Tag: ayo oti

Five Podcasts for Mental Health Awareness Month From Lemonada Media Founders Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer

May 19, 2022

Make Life Suck Less with Lemonada Media playlist art

In recent years, there’s been an increased focus on the importance of addressing and destigmatising mental health publicly; to do so, many people are turning to audio. It’s no surprise: Audio provides space for intimacy, honesty, privacy, and comfort in the stories, reports, and lyrics of others. Some Spotify listeners even see audio as a way to find helpful mental health resources or use their favorite music to feel calmer and more balanced. 

Podcasters, too, see the benefit. For Lemonada Media founders Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer, starting a podcast network fit the bill for the stories they needed to get out into the world. 

“Stephanie and I met through a shared tragedy. Both of us lost our beloved little brothers to opioid overdoses two years apart,” Jessica shared with For the Record. “My little brother Stefano passed away in October 2017. Harris Wittels, Stephanie’s little brother, passed away in February 2015, and Steph wrote a book about her experience.” 

The two women were united by a desire to tackle tough topics like mental health, sexual assault, and substance addiction through audio that aims to share an “unfiltered version of the human experience.”

“We realized that the world was really hard . . . just a difficult place to be,” Stephanie shared. “And how can we make it better? How could we have content and community that makes getting out of bed easier in the morning? That makes life suck less for people.” 

The Lemonada founders are just two of the many mental health advocates speaking up on Spotify. This May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the U.S., and we’re spotlighting several impactful individuals through curations on the Play Your Part: Mental Health page, curated by Social Impact Editor Ayo Oti and Black Culture editor Bianca Garwood. It’s also filled with guest curations, including Make Life Suck Less from the founders of Lemonada Media, Your Mental Wellness Toolkit from Jay Shetty, Mental Health Pods with Peloton instructor Kendall Toole (which you can also find on the Fearless hub), and Sun’s Out, Tums Out with Virgie Tovar.

In addition, listeners can find curations focused on trying to thrive, the importance of sleep and rest, using creativity as an outlet, and a special curation on motherhood and mental health. And beyond the Mental Health shelf, Black and Latinx listeners can also find guest curations on the community pages. The Dinner Table (curated by Bianca Garwood) features one from Nosy Neighbors, and PRESENTE (curated by Barbara Gonzalez), features Viv Nunez of Happy to Be Here. 

Read on for more of our conversation with the Lemonada founders. 

Tell us the story of how you two were introduced. 

Jessica: After my brother died, I heard [Stephanie] on a podcast talking about loss. And as only an extremely type A, lightly traumatized mom and big sister could do, I saved this episode of Terrible, Thanks for Asking for my birthday. If you’ve ever experienced a loss, any milestone days are just brutal. Shortly after and sometimes forever after. So on a cold winter’s day in Minnesota, I popped my earbuds in, went for a walk, and listened to Stephanie and her mother talking about Harris and their loss. I could feel my face smiling for the first time in months. At the time, I was an executive producer at Crooked Media. So under the guise of that role, I reached out to Stephanie and said, “Talk to me.” 

Stephanie: We got on the phone, and I think we talked for over an hour. It was a cosmic thing. When you have a shared trauma with somebody, you can bond pretty quickly. And at the very end of the conversation, she was like, “Would you ever want to do a show about the opioid crisis?” And I was like, “Thanks. I’m good. I’m all set.” Four months later, I was scrolling Twitter and saw something about how opioids are killing more people now than car accidents. And I picked up my phone, emailed Jess. I think it was one sentence: “The world is terrible, I want to fix it, let’s do this.” And here we are. 

What show did you start with, and what was the initial response? 

Jessica: Last Day is our flagship series. It tells our origin story. It really is a show about harm reduction in the spirit of The Wire meets Teen Mom, which is how we positioned it from the outset. Though Teen Mom is a reality show by MTV, it had an impact on the conversation around teen pregnancy over the course of its initial run. And we wanted to have that impact around overdose deaths. 

Stephanie: When we started pitching out Last Day, we got feedback that it was really niche. That there’s only a small amount of people that are going to listen to this. We were like, “Oh, no, no, no, this is affecting everybody. They’re not talking about it, but it’s definitely affecting everybody.” 

It’s clear that things were truly affecting people, because you quickly went from one podcast to an entire network. What was it like to take that leap?

Jessica: Making Last Day just clarified for us that this was our particular “barrel of lemons.” There was a space in audio for content that would be healing at a really big level. It was like, let’s do this ourselves, and if we do one show, we can do multiple shows. When the worst thing has happened to you—when you’ve lost your person—it’s certainly not worse to have a failed company or a podcast no one listens to. 

There was a real white space in audio at the time for content that was outside of politics and more about the human experience. So we launched with three shows: Last Day, quickly followed with As Me with Sinéad, and then Good Kids. The shows really were successful from the start, which emboldened us to keep going. 

Why do you think audio makes for such a compelling medium for tough topics like mental health, loss, and grief?

Stephanie: Audio is right into your brain. We like podcasting as our primary medium at Lemonada because we can get something up quickly and we can read the room. We see what’s going on in the world and we want to be able to respond to it fairly immediately. And audio is one of the best ways to do that. But on top of that, it’s so intimate—it’s the way I found Stephanie in the first place. You pop those earbuds in or put those headphones on and you’re walking around and that person is with you.

