Michael Osborne: Famous & Gravy

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:12  
So there's a podcast that explores the lives of modern icons who passed away that doesn't sound very interesting until I tell you that it covers the stuff you won't find in the obituary? The show is called famous and gravy and is hosted by Michael Osborne, an earth scientist and storyteller, and Ahmed Kapoor, a media expert who carries some comedic talent. The show uncovers the lesser known gravy of these figures, interesting, humanizing details often overlooked, the show makes you asked, Would you want that life famous and gravy has been picked up by wondery and has achieved many of the things podcasters set out to accomplish when they start create a show that people enjoy, something that gets the attention of a company truly invested in podcasting like wondery, today you'll meet Michael Osborne, who has a story to tell about how it all happened. And now Michael Osborne joins me from Austin, Texas. How did you get so good at podcasting?

Michael Osborne  1:17  
Dude, don't pay me a compliment out of the gate that's going to go right to my head. It's gonna throw me off my game. Need to put me on the spot and make me sound like an idiot first so I can build my way back up. But

Matt Cundill  1:26  
nobody starts at saying I'm gonna be a podcaster. From what I know, it is something that did evolve for you, and you have had a touch in radio as well at KQED, so why not start there? Unless there's something even further back I need to know about No, I mean,

Michael Osborne  1:43  
you know, I love this story. So I am a refugee from academia. I'm a recovering academic. Once upon a time, I was at Stanford getting a PhD in climate science. Around year four, I was having a real crisis of faith, wondering, What the hell am I doing with my life? Climate is depressing. I was at Stanford, which is a big deal, but I didn't know anybody, and year four of a PhD is when your head is just so full of jargon that there's like eight people on the planet who understand what the hell you're talking about at any given moment. So the last step before the therapist office, I went to the Career Counselor center, and I said, I need help. I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm lost. And I kind of unloaded on this woman. She said, after many minutes of me rambling on, have you ever thought about starting a podcast? And it was a real inspired thought. This was like 2011, or 10 or something like that. It was before podcasts had become really mainstream. But I think what she was thinking about is, you need a creative outlet. You know, you need something to take your mind off of the main thing you're doing. You need to activate other parts of your brain. And so I left that office like, God, I could start a podcast. And I should say, I was a real early adopter of podcasts. I was listening as far back as 2005 and that kind of first wave of interest back in the day. What were you listening to? The first one I fell in love with was a show called Open Source. Christopher Lydon, and I'll never forget this. There was a moment I want to say 2006 2007 kind of the thick of the Iraq War, where Stephen Colbert was invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner. What was interesting is that the coverage the next day really missed the significance of CO bear speech, but open source nailed it. I mean, they nailed it. There was this whole sort of like, who let the gesture in to, you know, the court quality of it, and the way they described it, and the panel they led. I remember thinking like, Man, I am getting this here and nowhere else. So that was my first love. But then, you know, I got really into Mark Marin very early on. I was an early adopter of Bill Simmons and a lot of public broadcasting in PR content. That was kind

Matt Cundill  3:55  
of what I was drawn to. Yeah, so you're touching all the bases when it comes to podcasting and mentioning 2007 probably one of the most pivotal years in our history, when this is when the Facebook starts and Twitter starts up, and YouTube begins to begin something, and we enter into the age of acceleration, and you're making very simple discoveries, such as, my local news is not giving me what happened Last night at the press corps dinner with Stephen Colbert?

Michael Osborne  4:24  
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I was, I didn't grow up on NPR, but my formative years in college, you know, NPR kind of trained my ear, and this American life for me still stands as, you know, one of the quintessential shows to this day, and its lineage that shows its influence and the way it kind of trained a generation of listeners, I think, cannot be overstated. But you're absolutely right in that I was drawn to, you know, niche things that I was not hearing on mainstream outlets at the time.

Matt Cundill  4:56  
Yeah, so, as somebody who spent an awful lot of time working in rock. Radio and commercial radio, I'm really spending, I mean, I just, I still play Van Halen. I just played Van Halen 20 minutes ago, nearly 40 years old, and I'm still playing it. But things like Terry, gross, Ira Glass, This American Life. Yeah, we had it in Canada. You know, if you live near the border, it would spill over. You'd get a little bit of it. But I think it's only now that podcasting has sort of eclipsed itself into mainstream that we're really figuring out the value of all the stuff that you grew up listening to throughout your formative years.

