Thousands of People Tune in to Hear These Two Women Tell Trump & Co. to Fuck Off
Hellbent Podcast is for feminists who resist and persist. It’s also hilarious as hell.
Welcome to PodFodder, where I talk to the people behind podcasts about why they created their podcasts. Yeah. Cool. Let’s get into it.
Today I’m talking to Sarah Lerner and Devon Handy, the forces of badassery behind Hellbent Podcast, one of my favorite political podcasts (not to mention, one of my favorite podcasts in general to listen to).
A lil’ confession: I actually thought of the idea for PodFodder after chatting with Sarah online for a while, so if you love this series, it’s partially Sarah’s doing, and if you hate this series, it’s completely 100% Sarah’s fault and toooootally not mine whatsoever.
You can subscribe to Hellbent Podcast here, follow them on Twitter here, give ’em a Facebook like here, and buy their v nice merch here.
Below, Sarah, Devon, and I talk mansplaining bullshit, dealing with ~the haters~, and keeping things casual with Wendy Davis.
The Queue: Y’all were told to prepare this ahead of time. Can you describe your podcast in haiku form?
Sarah Lerner: Oooh, I like it! Here goes: We’re Hellbent Podcast/Resisting and persisting/But mostly, cursing.
TQ: Can you talk a little bit about the origin story of the podcast?
Devon Handy: After the election, I was a little lost, and I wondered, “Okay. What can I do?” I thought, I need to find my smart, politically-minded friends, find out what they’re doing, and then copy them. So I called Sarah, and I said, “Can you please get brunch, we need to talk, or something?”
We got brunch and had a great time, it was amazing, so we did it again and had another great time. So I was like, we need to do a podcast. And Sarah was like, “No.”
SL: [laughs] I was pretty skeptical, because podcasts are a lot of work and I didn’t know how much time I had to devote to it. Then she pushed it, and I’m so glad she did because I can’t imagine not doing this podcast. It was really just us trying to find a way to funnel our anger and fear into something productive and positive. That’s how Hellbent was born.
TQ: Why a podcast over, say, a Youtube channel or a blog?
SL: I think that we immediately went to podcast because we felt like it was the right medium for us, and we could structure it in a way that fit our skills.
DH: Sarah and I have a really good rapport, and the conversation between us is what sets us apart. Also, I’m not a great writer, so a blog was never really going to work for me. Video, that’s a lot of makeup [laughs]. I think, too, we’re on the older millennial side of things. We’re pushing 30, and I don’t know that Youtube would’ve been the right medium for what we wanted to do. A podcast just felt right, especially because the political podcast space is so heavily white and male. We felt like there was a void there, an opening, there was hunger for a political podcast that was unabashedly feminist.
Part of why we did a podcast is because I wanted to find that podcast. There are some really great, unabashedly feminist podcasts like Call Your Girlfriend or Another Round, but I was just looking for something that was purely devoted to politics and current events. And not just the conversations around politics, but something well-researched, well-structured, and well-sourced. Those podcasts tend to be overwhelmingly white and male, whereas female podcasts tend to be conversational talk show-style, so at least for me, I was looking for us to be conversational (like I said, our rapport is our strongest asset), but then also, we research the hell out of our episodes.
TQ: I was about to say, too, especially with the conversation around Wonder Woman and Patty Jenkins right now, there’s people saying, okay, she’s a female director of this huge movie so you have to do it right the first time, or else people will say, “Women can’t do it, guess we tried it and it didn’t work!” Whereas you can have 27 male-skewed politics podcasts and it’s like, “Better give them another try!”
SL: Yeah, a lot of it was born of the fact that we were hungry for something like that in the marketplace and we figured we should just create our own. Fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves.
TQ: Building off of that, what does your process look like? I know you said you do a lot of research, so what kind of research do you do? How do you find your interviews — for instance, Wendy Davis?
DH: Wendy Davis was actually a fun outlier because her people reached out to us. We had not done any interviews at that point and we were like, “Uh — yeah — okay, whatever time.”
