I was chatting with a former Treasury person earlier this year, when things started happening really fast, and they referenced this phrase Overtaken By Events. Someone will close an email-thread loop when the subject has been rendered irrelevant by writing just: OBE. It’s apparently such standard government-speak it’s listed in their internal knowyourmeme.

Events have been especially overtaking lately, haven’t they. Professionally, the pipeline of episodes I’ve been working on has been interrupted by news, for months. We have created a great many Planet Money episodes about Fed Governors and central bank independence, and what happens when governments cook the books. (I had basically nothing to do with it but I REALLY liked the one about Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers that came out last week). They’re good shows and I’ve been very happy to make them, but it’s caused what they call in the publishing world “reflow:” I have had to re-typeset all my future pages, all the episodes I was about to make. People I interviewed months ago are emailing and calling saying “didn’t you say August?” Yes, I did. I need to clone myself.

Here, I will discuss three happy events which overtook in a different way: instead of arising unexpectedly from the mist of chaos, these were premeditated, constructed with intention, and yet for one reason or another they each surprised me.

First: I published a Treasury market opus at Planet Money. It’s called: How the government got hedge funded.

(We generally don’t break out credit for the individual pieces of our work, but for that headline, I must: that is the work of Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, who has the best brain of anyone in the game for headlines that are funny, incisive, and informative. I used to be good at a pithy headline but being on the field with Alexi, it’s like why bother. I just go home.)

In this episode, we follow the life of a Treasury bond, from its birthplace at the US Treasury, at auction, to a primary dealer, and finally to a hedge fund doing “the basis trade.” (The joke is that I should have continued the journey all the way to the Federal Reserve, after it has to bail out the hedge funds. the circle of life.)

You know I hate to brag but. When I first went looking for a hedge fund person to tell me about doing the basis trade, I was laughed out of town; they said it was impossible. They said no one would ever tell me. I called all the big ones and some smaller ones and also some other shops that were like “why are you calling us lol” and I told them very directly that I was desperate. Then — as loyal readers of Off the Run know — we met Phil Prince, at the Vanderbilt Law Treasury market stability party, and he was comfortable sharing his notes from that panel appearance, which you read. That he was comfortable with THAT to me suggested that he MIGHT be comfortable speaking on the record. So I asked. And he was. What a Prince. As you can hear in the episode, everything is so pleasantly matter-of-fact with Phil. We talked for over two hours, and now the world (/ the listeners of Planet Money) know more about the structure of the market for U.S. government debt. My work is done.

Except: as those loyal OtR readers may suspect, I’ve been working on the idea behind that show since 2023 when I got a persistent case of Treasury market anxiety, which also yielded the Harper’s piece. (The initial idea for this episode was a Dude Where’s My Treasury, because I feel like we aren’t talking about rehypothecation enough — just ask Manmohan Singh, who has tolerated so many emails from me. But, classic Alexi, he’d already / just used that title-format. And at the time people were less interested in the topic in general than they are now, grimacing emoji.) When you work on something for a long time, it’s confusing when it actually goes live. This is one such case. Long after this was published, I kept dropping new links into the episode’s dormant slack channel. No one replied. I couldn’t accept that it was over.

Surprising Event 2 is another happy yield from the Vandy Law conference: Mitu Gulati of UVA Law attended, and he invited me to one of his classes in September. I had the honor of moderating a conversation with Lee Buchheit, who has helped restructure approximately half the world. UVA Law has a write-up about the class here: how to avert a national debt crisis.

In the class, experts explored what the fictional president could do to safeguard the nation’s credit rating if the United States couldn’t borrow new money to pay off old debt and decided to stop repaying the principal on debt held by foreign investors.

There were ten options of what the President could hypothetically do to avoid formally defaulting. We the fictional economic advisors were supposed to pick the best one. Each option derived from historical precedent, which meant we could dig in, with Lee, the merits vs costs in each instance in the abstract and then what went unexpectedly wrong when someone tried it in real life.

In the UVA Law writeup, Mitu says the U.S. won’t default because we “have ways to stave [it] off” but that if we actually exercise those options, “we’re never going to be able to borrow in the way in which we have been.” To me this is the most interesting kind of power: it only exists if you don’t use it.

This was a fictional exercise, and honestly I have not-enough experience in fiction; if I were to host this again I would lean way more into the fun of it. Journalism doesn’t really lend itself to hypotheticals, speculation, projections. But — and this was initially confusing for me — it can be worth doing. The future arrives in one form or another, and it’s useful to think about what those forms could be.