Michael Osborne  5:29  
Yeah, radio lab is also very much, especially when it comes to science. But you know, when I came up with that first show, I mean, to go back to that story of walking out of the career counseling center. You know, the main point of inspiration was Mark Marin at that time, and there was something he was such an acquired taste still is. I remember listening to the first few episodes and being like, this guy is not for me. And then I came back around the time he interviewed Robin Williams. And, you know, it was like trying beer for the second time. The first time I didn't care for the taste the second time, I was super into it. And, you know, there was something about the way he would put his inner dialog on display, the kind of, you know, neuroses that I could relate to and could hear in my own head, and the way that he would tell a story in the course of a conversation, that it did become clear to me that this wasn't an interview, it was a conversation, but there were still key elements of a person's story. You know, Where'd you grow up? What your folks do, what was your big moment? And kind of, he'd marched through a chronology in a way that felt like a organic conversation. So that was the first main point of inspiration for me.

Matt Cundill  6:40  
You worked at Stanford beyond that. Who knew that they had an audio and production and some podcasts that were going like, circa 2014 they had some great foresight. Did you sell them on that idea? Or did they just come to you say, Yeah, we should be doing some podcasts, kind of

Michael Osborne  6:56  
yes and no. Okay. So what happened was, I started this first podcast when I was a grad student, and it kind of caught on. It initially partnered with an environmental news blog called grist, which is still around. Grist is really good. The podcast, for what it's worth, is generation Anthropocene. That's a mouthful. If you want me to explain it, I'm happy to do so. But it caught on, is the point. And my advisor wasn't really paying attention to me, kind of a hands off advisor. So I ran this podcast for about a year before he really took notice and said, What have you been doing with your time? Like nothing. He's like, You need to finish your PhD. So I crawled into a cave, banged out a 450 page dissertation on the stable isotope geochemistry of the Western Tropical Pacific. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn't matter. When I came out of that cave, Stanford hired me, and it was this office that was very cool, but also kind of startup within the university that was all about strategic communication. Initially, they came to me because they were looking for an environmental scientist. Then they discovered I loved podcasting, so my job evolved to build out a podcast incubator. I did a pretty terrible job at that, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing, really. I built out a studio, I hired a few producers, and we did a number of experiments. But Stanford's a behemoth. There was all kinds of nascent podcasting activity happening that I didn't know anything about. There were some shows that I was very involved with, and, you know, it's always been a pretty scrappy landscape. So I can't say that I had a real sharp, clear vision for what the podcast strategy of a university like that should be. I'd be much better position to speak to it now. But the great thing about it was I got a lot of kind of brute force experimentation opportunities. You know, I got to talk to talk to a lot of different people and try a lot of different things during those years. So it was an awesome job. It was blast

Matt Cundill  8:49  
having your ear trained on great podcast and public radio sound. You know, what a good piece of audio sounds like. So I can imagine that you just made it better and better. Was great, sort of practicing ground for where you wanted to take your next projects.

Michael Osborne  9:04  
Yes, although Lord knows, I need an editor. You know, the first show I did generation Anthropocene was edited long form interview. And certainly I got better and better at interview prep. And how do we approach a conversation so that there is a clear direction value proposition, and we tee the guest up to tell a good story. The second show I did was narrative. It was called raw data. It was about how information becomes power. And that's a whole different skill set that is writing for the ear. That is, you know, having a real eye towards good tape. That's many rounds of rough cuts and review. I mean, it's a lot more work. I think everybody kind of knows that. And I was, I was very drawn to that kind of audio storytelling. This is around the time serial hit too, so and gimlet was on the rise. I was interested in the art of writing for the ear, and then discovered how much work that is. But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed. And that's what trained me

Matt Cundill  10:02  
up. So this is a good moment for you to tell our audience about PrEP. So we talk about show prep and broadcasting all the time. In podcasting, I don't think anything really makes my heart sink any more than Hey, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, or somebody just reading the LinkedIn bio about the whole thing, right? I mean, it's and you have guests on your show tell me about the preparation part that leads to the excellent execution.

