Emily Ladau:
Hi, I am Emily Ladau.

Kyle Khachadurian:
And I’m Kyle Khachadurian.

Emily Ladau:
And you are listening to another episode of The Accessible Stall.

Kyle Khachadurian:
What are we going to talk about today, Emily?

Emily Ladau:
Okay. So, for the first time in a really long time, we actually have a guest and I’m pretty stoked because it’s been a minute. And he wrote a super cool book which I just had the inclination to hold up like people are watching us but they’re not, alas. I am super biased about how cool it is because our podcast is included in it. So, it’s called The Podcast Pantheon: 101 Podcasts That Changed How We Listen. And we have Sean Malin here with us today. So, first, because I’d be remiss if I didn’t do my homework before the episode, I found us a little quote. If you would be so kind to read it, Kyle.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes. The quote is from Kirkus and we definitely didn’t just use it because it mentions our show. We did though. And it goes, for each podcast, Malin offers a brief history, insight from those involved and his argument for why each show should be considered essential. They include the heavy hitters such as Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Planet Money and My Favorite Murder but Malin seems most excited when he writes about ones that aren’t quite as ubiquitous including The Accessible Stall, quote, a vector for greater empathy with disabled folks.

Emily Ladau:
I won’t be too offended about the fact that we’re not ubiquitous because they name-dropped us so I’ll get over it. But anyway, how cool is that? So, on that note, welcome to the show, Sean. And I, for one, know that I like you already, not just because you included our little podcast in your book, but also because I happen to read your bio on the back of the book jacket and I see that you were born on Long Island which I was too.

Sean Malin:
Oh, really?

Emily Ladau:
Yeah. Yes, I was. But tell us about yourself.

Sean Malin:
Do you know where? Which hospital? I’ll get into me in a second.

Emily Ladau:
Stony Brook Hospital.

Sean Malin:
Yeah, I, for a long time used to say LIJ and my mom just the other day said that’s not true. And I said, “Well, where is it?” and the call dropped and I still don’t have the information. I need to get that answer but definitely not Stony Brook. I love it there. I am so glad to be here, thank you for having me. It’s nice to see you both in the flesh. I’ve seen your photos. There’s photos of you in the book.

Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s true.

Emily Ladau:
I know. It’s so official and legit. But anyway, other than being from Long Island, tell us about you.

Sean Malin:
Well, let’s see. I was born in Long Island but raised in a town called Santa Clarita in the desert outside of Los Angeles, used to be unincorporated LA County. I split my time between LA and Austin, Texas, I have family in both cities. I’ve lived in a lot of places around the world. I started listening to podcasts while traveling back and forth from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It started with audiobooks and then I very quickly started listening to podcasts and then I very quickly stopped listening to anything else probably around 2010, ’11 and now I’m 15 years deep into a lot of bad habits for my ears and eyes and here I am. I’m still standing but we’ll see what happens after the end of this book tour.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Tell us about that. Do you remember the first time that you listened to a podcast? Did you have feelings? Did you know that they could take over the audio world? I guess what I’m asking is what drew you to it as a medium and what made you want to make it a part of your career?

