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How Liv Albert Gets 10 Million Podcast Downloads a Year
161 Plays2 years ago
Dive into this condensed version of a longer interview from Season 1, featuring Liv Albert, the force behind the hit podcast, "Let's Talk About Myths, Baby!" In this edit, we focused on her insights on podcasting, storytelling, her research evolution, and her love of myths.
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Transcript
Introduction to Meredith Farley and Medbury
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi and welcome to Content People. I'm your host Meredith Farley. I'm a former chief product officer turned chief operating officer turned CEO and founder. My agency is called Medbury. At Medbury we work with founders, execs, and companies who want to tell their stories and grow. But Content People is not about me or Medbury, it's about the creative leaders and professionals that we interview every week.
00:00:28
Speaker
We'll delve into their journeys, unpack their insights, and ask them for practical advice. If you like it, please rate and subscribe. I really hope that you enjoy. Let's get started.
Introduction to Liv Albert and Her Podcast
00:00:38
Speaker
Hey, guys. I hope everyone in the States is having a really good long holiday weekend. This week, join us for a bite-sized conversation with Liv Albert, the brains behind Let's Talk About Myths Baby, a podcast about myths in the ancient world that gets more than 10 million downloads a year.
00:00:56
Speaker
For today, we've edited down a longer chat that Liv and I had back in season one. We focused on the most actionable bits where Liv gives us a peek behind the curtain of running such a successful and research-heavy show. Dive in, and if you want the full expansive convo, just check back in our season one apps. Thanks for listening, bye.
Liv Albert's Background and Greek Mythology Passion
00:01:18
Speaker
For listeners who aren't familiar with you, could you share a little bit about who you are and what your podcast is about?
00:01:25
Speaker
I am Liv Albert. I created and host the podcast Let's Talk About Myths, Baby.
00:01:31
Speaker
Which is a thing I still dislike saying in front of other people. Just a name, not the podcast, obviously. I started it about five and a half years ago. I talk about Greek mythology. I retell stories. And over the past few years, I have taken to speaking with academics and experts and authors and all these different incredible people about the ancient world. And basically I will take anything if it features the ancient Mediterranean at all. Yeah, that's basically my entire life at this point.
00:02:02
Speaker
When did your love of Greek mythology begin and what do you think drew you to it? So funny, I get asked this literally all the time and I never have a great answer. I've loved it since I was a kid, but I don't remember where that came from specifically other than I was a child. I do remember in grade seven and I say grade seven because I am Canadian. That'll come out pretty quick.
00:02:23
Speaker
I had this teacher who not only taught us Greek mythology, but also he had us watch the miniseries from the 90s. I barely remember what's in it. I just remember watching that and have it be like, if it wasn't the catalyst, it just drew me deeper into Greek mythology for sure.
00:02:40
Speaker
Could you just share a little bit about the day-to-day work of maintaining such a successful, and it would seem to me really labor and research heavy podcast.
The Challenges of Podcast Production
00:02:49
Speaker
What goes into an episode and what is a week or two in your life generally? Like, yeah.
00:02:55
Speaker
So first, I would recommend to anyone looking to do this to not do it the way that I have done it, which is that I am now incapable of relinquishing control on so many things. And while I do have an assistant now, she basically just does this stuff that I would have never had time to do if I didn't have her. So hiring her didn't like take much off of my plate because I am a mess. But that is all to say, yeah, it is incredibly labor intensive. I often
00:03:21
Speaker
I'm just constantly looking for ways that I can make it easier on myself and I have yet to find them. But basically, so I release two episodes of the podcast every week. On Tuesdays, I do what I call a narrative episode. It's where it's just me telling stories from Greek mythology, or in this case right now, I'm in the midst of this big history series on Sparta.
00:03:41
Speaker
which is even more research intensive in a way that makes me question everything I've ever done. But for the regular episodes, for the Greek myth episodes, it does require a lot of research. Thankfully, I'm pretty good at research now. And one of the things that's funny is I can't even really give up the research aspect to my assistant because everything I do in research, I do like simultaneously while writing it. So I'll have eight books open around me with like 10 different websites. And I'm just reading these things and typing the script as I go.
