foster kamer finds out.
Athens, house music, NBA Jam, reporting at the rave, a Twitter FAFO boomerang, inspiring acts of altruism, luck, and 15 months working on one single podcast episode: Here's how we did it.
Hi, okay, so —
This finally happened:
October 2024, I’m walking around Glyfada, the seaside Athens neighborhood on the city center’s outskirts, pacing back-and-forth on my phone in front of the Aegean Sea, laughing like a goddamn maniac, because I can’t fucking believe what I’m reading, which is:
A flyer, attached to an email, promoting record label Circoloco’s massive Halloween house music party in Brooklyn. At the bottom of which is a name I haven’t thought about since, like, 1993. A buzzer-beater of an email, it hit my inbox right on time, the day before I was supposed to pitch a producer for Pablo Torre Finds Out.
And that, it turned out, was just the beginning of the story we’d put out….15 months later. Which is this:
Holy shit, holy SHIT, it finally came out, it actually exists — on YouTube up there, Apple Podcasts here, and Spotify here. This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on, full stop. I’m incredibly proud of what we made, so much so, that I’m breaking my own personal five-years-running rule about exploiting the FOSTERTALK media ecosystem to shill anything I’ve created outside of it. So you’re not a sports person, you say — do you know who you’re reading? Look: This podcast episode’s about basketball like Friday Night Lights (the TV show!) is about football, which is to say: Kind of, but not really. Many, many people had reactions like those above. I think you’ll like it.
For the uninitiated: Pablo Torre and Co. have been shooting with one of the hottest hands in media for the last year and then some. Named a unanimous Peabody Finalist, profiled in New York Magazine here; in December, named to Apple’s Top 10 Podcasts of the Year, NY Mag’s Top 10 of the Year, and so on. Just this week (!) they won podcasting’s Emmy equivalent for Best Sports Podcast and Best Podcaster. This all prompts a question I’ve gotten more than once:
What, if any, business do they have with the likes of you? (“…no offense!” None taken! This is someone whose experience producing audio is limited to a hobbyist pirate “radio show” and whose ouvre involves more writing about people ripping poppers than any semi-functioning adult’s should.)
So, fair question. But since everyone in media seems to be self-mythologizing while reflexively pulling the ladder up on everyone else these days, I figured: How about let’s not? And instead, if I’m gonna shill to you, how about we throw a little light on how something like this actually gets made — and some of the incredible, great, weird, despondent, and funny moments that turned up along the way.
This thing started, as so many in media do, with mental_floss, a once-glorious now-bygone print magazine about the culture of trivia and knowledge — whatever that was — beloved and memorialized by its diehard subscribers, its stacked alumni list, and die-hard magazine nerds.
It was too great for this world, dead in 2016, but I got a crack at being its executive editor two years before that — easily, one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, due in no small part to my boss (and the mag’s co-founder) Mangesh Hattikudur, now the co-founder of a different insanely-great podcast outfit, Kaleidoscope.
Mangesh gets hit up by his old friend Neely Lohmann, once one of the magazine’s first editors, who needed some fresh blood for stories on PTFO, where she’s now a producer. Like most of the mental_floss alum, Neely’s brilliant, and lovely, and went on to do a bunch of cool things post-floss, becoming a National Magazine Award-winning editor at places like ESPN The Magazine, where she met Pablo. Given that I didn’t make a complete fucking mess of Mangesh’s magazine (honestly, a fine standard), he throws her my name.
Neely and I meet at one of those ridiculous over-themed Maman coffee shops, May ‘24, and spend most of the conversation talking about how great mental_floss was and how great Mangesh is, a regular occurrence when two floss alum1 get together. Sports, however: Not really something I bring much expertise to the table on. I’m sure I ralphed some pretty dumb ideas at Neely, and I’m sure she politely nodded at them before telling me she’ll hit me next time they’re looking for pitches.