Sean Malin:
This is hard because I know that I listen to shows that are podcasts and famous podcasts but I don’t remember downloading them. I was a fresh air listener in high school, I really enjoyed listening to this American life and I also like the Sound of Young America, Jesse Thorn’s podcast which is now Bullseye also profiled in the book but I don’t think I was downloading them. It’s very possible, and I don’t know if the statute of limitations is on this but I knew someone who knew someone who used LimeWire and I might have downloaded episodes that way or asked them to, I should say. But when I first started downloading, I think was from a Starbucks gift card. I don’t know if you remember this but Starbucks used to have freebies. You could download movies, I downloaded movies on these cards or you could download free CDs and I remember that they had a free pack on iTunes where you could choose 10 podcasts that you wanted and I just looked up podcasts, whatever they were, and downloaded.
I remember I had a Plan of Money episode, I remember downloading a Comedy Bang Bang. Let’s see. I can’t remember the others that I downloaded. So, I’m going to say that’s 2010. But I wasn’t listening in any … I got my start as a film critic, I’ve been working as a culture critic since 2007, give or take. My first real big job was on the Rotten Tomato Show as a film critic but then I started branching off into media criticism more widely and then just to any subject of cultural interest, I would say, around 2012.
I think the first time I wrote about a podcast consciously was for the Austin Chronicle, they had podcast incubators at South by Southwest, I was in grad school at the time. And I really enjoyed that but I remember thinking circa 2013 or ’14 this is a flash in a pan. I remember it feeling like how AI feels now where it’s the bubble is about to burst and it’s no longer going to be exciting after this festival ends and I was very happily proven wrong. But I still remember how lame it seemed to see all these tech companies showing up, putting up a tent and giving out freebies, free magnets and stuff for their shows. I can’t remember any of the podcasts I saw there.

Emily Ladau:
So, clearly, you go deep with podcasts. And I think, even when you were listing an episode from ours, you picked a deep cut so we know that you go hard when it comes to listening. But we’re really curious how you actually went about selecting podcasts to include in your book and, more specifically, we would love to know what led you to ours because we obviously want our conversations on disability to be mainstream but, at the same time, it is certainly a niche topic.

Sean Malin:
Definitely. And just like in the podcasting world, it’s not the kind of thing that you see on top 10 lists a lot but I’ll tell you how I got to your podcast. I have friends who are in the media writing world and I remember seeing a post on Autostraddle that … I’m the kind of person who can follow a rabbit hole pretty deeply and I would like to believe that I have some pretty good disciplined media habits. I don’t disappear down a rabbit hole and I’m not easy to convince of something so I’m not being actively manipulated as hard as some people of my peer group are, an age group.
Not that I’m not a slave to the algorithm but I really like to cultivate a really healthy and broad algorithm and I’ve been the same way in cinema and with food, I have a very expansive palette for these things and it’s not always good. I like trash like everybody, I eat trash, I watch trash just like everybody, I’m not some … There’s nothing hoity toity about my taste, I just like a lot of stuff.
And I remember there was a piece on Autostraddle that included you in a list that was like, “Here are some podcasts,” I can’t remember if it was just about disability or if it was like, “Here are podcasts that we support that are really exciting and doing new things around niche topics.” And again, I haven’t looked at the piece in a long time but I remember it and I remember listening to a couple of podcasts, including this one. And I can’t remember the first episode I heard, I wish I could now but I have been checking in with this podcast since that article. How many years ago was that? 2016, ’17, something like that.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, that was-

Kyle Khachadurian:
We were a baby show back then too. We would’ve just started.

Emily Ladau:
We were babies.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.

Sean Malin:
Yeah.

Emily Ladau:
That’s right, yeah, And shout out to our friend Carrie Wade who wrote that article who then led us here today but that’s super cool. And yeah, we started in 2016 so the world was an interesting place at that time and we were just starting to figure out the medium of podcasting but we knew that it felt really important to bring some disability representation to the conversation because there was almost none of that in the podcast industry when we started.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I remember our friends would say that we should start a podcast as a joke and we would always be like, “Oh, yeah, we obviously should do that.” But then, with the pre-peeled oranges, that was the moment where I think Emily and I both realized, probably at the same time too, that the conversation we were having, it was a very constructive argument of each other and it was like, “What if this is it?” and we did and the rest is history.

