“What makes ‘good tape’? That is the question that has consumed my life for 20 years, and I have an answer for you…” — Alex Blumberg

Storytelling is an art form that is hard to master, and especially when you can’t rely on the help of visual imagery.

Alex Blumberg has been perfecting this craft for nearly 20 years, and joined The Tim Ferriss Show to discuss how to create an iTunes mega-hit podcast.

I strongly encourage you to keep reading if you have your own podcast, are thinking about starting one, or just want to learn how to tell stories that connect with people.

Alex worked for 10 years at This American Life (one of the top podcasts of all time), co-founded Planet Money in 2008, and recently co-founded Gimlet Media.

Gimlet had meteoric success topping iTunes with two hit podcasts — Startup (which is a podcast about Alex starting Gimlet Media) and Reply ALL.

For your convenience, I organized the discussion:

• On Working At This American Life
• On Learning From Ira Glass
• On Commitment to Excellence
• On Being A “Gotcha” Journalist
• On Co-founding Planet Money
• On Trying To Produce A TV Show
• On Podcast Prep
• On Creating A Documentary Style Podcast
• On What Makes Good Tape
• On What An Editor Does
• On What Makes A Good Editor
• On Listening To Your Boredom
• On What A Producer Does
• On Asking Good Questions
• On Podcast Metrics
• On Managing A Startup And A Podcast
• On The Startup Podcast Team
• On Tools Alex Uses
• On Documentaries
• On Who Is Successful
• On Who Is Punchable
• On Old Alex Vs. New Alex
• On Advice to 20-Year-Old Alex
• On Working At This American Life

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On Learning From Ira Glass

A lot of what Alex learned is about the effort you put in.

Watching Ira work you see that he just keeps thinking about things longer than other people think about it, and then eventually he comes up with an idea that’s good.

• This made Alex realize the way you get to good ideas is by going through a lot of bad ideas first.

Being a perfectionist is putting in a little bit more time to think through the level 1 and level 2 ideas, and then trying to get to something deeper.

This is why Alex and his team do as many edits as they do, because often in an edit you will take a bad idea and transform it in to a good idea over the course of several edits.

• Tim mentioned he had the opportunity to study non-fiction writing with the Author John McPhee who is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

A good habit Alex picked up from Ira is being committed to excellence.

If he had an idea of how to make something better he always tries to do that before it goes out, and still does this to this day.

Alex said prior to that he was the guy who would say “it’s good enough.”

• Being that way is an emotional thing you do to try and not make things as good as they could be because trying to make things good is scary, and you might fail.

Of all the things to care about in the world, trying to make something excellent is one of the better ones.

There’s a certain comfort with crisis that Ira had that wore off on Alex, and he thinks this is probably not a good thing.

For the entire time Alex worked at This American Life every single show was always being worked on until the very last minute - getting produced, edited, etc.

20% — 30% of the time they weren’t sure if the show would even air on time.

On Commitment To Excellence

Never in the entire time Alex was working at This American Life (10 years) did he have a time where he produced a story and handed it in to Ira Glass, and Ira said it looked great and had no other revisions.

In fact, there has never been a time for anyone in the entire history of This American Life where Ira didn’t have revisions on a draft story.

• There is always a new tweak and something that could be better.

In the beginning it would sting a little bit because Alex would take it personal, but then he realized that the first draft always sucks no matter who you are.

• You just have to get over yourself.
• It is not about you or your ego; it is just about trying to make it better.

Alex then realized that it is really useful to get feedback and edits from other people. The idea that other people’s ideas can make you better.

• This is a really good way of going through the world too, which is to be open to what other people are telling you.

The commitment to excellence means being comfortable hurting peoples feelings, and being comfortable having my feelings hurt.

You have to try to take the feelings out of it, and just talk about the goal at hand.

Excellence is just tricks. It is managing your time and expectations.

On Being A “Gotcha” Journalist

Alex has definitely changed from where he was when he started in his career.

• Although, he was never a “gotcha journalist.”