Here’s the thing about being asked for pitches: Rather that sorting through slush piles of inbound, they’ve got some hunch that you’ve got something better up your sleeve. It’s a great honor, and should be treated like one. But also, there’s pressure there. Don’t deliver on anything, and they stop calling. Which is why you gotta come up with something, and something good, or at least near-good enough to keep them banging your line again.
Because I’m a compulsive and insecure and insane person who believes every opportunity for creative work will be my last, and because taking on freelance is a great distraction from trying to do literally anything “on spec”2, I never, ever turn down the opportunity to pitch. This has resulted in me pitching some horrendously dumb shit, and editors never calling me again. It also, sometimes, results in paid work. Sometimes.
So, October ‘24: Neely hits me up again, we’ve got a phone call scheduled the next day. All I’ve got her for is a single pitch, about a story I heard in 2016, when I interviewed a guy named Harry Mara, the coach of American world decathlon champion Ashton Eaton. Harry Mara told me Ashton Eaton naps on the field between heats at the Olympics. And that this was key to him becoming a world champion, and (“more importantly!...”) inspired me to learn how to take 20 minute power naps.
Pablo Torre Finds Out is out here getting nominated for Peabody Awards while attempting to exonerate innocent sports fans languishing on death row, and all I’ve got is a (not just figurative, but literal) snoozer of a pitch. Cool. Great. Fuck.
Then, that aforementioned deus email machina shows up, manna from the inbox heavens: Ibiza-based record label and global house music party brand Circoloco’s press release, announcing the lineup for their Halloween 2024 show, on which is former NBA player Rony Seikaly’s name. Jackpot.
A thing about dance music: You can know enough about it to write about it for a living — know enough to write an entire cover story and accompanying side feature on it for the New York Times — and still have no idea about so many sounds and artists out there who don’t just have an audience, but a substantial one.3 And who had any idea that former NBA player Rony Seikaly — a guy I last thought about playing NBA Jam in 1993 — was a DJ? And let alone, as I’d later find out, not a novelty act DJ a la Shaq, or Paris Hilton, but one good enough to be on a lineup with the likes of some of the more popular draws in house music right now?!
Now I had something. I run back to my hotel room, open an email, and drop in some of the facts on him I dig up over the next few hours. This includes a one-off line from his Wikipedia page (backed up by an account from a site that looks like it was hand-coded three generations of HTML ago) about how Seikaly apparently once challenged Magic Johnson to a game of one-on-one, to show other NBA players that you couldn’t contract HIV by playing basketball with him. He also had a successful commercial real estate career. This guy!
I punch in the rest of the pitch, and shoot it off to Neely before our call. The story: Rony Seikaly, Miami Heat ‘90s big man, destroyer of NBA Jam cabinets, is an absolutely legit house music DJ enjoying an incredible second act of a career. We go over my email by phone. Halfway through pitching it, I already feel guilty for forcing Neely to respond diplomatically to the napping thing, which somehow doesn’t put her to sleep in situ. Finally, we get to Rony Seikaly, House Music DJ. We’re going through the notes, and Neely’s not blown over, but compelled.
Given where I was a day ago, I’ll take it. I keep going, when suddenly, audibly screeching brakes in Neely’s brain bring the call skidding to a halt: Wait, what?! Say that again. How well known is this Magic Johnson thing? What else did you find? Honestly: Not a ton out there. A clip of Magic talking about it for twenty seconds in a speech a long time ago. The aforementioned blog post. That was kind of it. Neely: “DJ Rony Seikaly is good. But that is great. That’s the pitch.”
I brought Neely an idea, and she found the story — a great editor at work. She goes back to Pablo and the rest of their team, and sure enough: Green light. Game on.
I immediately start firing off emails to Rony Seikaly’s manager. Nothing. I wasn’t sure how else to get ahold of him, so: Fine — I’ve got a few contacts in dance music, I’m getting to that Circoloco Halloween party, I’m getting backstage, and I’m chasing Rony Seikaly down myself.