Play Your Part and The Roster Team Up To Deliver The Fearless, a Podcast Page Focused on Gender Equality in Sports

March 28, 2022

Some of the biggest cultural moments of the past five years point to an increasing recognition of athletes as being more than just the sports they play. Whether it’s tennis star Naomi Osaka choosing to opt out of interviews for her mental health or NBA legend Lebron James refusing to “shut up and dribble” when it comes to the deaths of Black people at the hands of police, conversations about social justice and sports are now par for the course. As part of Women’s History Month, we felt it was important to call attention to the battle for equality that women in the sports world fight every day.

Which is why two of our podcast editorial communities, the social justice–focused Play Your Part and the sports culture–focused The Roster, have teamed up to deliver The Fearless hub on Spotify. Centered around identity in sports as well as the economic realities behind the sports industry, the inaugural edition of The Fearless features a selection of podcast episodes curated by Play Your Part editor Ayo Oti and The Roster editor Deondric Royster, along with guest-curated playlists that offer a deeper insight into the equality struggles women face in sports. 

“Whether sexism, racism, homophobia, or even a mix of those and other societal ills, women—trans women included—have gone about breaking barriers in spite of the ones put in their way. Our page is an opportunity to share their stories and the creators that amplify them,” Ayo and Deondric told For the Record in a joint statement. “We believe there is an opportunity to explore this intersection between social justice and sports, and we hope that listeners interested in either or both issues will engage with The Fearless.”

Flipping the script

One of the guest curators for this edition of The Fearless is Dr. Amira Rose Davis, whose podcasts Burn It All Down and American Prodigies not only explore the intersection of gender, race, and equality in sports, but also the ways in which it parallels the world at large.

“​​I think one of the old adages is that sports reflect society, and people have pointed to that to say, well, the way that women are treated within the world of sports reflects a lot on how they are regarded by their state, by their government, by society as well,” Amira explained in an interview with For the Record. “I also push it a step further and like to think about sports as a laboratory. And so it’s not just that it’s reflecting society, but it also has a capacity to lead the way both in good and bad ways on many things.”

On Hear Us Now: Black Women in Sports, Amira’s playlist for The Fearless, she includes two episodes of her own from American Prodigies. These episodes share the stories of two Black gymnasts: Dianne Durham, who was left off the 1984 Olympic team despite winning the all-around at the 1983 World Championships, and Betty Okino, who was part of the USA team that took bronze in the 1992 Games. But looking beyond the challenges these athletes faced, Amira also considers how they worked to create a more sustainable space for Black gymnasts.

“A lot of what Betty details is echoed in other interviews we’ve conducted about the sport of gymnastics and other aesthetic sports like figure skating,” Amira revealed. “It is about body image ideas—about being voiceless. And with Betty, we have a conversation about how being a Black girl on top of being a woman made it harder to speak out.”

The path to payback

In addition to this intersection of gender and race in sports, another major point of emphasis for The Fearless is pay equity. While working on the hub, Ayo and Deondric were both inspired by the film LFG, which documents the U.S. Women’s National Team’s (USWNT’s) highly publicized legal battle for pay equity following their triumph at the 2019 World Cup. And it’s a big reason why Ayo and Deondric made a point to feature Alex Andrejev’s podcast, Longshot: Payback. 

Like LFG, Longshot: Payback explores the social and economic issues revolving around the USWNT and women’s soccer at large. Along the way, Alex, a reporter who covers Major League Soccer’s (MLS) Charlotte FC for the Charlotte Observer, takes a closer look at one pro soccer player in particular: Jessica McDonald, who has become a prominent face in the USWNT’s pay equity battle.

Jessica also contributed a playlist to The Fearless, which you can find on Spotify.

There’s a lot that’s inspirational about Jessica’s story, which includes overcoming a tumultuous childhood to win a national championship with the University of North Carolina and then recovering from a devastating knee injury early in her career to win the 2019 World Cup with the USWNT. But what stands out most is that the 34-year-old forward is one of the few single mothers currently playing in the NWSL, and prior to this year’s NWSL labor agreement, she had never had a season as a professional athlete where she made more than $42,000.

“It’s a little bit jaw-dropping to hear Jessica say, ‘Yeah, I was only making $15,000 in my first few years in the league.’ Like, here’s a World Cup winner saying this, and really, it was a mountain,” Alex reflected in an interview with For the Record. “It was after her time playing for the NWSL’s Houston Dash that she was working at an Amazon packing facility during an offseason and she was like, ‘I don’t want to do this to my son anymore. I feel like it’s time to kind of throw the towel in.’”

Alex hopes that Longshot: Payback can help bring more exposure to athletes with stories similar to Jessica’s and help put into perspective just how little they’re being paid relative to the sacrifices they make. But Alex’s other hope is that this will inspire women in sports to continue banding together and demanding fair compensations from the leagues, federations, and organizations they play for.

This is a sentiment shared by Amira, who has seen the same phenomenon play out in the WNBA with its players securing a historic labor agreement, and she believes that the next step in pay equity in sports is to consider the idea of “fair compensation” in a more holistic way.

“Why are there players who are six foot and change squeezing onto coach flights? What about child care? What provisions are there for parents, for pregnancy, for adoption, for multiple forms of family making?” Amira asked. “We’re obviously seeing there’s more of an emphasis on not needing to work multiple jobs just to afford life as a professional athlete. And I think one of the big things that we need to continue to see happen are these widespread collective bargaining agreements that include provisions about quality of life and not simply that paycheck number.”

Interested in learning more about the ways that gender inequality affects women in sports? Head over to The Fearless and start streaming one of the podcast episodes handpicked by our teams at Play Your Part and The Roster. And for more on the film LFG, be sure to check out the curated podcast picks from the editorial community over at Listen If You Watch.