Mitu also invited me to his class about our mutual favorite topic, JSCrewed, but I was OBE (by Episodes) and had to miss it. Next year!!!

Event 3: our THIRD installment of Author RVA, an author conversation group the great Jessie Gaynor and I started here. I got to host literary hero and friend of the newsletter Gary Shteyngart, whomst I would argue is a living literary celebrity. (Happy to build out this hypothesis if useful.)

An edited (lightly condensed) version of our chat just ran on Full Disclosure with Roben Farzad (thank you, Roben!!).

This event surprised me because we booked it months ago and I was sure October would never arrive and then all of a sudden Gary was about to fly in. The future arrives! Luckily I’d read Vera, or Faith in July, before time stepped on the gas, and I had so many genuine questions for Gary that prep was a breeze. I barely needed to prepare questions anyway because Gary is such a pro I could have said “press play” and he would have launched into an eloquent and edifying meditation. He lands all his own jokes.

Here’s a Q&A we did with Tim Abbonelo at Style Weekly before the event.

And here we are at the Beekman earlier this year with our dear Neil Chriss. Gary is in a handmade suit, as you would expect.

Gary also published a delightful newsletter in which he revisits the places he visited in Lake Success, his 2018 novel about a hedge funder named Barry on a sort of walkabout. Barry stops in Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and El Paso. Richmond and El Paso were Gary’s favorites, congratulations to us!!

Gary’s Journey Through Hell

Revisiting Richmond

I did a reading in Richmond last week and it reminded me of how I write books…

Read more

2 months ago · 16 likes · Gary Shteyngart

In Gary’s newsletter he shares a picture of the now-exterior of my then-house; here is the opposite side of that view, before we put much furniture in the house but after we added our dog (rip) and the menacing portrait of my ancestor.

Gary also references Saison, a now-closed restaurant around the corner where (as I mentioned in our chat) I once got a fried chicken sandwich so farm-to-table it had a feather in it. See:

Gary does not reference this but I was looking at geotagged pictures from the era so here’s an extreme closeup of a little cartoon painting I did of when No Doubt performed at Plan 9 Records (which still exists!!! by the grace of god amirite), for a Jack Antonoff project that I swear is real. I’ll tell you about it one day.

In closing: I am glad to have been trampled by events that I like; I am embracing the peace that comes with OBE.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) yesterday announced that it’s winding down operations, after almost 60 years. The majority of staff positions, ex a small transition team, end on September 30 of this year.

Somewhat relatedly, Vogue asked me to write about the utility of public radio — what it actually contributes, and what might be gone if it goes away. That piece also published yesterday. It is entirely devoid of politics and it is embarrassingly heartfelt.

Obviously, my bias is hopeless here, we know that. Area public radio journalist thinks public radio is Good? :Groundbreaking gif:. But. News coverage in great swaths of this country is getting really thin, down to the wire. That’s literally dangerous, like on a physical level, as these natural disasters keep showing us. (here’s Alex Curley’s post about the time he told Sen. Mark Kelly and Rep. Morgan McGarvey about his experience with that.) But it also comes at a time when our ability to discern reality in our feeds is, I feel pretty confident saying, at an all-time low and going lower. And as I was drafting this, the BLS …. oy. A whole nother thing. (Here’s a new episode of Planet Money: Would you trust an economist with your economy?)

For this Vogue piece I talked to Roben Farzad, whom I’ve known since our Bloomberg days, when he got to write a profile of bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach, even though I had just pitched doing that and I was so mad (I’m no longer mad - sometimes you pitch things because the story is obvious! “we should profile the star cofounder of this insanely-fast-growing firm that everyone is talking about,” yeah, good catch kiddo, we should!!). Roben often uses his show, Full Disclosure, to spotlight local chefs and businesses and politicians and people doing cool things, and in this very COVID-era case used it to focus communal support toward helping a family besieged by the unique horrors of that time. I did weep in the process of this research.

Also in this piece, I argue that public radio is one of our few remaining gathering places. That’s so precious, increasingly so. On this thought, I’m building on the great work Derek Thompson has been doing -- did you read The Anti Social Century? I didn’t stop talking about it for months. You might have felt it: you are alone more than you used to be. The stats are WILD: “The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.” EASILY true for me. “Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021.” Honestly how is this possible. Do you remember 2021???