Sean Malin:
Yeah. I just remember checking in with this podcast after maybe a year of not listening to it, just digesting other stuff and falling away and thinking, oh, let’s see what’s going on here. Maybe it was even longer, a year and a half or two years, this is just before COVID and I had just fallen off or listened to three episodes or whatever. And I can’t remember if it was right on that listen or just after that I heard the marathon episode and that was so striking, that really hit a nerve with me. I can’t really explain why certain things stick in my mind but I can associate them. I talked to the Keith and the Girl people, it’s really just a guy now but I talked to Keith and I told him that I was hit by a car once while listening to his podcast, I just remember that so vividly of picking the headphones back up.
And with this show, I remember being, my partner’s family lives in southeast Texas, and I remember they don’t have sidewalks there. It’s a really horrible thing, there’s a famous thing about how they don’t have sidewalks. And the two of you were talking about the lack of sidewalks in this episode or any kind of accessibility through cities, visiting cities that didn’t have them and I am walking over broken glass and syringes on a railroad track as it was happening. And that was a really surreal moment and I’ve been regularly engaged since that point.
Now, in terms of adding it to the book, when I pitched the book, originally I wanted it to be 1,001 podcast like the film series 1,001 Movies You Have to See Before You Die. That’s how I envisioned it that it would be this big tomb that you would have on your coffee table and no one would ever get through it, it would just live on your coffee table for years. And the publisher said, if that happens, no one will read the book. You’ll sell the book but no one will ever read it. And I thought, okay, well, I can narrow it down, how much should we go? 500, 300, 200? They said we want to go as small as possible and that became 101. And I had a list of about 260 some odd podcasts that I thought would be interesting and then we whittled it down and whittled it down until we had the bare bones this must go in and that’s how we wound up here.

Kyle Khachadurian:
That is really cool to hear that our little show resonated so much with you. And actually, not just your story, but the words that you wrote. I think the first line in your summary, I suppose, or your, yeah, summary of-

Sean Malin:
We’re calling them profiles or essays.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Profile.

Sean Malin:
Yeah.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.

Emily Ladau:
Ah, profiles, okay.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Of our show is you called us the epitome of edutainment, a line that I love so much that I told my parents, I told my girlfriend, I told my boss, I was like, “This is everything that I’ve ever wanted the show to be. Can you believe someone finally sees that that isn’t Emily?” And it made us so happy because, genuinely, that’s all we’ve ever wanted and we felt and feel that you really got that. Do you feel like that’s still a core use of podcasting as a medium or do you think entertainment is creeping over into the dominant way that people consume podcasts?

Sean Malin:
This is the big fear that, as podcasts become … There’s many millions of them, there was a story just before we’re talking about how, in China and India, a billion people, I think they said, listen to podcasts every day, 900 million minutes downloaded every day, something like that which is just an … Your brain can’t get around that, it’s a hundred hundreds and hundreds of Super Bowls being consumed every single year. The fear is that what will rise to the top is the big corporate money and all they’re going to push out is distraction and entertainment and, certainly, there’s a lot of that out there.
I say at the beginning of the book that one of the core goals of the book was to get people who are trying to get into podcasts away from thousands and thousands of hours of pre-listening to figure out what they want. I think a lot of people could find their way to this show easily. I’ve seen it in press, now it’s in a book, it’s not going to be hard for people to discover if they wish to discover it. It’s more a matter of how much time do they have to keep going before they burn out.
I do think that that’s a grave concern, money rising the top. That being said, I can’t tell you how easy it was and remains to listen to you and enjoy this podcast. I try to explain this in the book of like, “Yeah, I’ve learned a lot. It’s helped with my language, it’s a vector for empathy that I didn’t know I had, it’s a subject that I really have not worked deeply in, I’m not an activist, I don’t have any particular deep, close familial connection to disability.”
I have people in my family who have disabilities but I don’t otherwise … I’m not going to protests or the Capitol or anything like that, it’s not my chosen big issue. And how could it be one big issue in the first place, you’d have to get it smaller and smaller. But none of that matters because I like the podcast, it just sounds fun and I enjoy. And your dynamic, the two of you have alchemy here and chemistry so you are part of entertainment. Yeah, there’s a lot of education to be had here and people can consume but I also learned so much from listening to Comedy Bang Bang or Never Not Funny and I don’t learn any less from those shows, nor am I less entertained by yours.
It’s a different kind of entertainment. I’m not laughing out loud every episode, sometimes it’s very emotional or sad. I don’t think everything in it is easy but I listen for pleasure, not out of obligation and I think that it’s very easy to … For most people who would read this chapter and listen to this podcast, I think they would have that experience most of the time. That’s my belief, my firm critic’s belief is that it’s just good to listen to for pleasure reasons.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Do you think-

Emily Ladau:
It’s really that Kyle has a radio voice.