Michael Osborne  10:26  
When I was at KQED, there was an editor who would always ask two questions. One, why would my grandmother care? And two, tell me the one sentence summary of why this is going to be an interesting conversation, and I impose that discipline on everything I do. I force that question, what is the one sentence summary? What is the value proposition? What is going to be interesting here? In my experience, as I'm sure yours as well, if you have bomber interview prep, if you've got a very clear plan, everything else is easy. Editing is a breeze. You know exactly where you're going to go and what it's all about. If you are in post and are trying to figure it out and cobble together some interview that was interesting in places and boring in other places and disjointed, it's nightmare. So for me, it does come back to a few simple rules. One, what is the one sentence, summary. Two, how do you make it interesting? Immediately, you spoke a minute ago about that question. You know, tell us about yourself. I hate that question. That's a real pet peeve when I hear that on other podcasts, because in my mind, you've now shifted the burden to your guests to make themselves interesting and relevant to your show, and that is not fair. You're the host. It's your responsibility to do that. So I try and find a great question to kick start a conversation. I also tend to look for I care a lot about the first and last question. I think great conversations have a way of circling back on themselves, and there's a thing where I want there to be a kind of mirror reflection between what happens at the top of the show and what happens at the bottom? A little bit of hero's journey. Right? New equilibrium. We've been through something, and we come right back to where we started. And then, I guess the last thing for me is, I think of this as setting the table, that all the stuff you say to your guest before the interview and then in lead up to a question, all that is more important than the question itself. It's it's offering direction and kind of handing it off in an elegant way. So I really encourage people to spend time with that process as they're visioning out a conversation.

Matt Cundill  12:34  
Tell me about your co host, Amit. So Amit is he's

Michael Osborne  12:39  
an eclectic guy. He has had a really interesting career. He right out of college, drove the Wienermobile around the world. He was in Guam he's got great Wienermobile stories. He was@match.com in the early days. He was at Samsung in Korea. We became friends when he was at Wikimedia. Wikipedia is parent organization, and he was dating a woman who was friends with my wife in high school. So, you know, the four of us would hang out a lot, and he and I had this thing where we would, we started this ongoing text exchange where we'd quiz each other about, is this person alive, yes or no, no, looking it up on the internet, can you remember, is this person alive? Yes or no. And, you know, just be walking along and get this random text pop up on your phone, Shirley Temple, dead or alive? Or, I don't know, Joan Rivers, or whoever, Ross Perot, and I'd have to stop and think, are they dead or alive? So dominant, and I stayed in communication by playing this stupid text game for many years, and then during COVID lockdown, I said, I wonder if you and I could come up with a podcast. And so I reached out to him. He was in Dallas at the time, and by then, I'd moved back to Austin, so we were just a few hours away.

Matt Cundill  13:49  
So I love dead or alive. I mean, I do remember it being on rock radio stations, you know, to win, you know, pizza tickets or, you know, concert tickets or whatever we had sort of stashed around. I mean, the other one is, would you rather, but I did sort of appreciate the shock value of dead or alive. I did know that in the 90s I had an easy time. I thought it was a pretty easy game. Today, I'm not very good at it anymore. I mean,

Michael Osborne  14:12  
the one thing that is sort of, I don't know funny about celebrity death these days is when somebody passes away, there's this outpouring, especially on social media, and all these clips get shared and all these old interview moments, but then just the nature of content, you know, a week later, it's all forgotten. And so there's this sort of disproportionate outpouring, which I guess maybe is normal, but it is sort of hard to remember who's who's still around and who isn't. And you would think we'd remember these things. I can add one piece to that. Ahmet, when he was at Wikimedia, told me that every time somebody famous died, he described it as a Cannonball Run kind of contest to be the first editor to update the Wikipedia page. And so there was something about that I don't know. Rat. Race that excited him about, and was just sort of like, it's a funny observation. So the topic of celebrity lives and celebrity deaths had been a sort of ongoing conversation. And then there was also, you know, I remember having drinks with them one night before we both moved away from the Bay Area and falling into one of those conversations of like, what makes for a good life? That's the kind of stuff we talk about a lot. So when I approached him during COVID lockdown and said, Hey, you want to think about a podcast, those two ideas were kind of right there. Celebrity death and what makes for a good life.