I for one am actively working on my social ties. I’m thinking about it like how I have to get up from my desk and stretch, so as to not die. I’m joining clubs, I’m going to openings, I’m traveling to see people when I can. I’m working on my email reply-time. Call me! I would love to talk.

I feel lucky to still be at NPR, doing this job that I love so much, bringing sometimes gnarly, complicated information to people who want to understand their world better. To help equip them to make informed choices in their communities, so they can show up in the way that they want to, on purpose. To not cede it all. That’s what I think we do. I’m working on a few such gnarly pieces for Planet Money about things I care deeply about (not JUST the Treasury market, tho yes, okay, that too)(they recently let me talk about Treasurys on Morning Edition!). I’m happy to entertain the idea that the way NPR was set up 50+ years ago wasn’t the optimal structure, that these structures are worth revisiting. But right now I’m gonna go walk my dog and try to run into some neighbors.

You can donate to NPR here. Or find a member station, where your dollars will go really far, here!

Remember the debt ceiling shenanigans of 2023? Did that stress you out, too? That was when the US lost the second of our formerly-three AAA ratings. (The last one went this past May.) Back then I talked to Vanderbilt Law’s Yesha Yadav (yes I wrote about her last week and also you can hear the conversation in reference here) — about the political brinkmanship and the invisible costs it was accruing in the Treasury market. And I got a little stuck in that conversation, in those thoughts.

So I wandered around my house muttering about the Treasury market for a couple years, to no one in particular, to anyone who would listen. About market structure, about eroding trust, about interest expenses getting awfully high. I was starting to sound like people I knew.

Well, I finally collected my thoughts and, with incredible, skillful care from my editor Elena Saavedra Buckley, wrote this piece for Harper’s. It came out yesterday.

Here it is!!!

I’m really proud of it. But uh. One quick note before you dive in: I want you to know, I NEED you to know, that I tried to write this piece with only a small mention of Bill Gross, almost no mention, really. It just seemed relevant, that time in 2011 when he bet against Treasurys and was basically/arguably right but ended up really wrong. I wrote about this moment in my book, as you know, and we also had Bill Gross on Planet Money to talk about it, in this 2021 episode, Bond Voyage, the point of which was basically “why have we been able to issue so much debt without yields going up?” (lol). So I just want the record to show that I DID try to drop that story in as a small little note, at the very end of the piece. But — as you’ll see — it is where it belongs. At the very beginning. Not so small. What can I say!! I am who I am. and sometimes Bill Gross’s logic just sticks with a person.

A crucial moment in that story, the crux of that story really, is S&P’s downgrade of the US sovereign credit rating, on August 5th, 2011. I remember that so well. It was a great time in my life — my second year in New York, second year at my job, and second year of my chaotic and beloved Hamptons sharehouse. I wore sale Anthropologie dresses and flat-ironed my already-straight hair.

In the process of finishing this piece with Harper’s just now, their great and fastidious factchecker needed proof that (spoiler of what’s in the article) I did in fact have friends and peers pregaming on the train out East after the S&P downgrade that Friday. I somehow remember and dig up an ancient thread from our sharehouse listserv.

This listserv was a very vibrant part of our lives, for logistics and merriment. After the news of the downgrade hit that fateful evening, one of our housemates replied all asking me and another business journalist in the group what the deal was, what we thought. People replied; I remained inexplicably and rudely silent.

So, fourteen years later, I unearth this email thread, and the factchecker is able to check things off her list. And I realize I have an historic opportunity.

I’m so pleased with this. It did land well. I’m so happy.

Separately, I found this behind-the-scenes moment from August 6th, 2011. I won’t identify her because now she is a distinguished mom somewhere else, but then she was an influential half-anon fintwit personality. She’s wearing a kid’s bike helmet.

Contemporaneous exchanges show a debate about consuming BBCs from Cryil’s (RIP), concern that we might, and hope that we would not. I have no record of the outcome.

I think we can all agree that iphone camera quality has really improved since 2011. Known, but still striking to behold! And look how bulbous our texts were:

One thing I keep thinking about (well, we all keep thinking about) is the trade deficit / Treasury market relationship. That relationship accounts for like 40% of this Planet Money episode, Do Trade Deficits Matter?, where we talked to Ken Rogoff. I know it’s my episode but I do recommend it. Anyway: Americans buy so much stuff, which exports US dollars. Those dollars gotta go somewhere; a lot of them go into our government debt. This dynamic has grown to where it feels kind of like a vacuum. A friend recently was like “can you do an episode about how I can’t stop shopping? I don’t even want to, but I buy things?” Not to diminish his agency, but to some degree this is that episode.