Kyle Khachadurian:
No.

Emily Ladau:
Sorry, I just had to interject her. Go ahead, Kyle.

Kyle Khachadurian:
No. Do you think part of the shift toward entertainment is to keep attention in your personal opinion?

Sean Malin:
Well, do you guys listen to podcasts?

Emily Ladau:
Yes. I-

Kyle Khachadurian:
I should-

Emily Ladau:
Okay. We always say we’re very bad podcasters because we actually don’t listen to a ton of podcasts but I, as of late, have vastly expanded my repertoire. I actually don’t know if you have Kyle, I think you’re more of a YouTube guy.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I think Katie put me on a few that I follow now.

Emily Ladau:
Okay.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.

Sean Malin:
Yeah. First of all, I have to say that, since finishing the book, it’s going to be weird on tour because I just have stopped listening to … It was just too much. I was listening to 12 to 15 hours of podcasts a day for two and a half years to get the book made and I can’t stand it, I’m back to music in a big way. I’ll come back to them, I love podcasts. I just need a little break. But I don’t have any issue giving my attention when I am listening. I listen to podcasts at the gym, I listen to them to go to sleep, I listen to them in the bath, I listen to them when I’m driving and I love to take long drives, I travel frequently, I have them with me at any given point, I stock up before every vacation. I do think that there is a premium on people’s attention and I think that because so many podcasts are dog (beep) that is why they struggle to hold attention for longer than a 40-second clip because they clip the funniest moment from a show and put it online and then everything else around it is a problem.
There are some really famous podcasts, I’m not going to name any by name, but there are some podcasts that are very, very huge at the moment where you might get a couple sound bites from a famous person that are of interest, pre-interested people that, if you listen to the rest of the show, it’s basically interminable and often too long, that is what struggles to hold people’s attention. Your show is not long, that’s never been an issue. Length is a problem for a lot of podcasts but I don’t think that people are falling out of love with them.
I also don’t think that, as many people as the video industry would like you to believe including YouTube, are falling out of love with audio itself. Obviously, younger people, especially kids, are going to filmed media and film versions, video versions of podcasts in droves but by no means is audio losing its fans. People who listen to audio only grow with audio and audio grows with people. We have better shows than we’ve ever had in the world right now. Five million podcasts means a lot of genius out there.
So, I don’t know. Have you found that people are giving you feedback of we don’t want to listen to the show anymore, it’s boring, they’re clicking off in the middle of episodes. That happens sometimes.

Kyle Khachadurian:
No, and I think that we’re a little bit unique in current year where we don’t put clips of our show on our social and it’s probably not, from an audience growth perspective, the smartest thing to do but it’s just not … The clips are out of context and they’re not funny in a way like the ones that you’re describing are or they’re not so teasy that you want to listen. I want people to hear the entire context for everything we’re saying. I want you to have a reason to not look at a screen. Even if you listen to us to go to sleep or whatever, I actually find a lot of value. I think recording a podcast for social media clips, I’m not going to go as far to say I think it defeats the point but I do think that it defeated in spirit where it’s this is an audio first medium and it should remain as such. But maybe that’s just me being old, I don’t know.

Emily Ladau:
Oh, well, you’re totally a curmudgeon.

Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s true.

Emily Ladau:
But I think the other thing is that, when we dive into a topic, we’re trying to address a lot of nuance in it and often we are sorting out our own thoughts on a subject as we are recording.

Kyle Khachadurian:
In real time, yeah.