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Matt Cundill  16:06  
did you guys start taking yourself seriously as a show? It's a good question.

Michael Osborne  16:12  
You know, Amit said, let's meet once a week and just talk and just see where it goes. There were two shows that really inspired me during lockdown. One was, you're wrong about and I'm a little bit infatuated with the career of Michael Hobbs. If books could kill is still one of my favorite podcasts and maintenance phase, I think is fascinating. And do you know who Michael Hobbs is? Have you run across him? It's interesting. He's one of these podcasters where the people who love him have, like, a deep commitment to his shows, but you're wrong about was the first one that caught my attention, and it was, it's a show that really kind of questions media narratives, so it is a little bit of looking back on history and, you know, revisiting big news stories to show how racist, homophobic and misogynistic they were, and that we didn't quite realize that at the time. Then the other show that I was really into was re watchables, the Bill Simmons show, where they re watch old movies. And so Amit and I started listening to those and talking about it. We started taking ourselves seriously, probably middle of 2021 maybe even early 2021 Amit had been the owner of a printing business. He's first generation. His parents started a printing business in Dallas, and he took over for them many years ago, and he decided he'd had enough. So when he decided to sell that business, you know, I was still sort of flailing about figuring out what my next move would be, we got excited about the idea of really taking the podcast seriously, and that, plus the inspiration from the shows I just mentioned, we started developing a structure that we had some real confidence around. We felt like we'd stumbled into something. So the

Matt Cundill  17:53  
question your show asks is, like, why do we become more interested in celebrities when they die? And I mean, I worked at a news talk station, and often we would prepare obituaries, like, months and sometimes years in advance. This is pretty good. We can run this right now, but no one's interested, right? Nobody's interested until they die, and then then everybody's interested in hearing the story. I mean, wouldn't it be nice to give the award to the person, like, while they're still alive, and not after.

Michael Osborne  18:21  
There's a great documentary called obit, I think it's on Amazon, where they profile New York Times obit writers, and they talk about, you know, how a lot of these are, are ready to go, because everybody's heading in one direction when it comes to life and death. One of the things that we have talked about on the show is what kind of conversations become available when somebody passes on, and we have a self imposed rule where we don't feature a dead celebrity until it's been at least a year since their passing, to sort of allow for grieving, but also to see, you know, kind of what happens with collective memory? Does their presence? Does their ghost, in some sense, hang around. You know, I would also say that one of the kind of conceits of our show, the way I've been thinking about it lately, it's almost like, it's almost like dream interpretation. And this is going to sound a little bit weird, but if, if you go to sleep tonight and you have a dream where your mother shows up, it's not actually your mom, it's some idea, some representation of your mom in your mind, celebrities are kind of the same way. We don't know them, but they symbolize something. They represent, something about our dreams, our aspirations, our fears, you know, our desires. And part of the approach on our show is to sort of do that deconstruction of what their representation means in the kind of collective

Matt Cundill  19:40  
conscious. So that's excellent that you mentioned that, because I do dream interpretation all the time. I'm big into it. And so let me lead you down with this. In the 1970s when somebody would pass on, you get about two lines on the evening news, and then that was the end. And it's been good knowing you. Greta Garbo, that's. Sort of thing then. And you know, you mainly cover figures from the 20th century as well, where most of the documentation that we had on these people was incredibly filtered, where it was just a bunch of press releases and just press coverage. And maybe you get a little bit on what you see today on imdb.com very filtered. And the reason why people dream at night and have these vivid dreams is because the filters are off in their brain, and then things come to life, and, you know, all of a sudden, you're having sex with strange people in strange places, with strange things, and all that other stuff that goes on and whatever dream that you have. So that when the filters go off, you you get the dreams. So I think this is really why I do find the show fascinating, and that's because the filters are off, and we're beginning to learn things about James Garner, Mr. Rogers, John Candy. Yeah, I

Michael Osborne  20:49  
haven't done a John Candy episode, but he's on the list.