It’s so minor but since April I have felt like this, us talking about this now, has embedded in it some small vindication for the Piper Ratliffs of the world, the white girls who fled to Asia because something felt fundamentally off. Hollow, derivative, something. Like maybe there were too many different types of dresses for too cheap, and maybe tissue boxes didn't actually need decorated covers. (My Thailand was India, if you were wondering. I did not go to meditate but to study economics at St. Stephen’s College, sorry to brag). Our analysis may have been largely vibes and the outcome problematic, but we were onto something.

Anyway please read the Harper’s piece and let me know what you think!!!

And what should we do next?? I have some ideas but I know you do too.

I want to tell you about the truly great party I attended last Friday. It was the Vanderbilt Annual Conference: “Transformations in US Financial Market Structure,” hosted by professors Yesha Yadav and Morgan Ricks. Disclosure: Vanderbilt Law paid for me to attend and moderate a panel. I can’t tell you much about what was said because it was Chatham House rules which means I can know what people said (thank god) but cannot share who said it or even who participated.

BUT I can reveal that friend of the newsletter Nathan Tankus was there (because he already revealed it), AND I’m happy to announce that I secured approval — just for you, readers of OFF THE RUN — of this picture of Yesha, below, presenting her thoughts about the Treasury market, courtesy obviously of Dan Awrey. In academic conference panels, everyone gets 10 minutes to say their piece, and THEN the moderator asks questions (it is a different vibe than a non-academic conference!!); Yesha was the fourth of four panelists to present, so we’d already established a sober, restrained vibe. She diverged. In this picture Yesha is blurry because she is moving so fast. In the background you can see me beaming as I watch her ping from one side of the room to the other, hollering about Treasurys.

If you haven’t experienced a Yesha presentation, you should. This is my second time on a stage with her; the first time I was unprepared, and my jaw was on the floor of the stage. This time, after her prepared remarks, I felt compelled to acknowledge that I would not be able to match her energy. I think the room understood.

Yesha’s been a guest on Planet Money a few times — once when I needed someone to explain that LIBOR was not boring, as laypeople often mistakenly believe, and she delivered; again when I needed someone to demystify the Fed’s discount window; and again about how USTs underpin the entire global financial system and perhaps we should not be “playing pickleball with a nuclear weapon economically,” as she put it (by which she meant doing debt ceiling shenanigans).

I quote her yet again in an upcoming piece for Harper’s about the Treasury market, about which you will hear more when it comes out in July. I’m so excited about this piece — I’ve been working on it for months (years?) and am really excited to hear what you think. So we have that to look forward to.

Also in the above picture you can (sorta) see panelist Phil Prince, of Pine River Capital Management. I loved the framework he used for his remarks so much that I asked if I could share it here with you, and he agreed. It’s so clean and useful in understanding the related issues of market structure, volume, collateral velocity and friction…

Here’s Phil (with extremely light edits from me for clarity):

What exactly are we doing this for? What is the US Treasury market (and are related markets) for?

We take as inputs:

• The productive capacity of the US population and

• The governance structure (fiscal, monetary, regulatory – financial and industrial) of the US

And we produce:

• Investments so that wealth can grow along with the economy

• Money – a safe asset

So if we step back, way back, and treat the whole thing as a black box, what are the risks to this whole endeavor?

1. Our governance structure could produce more debt that the productive capacity of the US population can support.

   1. Implicit default – inflate away value (preserve ‘moneyness’ while destroying value

   2. Explicit default

2. Our governance structure could break down.

   1. Strategic default

3. The world could demand more safety than the productive capacity of the US population can support.

   1. There is no longer an asset safe in all states of the world – pushing risk out to real economy worldwide

4. The world could demand more safety than our governance structure allows us to produce.

   1. Market actors step in to provide weak solutions – as in 2008

The conference, of course, will deal with all the risks within the black box - within the production process.

From my perspective, the main risks inside the box are:

• Production and delivery of money (in institutional volume) takes place in chains across multiple legal entities, which creates the risk of disorderly default. For instance: Long Term Bond Mutual Funds create extra value through leverage, by managing duration with UST Futures while investing in shorter Corporates and Mortgage-Backed Securities. Hedge Funds create the futures for those funds by buying offsetting UST securities and repoing those UST o/n through rated bank dealers to MMMFs [money market funds] to create money. If there is a breakdown in the Futures clearinghouse OR at the bank dealer, a chain of defaults can start.

