In June, our team met up in New York to take part in the 2025 Tribeca Festival as an Official Audio Storytelling Selection. I (Jacob) had the pleasure of representing our investigative comedy, Jacob Reed and Me, on the Surprises panel. This was a conversation with projects the festival described as having “bold formats, big imagination, and unpredictable turns.”
My wife, Heather, and I took a red-eye into JFK. About 45 minutes before landing at 4 a.m., we realized that we couldn’t check into our hotel until noon, and I talked her into the spontaneous purchase of a hotel room at the TWA terminal that is now a hotel. You can rent rooms by the hour, so we got a place purely to sleep. If you’ve never stayed at or visited the TWA terminal I would highly recommend it. It’s like staying at a museum.
Our panel was moderated by the great Ronald Young Jr.—aka ‘Big Ron’ host of Weight for It and Pop Culture Debate Club. I joined fellow panelists Mike Sacks (StanLand), Helena de Groot (Creation Myth), Theo Balcomb and Habiba Nosheen (This Call May Be Recorded), Katelyn Hale Wood (Heart Trouble), and Ross Sutherland (They Will / They Won’t).
Before the panel started, I happened to sit next to Sarah Amos, the creator of Vanity Fair’s Tough Cookie: The Wally Famous Amos Story, and we ended up doing exactly what you might imagine two podcast people do when they’re left alone before a microphone gets turned on: we talked about our podcasts. It was the best possible warmup, and her podcast sounds incredible. There is something genuinely wonderful about being around people who are doing the same weird, difficult, rewarding thing you are.
One thing I said on the panel that I keep coming back to: the buyers and platform executives who decide which shows get pushed are largely trapped by the economics of the industry. They’re not villains — they’re people trying to keep their jobs in a business that punishes risk-taking and rewards playing it safe. The system pushes them toward the middle, and they know it. A few of them actually came up to me after the panel and said as much. That was both heartening and a little melancholy — because there’s a lot of distance between understanding a problem and being empowered to do something about it.
Meanwhile, Audible threw a party to celebrate the festival’s winners — while, in a very charming bit of doublespeak, insisting that there were no winners. It was a lovely party. It almost certainly cost more than the high-end proposed budget for our show. I’ll let you do the math on what that implies about where the money in this industry actually flows.
What I keep coming back to is this: there is so much extraordinary talent in audio right now. The room was full of it. And events and communities like Tribeca Audio — curated this year by the excellent Davy Gardner — are doing something genuinely important by putting a spotlight on it. We need more of that.
Quick side note: We got to see Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway with an all-star cast, including college friend Donald Webber Jr., who not only crushed it but also held his own alongside Bob Odenkirk and co. but elevated all of the performances around him. This was very cool to see. Also, it’s how I learned the Alec Baldwin character was written for the movie, and the famous “Coffee is for Closers” speech isn’t in the play! They even sold merch with it at the show. WHY!?
The other half of the Tribeca audio cohort had their own panel — “Reckonings” — moderated by one of my favorite podcasters working today: Chenjerai Kumanyika (Empire City). That panel featured two shows I have to specifically call out.
The first is Dirtbag Climber — a CBC/Uncover true crime series produced by our own EP Chris Kelly about the unsolved homicide of a rock climber whose past turns out to be almost incomprehensibly layered. I described it to someone as a “true crime turducken” — every time you think you’ve gotten to the core of what’s happening, there’s another full story inside that story. It’s remarkable. I may be biased because Chris made it, but I’m not wrong.
The second is We’re Doing the Wiz, from Radiotopia/PRX — a four-part documentary series co-created by Ian Coss and Sakina Ibrahim about what happened when a predominantly white performing arts school in rural Massachusetts staged The Wiz after a racial controversy rocked their campus. It’s the kind of story that sounds like it should be a think piece but is instead alive, complicated, and emotionally devastating in the best way.
I also got to meet the folks behind The Old Derf Chronicles, which I hadn’t listened to before but which is genuinely hilarious. It felt like these would have been my friends if I had come up at UCB New York instead of UCB LA.
Also — one of the coolest parts of the festival for me was realizing Chenjerai Kumanyika was going to be there. His show—the Peabody-winning Uncivil, which ‘ransacks’ the official version of the Civil War—is (IMO) one of the best podcasts of all time. Every episode felt like it could have been optioned as a feature film. I embarrassed myself by fan-boying pretty hard when I went up to him at the day one mixer but by the closing night party I overheard him telling people about my podcast. This was a pretty rad full circle moment.
For those of us based in LA, the trip was also the first time we got to be in the same room with parts of our team we’d only ever seen on Zoom. Margot Leitman, Danny O’Malley, and I flew in from the West Coast. Our EP, Chris Kelly, came from Vancouver. Sophia Lanman joined from her home base in New York. Meeting the people you’ve been building something with — in person, in a city that’s moving at full New York speed, in June humidity — has a particular energy to it. Here’s a picture of us meeting for the first time on the red carpet:
Wait, my bad. I’m being told that [checks notes] that’s actually Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro. Funny story: we actually pitched Tribeca on having a bunch of other people named Robert De Niro all take a photo with us on the red carpet, and were told very kindly that we could not do that because then people would ask why famous Robert De Niro wasn’t included, and that we couldn’t ask him if he wanted to be because Mr. De Niro is very busy. Which… absolutely makes sense. It’s kind of laughable that our team thought we could make that happen. Anyway, here’s the actual picture of our team meeting up on the red carpet.
Danny, being Danny — the Emmy-nominated EP of Chef’s Table — made sure we ate extraordinarily well. One night, we ended up at a Greek restaurant with no sign on the door, packed wall-to-wall with glamorous people at 2am. When I asked him how he found out about it, he mentioned, extremely casually, that the editor of Bon Appétit had tipped him off. I didn’t push further. Some things you just accept. But the TL;DR is that we ate and drank extremely well.
Oh — and we also ran a little side event you may have seen floating around called Same Name Fest: a prank red carpet we threw during the festival, featuring some very famous names dropping by. That deserves its own post, which is coming. Just know that it was exactly as absurd as it sounds, and that I’m very proud of it.
The whole week was chaotic and fun and sticky and loud. We got to talk about this show — our weird, deeply personal, four-years-in-the-making show — to a packed house at one of the biggest media festivals in the world. For an indie podcast made by a small group of people who just really believe in it, that meant a lot.
