Getting Even: An Interview With Laura Mayer

Jane Drinkard calls Laura Mayer, the brain behind “Shameless Acquisition Target,” to talk about podcasts, burnout, ambition, and betting on yourself as a freelancer.

Laura Mayer wants to buy the gray house down the block from her rental in Brooklyn. The house, which she never actually describes for “legal reasons,” isn’t for sale. And as evidenced by the Halloween decals that were recently put up in the windows, Mayer fears that the family who lives there has young kids, suggesting they won’t be going anywhere soon. Still, the house is really just a symbol, a tangible representation of a sense of financial and professional stability that has come to feel so elusive in media — she wants it so badly in fact that she produced her own podcast, “Shameless Acquisition Target,” detailing her impractical quest. 

Mayer is a new voice as a podcast host, but she brings years of experience in the industry, having worked on shows such as Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History” and “Bad Blood: The Final Chapter” with John Carreyrou (her website describes her as “the person who has created and launched more successful shows than anyone in Big Podcasting.”) That experience is readily apparent in “Shameless Acquisition Target,” which transforms Mayer coveting her neighbor’s house into a hero’s journey worth rooting for. 

But the podcast is not a real estate show. Listeners get to hear the story of Mayer’s epic burnout at Panoply, Mayer pitching her project to investors, interviews with “Shark Tank” rejects, and lots of sweet interruptions from her toddler, Joanna. The result is a refreshingly honest look at how the audio sausage is made. Tuning in has taught me a lot about the podcasting world and what it looks like to start your own creative project. 

Over the phone, Mayer is funny and personable in a way that made me feel like I already knew her. I ended up word-vomiting about my own shame and asked Mayer how she combats hers.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

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How is your week going? I know you’re working on the final episode of “Shameless Acquisition Target.” 

The podcast is going pretty well. My final episode of the series will be on November 30 and, if I’m lucky, it will feature Ira Glass, who I’ve booked, and Michelle Kwan, who I’m working on. The hardest person to get for my final episode might be my childhood orthodontist because he might be dead, but I don’t know yet.

You talk about your own experiences of — I don’t know if “burnout” is too overused of a word — overworking yourself and losing sight of the fun parts of the job. But your podcast is so fun and silly and creative. I feel like that has been hard to hold onto in my own work. How do you maintain that? 

Well, thank you for saying that. I have the most fun doing the silly stuff. I agree that “burnout” is overused but it’s used a lot because that’s how so many of us are feeling. When I was in more of an executive position, I used to have fun in meetings in a way that was probably weird for the setting, like doing high-fives on the kombucha machine. I’m sure no one appreciated it. I’m sure it was very Michael Scott from “The Office.”

Oh, I know the guy.

That’s so embarrassing I just explained who Michael Scott is as I’m comparing my previous self to Michael Scott. But I think that that kind of playfulness for me, especially when I was at my most frustrated in corporate settings, was something that was a means through which I would gamify my day-to-day work and frustrating interactions and try to incite playfulness among people I was working with. 

One example of that is when I worked at a podcast company where I generally had a pretty good time. I kept being called by a peer’s name and that person was being called by my name all the time and it was so frustrating. There’s only so many times you can tell people, “That’s not my name,” and have them be like, “Oh right right right, moving on.” And this is our boss and I remember just thinking like “well, I could get mad or I could get even.” 

And getting even was creating one of the more chaotic accidental art installations I’ve ever created. We just cut out pictures of women that were powerful and respectable in this world and we taped them to the wall of the brand new office near where our desks were so when various people would walk by and be like, “Who are these people on the wall?” I would be like, “This person’s name is X,” and “This person’s name is Y,” and it became this joke because the producers I was working with kept hearing this, too, and kept being like “this is so strange.”

It was not in any way mean-spirited and it was fun but just being able to be like “listen, we’re just gonna do this thing and it’s gonna be funny and it’s gonna take my mind off of this whole annoyance I’m experiencing at work.” So to go back to one of your first questions, which was how I deal with the vulnerability hangover: exercise and creating dumb things that I think are funny for myself. And so that’s why I think “Shameless Acquisition Target” was so filled with that because I think that’s a coping mechanism.

I think that’s what people respond to and want to listen to. Those are the bits that are especially compelling. I saw you retweeted the “Normal Gossip” news. In some ways, that’s the thesis of your show.

Totally. I’m testing it and that’s also why I am such a “Normal Gossip” fan. It’s so good and it’s a breath of fresh air.

And it’s fun! I think that’s the connection I’m making… it’s like you’re listening to it and you’re having a good time. 

Yes! When I listen to “Normal Gossip” I’m like “hell yeah, I’m so excited” and I’m re-listening to shows. It’s just this experience I have not had in so long and it was something about creating things that have that kind of buoyancy. It’s selfishly so important for me because that’s so often what I want to listen to and I want to include in my listening diet outside of news or more serious, serious, serious stuff but I also think there’s a way to incorporate fun into shows even if the topic matter is serious. 

Your show is loosely structured around the ambition to get acquired and to also purchase “the gray house.” You’ve been vocal in interviews about being comfortable with failure on that front. As you make this last episode, where are you at with that? How do you feel about those two things and whether they feel attainable?