Matt Cundill  20:53  
I was thinking also Steve, the Science Guy who got stung by the Stingray. Oh, Steve Irwin, thank you. Yeah, that one too. But we begin to learn this stuff. And I think this is one of the reasons I find the show fascinating, is that we're going beyond the filters and the BS that we've basically been fed, you know, through media throughout the years. I mean, it was just, you could just be more guarded. And I don't think the show is going to be terribly interesting if you were to do figures from the later half of or, you know, well into this centrist because we already got all the dirt. There's a TMZ,

Michael Osborne  21:25  
yeah, right. Somebody's already dug it all up. I really like what you have to say about filters and how the filters come down. You know, it's funny. I'll offer all kinds of ideas of what I think my show is about. I'm still sort of figuring it out on some level. I do think that we what I mentioned a second ago, about a certain kind of conversation becomes available when somebody is passed on. I think we have a kind of soft expectation that people can change, and that if they're held accountable in the court of public opinion, maybe we will see, I don't know, either a redemption or a canceling, whichever way it may go, that opportunity vanishes as soon as somebody's passed on, the story is complete. And so what to make of it at that point? I also tend to think that, you know, I mean, one of the things I want to do on every episode is start off with the first line of the obituary, where we give the headline story and sort of say, This is what everybody knows them for, and then start getting into things that we either did not know or knew but didn't really think much about. I will say this. I'm not a journalist. The information we are working with on this show is publicly available data, and I'm not talking to primary sources, and that's sort of an important distinction for me, that the story is available based on what's already been documented, and I have a high standard. I want to make sure it's verified and so forth. But I don't, I don't claim to be doing original reporting. What we do claim is that we are taking the same information everybody already had and looking at it through a different point of view.

Matt Cundill  23:00  
How do you recruit to find the people or the experts about certain celebrities and bring them onto the

Michael Osborne  23:07  
show? You mean, how do I how do I go about the research? I'm not, for the most part, not talking to biographers, although I have had some conversations with biographers and pop culture historians and, you know, journalists who who know more than I do. So I will go to some length to try and learn about somebody and get a handle on them, but it's to get a handle piece that's really sort of, I don't know. I want to try and get at somebody's essence as best I can, recognizing with some humility that's not possible. Again, I don't know these people. They are more like dream figures than they are, you know, actual humans, for better or worse.

Matt Cundill  23:42  
Why is the Mr. Rogers episode explicit? Because I've gotten lazy because of

Michael Osborne  23:49  
the opposite problem. I did not mark some episodes explicit that were and I don't do a great job of policing my own language. So better to be safe than sorry. I don't think there's any curse words in the Fred Rogers episode, although, and in fact, I'm actually quite sure of that. That one I did scrub, but I don't want to speak with the rest of them, just safer to assume I might curse. I

Matt Cundill  24:11  
just saw that just casually. And I thought to myself, what gets said about Mr. Rogers that merited that?

Michael Osborne  24:19  
Oh, dude, it goes dark. Oh, no. You don't want to know. No, it gets it gets nasty in there. No, I there's, I really don't think there's any actual cursing in that particular episode. And that was a kind of love fest. I gotta say, almost every episode part of fun for me. It kind of gets back to the prep question. I love the research. I mean, this show gives me creative license to go down Wikipedia and YouTube rabbit holes. I, you know, read biographies, I dig up obscure interviews from way back when. I love that part of it. I always feel like there's always some point in the journey where it's like, oh yeah, huh. I feel like that's the interview that kind of unlocks somebody. For me, where they almost accidentally betray their humanity, and that's the thing I'm always looking

Matt Cundill  25:06  
for, yeah, and I'm a bit of a trivia guy. I've also dated women who, first thing the morning would grab a newspaper and read the obituaries. I love biographies. And I think, I mean, if it's one thing that did carry us through the pandemic was, you know, biographies. I mean Bill Simmons, 30 for 30. I mean, all that stuff. It's just great. It's what I watch. I don't really spend too much time watching, you know, strange stuff on Netflix. I find biographies and stuff very fascinating, because I always think there's there's more to know and there's just more to know. And this is why I love this stuff. So I go through just a catalog, I could probably name a few things. And I don't know, maybe you mentioned it or not, but someone like Julia Child, I do know she spent summers in Maine, you know, because I saw her there. So, you know, Fred Rogers had a stint in Canada. You know, it's, it's small little things you go through. I'm like, Oh, I wonder if, I wonder if that'll get talked about in the show today.