Emily Ladau:
So, sometimes, actually more than sometimes, I would say probably 75% of the time we end up getting to the key points that we want to make three-quarters of the way through the episode because we’ve finally come to our own realization. And interestingly, I hadn’t looked at this stat in a long time but I was very curious to see if the stats still aligns with what it used to be. And we use Blueberry as a podcast host and they give us data on impactful plays which are show listens through at least 75% of an episode and we have 83% impactful plays which I actually think is pretty good.
Not that I know much from a podcasting standpoint but that’s 83% after having podcasts since 2016 and I think that that is really because people don’t come to us necessarily looking for a sound bite, they come to us because they want to feel seen, they want to understand something better, they’re trying to learn something, they’re looking for a point of connection. So, I’m not trying to toot our own horn here but I do think that we’re a little bit unique in this space.

Kyle Khachadurian:
No, I think a part of it too is I think it makes it less intimidating if you’re someone that doesn’t know about … Actually, you can tell us if this is true that doesn’t know about disability issues as much as we do where it’s we are actual two people with professional and lived experience in this world and yet, despite that, we still have to go back and forth for 40 minutes before we get to a point. And to me, that would feel like, if you’re someone who’s not in this world, that you’re coming along with us for this journey.

Sean Malin:
That’s very well said and I think that’s definitely accurate. And also, I made this joke to my publicist earlier today but I was like, “Explain to me what is going on like I’m five years old.” I’m not a stupid person, I don’t think, but certainly I have many blind spots, many limitations on what I already understand and I’m constantly learning and I try to keep my heart and mind open to that but I have so much that I just don’t get. And one thing about this show is that it drags me kicking and screaming into an understanding of … I think I talk in the chapter about the Moro reflex. Yeah, that was a big deal for me, Kyle, because I’d never heard … It’s just one of those things that why would I have heard about it, it doesn’t involve me and, learning about it, it’s just a factoid. And I want to be on Jeopardy someday, I need to know that, that was helpful. But you spend-

Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s why we do this.

Sean Malin:
Yeah. And you spend a good time, a good amount of time talking about it, I can’t imagine a clip. This is one thing that bothers me about other health podcasts. I think there were a lot of options in the health space for this book, obviously, there are some very successful quasi health related or health science podcasts out there that are very popular with people. And I’ve listened to quite a good number of them and I find myself coming out having learned nothing and also feeling a little bit turned around on the subject that somebody was talking about as if I have more questions than I did at the start.
And I find that that’s not really the case here because, by the time the two of you’re done speaking, any question that I might’ve had, especially as an outsider to this world, gets answered. It asks and answers itself, it’s a really good full circle format. I don’t think that you ever, certainly that I have experienced, the two of you rarely leave a subject dangling. You conclude … It’s very pat these episodes. You talk about something, you’re done talking about it by the end.

Emily Ladau:
We try really hard to tie things up in a bow but it is challenging with topics that are so big, especially when it comes to talking about an entire experience of identity. And I think this ties in really well to something that’s been on my mind which is, as I was reading through the book, I noticed that you include other podcasts that cover perspectives from different marginalized communities. So, you have Asian Not Asian, you have Yo, Is This Racist? And I decided to take a quick look earlier today at what’s on Spotify’s top podcast chart right now and I am sure, surprising no one, there’s a really significant lack of diversity in those top charts and also a pretty rightward lean in some of the higher ranking shows. And so, I’m wondering what are your thoughts on how we square the fact that this medium that can be used to open people’s minds to experiences of marginalized communities can also be the same medium that is then used to silence them or promote disinformation?