At This American Life, Ira didn’t want to do the story where you didn’t get the comment from the person who was supposedly the villain.

• Ira really was trying to understand everybody’s point of view, which was an amazing lesson to learn.

It’s always a better story when you are trying to understand the other side.

Tim mentioned that he makes a point to never attack anybody on his blog because he felt like it would be going for cheap applause.

On Co-founding Planet Money

There was a decade in-between getting the producer job at This American Life, and then co-founding Planet Money.

• The producer job at This American Life started in 1999 and Planet Money started in 2009.

One of the nice things about working at This American Life was that it was constantly changing as he was there.

It takes a long time to get good at producing documentary radio. The learning curve is pretty steep.

This really helped when Alex started Planet Money.

On Trying To Produce A TV Show

Alex said they thought they were storytelling experts, but then they got in the TV medium they realized nothing they knew worked.

Everything that makes good tape doesn’t apply to TV.

Often times you can make an amazing radio story with just having one or two people telling a story of what happened to them in the past.

• That is death on television. You can’t watch people telling a story about something that happened a long time ago.
• Something about it just doesn’t work.

They would try to produce those TV shows like that, and would watch them and be completely bored because you need much more visual information than just watching people talk.

You can produce a story form the past for TV, but to do it you have to give people something to watch. You have to invent an entire visual story to go along with the narrative story, and that is really expensive.

If you look at an Errol Morris documentary like The Fog of War it is a lot about what went on back then.

• Errol filled every second of every frame with invented imagery that he had to come up with, which is extremely time consuming and extremely expensive.

The documentary Man on Wire is a similar type of thing.

This is compared to your average reality TV show, which is just two family members fighting with each other. That is the narrative crack in visual terms.

We are hard wired to watch reality TV, and it is so much cheaper. You just turn the camera on, and it’s two people fighting, and we want to watch it.

That is why TV is the way it is because it is what we want to watch. We want to watch things moving on the screen.

On Podcast Prep

Alex said there is no balance right now of time management, and they don’t have things ready to go in advance.

• They just finished editing an episode of Startup that day, and it went live that same day.

That episode was all about burnout.

There is a period in a company’s life where people are like “Well this is just the startup experience,” but then there is a point about 4–5 months in to it where you think “It’s a startup, but it shouldn’t be this hard.”

They are realizing they have to change some things, and add some more support.

Part of it is you just don’t know what’s possible, and the way they started there just wasn’t enough capacity to do what they were trying to do.

The shows for Reply All aren’t as planned out as they want to be. There are things on the calendar going out one or two months, but it is always a race every week to get things done.

Their goal is to get to a point where they can be one week ahead, which would have next weeks episode completely finished this week.

• They are several months away from that goal.

On Creating A Documentary Style Podcast

When you are doing a documentary style podcast (the kind that they do) there is a script.

Alex will go out and gather tape in the field and record different conversations with people, and will edit those down so he has a lot of select tape.

He will have 25 minutes of edited tape for example, and then you have to stitch that together with a script.

Alex will write the script, edit the script, and then the whole team sits around and does a table read and edits it as a group while playing the parts of the tape throughout.

You then re-write the script and get to the final version.

That is when you go in to the studio and “track it”, which is when you actually lay down your voice tracks which are then mixed together in to the final product.

Alex will sometimes review all the tapes gathered in the field, or sometimes the producer does it.

• In this instance with the StartUp podcast Alex is usually the one actually getting the tape so he has already heard it because he was there with the microphone and recorder.

Usually it is his producer who does a first review and pulls out all the select tape.

On What Makes Good Tape

This is the question that has consumed Alex’s life for the last 20 years.
There are a couple things you’re looking for when you’re going through a tape.

With his script he can say almost all of the basic information usually better than anybody that he is talking to, so what he is looking for are specific moments.

Alex is going for specific moments that have some sort of deep emotional resonance, or where something very live and unexpected has happened, or where a very authentic emotion has been expressed.

Using an example from his Planet Money days is if he is doing a story on bond prices what he doesn’t want is somebody actually talking about bond prices.