SL: In terms of our process, like Devon said, we do put a lot of work into our outlines. We do two shows a week, so our eyeballs are, like, on fire —
DH: [laughs] Glazed over —
SL: — staring into our laptop and phone screens. In terms of the research that we do for our podcast, I want to say we spend at least five hours each on each outline. Our outlines are very robust. A lot of times it’s just me following along on Twitter. We have a Slack channel and we drop articles into different channels to organize our outlines throughout the week, so then when we do actually sit down and have the interview, we have the articles and tweets we want to reference. It’s very much an ongoing process, and I would say for the two episodes a week, it’s at least ten hours total from each person.
DH: I would say the same.
Sarah is super active on Twitter and she’s always finding these great things on Twitter, and I subscribe to pretty much every newspaper and get their digests, so I do a lot of my reading at night before I go to bed. I’ll go through the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, all those digests. That’s just my process, which is a little bit different, and I always think it’s interesting, our different processes.
That’s the research side, and then it usually takes us an hour and a half to record and hour-long episode. We stop and listen, we go off on tangents. And then to edit, it takes about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how we recorded it, if we had a guest or not, and then another probably 30–45 minutes [because] I do all the episode art. You know, every episode has a title, and I try to make funny graphics because, well, I think I’m funny.
SL: Then just throughout the week, I do all of our social media, so that’s at least a few hours a day scheduling stuff. And now we have all of the administrative work, booking guests —
DH: Merchandise, Patreon —
SL: — so we spend a lot of time. And we’re able to because I’m a freelancer and Devon’s a stay-at-home mom.
TQ: It’s always funny when people don’t realize that the more effortless things look, the more work it takes. Going back to what we were talking about earlier, [about] being women in the politics podcasting space: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in terms of being women in this area of politics? Sarah, I know what women deal with on Twitter firsthand and I’ve seen some of the battles you’ve fought.
SL: [laughs] Well, how much time do you have?
Especially being female podcasters, we’ve had to deal with harassment, and it’s more people on the left than anything else. And it’s people on the left who perhaps don’t see our point of view, and they want to silence us, so they’ll harass us for just being vocal women, just being women with opinions. I feel like there’s a lot of trying to silence us, but we are just not women who will ever go quietly in the night.
DH: [laughs] I don’t think I’ve ever done anything quietly.
SL: Yeah, we’re really so focused on creating the best product we can and the best podcast we can, and it’s interesting to live so rent-free inside of these men’s heads when I literally don’t think about them at all. Unless I’m being harassed, then I have to think about you.
DH: It’s interesting, I have a much smaller Twitter following and I have a much lower profile on social media. It’s just not really my forte.
SL: Well, she just joined recently. You might be saying something different a year from now.
DH: That’s true, that’s true. But I don’t get as much as the online harassment, but what I’ve found is that out in the “real world,” because I’m very knowledgeable about politics and I spend all of my time reading and researching and I’ve got statistics, and I’m smart, when I get into conversations with men about politics, they just assume that I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. I get mansplained to a lot. And I’m just like, I’m not a small person. I know it’s weird that I keep bringing this up, but I’m almost six feet tall; I’m not tiny. I’m not some wilting flower.
SL: I would just like to point out that I’m 5’ 3” and not a wilting flower.
DH: [laughs] Of course. But for me in my personal experience, I get mansplained to so much. And I don’t understand, I’m a big person and a big personality, and you think that would protect you a little bit, but no. Being just a women in the political space with an opinion, it’s almost like you’ve got “please be a dickwad to me” tattooed on your forehead.
SL: Also you’ll see too with our iTunes reviews that we have over a hundred with a five-star review, and then you’ll see ten one-star reviews that are just trolls trying to bring down our iTunes reviews. We had one episode on our SoundCloud where someone left close to 50 comments on it just to be an asshole. Being a woman in this space is dealing with a lot of men who are trying to grind you down and silence you, and you just having to go, “Fuck you, I’m not going to go quietly in the night.”
TQ: I actually talked yesterday to two different duos of women, and both of their podcasts are focused on film — one was more TV-movie focused and the other was more niche — but both duos said the same thing of people underestimating them, getting comments about their film knowledge…especially the duo that talks about niche films. That’s the whole point of their podcast, they say up front that they’re just two women who like to watch film and don’t work in the industry, so hop off.