Sean Malin:
Yeah, I say at the beginning of the book that it doesn’t include any podcasts that are more famous for contributing harm to the world or perpetuating negative experience for anybody. And what I’m saying there is very pointed, we are choosing to eliminate from the diet of anyone with good taste anyone who cares about this world in a serious way art that is going to be essentially meaningless decades from now. You think about literature, the Podcast Pantheon, the goal of the book is to elevate podcasts to the realm of great art. It’s the medium of the moment, it’s this truly rich new art form and there are other art forms that have been co-opted forever. The Nazis had literature too. Where is that literature? It’s almost all gone. The only one we ever hear about is Mein Kampf and I think there’s a reason for that. We should have one example that we can read to understand what kind of evil was being perpetuated and co-opted through literature, how it’s spread through society.
Podcasts are the same. I think we are going to find very soon, and by very soon it could be five years, it could be 20, but as the medium, as the cream rises to the top in this medium and as other books of this nature are written, this is just the gate opening. I’m the first but not the last or even the best. And we’re going to see so much of this fall by the wayside, it’s going to disappear forever but there will always be attempts to co-opt every art form for the malevolent purpose of making money which is what almost all of hate or fearmongering is and also what the exclusion of diverse creators is about on Spotify. The book very consciously, hardcore consciously was this is going to represent a wide range. I think there’s 44 podcasts or 44 genres or something in it. The whole goal was to represent a massive swath of podcasts and that eliminates any direct field that’s just controlled by the same demographic of people.
Spotify, their money is made by a very particular subset of people in large part and I think there’s a lot of art like that in every form. Lenny Riefenstahl’s movies were famous too, it’s never going to go away but I think we’re not long for it being pushed to a side like, “Remember this horrible (beep)? Remember this terrible disgusting crap that polluted the world of this art form?” Yeah, now that’s over here and now good, interesting stuff as well as mediocre but not evil stuff just lives where everybody can grab at it.

Kyle Khachadurian:
It’s a very insightful answer to that question, I like that. Thank you very much.

Sean Malin:
About the diversity, I was just going to say that I don’t want it to seem, because this is not the case, I don’t want to be confused as having chosen different genres and eliminating more deserving podcasts from this official critic’s compendium. It was really more of just looking at these genres of what are the things that do well and, if you’re paying attention in any serious way, it’s going to be a, quote-unquote, diverse list. People from all types of backgrounds are going to rise to the surface naturally, it really didn’t take much. You mentioned Asian Not Asian, I just love that podcast and I’m just not Asian and I just don’t have anyone in my family who is Asian and it just doesn’t matter, it’s just an amazing podcast no matter how you … And Yo, Is This Racist?, another podcast, I don’t think they would ever want me on that podcast. Andrew has a sharp tongue but that podcast changed the world.

Kyle Khachadurian:
So, bringing it back to our realm and why we podcast. One thing we care a lot about is accessibility. And we try to make this show as accessible as possible by transcribing every episode. But for some reason or another, it’s just not as common as it should be especially with how easy it is and given the fact that there are a lot of shows that are a lot larger than ours, that have much larger budgets than we do. I don’t really understand why and it’s not just good for people with disabilities who listen, it’s good for everybody. And I was curious, especially because you had to listen to so much to write your book, did you ever find yourself using transcripts in a way that helped you gather information or inform you at all when you were writing this book?

Sean Malin:
Constantly, constantly. And I could not agree with you more. Not only do I think it’s going to become more common, there’s such money to be made here because you get … SiriusXM sends me, they were involved with the book and they were very helpful, and they will send me little written out clips from their podcast of these are the moments, here’s the timestamp, this is where something important that’s making world news is going to be said and then they go out and they make world news. Same thing happens with the team behind Travis and Jason Kelsey’s show.
That show, I get emails from the producers of that show every episode that goes out and they send transcribed pieces and that is my gateway into understanding if I should be listening to the episode or not. I mean, it’s a taster, it’s a feeder. And I’m so much more engaged by the writing than I am by a clip of people sitting in a studio on top of which, if I’m searching by word, it’s so much simpler. If I’m trying to remember Moro reflex, I can type that into Spotify under your category and I can find the episode because it’ll pop up in the transcript. That is fundamentally so important.
On the money thing, it’s going to come to a time … Podcasts, it’s complicated because we want to drive people to our audio and to our conversations but a lot of podcasters now are turning to Substack too. And Substacks are another way that a lot of podcasters are finding an audience that they didn’t really know would come to them, that actually they are engaged with their writing sometimes more just as much as with their speaking or their audio.
Think about that what you will but the reality is that, when you’re reading people putting stuff down on paper, submitting it to your newsletter as Marc Maron has been doing for more than a decade, you can pull people in so much harder than in other formats, everyone learns differently. My partner, for example, has to be looking at what she’s watching, she’s very visual, a transcript is essential to capturing her attention. I wonder why it’s not more common. I actually don’t really think I get it. I can’t see why we wouldn’t go through, if you have the money, I’m not sure why we wouldn’t … What people are thinking at these higher studios. It’s a question I’d like to get answered someday.