Michael Osborne  26:00  
Yeah, it's interesting. You say that I have realized I cannot be comprehensive and things get missed. And you know, one of the questions you have to consider in terms of the audience experience, is like, is this targeted at the people who are infatuated with the figures, or the people who don't know them, or even have no idea who they are. I mean, it has happened a lot that people my age and even a little bit younger, will have absolutely no association with some of the figures. So I don't pretend to cover all the essential bases and all the critical stories. I do think that and finish things on the cutting room floor that I wish made it into the final episode. I don't think that's the point for us. It can be. I mean, we want to have a good handle on the story, and we want to understand the critical events that shaped a person and the major inflection points in anybody's life. But, you know, it tends to be the more obscure moments or less well publicized trivia that round them out and shaped the stories into something a little bit more interesting and relatable. I mean, the whole, you know, thrust of the show is celebrity as mirror. What does it say about us? How do we turn this back on ourselves and in terms of our own dreams, fears, creative aspirations and trade offs that we make in life. You know that that is, ultimately what the show is about, is personalizing it. I

Matt Cundill  27:29  
mean, I can only imagine with the Carrie Fisher episode, how much mail you got from Star Wars fans who said you left so much stuff out and you didn't cover this. And,

Michael Osborne  27:38  
of course, and honestly, early on, you asked the question, when did you guys start taking yourself seriously? Early on, I was not doing enough research. I still look back at the first like eight or so episodes. The ones that really stand out for me are Leonard Nimoy and Roger Moore. I have to go back and do those again. At some point, I did not do my homework, and there was a lot of meat left on the bone. But when it came to Carrie Fisher, I don't know she's a good example, in a way, because she was, I mean, the way she was a mental health advocate. I mean, that's the more memorable thing than how, you know, hot she looked as Princess Leia and Jedi. You know that? I know that that occupies a certain place in people's minds, and I guess I care about that, but all of her ups and downs with bipolar and addiction and and just having, you know, being the child of celebrities and navigating a very, very confusing system, all of it, made her a lot more relatable to me, and kind of like a bit of a, I don't know, pioneer in terms of how we talk about our trauma publicly. So I don't know. I mean, those are our points of emphasis, and making it sound more serious than it is. I hope that episode is funny. She's a funny lady.

Matt Cundill  28:51  
Oh, she was very funny. And a great writer.

Michael Osborne  28:55  
I mean, a really great writer. I didn't quite appreciate what a screenwriter she was, too, and like a scripts doctor. I mean, she was involved in some like, not remembering off the top of my head, but I remember some really big movies,

Matt Cundill  29:07  
famous and gravy is the name of the show. How did you land on that? Oh, god, okay, there's

Michael Osborne  29:13  
a pain point. Can I ask this? I want to turn this on you for a second, if I can. When you first heard the title, what did you think it was? What did you think it meant? Or when you first listened to the show, do you remember?

Matt Cundill  29:22  
No, I knew what the show was about from the trailer. It's a bad title, man. I mean, I don't know that it is, well,

Michael Osborne  29:30  
it might be okay. So this has been a major there's a pain point. You hit a nerve and asking this question, so I'm glad you did, and I want to speak to it. Ahmed, and I initially the show was called too soon with a question mark, and that was kind of confusing. And then when we were looking at other podcasts out there, there's, there are other shows called too soon. So we were trying to find something a little more cute and clever. We were at a Mexican restaurant underneath the Interstate in downtown Austin, writing names on a napkin, and. And we started talking about the unexamined life is not worth living, or something. We started talking about lofty quotes. We we drifted into lofty territory. And I was I remembered a scene, I think it's in Romeo and Juliet, where a character is gets stabbed and says, look for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. And it was Shakespeare being cute with the word grave. And Ahmed smiled at me and said, famous and gravy. And we wrote it down on the napkin, and there, there it stayed for a few weeks. And then we were looking at names, and I remember talking about this with my brother in law, and I said, What's the famous and gravy? And he said, I don't know what it means, but I want in so we ran with it. I have had very important people in the podcast space say you need to think about change your name. I say very important people who has called me out, I think Lauren Purcell, Jeremy ends and Justin Jackson have all said you really need to think about changing the name. We did a survey of our audience about a year ago, and one of the questions that came up was, what do you think? And overwhelmingly, people are like, you gotta keep the name. I don't know what it means. And we've tried to, like, backfill it and try to be like, revisionist about it, like it's the secret sauce of life. It's the thing on top of the main dish. Maybe those metaphors mean something. There's not a great origin story, but I don't know it is. It is a rule for developing a podcast that I'm sort of consciously breaking at this point because it's got a little bit of cult value. I think you're