• Relative value trading can break down, creating a doom loop. The more expensive it is to police the guardrails of relative value, the greater the price impact on a specific instrument of any purchase or sale. The more variable (both absolute and relative) the price of specific instruments, the more margin required to police the guardrails, which increases the expense (capital cost), which increases the variability, which increases the margin, which increases the expense, rinse, repeat.

…me again. Thank you, Phil!!

The word “default” in here is somewhat noteworthy, in the context of Treasurys. lol. Phil was not the only one to mention it. This is new! It’s not that people think it’s likely. But it is now “on the table,” where before it was not. (I also have permission to share that the legendary Mitu Gulati attended this conference, and his presence alone is noteworthy, because his work “focuses on sovereign debt restructurings and the evolution of sovereign debt contracts over history.”) I have let go of the strategic default anxiety, because a bestie of Scott Bessent’s personally assured me that “the US will never default, period,” and I chose to accept that.

A quick note on aesthetics: in my book I write the word “Treasuries” approx 47 times. Upon further reflection, I am now strongly of the opinion that it’s Treasurys, not Treasuries. Because Treasurys are special. Treasury is a proper noun, a name, and thus cannot be pluralized like some common debt instrument or berry. They don’t act in normal ways, seem to not be subject to all of the laws that govern more common instruments (at least to date, ha ha), and it’s nice to reflect that in how we refer to them. Also “Treasurys” looks old-time-y, which feels accurate.

A final bit of documentation of the day: I lost a button.

If you see my button, please let me know!

Other things I’m thinking about:

• Depopulation! if you can get past the eugenics, there is something real here — yes immigration but that’s a near-term and country-specific “solution,” because the whole entire human population is projected to peak in the mid-2080s and then begin to decline. There are of course benefits to fewer people on the planet, and sometimes I like to daydream that demographic trends will align perfectly with AI productivity gains, that retraining and reskilling are a breeze and no one will suffer. But as this oped points out, it’s probably more effective to do actual governance than to hope that depopulation solves our problems. For example, declines are not fast enough to solve our climate issues, haha. There is evidence that the trends are accelerating, projections getting pulled forward, so if you want to hope for that, you can….but depopulation also presents enormous economic challenges. The global economy is just not built for this demographic shape!! We have never even had to think about this!! It will be thrilling to cover, if journalism still exists in the future.

• I just read the novel Dream State by Eric Puchner, and, alongside my parasocial friend and peer Oprah, I am delighted to recommend this book. I’ll just note it is not great if you are trying to avoid future climate realities. We just hosted him at Richmond’s ICA in our ongoing Author RVA series. (hey — are you publishing a cool interesting book and want to visit Richmond to talk about it to a warm, thoughtful audience in a beautiful room?? get at me!!) I’ll post a link to the transcript of his conversation with my beloved cohost Jessie Gaynor as soon as it’s published.

• I forgot to tell you about our FIRST Author RVA event, which we ran on Planet Money Plus (our subscription platform): I got to talk to the brilliant Atossa Araxia Abrahamian about her book, the Hidden Globe. She’s interested in all the best nation-state things, like funeral flags and passports for sale:

  “This idea that law and land don't necessarily come together….to borrow an expression, they've become sort of consciously uncoupled, right? You can take law and put it somewhere else. You can take it away from a piece of land and put another piece of law…We shouldn't take these things for granted.”

• I recently got to co-create a rap, for an episode of Planet Money called “Econ Battle Zone.” More accurately I was involved in making a beautiful rap song materially worse. I’ll unpack the behind-the-scenes from this soon, because the journey was crazy and very fun and educational, but one big lesson is: rhyming is harder than you think!!

• I am proud to announce that I am growing blackberries in my backyard, as an inflation hedge (berries comprise 47% of our monthly household budget.)

Last weekend was Resonate, the world’s best and only festival for narrative podcasts. Improbably, it’s in Richmond, so all my far-flung peers and colleagues trek to my fair city and rudely stay in hotels instead of my basement.

The conference was at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, and co-organized by Dr. Chioke I'Anson, one of Richmond’s greatest and the owner of that beautiful voice when you’re hearing who brought you this message from NPR.

NPR sponsored so it had a little table in the middle of the lobby. Below please behold Dan Girma, who years ago interned at Planet Money; we stay devastated that he moved on, but he is flourishing at Embedded. Alongside him is new friend Andrew Beck Grace, who cohosts White Lies, a nonfiction series on the Embedded feed/platform.