00:04:09
Speaker
And those episodes always have a script. It sounds really off the cuff a lot of the time. I like to think at least, but it is completely scripted for the most part. It's just like stream of consciousness scripted. So it still sounds like a person rambling, but those are like five to 6,000 words.
00:04:25
Speaker
that I'm writing and researching every week. And then Friday episodes are either like, I'll just read something from the ancient world. That's like a translation that's in the public domain and thus is like copyright free, or I will be speaking to academics, experts, authors and things like that. So that requires.
00:04:42
Speaker
me to schedule and record and edit those conversations, which is why I do sometimes the reading episodes because they're considerably easier. So when I need to make my life a little bit nicer in a week, I will do one of those instead. As you're talking, it's reminding me a little bit of startup founders who've created something that's wholly of them and figuring out how to delegate feels absolutely impossible. Do you do several ahead of time? How do you work that?
00:05:11
Speaker
I try to do several ahead of time, but obviously because they're so labor intensive, it's often not really possible because I just keep getting wordier and having too much to say in every episode. That's partially on me, but I'm also really conscious. Like I have ads in my show and that's how I pay the bills, but I also never want the episode so short that the ads are overwhelming. So while I used to do what I called mini myths were like short, brief episodes.
00:05:37
Speaker
One, now I don't really think that I have the ability to be that brief anymore because I am too obsessed with like all of the intricacies in the ancient world. That's just come with how many years I've been doing this, but also I never want to release episodes that are so short that the ads become over the top. So it's always a juggling act with that as well. My goal is always to have like at least a month prepared in advance, but because they're so labor intensive and I struggle with ADHD, that was not a problem until I became full time with
Research and Script Development
00:06:03
Speaker
the pod. And now it's, it's very hard to do things in advance because I need the deadline.
00:06:06
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in order to force my brain to do them. So it becomes, yeah, it's tricky, but that's always a goal. Let's just work ahead. I'm listening to the Sparta series and I absolutely love it. And so fascinating when you listen, you can feel the labors of love and a true dedication to being as thorough and comprehensive and thoughtful as possible. How do you find your sources for these very complex and in-depth
00:06:35
Speaker
stories. Thank you. I'm glad to hear people are enjoying the Sparta ones. I've heard it from a few people and it actually, it makes a really big difference because these are me stepping out of all of my comfort zones and talking about not only history, but this part of history that I'm not that familiar with. For the research of the Sparta series, the only way I was able to do it is the assistant that I hired last year, Michaela Smith. She is one, amazing, but two, she is studying classics in university. And she not only has a fresher grasp on all of this,
00:07:02
Speaker
which also has access to university publications and university libraries. So thankfully she pulled everything that we could need and then put it into a means by which I could then use it. And we've been working on the scripts together a lot in a way that we don't for the mythology. She's been writing a ton based on her own research and knowledge and then I will go in.
00:07:23
Speaker
and make it more my voice, my humor, all those different things and like flesh it out with what I want to say and make it a little less academic because she's stuck in that head space, which is really helpful for me. And I'll just pick through it and change what I need. So for the Sparta one that's been entirely based on her, but when it comes to the mythology, the research methods I use now versus five years ago are unbelievably different. I used to just Google things and see what I could find and piece stuff together. Or I had one book of Greek myths.
00:07:51
Speaker
that I was doing that. And it was like a retelling book, like a book, a scholar wrote of Greek myths rather than the original sources. And now it's very rare that I will use anything that's not a primary source from the ancient world. And when it is, it's this two volume set called early Greek myths by Timothy Gants.
00:08:08
Speaker
And it's a source book, basically this academic went through and picked out every reference to every character in every ancient source. And he puts them all together and talks about what is the same and what is different and what these weird things are and who said what and when. He often has sources that are like fragmentary or partially lost in a way that like, it's, it's often hard to find that as well.
00:08:31
Speaker
So that's completely invaluable. There's also a website called theoy.com that's like a lifesaver because it compiles a lot of ancient sources as well. So basically I'm pretty familiar now with where to find ancient sources. I have so many books and so many different places where I can find that. The trailer for the show, or at least it was when I first started listening, which was a few years ago.