• He want somebody expressing some sort of emotion about it, because he can do all the nuts and bolts information transfer.
• What you are looking for with your interview subjects is something you can’t provide yourself (like a unique perspective).

So that is one whole category of good tape.

The other thing that you’re going for is emotionally authenticity where something interesting or unexpected happened in the moment.

Another category is someone just telling you a really good narrative, like a little story (at This American Life they called it an “anecdote”).

For example, if he starts to talk to you and says “This morning I left my house and I looked up in the sky and I saw something I couldn’t believe.” — You want to hear what happens next.

• So that’s a story.

We are hard wired to want to hear one sequence of action that leads to another sequence of action and we want to hear what it is building towards.

Human beings are hard wired to want to pay attention to the mechanics of how stories are told — the fact it has a beginning, a narrative progression, and rising action.

• These stories are what we have been telling each other for 40,000 years.

So people telling you stories is one of the other things you are going for.

On What An Editor Does

Alex’s primary skill is being an Editor, which means you are a collaborating with the hosts in getting the best show you can get.

They have a weekly story meeting for Reply All where they will talk for an hour about the stories they want to pursue, and think about interesting angles, who to talk to, what questions to ask, etc.

The questions are really important. If you go out and don’t ask the right questions you can come back with nothing, and no good tape.

You have to design your questions so that you have a higher chance than average of getting good tape.

When they come back and write the script, Alex will then go through the script with them and usually do up to three pass-throughs depending on how tricky the story is.

• They will dive deep in to the language and phrasings.

When people see it for the first time from the outside they can’t believe how much actual work goes in to the making of this stuff.

• One of the big questions is how much of that work is necessary, and how much of it is just spinning the wheels.

If you look at the very top of the charts at iTunes those shows have that amount of labor embedded in to the programs they are putting out.

Alex came from This American Life where he learned all of this, and there is even more editing and production work that goes in to making those shows.

The Serial team was working on that for one whole year at least.

On What Makes A Good Editor

This American Life was a real editing shop, and it was a very special place in that Ira Glass is a really great editor, but also very encouraging of people to do their own thing.

• It’s his show, but he really encourages you to do your own thing within that show.

When Alex worked there every story that he wanted to do and could make a good case for, he was allowed to do and write it himself.

Part of being a good editor is wanting to encourage others, and share credit.

When Alex got to NPR the concept of the job was the reporter goes out and comes back to you with a story, and you make a couple suggestions but you are not thinking big about what the actual idea or new thing of the story is.

Another part of what makes a good editor is getting in there from the beginning and talking with the reporters about what the new and interesting thing they are going for is.

A lot of the work that makes a story good is in the beginning. A lot of editors don’t think about their jobs that way.

One of the biggest things about being an editor is paying attention to your own boredom.

People who get in to journalism get in to it because they are interested in the world and have a natural curiosity and they want to satisfy that curiosity, but you still have to keep your audience interested and the Editor can help do that.

You have to be curious about the world, but also have an internal sense of your boredom.

• This was something Alex had to learn to do, but once he did it has been really helpful.

On Listening To Your Boredom

A symptom of boredom is you trying to make up what the reporter is meaning if it’s somebody you like that you work with and they read something that is sort of boring, or you don’t know what the point is.

• That’s good because it is decent human behavior to try and be understanding and meet somebody half way.
• There is something that happens in audio, which is the listener doesn’t do that so you have to train yourself out of doing that, and to not fill in any gaps with what people are saying.

Another sign of boredom is just having a slight confusion on something being said.

• It is often at the back of your head so you have to pay attention to it. The minute that feeling happens you know it is a spot that needs to be edited.

The other part is you find yourself drifting in an edit, and if you find yourself drifting in an edit then you know it’s not your fault it’s theirs.

• That’s harsh but it’s true. It is the reporter’s job to keep you from drifting.

It is not your job as Editor to be engaged, it is their job as the reporter to engage you.