Emily Ladau:
Well, we have prioritized it for a long time because it is a tool to welcome in people who have hearing disabilities, who have auditory processing disabilities and we value that just as part of the ethos of our podcast. But at the same time, I try to give people the business case now where I’m like, “If you don’t care about disabled people, do you care about SEO?” Because, at the end of the day, it’s going to help you and there are plenty of people now who, for example, when watching a video on Instagram, don’t turn the sound on and just read the captions.
And I really do think that for at least a subset of people who are like, “I don’t have 45 minutes but I do have five to skim the transcript and see what I’m going to get out of this,” we’re missing a key audience if we don’t have the transcript. And we have always been bootstrapping this podcast so we use Patreon solely to raise enough money to transcribe each episode and not to pay ourselves but it’s amazing to me when me major podcast networks and studios still haven’t seen the value of it.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah. I remember when we were just starting out, because we had a couple ready that we put out right before we were like, “Oh, we should transcribe these.” And in between the time we were waiting for the transcripts and when they arrived, the moment I put them on the website, we jumped up Google from result 200 to result three. And that was obviously before AI ruined everything on Google search but it’s incredible. Like Emily said, if you don’t care about accessibility, it will do wonders for people potentially finding your show.

Sean Malin:
I’m so glad that you put that into words. I just have been … I think you said something so key there about, even if you don’t give a (beep) about what it is that we’re talking about but you just want success, the transcript will help. I just think that’s so important to say.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah. So, now keeping with the theme of what we always do, we take a very broad ranging approach to talking about a topic and then we get to a point where we’re like, “Okay, our listeners are probably going to start losing interest soon so let’s wrap it all up.” And I think that might just be because I have ADHD and I’m like, “I don’t have the attention span past 40, 45 minutes,” truth be told. So, we get to a point where we’re like, “Okay, let’s do key takeaways.” And so, today we want your final takeaway because we’ve touched on so much and so this is our way of trying to tie something that can’t really be tied in a bow in the nicest possible bow that we can.

Sean Malin:
Yeah. Well, I have two, I would say. My first takeaway is that you’re both so gracious to let me on the show. I have to say, it’s really weird, it’s the strangest feeling to be listening to a show for a long time and then you’re talking to the people who make it. It’s not one of the consequences I expected from the book because you don’t get authors on shows like this a lot, it’s weird. But thank you, I appreciate it so much and I’m so glad that the two of you were able to help with the book because your words are in there. I don’t think that got mentioned that you spoke to me for the book. You’re in the book, you both talk, there’s original quotes from you, we have artwork, I hope people will check it out just to hear you get a little extra content on the two of you.
And my second takeaway is that you can listen to a podcast because it’s edutainment, you can listen to it because it’s rich for the brain like broccoli but broccoli and cheese soup is just as good. And I hope that the two of you embrace your radio-voicedness and come to appreciate that you two are entertainers in this world, you’re both performers. And although I’m a fan of what you’ve done at a more high integrity level, I hope you come to see yourselves as just the goofballs that I’m listening to when I listen. I listen for fun and my firm belief, as I said, is that people who read this chapter and go, “Okay, I’ll give the podcast a shot,” will be more delighted than they will be dulled by the experience of there’s nothing histrionic or overly teachable in the show. It’s through osmosis that we learn while listening to this show, not through anything getting shoved down anyone’s throat.