00:08:51
Speaker
You referenced, you said, Hey guys, like start at this episode number. And I think the message was something to the effect of around this episode is when you feel like you honed in on how to tell a story and how we wanted the podcast to be. And.
00:09:08
Speaker
One, I found that even just thinking about it now as someone who's done like 10 episodes of a podcast, I find that really comforting because it's like, yeah, you got to do a lot of these before you like really figure out how to do it, but you're so good at it. Can you tell me a little bit about
00:09:26
Speaker
what you learned about storytelling and podcasting from those early days. Oh God, yeah. The thing about podcasts that is like both amazing and so frustrating is that they just live forever, no matter when you recorded them.
Reflecting on Podcast Beginnings
00:09:37
Speaker
Episodes I recorded and put out there five and a half years ago, people are coming to them as if they're a brand new thing they're listening to for good or bad. It can be troubling. What you're referencing to is actually the very first episode of the show has a disclaimer up at the top that says,
00:09:50
Speaker
Around this episode, I got better at my, what I'm doing. I got better at researching. I got a better microphone, blah, blah, blah. And so I do have that at the very beginning of the first episode. And does it convince people? No, everyone starts with the first episode. My first episode is always the number one downloads of my entire show, including I think it was, it's about one 10th of my total downloads for this year, which yeah, 2022 I had, or a total of 400 episodes, like obviously not released in 2022, but by the end of the year.
00:10:20
Speaker
My show had 400 episodes available in the feed.
00:10:24
Speaker
And out of those 400, like our total, I got something over 10 million, I think downloads last year. And 1 million of those downloads was my first episode. It gets so much better because a lot of people stop after the first one too, or leave me reviews where they're like, she's bad at researching. And I'm like, I told you that. I acknowledged it. I am better now. It's almost like I've been doing this for five years and there's 400 episodes. Like maybe the first five aren't the best reference point.
00:10:54
Speaker
Anyway, I feel very strongly about it, but also they get the most downloads, so they're not getting deleted. But that is all to say, like, I started this podcast as a hobby explicitly because I was really depressed and I hated my job. I'd gone through the full blown quarter life crisis and quit my career that I'd worked everything for and moved across the country, like home-ish, but not home. And so it was just like, I was in a deeply messy place and I was super depressed and lonely. And all I did was listen to podcasts and
00:11:22
Speaker
Even like we talked about before we started recording, like you develop these kind of relationships with the podcasters that you listen to and they're like friends. And that was just my whole thing. And I started one purely because I was like, this could be my thing too. I could just do this as a way to pass the time to feel less depressed, what have you. And that is a hundred percent why I
Podcast as a Creative Outlet
00:11:43
Speaker
started the show. And so it was really piecemeal. It was like.
00:11:46
Speaker
I explicitly remember probably the first three or four episodes. I wrote the script primarily in my phone's Notes app while I was not doing the job that I hated. While I was sitting in my office, typing. And so I was reading on Wikipedia and whatever other websites I could get on my cell phone while I was also writing in the Notes app. So they were very just... They were a stream of consciousness, but in a very different way from what I do now. And it was just thrown together and just whatever came to me.
00:12:15
Speaker
And I think they're good, and I don't think that they were bad in terms of storytelling, but they weren't as accurate as I would like, as detailed. They glossed over a lot of things. All the misogynists out there who hate my show would say that I mentioned the patriarchy too much. I didn't really change that, but I got better at it.
00:12:33
Speaker
And I think it's just a matter of the more you're doing it and the more sources you get to. I think the episodes where I decided I got better at it was when I started the Iliad. And that's because I was reading the Iliad. Whereas before I had been reading books of Greek myth that are written by people today versus the ancient sources. But with the Iliad I had to inherently go to the ancient sources and I think that kind of
00:12:56
Speaker
switch something for me. And I realized the value of being exclusively or wherever possible exclusively with ancient sources and what that did both for my detail and accuracy and so many different things. And yeah, I think it's just a matter of it's just practice, right? It's just with podcasts, practice remains in the feed forever.
00:13:18
Speaker
Whereas if you're writing a novel, you're going to go through 10 different drafts and no one's ever going to see those, but a podcast, especially when you're not starting it with a company backing you with producers, with editors, with all these different things. You're just starting it with however you're going to start it. And yeah, the first probably 20 episodes of my show are practice that everyone gets to listen to forever.