Resonate is centered around narrative podcasts, but, at least in my conversation, we mostly talked about chatpods. We’d all listened to the Zadie Smith episode of Ezra Klein’s pod (at least one of us PRINTED IT OUT), and the Jia Tolentino one. Chatpods are obviously way cheaper and easier to create; you need ProTools and the Joe Rogan mic to do a decent job. To do a GOOD job, add a producer/editor. By comparison, a decent narrative episode requires, like, three weeks of five full-time people. Expensive! I think it’s worth it, but I’m the definition of biased.

As the great Anna Sale said at last year’s Resonate, there IS still an audience. People are listening, millions of them. And niche still works — for example, the woman who invented The Daily just helped create this series about “powerful women, witches, and magick.” (I was the ~50th person to recommend the “woo woo” episode of Critics at Large to her lol) But also the signals are somewhat confused. My favorite Resonate presentation was Gabby Bulgarelli’s, senior producer on NPR’s Louder Than A Riot, about how to tackle structural problems in building your narrative. The show won the NABJ Journalist of the Year award…awkwardly AFTER it was canceled. And listen. I don’t know the download numbers. And we all know prestige ≠ funding (and ok they may often be inversely related), but one does want good work to be rewarded, not canceled. Something fundamental is broken.

Anyway. I didn’t document the last event of the conference, when we walked five blocks to the afterparty (with police escort), ringing bells, wearing masks, singing “I used to think…I had control…but now I know…I can’t control…anything.” (some of us took issue with the lyrics, but I guess it’s a debate!) We were followed by a drone, I don’t know whose; I personally didn’t love that, I don’t think drones have party energy. When we got to the afterparty, this is what awaited us on the roof:

It’s Kaitlin Prest as a mermaid, in a pool, rolling a cigarette. Aux cables dangled into the water (for a lot of audio people, this was hard to see).

On Sunday I had the distinct honor of ferrying folks to Redbird Equestrian Center to trot horses around on a beautiful day. I grabbed a velvet helmet because I read that’s what Mary Kate Olsen wears; equestrian Sarah Mankoff told Kaitlin Phillips velvet helmets are “[v]ery classy, very rarely seen” bc they’re so hot. It was a cool day so I thought could get away with it, and I did! (Virginia does fall exquisitely. It’s longer than ten minutes here; you can wear your transitional jackets for months.)

Seeing friends and making new ones, being buoyed by shared enthusiasm and commiseration — it all filled my heart. But also… the vibe felt adjacent to grief. One person told me that, like a lot of people present, he attended Resonate 2023 freshly laid off but optimistic about his prospects, but this time around he was still unemployed and a lot less optimistic. Now — after 12-18mo of layoffs, employers shrinking, disappearing, filing for bankruptcy — the pool of folks he’s competing against is bigger and absurdly talented. I heard more than a few times that people felt at a crossroads, in transition. Those with jobs seemed to be waiting to see how long that will last.

I come from print, which has been dying for decades, so this isn’t new to me. I joined audio in 2019 when the industry was still on a Serial high and raking in money. Call Her Daddy was new and still co-hosted, lol. Today, this conference feels necessary as support group and also networking for the next life raft.

For those readers who are considering starting a podcast at this late stage, boy can I recommend some great people for you to hire!!!!

The Thursday before was Student Podcast Day, so I sat at a table in the lobby so students could question me. A minor problem: my sign said I’m a producer. I am NOT! I could in a pinch produce my own segment, but you wouldn’t rly want me to; I can tell you what gear I use, and I can troubleshoot your setup if your audio sounds like you’re speaking in a tin can under the sea. But (hopefully) most people in audio can do all that?? That’s not what to ask me about!

I fixed it.

(in case you are looking for a notebook so large it makes you feel like a tiny doll — mine is the LEUCHTTURM1917 Notebook Hardcover Master Classic A4+, in Navy, with dotted pages. Für Denken mit der Hand, they say. because Schreiben ist Denken.)

Students DID ask me questions about reporting and hosting, and told me about their dreams and aspirations. I regretted to inform them about the industry’s decay, but many were already aware, and in turn some were SO with it that I felt a little glimmer of hope.

Speaking of a good chatpod — my husband was on the most recent episode of Roben Farzad’s Full Disclosure!! The episode is about being a musician yet also making money. HusbandScott literally just won an Emmy, I’m so proud.

A thank-you for scrolling this far: I went to the eye doctor for a checkup exam, and look what I saw.