With this project, the greatest failure that I would feel bad about is if I didn’t fail big enough. If nothing happened and I sort of let this peter out. That, to me, would make this a complete waste of time. I’m committed to the project through the end of it. It’s interesting because we’re experiencing some macroeconomic headwinds here in this world and uh…this is something I knew, obviously, going into the project. At the dawn of big podcasting, if I had made this show, someone would have probably given me a stupid amount of money after the second episode and I would be considering what part of Los Angeles I would be moving my family to. I still see success as being able to set up a way of working and living and making money where I can make more silly shit — to use a technical term — like “Shameless Acquisition Target.” But also I have turned down a bunch of opportunities that, from a financial perspective, just didn’t make sense because I do think I can still make, maybe not great house money, but my market rate, even if it is harder to make money in podcasting, or in media, or in any field these days. So maybe it won’t be the gray house. 

How has it been being your own boss? 

I don’t have great boundaries when it comes to not working. So I have been working at least 6 days a week since I started working for myself. I guess technically that was in February which is probably not sustainable. I feel like I’ve been working harder than I’ve ever worked before and because I’m taking this calculated risk with a specific portion of my savings account to make this show I’m working as hard as I ever have and I’m making as little money. As the months progress, there’s a cognitive dissonance where it’s less like “hell yeah, I’m doing this,” like when I first launched the show in June to “oh no, I’ve done this,” as we lurch into November. 

How do you cope with all that?

The only successful way of externalizing that stuff that I’ve ever been able to discover — and it’s relatively recent, in the last five years — is I’m a pretty devoted but incompetent weightlifter. I’ve been learning how to do the Olympic lifting lifts, specifically the cleaning dirt and the snatch, and all that kind of stuff. So I find that to be very helpful because it’s so hard and I’m so bad at it that it blasts my concerns about being embarrassed about myself out of my brain for like an hour. Complaining to people who have similar concerns can go either way. That can be cathartic or it can be like “I need to go take a nap.”

But really for me it’s the boring answer of physical exercise and aggressive cleaning. Like fold everything. Every piece of fabric in my house — in my house I say, apartment — I fold. I will fold it. 

You started in the podcast industry in 2009, so you’ve seen its shifts and changes. You talk about how you believe there are creative solutions to achieve quality at scale in podcasts. Can you elaborate a little bit on what things are at the forefront of your mind for what that looks like?

I just want to note that today is the day of the “Normal Gossip”–triumph news so I think that they have a really good business model for showing that if you bet on talent, bet on a show, bet on the right audience, you can make a hit. So that is an example to me of quality at scale from just what they revealed about their audience and revenue. It’s amazing and obviously the show is so good. That had to have been done so thoughtfully and with such a committed vision for how the work needed to happen and an audience they knew was there. I know if that show had gone to any of the networks that I’ve ever worked with it would’ve been like “eh.” Someone would have done some sort of calculator and would’ve been like, “It’s too small. Not enough people will listen to it,” which is not the truth. There’s this idea of: narrative shows don’t make money unless you’re like “Serial” or you’re launched off of the “Serial” feed because advertisers aren’t going to feel confident in investing in a show that doesn’t have a known listener base. What I want to do is make shows where from a format perspective, whether it’s narrative or chat format, that audiences are rooting for the person at the center of it. They’re rooting for the host, they’re rooting for the subject and they’re interested in the subject as a whole so that when the narrative series is finished, then that audience will still want to stick with the series as it continues into a chat format and going back again to “Normal Gossip,” what it seems like they’ve done is they’ve also put first and foremost: “we’re not going to create a podcast that becomes impossible to produce due to a high volume.” Narrative-chat or chat with narrative elements is a type of podcast format that hasn’t been explored enough and that’s my business thesis for a lot of the pitches that I’ve been making for myself.

You talked about how you’re working harder than you ever have in your life, but you also talk in the podcast about when you were working at Panoply becoming a “corporate mommy” where you were so invested, working crazy hours. Is the quality of that stress different now that you’re freelance?

When I was working at Panoply, I had the ability to sleep one weekend day and that was for a bunch of different reasons. I didn’t have a toddler to deal with — “to deal with” meaning to love forever, but she also interferes with my rest — I love you, Joanna, but you interfere with my rest! But there was that college-y ability to work, work, work, work, work and crash every Saturday and so all I was doing was working except I was able to sleep and/or be depressed for 5-6 hours every Saturday afternoon and now I don’t have the luxury of that level of opting out. Not in a problematic substance-y way. It just so happens that my drug of choice is Benadryl and I only drink caffeine. I’m sober and I was then, too. But now, whenever I have any down time on the weekends, it’s filled with tending to child and home. It’s basically been impossible for me to leave the project and come back to it because I dream about the work I should be doing or the work I should’ve been doing in the past. I hope that stops at some point, who knows? 

It seems like there’s less of a depressive quality to it and more of—

An anxious quality! But my therapist says that could be excitement and I’m like “No girl, uh-uh. I think it’s anxiety,” and she’s like “I don’t know!” And we go back and forth like that for 50 minutes and then I give her $200 dollars.

I think you need that excitement—which, yes, maybe you experience as anxiety—to have that silliness quality. Do you know what I mean?

I like that reframing. 

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