Two weeks later, back in NY, I’m en route with a friend to Brooklyn Storehouse, the 5000-plus capacity Navy Yard warehouse venue/that night’s theatre of combat. This is a friend who I’ve dragged — depending on the night, begrudgingly to semi-willingly — to many loud electronic music parties like this. They’re a great co-conspirator for this kind of thing, but usually, they don’t involve anything remotely resembling work, and neither one of us have to appear anything remotely resembling professional.
This night was different. A contact got us passes that indeed landed us right onto the stage, as close to the DJ booth as you can be without actually being in it. Like plenty people there that night, it wasn’t long before said friend was well on their way to — how to put this delicately? — sous vide cooking their own brain for the evening. I leave my friend to try to position my way at the booth’s opening. Rony finishes his set, packs up his USB sticks, and sets off, out of the booth. I rush him.
Rony Seikaly is (very) 6’11”. I’m (charitably) 5’8”. I’m staring up — literally, craning my neck up at him — and yelling at him, because if anyone is more than eight inches from your face, you likely won’t hear them speaking at a normal volume inside Brooklyn Storehouse. And so:
“HI RONY HI YEAH ME HI UH MY NAME IS FOSTER LIKE JODIE FOSTER JO-DIE FOS-TER SURE I THINK YOU GOT IT ANYWAY I’M A REPORTER YEAH A JOURNALIST BUT I WRITE ABOUT DANCE MUSIC! DANCE MUSIC! SOMETIMES! (AMONG OTHER THINGS!) AND I WELL THIS IS ADMITTEDLY STRANGE BUT — “ADMITTEDLY STRANGE!” — WEIRD! I SHOULD’VE JUST SAID WEIRD! BUT UH I HAVE SOMETHING TO ASK ABOUT I EMAILED CLAUDIA YOUR MANAG—YEAH CLAUDIA RIGHT AND UH I KNOW HOW THIS SOUNDS BUT WELL UHH COULD YOU JUST READ THIS EMAIL?”
All 6’11” of Rony Seikaly is looking down at me as you might expect: Like I’m fucking insane. Because he’s Rony Seikaly, and his vocal cords are the size of my skull, he doesn’t need to yell.
You want me to read an email? Now?
UH YES THIS ONE TO CLAUDIA, YOUR MANA—COULD WE DO THIS OFF THE STAGE, JUST BACK HERE WHERE NOBODY IS?
I lead him to the gangway leading off the stage. If you’ve never had a man who could literally eat you for a leisurely lunch look at you like you’re possibly somehow a threat to him and/or that you may be forcing him to do some kind of clerical work in a dark corner of a warehouse nightclub, reader, you haven’t lived. Rony Seikaly — then 58-years-old — takes out his CVS-checkout-style reading glasses, puts them on, and puts my phone to his face.
He scrolls through it. He reads it. I’m literally holding my breath. He puts it down.
I haven’t talked to anyone about this. He pauses. I hadn’t thought about this in a really long time, but I ran into Magic Johnson in an elevator a few years ago. He thanked me again. He told me if I ever needed anything from him, he’d do it. He pauses again. I really didn’t do it to talk about it, you know? I nod.
He scrolls my email again, one more time, the entire thing. I genuinely have no idea how he’s going to respond, right until: Okay. I’ll do your interview. Take my number, here.
The relief that washed through my body, you’ve got no idea. I thanked him profusely, promised him that we’d make it worth his time, etc. After he puts his number in my phone and gives it back to me, I ask him the one thing I’ve wanted to know since I started this thing: How did he know, in 1991, unlike everyone else in the NBA, that he wouldn’t get HIV from playing basketball with Magic Johnson?
He told me. I didn’t start tearing up right there and then, but I came close, and definitely did when I told someone close the next day. I started with a fine pitch. We found a good story. That moment…was when I knew we had a great one. I made my way back to my friend, whose brain had moonwalked several astral planes away by then. Still, they clocked the look on my face and asked me if I was okay — did he shut me down? No, he said yes. Then, they asked, what’s wrong? He told me something wild. That’s all. I got the interview. I GOT THE INTERVIEW!!! Let’s have a night.