SL: It’s a universal thing. Even our guest today, Sarah Kendzior, whose one of the foremost scholars on authoritarian states. She has a PhD and she still deals with people not taking her as seriously as if she were a white man, basically. She said today, “I’ve had people tell me my PhD wasn’t real to my face.” And this is one of the most brilliant journalists, in my opinion, and just being a woman, no matter what height you achieve — almost if you achieve greater heights — you’re more vulnerable to that kind of thing.
TQ: Totally. My last two questions are ones that I’ve been asking everyone less about their topical focus and more about getting into podcasting in general. Regardless of genre, what do you think makes a great podcast?
SL: I think Devon alluded to it earlier. I think having a good rapport between co-hosts is really important, a really natural conversational flow. That’s what I’ve noticed for podcasts that I’ve really liked, that’s always something that draws me in.
I think it does go back to the amount of effort you put in. Like you were saying, when it seems effortless it’s often because the people put in so much effort to prepare. I think doing the research, putting in the time, putting in the effort, and also — this seems really obvious — but good sound quality.
DH: Yeah, okay I have a whole rant on this. When we started and I said, “Let’s do a podcast,” the amount that I knew about audio-anything was zero. I literally bought an Adobe Audition manual and read it cover to cover, and that was the sum total of my knowledge. It’s definitely been a stop-and-start, trial and error learning process, but listening to the first couple of episodes now, it makes such a difference. All the time that you put into research and rapport and putting your heart into this, if you don’t take time to research the right equipment and right software, and maybe look up some basic online tutorials on how to do this stuff, it doesn’t really matter. You can say the greatest thing in the world, but if no one can understand you —
SL: — Or if they’re distracted, it doesn’t matter. I also think, too, podcasts that are able to build communities —
DH: Yeah, that is huge.
SL: With our podcast, you’ve probably noticed if you’ve listened, the first block of every podcast is listener feedback. We really want to make it feel like a two-way conversation. We’re responsive to our listeners, and we also have a Facebook group that’s got over 700 people and we just created it a month ago. On Twitter, I pretty much respond to everybody.
DH: Yep, I spend a lot of time responding to emails. I think being responsive to people who listen and making them feel like they’re part of something bigger than a podcast also helps.
TQ: What would you say would be a good first step for people who want to start a podcast?
SL: For us, we really put pressure on ourselves. We were going to record an episode and see how it sounded, and if it didn’t feel right, we wouldn’t do the podcast. We almost treated our first episode as a pilot episode.
DH: It was, and we shopped it around in our own brains.
SL: I think if you’re going to do it, just commit to it.
DH: Here’s what I will say if you want to start podcasting. You don’t need to spend a ton of money, but you do need to research and you need a microphone. You need at least a basic microphone that is not built into your computer. You need to have a general idea of how to record and mildly edit. Get Audacity, it’s free, watch some videos on YouTube. You have to know your way around that a little bit. Beyond that, I would say what Sarah said — just do it.
SL: And stick to a consistent schedule. We’re pretty clear that new episodes drop Monday and Thursday, and if for some reason we ever have to change it up, like Devon went to the Grand Canyon last weekend, we can switch up our regularly scheduled Monday episode to Tuesday. But when people know when to expect your podcast and it’s not all over the place, I think that also helps.
DH: Also having a structure for your episode. You don’t need to do these huge outlines like we do. Obviously ours is very information-driven, so ours are very robust. But have a structure so people know what to expect and know where you’re going. You can’t just talk for an hour; it’s not going to sound good. No one’s going to like it. You have to have a point.
TQ: That last point is interesting, because as I’ve been talking to people I’ve found that on a spectrum of total spontaneity to firm planning, most podcasters fall somewhere in the middle, but I’ve also talked to some people on who fall on both extremes.
DH: I say that I like to leave space for us to make bad jokes, is how I put it, to kind of ad lib. So I like to have the outline, but I talk about things a little bit more that aren’t necessarily written out on the outline.
SL: We’ve found that in organizing our thoughts, it helps the audience follow the conversation more easily. I think too that a lot of podcasts are very high-concept, and I think that can help drive it. For example, Gilmore Guys. They know they’re watching an episode of Gilmore Girls every week and breaking it down. When someone’s concept is a structure in and of itself, I think that helps. We’re just a politics podcast, so we have to find a way to set ourselves apart a little bit and make sure we’re organizing it in a way that helps our audience follow.
Transcription provided by Shea Fitzpatrick.
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