00:13:40
Speaker
that like a million people a year listen to and for a period. Yeah. I actually just heard from a professor at a university who was like, I just wanted to let you know that I assigned your first episode to my class and they really loved it. And she said all these incredibly kind things, but I was like, Oh God, no, not my first episode. Pick a different one. I'm so much better now. Do you think that were you hard on yourself, harder on yourself in the early days?
00:14:07
Speaker
I don't think that they are bad. I just think that they're not a good representation of what my show has been for the last three to four years. And I am proud of what the show is now. I'm proud of what it was back then too, but it was a different show. It was...
00:14:24
Speaker
entertainment. It was just like, here's a fun and quippy myth. It's going to be 20 minutes long. It's going to be really surface level. You're going to have fun. It's fine. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But what my show is now.
00:14:38
Speaker
is a real deep dive into the ancient world, the ancient sources, the context, the nuance, the history, the everything in a way that I love that part. And I think a lot of people also just prefer the storytelling. So probably those early episodes are best for them, but I love everything I've learned and the detail I can go into now and the nuance and the history, literally everything. I'm obsessed with that.
Accuracy and Ancient Sources
00:15:01
Speaker
And so to me,
00:15:02
Speaker
I'm just way more proud. And I think that my current show is just, it's just better in all of those respects, but it is the preference thing, probably more than anything. Can you explain exactly what ancient sources is? I don't know. I really know.
00:15:19
Speaker
Ancient sources, what I mean by that is the sources that actually come from the ancient world. So I read them in translation, but they are from the ancient world. So I'm talking the Iliad, the Odyssey, Homer's works, quote unquote Homer. He probably wasn't a real guy, but those are the works that we have his name on. Or the ancient plays, or the plays of Euripides and Aeschylus and Sophocles.
00:15:41
Speaker
Those are some of my favorites to cover. Euripides is my favorite. He's the absolute best. So these are plays that were written in the ancient world, written in the fifth century BCE, performed in the fifth century, and they just survive for us to read today.
00:15:56
Speaker
So the comparison between something that was written in ancient Greece and survives for us to read in translation, the alternative is, say, books of Greek myth that are written by people in the last hundred years. Edith Hamilton is the most famous, I would say, but there are so many. I wrote one. Mine is an example of this. People writing about the Greek myths
00:16:19
Speaker
But from our, from now, just over the last hundred years. And often what they're doing is looking at a bunch of different ancient sources and they're putting it all together, but often they are doing that. And then they're inserting their own and sometimes biases, like the book that I had, that I was using at the early days of the podcast, I just found it's just called the great myths. And like, it was on sale at a bookstore and I was really broke and doing this just for fun. So that's the one I bought. And that's the one I read. And I've looked back on parts of it now.
00:16:49
Speaker
And it has all of these completely invented things that are often super misogynist and it presents them as if that is exactly what was said in the actual Greek, the ancient sources, the Greek mythology. Whereas this is absolutely a man inserting his own wild insults to women that are like not in the ancient sources at all.
00:17:13
Speaker
So often when you're reading these ones, and unfortunately they're the most accessible, they're the most comprehensive, they're the easiest way for you to find all of the stories as just an everyday person accessing them, but they can often be super inaccurate in terms of what we do know about the ancient world. And they can often be, because for the most part, everything's been written by men up until very recently, they can often be really misogynistic. And you don't know when you think the ancient world was super misogynistic, but it wasn't that bad. This guy can even make it worse, which is saying something.
00:17:42
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the big difference and why I am so specific now where I'm going to be referring to the ancient sources wherever possible.
00:17:53
Speaker
You take what I perceive as a very deliberately intersectional lens when telling and interpreting these myths. A question I came into this wanting to ask you was, do you think that these myths initially spring from a patriarchal heterosexual lens or is that a more latter day retelling that we're still disentangling ourselves from?
00:18:16
Speaker
It's a little bit of both in a way that I think is really interesting. Basically, the ancient sources as we have them now were absolutely developed in a patriarchal society.