Matt Cundill  31:37  
speaking to somebody who's come up with some good names and bad names for radio stations before, and some of the names that it took 12 of us around the table to land on just flopped. And some of the crazy stuff that we just, you know, one person would just make up on the fly, would succeed. And in the end, it's how you brand it. What you have inside is the content and how you sell it. That's it. The rest of it is just a lot of mumbo jumbo. Billy Bean,

Michael Osborne  32:05  
the movie, the Oh, the one with Brad Pitt. The,

Matt Cundill  32:09  
Yeah, Brad Pitt, blah, blah, blah. So you people are, it's just, it's just a lot of talk from people around the table. And so, I mean, I famous and gravy. I just say, yeah. You just got to listen to it. I do love it now,

Michael Osborne  32:22  
but it is, you know, I It doesn't tell you what the show is, and I'm sort of aware of its shortcomings that way, but I wholeheartedly agree with you that what matters is what happens inside the show. And if people start to map meaning onto it, awesome, all the better.

Matt Cundill  32:39  
Having worked in radio broadcast and doing a lot of promos, and being the voice for a lot of promos, famous and gravy, if you can define it inside the audio promos and get those promos out there, it doesn't matter what the title is. It really doesn't, yeah,

Michael Osborne  32:54  
well, this is, this is good to hear. Thank you. This is reassuring.

Matt Cundill  32:58  
So when you join one degree with the show. The question that I get asked all the time is, you know, what do you gain and what do you give up when you join someone like wondery?

Michael Osborne  33:10  
Yeah, it's been almost entirely upside. We still have creative control. We take input and feedback, but they are not telling us what to do or what not to do inside the show. The big thing that has come with the wondery collaboration is a stamp of approval that you know, wondery, I think, is a kind of HBO of podcast channels that you don't need to know much else. If you say it's a wondery show, it means that it's hitting a certain standard. You know, they wrestled with the question of why gravy, and asked us to create a little promo video on why gravy. Being able to cross the road in network has been wonderful. And I think that the most exciting moment in one way, was when we got featured on Times Square. There's a big billboard, you know, that lasted all of three seconds, that I don't think really moved the needle on the listenership. It's not like people saw the billboard, but the awareness. I mean, it's a little hard to top that. So, yeah, I have that saved as a screensaver on my phone in as much as there is downside, wonder is a big operation. I mean, they got the Kelsey brothers and Monica Lewinsky and I mean, they are, they're doing some very hysterical. I mean, they're doing some really top shelf shows, and we're an experiment for them. But, you know, I think maybe part of what's important to me, I'm really honored, not that they picked us up. I mean, obviously that they picked us up, but I think that this idea that an indie show on a shoestring budget can still attract the attention of a major network. That's a really important story in the podcast space, and I'm glad it still exists. I'm glad our show's an example of that. And one of the things I really want to do is kind of open up how we did it, how we went about developing the show, how we produce the show and offer it up as a case study. Because I want those kinds of. Stories to continue to exist. You know, whatever happens to our dead celebrity show? I want indie creators to have a shot with the big guys.

Matt Cundill  35:08  
This is why you're here, because it's an inspiration. And I want to thank you today for telling the story of the show and looking forward to it. You know, if you've got one degree plus, you're going to get early access to it. I just love where this has gone and where it's evolved from, and it just brings so much inspiration and hope to those of us who are just starting out in podcasting.

Michael Osborne  35:25  
Matt, thank you so much, and I can't thank you enough for bringing me on the show. It's been a real pleasure talking the sound

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  35:32  
off. Podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan Surminski, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aidan Glassey, another great creation from the Sound Off Media Company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai