new people doing the new things. And I get confronted with a problem that I didn't know we had. I feel like that happens a lot lately. Also, just one quick advisory, there is some naughty language in this episode. All right, StartUp producer Molly Messick takes it from here.

 

 

MOLLY: The new show we’re talking about this episode is the show that Ngofeen is working for. It’s called Twice Removed, and it’s a genealogy show hosted by a writer named AJ Jacobs. But the person Ngofeen reports to on his first day of work is the show’s senior producer, Eric Mennel.

 

ERIC: Oh hey!

NGOFEEN: Hey.

ERIC: Welcome.

NGOFEEN: Thanks, man. How are you?

ERIC: Good.

NGOFEEN: Cool.

MEG: Hey!

NGOFEEN: Hi!

ERIC: This is Meg.

NGOFEEN: Ngofeen. Nice to meet you.

Meg: Great to meet you!

 

Eric has been working on Twice Removed for a while now. He helped AJ make a pilot episode last fall, and over the last couple of months, he’s been pulling a team together.

He’s young—27. Actually he’s the youngest person on his team. But compared to the rest of them, he’s a veteran. He’s been working in radio for six years. He’s had pieces on national shows and he’s won a big award for investigative reporting. He helped launch one of the most successful true crime podcasts in existence, a show called Criminal, which he and two friends started on no budget.

 

He came to Gimlet very early on, employee number seven. He worked on Mystery Show, and he produced a season of this show, StartUp. Regular listeners might remember him from the episode about diversity at Gimlet. He’s the guy who told Alex that he’s a Christian and goes to church every Sunday.

 

If you met Eric, a few words might come to mind. He’s earnest and level-headed. A joker, and a mensch. He’s also nervous about his new role.

 

ERIC: This is my first time managing anybody. And I don't know much about management, but it feels like the first month is like not a good time to like open up to your team about...

MOLLY: Self-doubt.

ERIC: About self-doubt. I'm sure that moment will happen. It may happen like kinda soon. But it's only been a month and so I'm like trying to portray like a coolness and calmness that "I think the show is going to be great, and we're going to figure it out.”

 

MOLLY: And there is a lot to figure out with this show. Not only is Eric working with a team that’s almost entirely new to radio, but the genealogy show they’re trying to make… it’s really complicated.

 

ERIC: The basic format of the show is we start with one person and we tell them "we're going to look into your past. We're going to find the most interesting characters that are part of your family tree, and we're going to build that family tree out really wide and follow this sort of chain of interesting characters from A to B to C to D, and at the end of it we're actually going to introduce you to a relative that you didn't know you have.

 

MOLLY: A working tagline for the show is: People say we’re one big family. This is the show that proves it. For a couple of years now, the show’s host, AJ Jacobs, has been playing with this idea that we're all related at some level. He started thinking about it when he got an email from someone in Israel who claimed to be his cousin.

 

AJ [TED TALK]: ... and the email said,"You don't know me, but I'm your 12th cousin." And it said, "I have a family tree with 80,000 people on it, including you, Karl Marx, and several European aristocrats."

 

MOLLY: The note spurred this TED talk, where AJ dug into his genealogy and found a path through his family tree to Hollywood royalty.

 

AJ [TED TALK]: Here’s my cousin Gwyneth Paltrow. She has no idea I exist, but we are officially cousins. We have just 17 links between us...

MOLLY: AJ and Alex met, and they decided that this conceit—connecting one person through their genealogy to another living person—could make a good podcast. Because in theory, with enough research, and if you allow connections through marriage, you can connect anyone to anyone else.

 

AJ and Alex imagined a show that travels backward and forward through time. A show that brings historical moments to life, and ultimately connects two people who aren’t aware of the ties between them. They imagined a show that’s informative, whimsical, surprising.

 

But making that show isn’t easy. In fact, Alex says Twice Removed might be the most ambitious show we’re launching. It involves specialized research and digging through historical documents. And also, each episode isn’t just one story but a series of stories to find and tell. And a lot of those stories are about people who are no longer living. Sometimes they’re about people who’ve been dead for centuries. Here’s Eric again.

 

ERIC: The hard thing about doing a history show is like stories about the past often just don't feel very real. It's hard to get like emotionally invested in people who aren't there to speak for themselves or people who nobody knew or are referenced in totally the past tense.

MOLLY: Right. How much is this drawing on interests you already had?

ERIC: I had never been on Ancestry dot com until about three months ago. And now I am like an Ancestry dot com Jedi knight. This message is brought to you by Ancestry dot com.

MOLLY: [Laughs]

ERIC: No, uh, I mean the thing I'm interested in is like making a new kind of show. Making something that feels different, and is like a totally like wild and different experience than what's out there already.

 

MOLLY: Creating something totally new and different from anything that already exists. More than all of the difficulties of making the show, that’s what’s keeping Eric up at night.

 

ERIC: You know the hardest thing about it is like you feel like you need to have a good idea every day. And I go most days of my life without having a good idea. I don't have ideas at all most of the day, let alone like good ones, and so like there is like constant fog of like "you didn't have a good idea today. Is this show going to fail?"

 

You know, you can kind of see our whiteboard through the window over here, and it's like—I'm really happy with that white board, it's got blue tape on it blocking it up into like ten squares, and each square is an episode. And right now I've got like two squares that don't have anything written in them, except for like scribbles that I wrote in there to make myself feel like there’s something going on. And every day I go home and those two squares don't have something written in them I'm just like so stressed out. And I come in the next morning I don't have anything to write in those squares and that's—yeah it's driving me nuts.

 

MOLLY: Perhaps hardest of all for Eric, with Gimlet growing so quickly and launching all these shows, there isn’t really anyone for him to go to with his questions, or turn to for guidance and support. That’s because the person who’s editing and managing Eric’s work on Twice Removed is probably the busiest guy at Gimlet. The company’s CEO. Alex.

ERIC: Alex is going to be the editor on the show, and part of launching like six shows in the fall is that like, Alex is the editor on most of them. And so you could probably pull his schedule up right now on the calendar for like next week total from like nine A.M. to six P.M. every day, it's just like—his calendar is purple on my Google. It’s just a purple square. Not that Alex should be less busy, but like I don't have like another editor to go to. Like I don't have that other person right now who I can like bounce ideas off of.

MOLLY: And so you're in this position of, like, managing a bunch of people who you want to manage well and who you don't want to, like, share the stress with.

ERIC: Yeah.

MOLLY: And Alex is great and he’s there, but he's there in a very limited basis, just because...

ERIC: Right. And he's so positive.

MOLLY: Right. Is that a bad thing?

ERIC: No. I mean it's good it's like a necessary thing, but like sometimes you just like—

MOLLY: I need to be able to talk to somebody about the hard part.

ERIC: Yeah.

MOLLY: Yeah.

ERIC: Yeah.

 

MOLLY: Eric doesn’t say it directly, but what all of this adds up to is that at a company full of people who are a lot like him anxious about making something good, he’s feeling pretty alone.

 

Eric: Do these work? Do these work?

 

MOLLY: A couple of weeks after Eric and I talked, the Twice Removed team assembled in a conference room to play through a first draft of an episode for Alex. Eric fiddled with a set of speakers, and Alex did his best to put everyone at ease.

 

ALEX: So excited!

 

MOLLY: Producer Meg Driscoll laughed.

 

MEG: Excited, that’s the word.

ALEX: Wait, are you not excited? Are you nervous?

MOLLY: Eric explains that they almost didn’t meet their deadline. They had to crash a little bit to be ready for this meeting.

 

ERIC: I wouldn’t call it like a head-on collision. More like a sideswipe crash.

 

MOLLY: AJ and Eric want Twice Removed to mix celebrity guests with everyday people who have surprising backstories. An early episode of the show will feature someone that longtime StartUp listeners already know well. Nazanin, Alex's wife. It's Nazanin’s episode we’re listening through today. This is a very early step in the editorial process. The team is playing some of the best moments from the interviews they’ve already done. And they’re walking through the arc of the episode. It’s a way of figuring out how well it’s all hanging together. Eric kicks it off.

 

ERIC: So I think obviously we will start with Nazanin’s immediate family, and this is her sister Nilu…

NILU: I wanted to be a boxer...

AJ: Really?

NILU: Yeah, isn’t that crazy?

AJ: When you were a kid in Iran?

NILU: Yeah, because I was obsessed with Rocky....

ERIC: Okay, Nilu was born in Tehran. She’s now a fitness instructor in California…

 

MOLLY: As they move through Nazanin’s chain and toward her mystery relative, there are funny and emotional and dramatic details. At one point I look over at Alex, and he’s about to cry. But there are also times when the whole thing lags. People in the room lose focus. And the thing Eric was afraid of, that history can be boring, it feels very real. But as they play the last piece of tape, Alex is upbeat. He says the episode? it’s coming together.

 

ALEX: To me—I feel like you’ve got like, you’ve got one hole and everything is—and then some basic transitional things to figure out. And like the whole story to put together and everything like that and—sound design. All the big things! But like, but like—in terms of structurally, you’re like, you’ve got one hole, basically, to fill with something. And I don’t think—you know, you’re in—you’re in good shape.

 

MOLLY: This is classic Alex. He’s full of optimism, even though there’s still a lot of work to be done. AJ, the show’s host, also seems to like what he heard.

 

AJ: Thank you for cutting that initial Iran stuff. So—it is so compelling.

 

MOLLY: And that’s basically where the meeting ends. It’s late in the day, time for people to head home.

 

ERIC: Great, thanks everyone!

ALEX: Alright!

 

MOLLY: As the room empties out, I ask Eric if he can stay behind.

 

MOLLY: How did you feel during all of that?

 

ERIC: Awful. Man, I think once we left Nazanin’s family, I was just like, “Oh, this is not great.” Like they're just good tape, right? Like, they give a lot. And, um, everything else felt like you were pulling, trying to make it work. That's how I felt listening through. I guess everyone else disagreed, but yeah.

 

MOLLY: Eric has been working on this episode for months. He started on it before his producers Meg and Ngofeen came to Gimlet, so for a lot of that time, he was working alone. He hoped that after this edit, Alex might roll up his sleeves and help him get this piece to the finish line, because with such a green team, there’s no one else to help him do that. But that’s not what happened.

 

MOLLY: You were looking a little bleak during Alex's conversation about what he felt was working and what he felt wasn't. And I wondered if it was because—if it was about something beyond just the conversation at hand, and it sounds like it was?

ERIC: I'm just like... Um... Yeah, I'm just exhausted.

MOLLY: Is it stress or is it long hours or is it both?

ERIC: I mean it's like, all of my day-to-day work is dependent on having answers. And it's like—everyone on the team comes to me for everything. Is this tape working? Should I book this person? Should I order this thing, should I reword this email? It's like having answers, having answers, have an answer. And then like—we play through the tape and I don't feel like it's great and like I don't know how to make a show that I don't have good tape for. I don't have that answer.

 

MOLLY: Coming up, what happens when the boss feels your pain and he doesn’t want it to go away? That’s after the break.

 

[ADS]

 

MOLLY: Welcome back to StartUp.

 

Talking with Eric about all the doubts he was having, I couldn’t help thinking about how his team must feel. After all, this process was at least familiar to Eric. He’d made podcasts before. But Ngofeen, the new employee who reports to Eric—and who I met at the front door on his first day of work—he’d just landed in a new universe. I wanted to know how he was doing. So I asked Ngofeen to come into a studio.

 

NGOFEEN: Maybe the biggest difference that I didn’t think about beforehand is that I was working in a place where I came in with a class of like eleven people.

 

MOLLY: When he started his earlier career at a big law firm, he was part of what’s called a hiring class.

 

NGOFEEN: We all were the same year, we all were at the same point in our studies. And so when we all start, you have this group of people that when you’re freaking out, you like call. And you’re like, “What did they say? What am I supposed to do? Did you get that?” Right? So you have that—while you’re in limbo, you have this sense of, like, “I’m in limbo with a bunch of other people, so it’s going to be fine.” You know? And so it is different to come in and just kind of be like—“I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t really…”

MOLLY: Who do I talk to about it...?

NGOFEEN: You know, like? Yeah, I don’t mean that in a bad way or anything but it’s like—

MOLLY: Who do I talk to about it. Yeah?

NGOFEEN: Yeah. In that way that’s like—it’s okay. That’s the thing, it’s the safety of like, “It’s okay, it’s 100 percent okay that you don’t know what you’re doing, and ask me anything, no judgment.”

 

MOLLY: Ngofeen had been at Gimlet for about a month at this point. He said there were all kinds of things that were hard to get used to. Even little things, like the fact that Gimlet is really casual, and doesn’t have a dress code.

 

NGOFEEN: I dressed up for all my exams in law school. Like I wore a suit to my exams. And I had this motto that was like, “look good, feel good, do good.” And so, coming into work and kind of feeling like I rolled out of bed and I’m wearing jeans and a graphic tee, I’m just kind of like, “I don’t feel like I’m put together.”

MOLLY: You don’t feel ready to perform. Do you feel can’t wear a suit to work here?

NGOFEEN: No, you can’t wear a suit to work here! You can’t. No! That would be so weird… You can’t wear a suit here.

 

MOLLY: Ngofeen said that all of the differences—big and small—between the law firm and Gimlet were like bricks in a wall. Each little thing stacked up on top of other little things, and on some days, all of those things together could make him feel really lost here at Gimlet.

 

MOLLY: Have you had any moments of, like, regretting it? Of regretting the decision?

NGOFEEN: Umm, not real regret, but like momentary regret. Um. And I don’t know if even regret is the right word as it is, like, “Should I have done this?” Is that regret? That might be regret. I feel like regret is like, “I shouldn’t have done this.” I have, like, “Should I have done this?” And then, like, the real answer—reasonable Ngofeen says, like, “Yeah, obviously.” But Ngofeen in any given moment is like, “There are just things that were a lot easier.”

 

MOLLY: Easier because at the law firm, he knew how things worked. At Gimlet, he doesn’t. At least not yet. And it makes him doubt himself.

 

I couldn’t help thinking about how sorry Eric would be to know Ngofeen feels this way. Eric is terribly aware that the people he hired left good jobs to work for him. It’s one of the reasons he feels such a strong sense of responsibility for making Twice Removed a success. He wants his team to be happy. He wants to show them that they were right in choosing to come to Gimlet.

 

But widen the lens just a little bit, and you see that Ngofeen and Eric are feeling really similar things. They’re both a little alone, and out on a limb. They both could use someone to go to with questions. And as someone who works here, those seem like symptoms of being at Gimlet during this moment of growth, when the company’s resources don’t match its ambitions.

 

For most of this year, Gimlet has had twice as many shows in development as it has out in the world for people to download and listen to. The leaders of the company, Alex and his co-founder, Matt Lieber, have said repeatedly that they know that ratio is ambitious, and we won’t ever be in this place again. So at some level they are aware of the problems. But I wondered if Alex knew how much anxiety there was, or how much pressure someone like Eric was feeling.

 

With sign-off from Eric, I gave Alex the tape of our conversations. Alex listened, and then he and Eric sat down in a studio, and we turned on the mics.

 

ALEX: I didn’t realize that you were under so much pressure. I think if I’d thought about it—I knew you were feeling a lot of pressure, because how could you not? So I am intellectually aware of, like, everything that you’re going through. But I would never have thought that, like, after that edit, that you would be feeling that way. I didn’t know that. Should I know that?

ERIC: Are you asking do I want you to know that or are you asking is that something you should know as like the...

ALEX: As the person who’s like created the company to try to help you do this thing that is making you cry—has something gone wrong that that’s happening?

ERIC: I mean, I think—I think everyone who’s started a show here has been under a lot of pressure, and I imagine I’m not the only person to lose it for a few minutes in that process. So I don’t think that in and of itself is, like, an indication that something has gone terribly wrong. As far as my personal experience as an employee here, it’s probably good for you to know only in the sense that it says something about the resources that are being allocated towards new shows and what’s necessary to make something work. We’re launching a lot of shows this fall. I don’t totally know what kind of pressures the rest of them are feeling, but I’m probably not the only person dealing with some of this. So in that way it’s probably good for you to know. That like this question of—is there enough support at the upper levels of the company, editorial support, management support, that’s probably an important thing for you to know.

ALEX: Right.

 

MOLLY: Thinking back to that listening session that made Eric feel so awful, Alex says the reason he told Eric that what was clearly a messy draft was going to be great—was because of his trust in Eric. He knows Eric’s skills, and the sense of responsibility he feels. And he’s counting on that.

ALEX: I’m hearing this with two very conflicting feelings. Which is sort of like—yeah, man, it’s so much pressure you’re putting on yourself, and I think it’s going to be fine and it’s not… A big part of me wants to just be like, “You have set very, very great expectations for yourself, and it’s going to cause you, like, heartbreak for the next several months. And perhaps for the next year. And perhaps for the rest of your life.” But then the part of me that is sort of like, that has high hopes for you and your career at Gimlet and this show is like, that’s, that’s great. That’s what we need. Is we need people who take that on themselves. Because that’s the only way that something good is going to get done. And I didn’t mean to suggest at all that, like, I want people crying.

ERIC: Right. But maybe a little.

ALEX: I want people—yeah, I wouldn’t, yeah, I’m not going to call the alarm. I’m not going to be like, “Oh no, somebody got really stressed out and lost it once.” If you’re losing it, like, every day. Or if you’re losing it, like, twice or three times, or you’re just feeling like, “Oh no, this is really not…” like, that is a problem for sure. But I feel like, one of the reasons that you are in charge is that, like, you do take a lot of responsibility for making something really good. And that’s part of the thing that makes you good at your job. And part of the reason that you are the one in charge is that you take a lot of that responsibility on yourself. That’s what a leader does, you know?

 

MOLLY: Eric gets what Alex is saying, but for him this response, that he’s stressed out because he’s learning how to be a leader, it doesn’t sit right. Before Eric committed to working on Twice Removed, Alex told him that the show would be his priority. It would be a main focus of his time and energy. And that’s just not what happened.

 

ERIC: As this company continues to grow, people are going to continue to be put into positions that they’re not really ready for. And I imagine at some point if, god willing, the company lasts long enough and I am here long enough, I will be put into another position that I am not ready for at some point in my career. But I think there has to be like a recognition on management’s part that, like, those people aren’t always going to know how to ask for help or what to ask for help on.

ALEX: Um hm.

ERIC: That’s the thing that I think would be helpful coming out of this. I mean, if I had another person who was thinking about coming to Gimlet to take a senior producer job and they think they’re going to get to work with Alex Blumberg and it’s going to be great, I would say: “Well. Gimlet is great. And you’ll get to work with Alex Blumberg some, but like be realistic about what you’re being asked to do, and make sure you ask these questions about the kind of support you’re going to get.”

ALEX: Um hm.

ERIC: If you think that’s unfair, I would really appreciate hearing otherwise. I think, um—

ALEX: I mean, I don’t think it’s unfair. I mean, we’re two years old. It’s a shit show. It was a shit show from the beginning. And I feel like part of running a startup is always being two steps behind what the needs are. Or maybe not part of running a startup, part of running Gimlet has been being two steps behind and catching up. I’m as much of a beginner doing this as you are doing what you’re doing. And so, I don’t know, you know what hurts? It hurts to hear myself referred to as management. I don’t feel like that. I don’t feel like I’m management and you’re labor. I feel like I’m trying as hard as I can just like you’re trying as hard as you can. And I know on the one hand, this feels like I’m the CEO of the company and it’s like, cry me a fucking river. I know that. But I guess honestly it hurt my feelings a little bit to hear that. I mean, if I’m 100 percent honest.