Later that night, said friend forced me to take a picture with a guy whose Halloween costume he loved — the guy was dressed as the chef from Ratatouille, with a stuffed rat under his chef’s toque. I had, in all fairness, a few drinks at this point, and played along. A girl later came up to us and asked us if we could introduce her to “the guy from the Chainsmokers.” We had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. Turns out it was this guy.
ANYWAY: Things started picking up steam. The guy who wrote that blog post that looked like it was from three generations of internet ago? A hobbyist, who made the blog and accompany podcast with his kid during the pandemic lockdown. He was at the game in question. I didn’t own any podcasting equipment, so I did the interview from ItsTheReal’s apartment. He was an incredible interview.
I flew down to Miami a month later to interview Rony, just a two-night trip, slept in my friend Danielle’s guest room. Rony was sick, almost didn’t come into the Meadowlark studio down there, did so anyway, and gave us two hours of his time. He was a phenomenally giving and charitable interview. Everything was coming together. We were barely two months in, and basically had this thing in the bag. We just needed one more piece — which, I figured, was gonna be the easiest part.
In a word: Jokes.
Sometime in the days after the story was greenlit, Neely and I were gaming out the interviews we needed. Magic Johnson, the biggest name involved, would be the last person we reach out to, once the other pieces were in play.
Neely: Yeah, so, about that…you may run into a little…resistance, maybe, getting Magic. What? But really, shouldn’t be a problem. We just had some trouble getting to him for a previous episode. Oh? A funny little thing. About his Twitter. Again, shouldn’t be a big deal.
A fun wrinkle! There are two major characters in this story. We get them, we really don’t need anything or anyone else. We don’t get either of them, I’m probably cooked. And at the outset, it felt like Rony would be a far tougher nut to crack than Magic.
After all, how could Magic refuse? A story about a cause he’s championed for the last three decades and then some — about a global health crisis for whom he is the alpha and omega, for an entire generation of people, all around the world? ‘Seems, pardon the expression, like an absolute layup.
At this point, I hadn’t listened to the other episode in question. A few days after we wrapped the Rony interview, I did.
It was funny. It was charming. It was fun. It was in good humor, and innocent enough! It was also, I could imagine, for a certain kind of person — and specifically, not Magic Johnson himself, but rather, a certain kind of person who is also the one person we’d need to go through to get to Magic Johnson — casus belli, to burn with the fire of a thousand suns, anybody working for Pablo Torre Finds Out for the rest of time.
That episode fucked around, and my episode was (wait for it) finding out.
What was it about? Magic Johnson’s Twitter. It sounds like it’s written by something like a chatbot impersonating Magic Johnson. It’s declarative and clunky and unintentionally funny-weird. The episode was simply: Who writes this? Magic’s then-head of comms declined to comment on their social media policy, so Pablo interviewed (hilariously, of all people) actor Rob Lowe about it, because Rob Lowe partied with Magic Johnson in the 80s.
At the end of the episode (spoiler alert!) Pablo gets a source to tell him Magic’s tweets are dictated to and written by the same head of comms who declined to comment at the top of the episode. Again, beginning of episode, person declines to comment; end of episode, person who declined to comment is outed as mystery Tweeter in question. Tee hee, etc.
By the time we went to tape the final bits with Pablo and I, this person didn’t just still work for Magic Johnson, but had been promoted…to the president of Magic Johnson Enterprises.
And Magic Johnson Enterprises turned our story down — our lovely little story about altruism and compassion and kindness — not once, not twice, but several times. They even refused to comment.
In the time since we first asked, Magic Johnson has done the A16Z podcast, the Jennifer Hudson show (6.6K views) to talk about the anniversary of his HIV announcement, and an interview with local TV news stations in Lansing, Michigan about a car show (247 views). Magic Johnson has done a shitton of press, but he didn’t do Pablo Torre Finds Out. Maybe it’s true that Magic Johnson only wants to talk about the thing he’s prided himself on speaking about more than any other cause but once a year, and with Jennifer Hudson. Weird, but okay!