The minute you feel yourself drifting it means that is another section that needs to be edited.

Tim mentioned when he sends some of his writing to other writer friends and first asked them to let him know what they like and dislike they may try to appease him or feel bad about hurting his feelings,

• So he instead asks them to just point out what isn’t clear.
• This usually yields a much better result because they don’t feel like they are being as judgmental towards him personally.

That is even more important in audio because you can’t go back and re-read audio.

• The minute you are confused listening to audio your brain has to assess it, and then you are no longer focused on the story.
• If that happens it is a train wreck and you never catch up.

On What A Producer Does

A producer has many meanings, but in Alex’s case his Producer helps him think through the interviews, listen back and/or transcribe the tape, pull the interesting parts of the tape, think through how to structure each episode, and all sorts of other things.

The Producer basically helps build the story with the reporter.

• It is the reporter’s voice and the reporters writing usually, but really the reporter and Producer are a team.

Structuring the story is so important; especially in audio because you can get confused easily so generally what the Producers are in the audio world is experts at structuring the story (how does the story begin, what emotional moments are being led to, etc).

At This American Life Alex would provide a road map for the structure of the story to the reporter.

On Asking Good Questions

Tim mentioned he is an advisor to Creative Live and was able to get a copy of Alex’s master class on storytelling.

What’s often interesting is the nuts and bolts of people’s processes. Alex will often ask people, “On a day-to-day basis what are you actually doing?”

His goal is to try and find one “vivid moment.”

The idea is to get a real sense of the details of people’s lives.

On Podcast Metrics

Alex was obsessively checking their Soundcloud numbers because they host on Soundcloud.

Soundcloud feeds their iTunes so anytime someone subscribed to StartUp that downloads to their phone that would register as a play on Soundcloud.
Soundcloud was capturing both the people streaming it through the web (the StartUp website), and through downloading it on their phone through iTunes.

• It was a one-stop shop for the listening numbers. Alex would check those numbers and that was pretty much it.

PJ and Alex the hosts of Reply All are much more tech savvy, and they do look at Chartbeat a lot but Alex does not.

On Managing A Startup And A Podcast

It is sort of an insane project what they are doing, which is to create a regularly occurring documentary podcast about a company that is starting up, while at the same time trying to start that company.

Both of these are full-time jobs so it has been pretty tough.

On The Startup Podcast Team

The style Alex does is much more time consuming than the other style of podcasts out there, which is just a normal interview style.

Alex goes back and forth on thinking if it insane or not to spend this huge amount of time producing a 20-minute podcast, when the other style of podcast you could produce in 20 minutes.

Right now on StartUp it is just Alex and his Producer Kaitlin, and another employee Lisa who is going to be Producing the second season of StartUp.

• This amount of people is not quite enough.

Startup comes out every 2 weeks, and they can barely get by with that, and that takes in to account all of the experience Alex has which makes him faster than most people would be.

• They definitely need another one or two people to help.

There are also people who help with the editing (the table reads), outsourced help with the transcript of the tapes, and an engineer who mixes the episode which is basically everything from putting compression on it and making it sound good with the right levels, etc.

On Tools Alex Uses

Alex’s recommended equipment for field recording:

• AT8035 Microphone | Tascam DR-100KII Recorder
• Sony MDR 7506 HeadPhones | XLR Cable

Alex also uses Pro Tools as their editing software.

They use an actual whiteboard that has a checklist of everything that needs to be done every episode.

• Basic stuff like the ad copy, emails, list of songs in the episode, etc.

The scripts are all written in a Google Doc, and there are multiple people editing through that Google Doc.

Slack is also used somewhat, and things are scheduled through Google Calendar.

Alex has used Basecamp a few times before, and he feels it is really good for distributed teams (but has not used Trello or Asana).

On a day-to-day basis he doesn’t use it much because it is pretty simple what they are doing, which is just writing scripts and wrangling tape.

• That is the day-to-day of their work.

They also use flash card recorders and nice microphones for capturing tape in the field.