 

MOLLY: Eric and Ngofeen aren’t the only ones at Gimlet who are growing into new roles. Alex says one of the things he’s learning is that he’s overly optimistic about what he has time for. He winds up making promises he can’t keep.

ALEX: What you’re saying is, like, you don’t have a manager, really. I said I’ll be your manager, and I’m not. I’m falling down on the job of being your manager. Of being, like, having an intimate understanding of what you’re going through on a day-to-day basis and being able to check in with you about it. And that makes, that sucks. It’s hard to be without a manager. It’s hard to be without somebody that you feel like is just like in it with you, and has been there before and can roll up their sleeves and do it with you. And I shouldn’t have promised that to you if I wasn’t going to be able to deliver it.

 

MOLLY: It was around this time that Alex had some good news for Eric. Gimlet’s editorial team had made a new hire, an editor named Jorge Just. He wouldn’t arrive for a couple more months. It was July at this point, and Jorge wouldn’t be at Gimlet until September. So it was relief, but it was still a ways off.

 

One of the most important resources Gimlet has is Alex. And a question he gets all the time from investors and from people inside the company, too, is: how do you scale yourself? His answer is by training people like Eric, and the rest of us at Gimlet. But that’s a slow process. And this question of how much is Alex the editor, in the thick of writing through scripts and workshopping ideas, and how much is he the CEO, managing from above—it’s something he’s still figuring out.

ALEX: And as a matter of fact, me figuring stuff out is the subject of our next episode of StartUp. And it goes pretty deep. It’s a psychological deep dive. It’s unlike anything I think we’ve ever done before. I’m a little nervous about it. Hope you guys like it. That’s coming up next episode.

 

By the way, you know the show that Eric and Ngofeen are working on, Twice Removed, it is much further along than at the time of those recordings. It is almost here, just a couple of months away. It will be launching in mid-December and the shows are sounding really, really exciting and good. Eric’s doing a great job. So is Ngofeen. We’ll be talking about it on this and our other shows when it’s closer to launch. Keep your ears open. Alright, let’s hear from our sponsor, shall we?

 

[ADS]

 

ALEX: Coming up next episode, I get a job review from my friends, my family, my co-workers. They tell me what I’m doing well and… not so well.

 

ALEX: He tends to underestimate the time and resources necessary to build something, yep. Constantly running late, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know. Blind optimism and overcommitment, that is—

NR: Okay, let’s get in there.

ALEX: Yeah...

 

ALEX: That’s coming up, next time on StartUp.

 

Today’s episode of StartUp was produced by Molly Messick and Luke Malone. It was edited by Lisa Chow, Peter Clowney, Bruce Wallace, Kaitlin Roberts, Simone Polanen, Stevie Lane, and me.

 

Mark Phillips wrote and performed our theme song. Build Buildings wrote and performed our special ad music. Additional music from Golden Gram, Marley Carroll, Bobby Lord, and Hot Moms.gov.

 

David Herman mixed the episode.

 

Also, we mentioned the podcast Criminal in this episode. It is fantastic. You should definitely check it out. Eric’s co-creators on that show are Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer. You can subscribe to Criminal in iTunes.

 

While you’re there, subscribe to this show, StartUp. Or check out the Gimlet Media website: GimletMedia.com. You can follow us on Twitter @podcaststartup.

 

And one last thing! I have a special announcement for you members. Next Wednesday, October 19, from 5PM-6PM, I will be hanging out in the members Slack channel, answering your questions, getting your thoughts on this episode, and on this season of StartUp. We’re making a special channel for it: #AskAlex. I’ll be there, next Wednesday, the 19th, 5-6PM eastern. I hope you can join me.

 

And if you’re not a member, but you’d like to be one, you can visit our website gimletprod.staging.wpengine.com. Click on the “become a member” button. Once you sign up, you’ll be able to join our Slack channel, and have access to lots of other cool things. Like early access to new Gimlet shows. You can hear them before anybody else does. If that sounds good to you, go ahead and join and you can be part of that conversation next Wednesday.

 

Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week, on StartUp.

 

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