Evolution of Greek Myths
00:18:26
Speaker
Patriarchal, yes. Heterosexual, no. Which I think is interesting. The time in which these pieces say the Iliad and the Odyssey, I'm just gonna use those as the best example because they are also the earliest surviving sources we have from ancient Greece. So they're from about the eighth or ninth centuries BCE, some of the oldest.
00:18:45
Speaker
So they were developed in a patriarchal society. They were developed around that time. They might not have been written down until later because everything comes from an oral storytelling tradition. Around that eighth, ninth century, these were oral stories that were told by traveling bards. This is why we think Homer was probably not a real person. It was probably a number of traveling bards that would travel the Greek world.
00:19:10
Speaker
They would tell these stories, but they would sing them. They're songs. They're songs set to music. So it's not even just poetry. They're absolutely songs set to music. They would sing them in front of a bunch of people. Night after night, things would change because there was different people singing them. So they all sung about the Iliad. They all sung about the wrath of Achilles.
00:19:27
Speaker
But they would insert things, change things, adjust, possibly based on where they were telling the story to whom all of these things they would want to feature that region more heavily or there's all these different connections they could make and why these things were constantly changing because it was only ever spoken aloud. And then eventually they were written down into things that have survived today. But they were both developed and written down in a patriarchal society. However,
00:19:56
Speaker
The groups that existed in the same areas before and influenced the gods that exist in the Greek mythology that we know were, however long far back, probably a good thousand years before, they were matriarchal in a way, or we think that they were, in the Bronze Age and earlier. They worshipped women a lot more.
00:20:20
Speaker
And there's a lot of goddesses that were probably developed in that time and then passed down to become the goddesses of Greek myth. Athena, Aphrodite, Gaia. They originally probably were more goddess based and then they just became these lesser characters. Like Aphrodite is incredibly strong. She is incredibly sexually transgressive. She has to do whatever she wants. And she, she's married, but she's not with her husband very much. She has kids with a bunch of other people. She is a really good example of this goddess that probably
00:20:47
Speaker
comes to us through an originally matriarchal society and turned into what we know of Aphrodite today. And so there's like a lot in there, but when it comes to the heterosexual side, that is for the most part something that came about more when Christianity took hold and that we are still pulling apart today. The ancient Greeks were not particularly heterosexual, but they also weren't
00:21:13
Speaker
homosexual in the way that we think of it now, but one thing that's really important too to think about is that everything we tend to talk about when it comes to ancient Greece from the philosophers to the playwrights to just this general idea of what we think of for the classical period broadly and like that kind of influences how we see ancient Greece generally tends to come from Athens and
00:21:33
Speaker
people are starting to look at things from other areas, but up until this point, we're really heavily influenced by Athens.
Athenian Influence on Greek Understanding
00:21:41
Speaker
So everything comes through this really strong, Athena-centric lens that influences what we think. And so Athens was super patriarchal. Women in Athens, their lives sucked.
00:21:52
Speaker
But we can't say that with certainty about the rest of Greece. Their lives were different in Sparta, like marginally better, but mostly just different. And then elsewhere, there's like even more kind of question marks. So a lot of what we tend to say about ancient Greece, especially in the classical period and archaic too, to an extent, is just like Athens.
00:22:11
Speaker
Whereas Athens is a small part of the larger Greece, which is also a good reminder that like ancient Greece was not a unified place whatsoever. They were always fighting with each other. We call them ancient Greece now, but it was like a bunch of small states.
00:22:25
Speaker
that sometimes would team up with one another, but ultimately they were all individual people, individual states, and doing their own thing, writing their own stuff, having their own dialects of Greek. It was really broadly spread out, and we just now put it all under one umbrella of ancient Greece. I don't want this to be an overly gimmicky question.
00:22:48
Speaker
I would hate getting a question like this for the record, but if you only preserve one Greek myth for the next millennia, do you know which one it would be?
00:23:02
Speaker
Oh, like I, I know I have an answer. I don't think it's like a great answer based on a ton of different factors that probably should be put into such an important question, but I would just say the Odyssey because it's great. And I love the Odyssey. Yeah. So that's my like easy go to it or no Greek myth. You say Greek myth. So I'm going to say the Odyssey. Yeah.