• They use Tascam recorders or Sony’s. They aren’t the nicest ones, but they are pretty nice. They also have nice microphones.

Tim mentioned that he has a Zoom recorder (H4N model), and that he finds that the hand-held zoom recorders work very well by themselves, and work even better with a lav mic or a hand-held stage mic connected with XLR’s.

The truth is it’s just habit for why Alex keeps using the Tascam because they were the microphones they first started using at This American Life.

• Alex is not super tech savvy, although he does know the basics on what he needs to know.

So part of it is just being used to it, and being comfortable with it.

Alex bought the Tascam just because he saw a recommendation for it on a website, and he bought it and it has worked great thus far. Whatever works for you individually with the recorder is fine.

The microphone is more important than the recorder.

The other part is if it is a directional mic.

What Alex is trying to do is get intimate sounding conversations.

So if you have an omni-directional microphone (which is the mic’s recording pattern is picking up from all around) you have to worry a little more about placement, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like the conversation is as present.

If you get one of the uni-directional boom mic’s and you point it at someone you hear them very well, and when you point it away you don’t so you get this very nice intimate sound.

If you are in a place where there is a lot of stuff going on around you and you want to document that as well you can just point it towards those sounds after the interview to get that ambience.

Alex likes the intimacy you get with a nice uni-directional boom mic.

On Documentaries

Alex loved Man on Wire, which is one of the best things he has ever seen.

On Who Is Successful

When Alex thinks of success he thinks of it as two layers:

1. The outsized success of amazing people who have skills and abilities far above ours, like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, etc.
2. People who have managed to carve out a nice life for themselves with friends, family, and time.

When Alex was younger he really wanted a mentor to learn a skill and to have meaning in his life.

• When he stared working at This American Life that is what he felt like he got. Once he got on that path he felt pretty consumed by it.

Alex has a very particular thing he is trying to accomplish, and feels a little too busy to try and look around to emulate other people.

He has tunnel vision in this regard.

Alex doesn’t know that many entrepreneurs because he came out of public radio, and most of his colleagues are still in audio.

The more Alex has been running his own operation, the more he sees what Ira Glass did really well at This American Life.

What Ira did really well was he made people excited about the mission. He did that by caring about the quality of what they were putting together, and making it feel meaningful.

Tim mentioned that he has people he admires because of the methodical way they dissect certain types of problems, and these are people like Chris Sacca, Naval Ravikant, and Mike Maples Jr.

• Tim enjoys learning the recipes they have for evaluating things because they are all clearly effective and all have different methods.
• Tim also really likes Morgan Spurlock who is very good at establishing rapport with any different groups of people.

On Who Is Punchable

The first for-profit job Alex has ever had is this one with Gimlet Media where he is the CEO.

Coming from the public radio and non-profit world there is a way they see themselves in the manner that they need to be shielded from the world of profit because it’s dangerous and people will eat you for breakfast.

There was a slight attitude in public radio that they are shielded from this world from having macho forces in the for-profit world.

There is something about going out and being a part of the market economy in a really straightforward way that is freeing, which feels like the way it should be and not scary.

Tim mentioned he works with a lot of non-profits like Donor’s Choose, which actually runs very lean like a for-profit.

• The for-profit world gives you a lot of metrics that can be freeing because there is very little ambiguity about it.

The metric thing is huge, because in the non-profit world you make decisions based on all these arbitrary reasons like “Does the Director like it,” or “Do our donors like it,” instead of “Do people like it?”

On Old Alex Vs. New Alex

The Alex from back in college would probably think the new Alex was some kind of sell-out.

• Alex was a lot more suspicious of the profit motive when he was younger.

On Advice to 20-Year-Old Alex

Alex’s advice to his 20-year-old self would be don’t be so afraid.

Alex organized a lot of his choices around what he thought he could do rather than what he wanted to do.

• He did that because he didn’t want to try things he wanted to do because he was afraid he would fail at them.

Alex organized a lot of his life around fear for the first decade after college.

His advice would be to not be afraid and go out and fall on your face more.