Emily Ladau:
Man, I didn’t know your key takeaway was going to be something so nice.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Which one of us is broccoli and which one of us is cheddar?

Emily Ladau:
Oh.

Kyle Khachadurian:
You know what my answer would be.

Emily Ladau:
I think I am, ugh, probably the broccoli.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Oh, I see. I would call you the cheddar.

Emily Ladau:
Really?

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.

Emily Ladau:
Well, okay. If we’re talking broccoli-

Kyle Khachadurian:
Because I’m an acquired taste but …

Emily Ladau:
Yes. Oh, fair.

Kyle Khachadurian:
No. But if you like it, you really like it.

Emily Ladau:
Okay. First of all, I love broccoli cheddar soup. The Panera one, mwah, chef’s kiss.

Sean Malin:
That’s what I was thinking of.

Emily Ladau:
What? I can’t eat it anymore because I’m gluten-free.

Kyle Khachadurian:
This is what he’s talking about.

Emily Ladau:
Oh, what? The fact that we just get off on a tangent.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes.

Emily Ladau:
But okay, I think I’m probably the broccoli in the sense that I’m the one who’s I am a professional disabled person, I just do this all the time for a living. Whereas, I guess you’re a professional, disabled person too, but less than I am.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Not as much as you, yeah.

Emily Ladau:
So, yeah. But you’re still broccoli in the sense that you’re a curmudgeon, I’m broccoli in the sense that I’m more of an educator and we can both be cheese at times.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I’ll get that tattooed on me.

Emily Ladau:
Anyway. We also want to know, and, Kyle, I’m stealing your question, sorry, where people can find you online.

Sean Malin:
Okay. I’m on Twitter @cinemalins. You can find the publisher Chronicle Books on Instagram @chroniclebooks. We’ll be out with the book in a couple of cities. The book launches September 16th, bookstores everywhere, six continents currently it’s being sold on. If you’re in Antarctica, unfortunately you are (beep) out of luck. But everywhere else, it’s available. We will have an event September 18th, launching the book in New York City then we’ll be in LA, Austin, San Francisco, Miami, a couple other cities. We’re waiting on invitations for a couple of other places, more in the new year but please come out to one of those shows if you’re around, we’ll have podcasters there.

Emily Ladau:
I’m in New York City.

Sean Malin:
Come out.

Emily Ladau:
I want to come.

Sean Malin:
September 18th, we’ll have a nice little time.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, we’ll have an offline. You can tell me about it.

Sean Malin:
Yeah, cool.

Emily Ladau:
Okay, burning question before we wrap this up for real.

Sean Malin:
Yeah.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Do you have a favorite podcast? Not necessarily the best one you’ve ever heard, not necessarily the one that brought you the most joy just your favorite.

Sean Malin:
Yeah, I’ve been asked this a lot recently. Like movies or anything else, it changes but I can answer. Today, I listened to yesterday’s episode of Hollywood Handbook with Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney and I just laughed so hard that I made, oh, a person that I see in the gym all the time uncomfortable. They were like, “What kind of reaction is this? Was that a scream?” That show is the one that I think I binge on the most, it matters the most to me that I get every single piece of everything that they make. Yeah, I would say today Hollywood Handbook is my favorite podcast but tomorrow it could be very different. So, let’s do another one of these tomorrow, we’ll put it on the schedule and we’ll do this whole thing again.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Mm-hmm. You’re reading my mind, my friend.

Emily Ladau:
See, what I got out of that was that the best podcasts are ones where one of the co-hosts name is Kyle.

Kyle Khachadurian:
You know?

Emily Ladau:
So, that’s my takeaway here. But on that note, Sean, it has been such a joy to have you on the show. Having a guest is always fun, having a guest who thinks we’re as cool as we think they are is also really fun. And usually, we tell the people listening that they look good today but today you are the object of our affirmation.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes.

Emily Ladau:
So, may we say, Sean, you look good today.

Kyle Khachadurian:
You look good today, yes.

Emily Ladau:
Thanks so much for listening, everyone.