Jemma Brown, General Manager, The Signal Awards: Something I really love about this industry is there’s no single way people start off making podcasts. Michael, you had been getting a PhD in climate change at Stanford when you made your first podcast. I’m curious, where did that idea come from?

Michael Osborne: I was an early adopter of podcasts as a listener. I rode that very first wave in 2004/2005, and a lot of research scientists did because there’s a lot of idle time in the lab where the body is occupied but the mind is free. As soon as podcasts came along, I got interested.

But the catalytic moment was when I was in year four of my PhD and really wondering what I was doing with my life.

The last stop before the therapist’s office, I went by the career development center. I remember meeting this woman who had me sit down and said, “tell me what’s on your mind?” I ended up unloading for about 20, 30 minutes, going on about how I don’t think I’m cut out for research, how climate change is so depressing. Then out of nowhere, she goes, “Have you ever thought about starting a podcast?”

I swear to God she just plucked it out of the air. It was divine. A couple of things then happened pretty quickly. I started looking for a concept, and around this time, there was a front page article in The Economist called Welcome to the Anthropocene. And then I had this idea to create a class called “Podcasting the Anthropocene.”

The idea was to present the idea of the Anthropocene and global environmental change to a bunch of undergraduate students, scare the shit out of them, and then say, “who do you want to talk to?” We’d facilitate conversations and record them. So I went down to the college radio station and I got trained up in their studio. Then the next thing you know, I was teaching a class about podcasting, having never made a podcast before.

Jemma: Do you think that your pathway to learning how to make a podcast was through listening?

Michael: Yes and no. I was in year four in a PhD program. I was in a place in life where I was working on a very, very narrow scientific project. My head was filled with jargon. There were probably only eight people on the face of the planet who could understand what I was talking about at any given moment.

I say all of that to describe the sense of isolation I felt at the time. I was suffering from a lot of imposter syndrome because here I was at Stanford University with all this prestige and I had lost the confidence to ask a stupid questions.

As soon as I enlisted the help of undergraduate students and started thinking about a podcast, part of what came with that was a mandate to ask simpler questions for a broad audience. That opened me up. Podcasting broke me out of a sense of deep loneliness. You asked about my love of listening. I think I had forgotten how much I learn via listening until I started a podcast.

Jemma: You just gave a really interesting definition of learning, which is to ask stupid questions.

Michael: When I was as an undergraduate, I was the kind of confident student who could be in a lecture with 300 people and I’d be willing to raise my hand and ask a “hey, I don’t get it” type of a question. Part of that confidence was because when you do that you’ll hear murmurs around the room from other people who were thinking the same thing. Right?

That’s an analogy I often use when I’m working with podcasters and creators. I’ll say “think of yourself as the one willing to raise their hand in a large auditorium and ask the dumb question on behalf of that audience.”

Jemma: You’re also bringing up this concept of loneliness and companionship, which is such an important part of making and listening to podcasts.

Michael: I don’t think until a year ago I’d ever heard of the term “parasocial relationship” and now I’m obsessed with the concept. The way we feel like we are in conversation with creators is part of why I fell in love with podcasts in the first place. I felt like I was participating in interesting conversations about the world.

I think there’s three main buckets for why anybody locks into a show: for the story, to learn and for a hangout space or vibe. And that last one is really about the parasocial relationship. It’s about listening for connection and a feeling of belonging.

Jemma: I had a question I wanted to ask and you just walked right into it. You’re a Judge for the Signal Awards. When you’re listening to a range of podcasts, what are you listening for? And how do you know when a show is award-worthy?

Michael: I really like the term “value density.” One thing that I think audio in particular excels at is how much information is communicated per unit time.

Jemma: You know you’re a scientist when…

Michael: Yeah, I know. I get a little nerdy on it. But I’m impressed by how much exposition is happening in a story, or how many ideas are being introduced in a way that I can digest them.

Part of the reason that audio is such an intimate experience– and I don’t think I’m the first one to describe it this way– is that it’s an interesting balance in terms of what information is being given to you.

If say you have literature on one end of a spectrum, where there is are words on a page and the reader has to do all the work to imagine ideas, and then on the other end of the spectrum, you have VR where you have all information being delivered to you, the experience of watching is very passive.

What is so elegant about audio is that it’s somewhere in between. It is only sound, but it’s amazing how much information is captured just in sound waves. We can hear humanity in somebody’s voice. It’s amazing how much range and creativity exists with just that sense, you know?

Jemma: What you’re saying is making me think of some of my favorite works and how they trigger different memories and emotions in me in real time. I rarely have that experience when I’m watching a film.

Jemma: Pivoting here, I do want to chat about your show, Famous and Gravy. It’s a show distributed by Wondery. You guys recently had a very splashy billboard in Times Square. Could you give a synopsis of the show?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. The synopsis of the show Famous and Gravy is biographies from a different point of view on every episode.

We choose a recently deceased celebrity, and we tackle the question: would you want that life? It’s a sort of flipping the script, or an alt biography. Rather than asking about a person’s legacy and impact, it’s more of an empathetic approach to what you think this person went through, and what do we make of it now that their life story is complete.

Jemma: I’m thinking about what you told me earlier about being part way through a PhD program and going to your career counselor’s office and being like, “what do I do with my life?” Is this show a continuation of that search or that yearning to answer  the “how to live a life” question?

Michael: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a funny relationship with celebrity. On the one hand, we’re very drawn to celebrities. They’re sort of superhuman. We give outsized attention to them because they symbolize parts of our humanity and culture.

One of the intellectual thrusts of Famous and Gravy is that we are interested in asking, what do these people represent? What virtues? What desires? What aspirations? It’s a show that looks at celebrity as a mirror.

I do tend to think of celebrity as a little bit like natural selection. It’s as if some people are selected by culture to embody certain characteristics. And those characteristics are valorized because of a moment in time.

Jemma: You’ve shared that winning a Signal Award for Famous and Gravy changed the trajectory of the show. Can you tell us about that experience?

Michael: In 2023, we won an award for Best Gateway Podcast, which I love that category because it’s all about bringing new listeners into the medium. I like to think that Famous and Gravy is a, “if you’ve never listened to a podcast before, try this one out” kind of a show.

After we won, a lot of things happened. One of the things was that Signal put a stamp of credibility on the podcast. It also gave us reason to up our social media game and make a little bit more noise and say, “hey, check out what we’ve done.”

Most importantly, in 2024, shortly after we won, we began to meet some people at conferences and eventually establish connections at Wondery. The fact that we had won a Signal Award gave them a lot of confidence in our work.

Jemma: What have you learned about a life well lived through making this show?

Michael: Maybe it’s a bit corny, but I do wind up coming back to some very common ideas. Gratitude matters a lot. Selflessness matters a lot. Service matters a lot. The more you give away your gifts and the more generosity you have in your life, the more you seem to feel that internal validation. The more you look for connectivity across humanity, the more you create a sense of belonging.

Jemma: Michael, thank you so much for sharing your work with us, and congratulations once again on your Signal Award win!

Michael:  Thank you for asking these questions. It was an honor.

Listen to Famous & Gravy here.