00:23:19
Speaker
Cause otherwise I would have said in the Euripides play, but plays are different. They don't count. It's fine. And without the Odyssey, you would never have had your VHS mini series. Exactly. Yeah. I would have never become this. It's still my favorite Greek epic. Odysseus is my problematic love. He does a lot of bad things and I love him forever. Yeah. It's all the Odyssey for me.
00:23:41
Speaker
All right, so maybe this is a good way to wrap it up is that I love the Greek myths. I'm a very linear thinker. And one thing that I find complex about them is I'm like, where do I start? Like, how do I, right now.
00:23:56
Speaker
it often seems to me like it's like trying to understand an eight season TV show by starting in season four. So if someone was like, I really want a foundational understanding of who's who and the basic narrative here, where would
Appreciating Non-linear Greek Mythology
00:24:11
Speaker
you set them? You can't have that viewpoint if you want to actually understand it from the ancient world. Basically, you have to
00:24:20
Speaker
Forget everything you think you know about what a story or a narrative should be. They were told
00:24:29
Speaker
to just share stories around a fire or to explain something in the natural world or to explain the importance of certain regions and cities. Every area of ancient Greece has some story connected them to Heracles because he was like the hero for all Greece. And so they would all make up their own stories of how he was connected to their culture. And often it's five words and that's like a whole story.
00:24:54
Speaker
Because it didn't, it wasn't about what we think of as stories. It was about the overall purpose of what was being shared. So I think that the best way to understand it in terms of like the ancient world is to ignore everything you think you want to know about stories and to just pick up anything honestly. I think my show is a good reference point because you can almost start on any episode as long as it's not one that says part two of three in, in the title.
00:25:18
Speaker
and I'm gonna give you enough background and stuff but I think that the key and what I think makes the way I'm coming at these myths particularly relevant for the myths themselves is the way that they originally were meant to be told which is that it wasn't about this structure wasn't about understanding all of it you cannot have in your head a timeline because timelines did not exist because these stories were told over 800 years a lot changes over 800 years so it's just not about
00:25:47
Speaker
It's not about dotting the I's and crossing the T's because they didn't care. It was like 800 years of culture melded into these stories. And so the way I do it is like story based. So you can just click a story you want to hear, but also it's, I give enough background and history and all these different versions and why and everything. So I think.
00:26:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I have a lot of episodes to listen to it's daunting, but I think that's a good way to understand like how it worked and why. Because it's so much more interesting if you understand the why.
00:26:22
Speaker
Alright, that is fascinating. Is there a particular episode of yours that you'd play if you just want to dip your toes in, start here. Let's say the Theogony, not my first episode, which is also about the Theogony, but I did one last year or the year before where I went back and I did a much more detailed look at the Theogony and I should explain what the Theogony means. It literally just means like the birth of the gods. So essentially it's like the origin story of all of the
Where to Start with Greek Mythology?
00:26:48
Speaker
gods. So it introduces a bunch of people and where they come from and why and
00:26:53
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. There's just, there's, there's so much, there's too much. I would also say, I love your book. I have your book. It's called Greek Mythology, the God's Goddesses and Heroes Handbook. Illustrations are gorgeous. I found it a helpful reference play. I'm definitely like at times been like, wait, who is this person? It's helpful and just so fun to page through for me.
00:27:14
Speaker
Good. Thank you. I think of it as being so surface level. Also, I was commissioned to write it, but that's why I talk about it like that. And I love it to be clear, but yeah, I do think it probably is a really good starting point because also the whole commissioning aspect of it from the publisher was that they wanted a book that also connects in like where you might know certain characters from pop culture, which is a good way to get a grip on what you're reading and what names you might remember or recognize and things like that. So all of that is in the book and it does cover a lot of.
00:27:41
Speaker
sort of the introductory level myths and the gods and why you should be interested and what their major stories were. So yeah, maybe my book is a perfect introduction. All right. Thank you so much, Liv. I could have picked your rainbow hour. Thank you so much.
00:27:59
Speaker
All right, folks, I hope that you enjoyed that episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe or review us. And if you want to check out our newsletter, Content People, it is in the show notes. See you next time. Bye.