We have no way of proving it, but I have a different theory, which is:
Like many extremely wealthy and successful people, Magic spends absolutely zero time online, which people do for him. One of them, his personal internet bottleneck, is infernally pissed and personally aggrieved over a relatively innocent, funny podcast that took a wee bit of air out of an otherwise seamless comms veneer, and will find a way to stand between us and Magic for the rest of motherfucking time.
Not that we didn’t try to find a way around that, too. At one point, I almost drove up to Springfield, Mass. to try to rush Magic at the NBA Hall of Fame (he ended up not being there). Pablo made his own admirable, hilarious attempt at Magic in a very public forum — and got close! — which you can hear about in the episode.
But still, we had at least two great interviews — and a funny reason we didn’t have a third. We still had a great story, and had to find a way to make it happen.
Again, Neely’s ingenious: It was she who thought Jackie McMullen — who briefly documented the 1-on-1 game in question in her book on Magic and Larry Bird — would be a great voice to have on the show. Listeners/viewers were thrilled to see Jackie, a sports journalism legend and veritable expert on Magic, who helped deliver one of the pivotal moments of the episode. And it was Jackie who suggested we talk to Lon Rosen, Magic’s longtime agent, who was also, we learned, actually there that day.
Finally: Time to tape. Before, we had a bunch of good pieces. Pablo comes in, and using the outline that Neely worked up, and does he thing — the man is a heat-seeking missile for story, he’s practically editing the episode on the fly, giving the entire thing the definition, depth, cohesion, and color it needs to come to life. He shows up, and he cooks.
I’m not gonna glaze Pablo here too much, but I’ll say this: Game-osmosis-game — by virtue of being across a table from him, and perhaps only that, I managed to come off as an articulate, knowledgeable person worthy of appearing on the show (and not, like, me). This goes without mentioning the work of the episode’s editors and engineers behind the scenes, who all make it look and sound as great as it does. That they do this once a week is flatly impressive. That they do it three times a week is, frankly, fucking wild.
Finally, the episode drops last week. I’ve been talking about this thing for so long — this story that involves first and second-generation immigrants and dance music and the HIV crisis and two incredible sports talents and second acts in American life and unconditional acts of compassion and integrity — that honestly, I kind of forgot what we had. I was worried that, without Magic, we didn’t have much.
Neely and Pablo certainly didn’t — they didn’t lose faith in this story once, which speaks less to its intrinsic qualities and more to the confidence in their team’s abilities to get to the root of something. For my own part, I’m now in the comedown phase of not getting to do this, with these guys, every single week. The reaction stuns me. For the most part, for them, it’s business as usual. A week to the day later they collect two massive awards, and then three days later, publish a blockbuster investigative finding about the NBA betting scandal that in 24 hours has nearly three times the amount of views as my episode. All in a week’s work.
But all in, there you have it, how a single episode of your best-in-class podcast is made. Nothing as complicated nor magical as a group effort, made by a team of great people, each one as diligent, smart, and wonderful as the next.
That’s it for now. FOSTERTALK will return with radio and shit talk regularly, at some point. LISTEN TO THE EPISODE YOU WILL LIKE IT. And thanks, as ever, for taking the time here.
More soon,
-f.
Sorry to keep beating on about how great this magazine was, but it really was the shit. I had Kyle Chayka writing a design column about Swingline staplers and Solo Jazz Cups. Before me, they got reclusive Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson to agree to an interview, and made this one of the most iconic and collectable magazine covers ever. John Green and Ken Jennings were columnists. It was sick.
This includes anything from writing a novel to buying a new couch.
Show me the person with the most encyclopedic knowledge of dance music you know, and I could show them a bunch of people going fucking insane for something they couldn’t dream existed. Literally: The looks of delight, disgust, horror, and mystification I found myself facing while speaking to a bunch of DJs from disparate corners of the dance music universe for this piece knew no limit. Showing a certain kind of person Horsegiirl or DJ Levi or I Hate Models for the first time was akin to my own personal set of Two Girls, One Cup reactions. Google each at your own risk and don’t ask me to explain it.