Podcast 360 Episode 10: Martina Castro and Eric Nuzum
Podcast 360 Episode 10: Martina Castro (Adonde Media) and Eric Nuzum (Magnificent Noise)
Host: Martina Castro
Martina Castro: Hi I’m Martina Castro, Founder and CEO of Adonde Media. In case you missed my episode last week, I was interviewed by Jenna Weiss Berman, Co-Founder of Pineapple Street. So get that a listen you haven't already.
And who's in the hot seat as today's guest?
Eric Nuzum: My seat is very hot, and my name is Eric Nuzum. I'm the Co-Founder of Magnificent Noise, which is a consulting and production company based in New York City.
Before we dig in, we ask our guests to lay out two truths and a lie. Our host will guess which is the lie. We'll find out the answer together at the end of the conversation. But our host will have an opportunity to change their answer based on what they learned from our guest. Or they can stick with their first intuition.
Martina Castro: Eric, thank you so much for joining me.
Eric Nuzum: I am humbled and honored.
Martina Castro: It's fun because I know you a little bit. Obviously, I think a lot of people know you through all of the panels and talks and your books and your newsletter, which I'm an avid reader of. But we actually have had a chance to, like touch base as business owners, as both fellow founders of independent production houses. And I just loved that conversation so much. I was like, oh, if I have a chance to talk to them again, I'm going to do it. But I'm a little nervous because they don't know you well enough to guess what the answers to these things are going to be. So let's see. You know, are you ready for this? Two truths and a lie game.
Eric Nuzum: I think I am. Should I fire?
Martina Castro: Yes, please. Go ahead.
Eric Nuzum: Okay. Statement number one is: I once recorded an interview mid-air on the Goodyear Blimp. Statement number two: the first time I ever appeared on NPR's All Things Considered, I was with 200 high school cheerleaders and me.
Martina Castro: Oh, my God. That's very specific if that's made up. Okay, go ahead.
Eric Nuzum: Let’s see how fast you are Googling. And the third statement is I have a very large collection of EVP recordings, which stands for Electronic Voice Phenomenon, which is the sound of capturing ghosts on tape.
Martina Castro: Oh, wow. You're good. You really wanted to trick me, didn't you?
Eric Nuzum: I tested these on my wife. And she's like, no one's ever going to be able to guess.
Martina Castro: Yeah, okay. It's just going to be basically a guess. But I'm going to guess that the first one is the lie. But you're not allowed to reveal. We're going to reveal it at the end for our audience. I doubt my questions are going to reveal these answers. I'm just going to put that out there. But who knows? We'll see.
Let’s get to the heart of it. So now I'm going to ask you three questions. You're only going to have 60 seconds. This is the hardest part is you're only going to have 60 seconds to answer each of them. And after that, we're going to pick one of the subjects we covered to explore it more deeply so you can elaborate some thoughts that you might want to share. This was so hard to prepare for, Eric, because I want to talk to you about so many things and I feel like you've gotten all the questions under the sun. You get to talk about so many things, so I'm going to do my best. I hope that these are interesting to you. But anyway, here we go.
Martina Castro: Question one. Business owner to business owner, founder to founder. This year sucked. And it’s not over yet. I was hoping for a change that I'm no longer waiting for. I'm just kind of hunkering down now just to make it to 2024. Who knows what's going to happen in Q4.
I've been reading your newsletter, The Audio Insurgent, everybody should go sign up right now. It's really, really good. And you've talked a lot about the industry at large, like, oh, 2023. Yeah, it's a bad year, but we've had bad years and like sort of what is up for the industry. But I want to hear your perspective as a business owner.
What has this year been like for you as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a person who manages people, who have to take care of jobs, like help me feel less alone?
Eric Nuzum: It's a great question. I would say that it's very easy to make predictions about an industry. It is much harder to see things up close. And one of the things I tell people makes me a good consultant is I don't have the perspective of being in it every day. I see it very clearly from the outside. And I think that it's been a scary year. I think that's the best way to describe it because there's been so much unknown, so much shifting. It reminds me a lot of the first year, the pandemic, when actually that was scarier to me than this. We saw this coming. We know this has been coming for a while, so we kind of planned for it. And I think the first half of 2023 was dealing with the reality of, yes, this is the worst case scenario we thought was coming. And the second half of 2023, knock on wood, has been grateful that we listened to ourselves and feeling much more common focus now because we made the choices we did before.
Martina Castro: Awesome. I'm so glad. I mean, here we are. We're still standing. Hopefully things start turning around. And I'm with you. I mean, I've seen things shift, which is really, really promising. I just can't tell how fast.
Eric Nuzum: It's not like the bad is over, right? But that feeling of like, where is the bottom of this doesn't seem to be occupying as much of my thoughts.
Martina Castro: I'm so glad to hear you say that. You know, I really think of you as a person who has seen it all. And we both come from public radio backgrounds. And so we both have this service oriented approach to our jobs, even though we are in the for profit world now. And I love reading your newsletter because you just say so many of the things that are true to the way I want to lead and I want to run my business.
Eric Nuzum: Well, thank you very much.
Martina Castro: Yeah. You're welcome. So my second question goes to something you brought up in, I think, the last Dispatch, which was about making exquisite things and just being super detail oriented and in service of your listener. And I just loved it so much. And you cited the scene from the TV show The Bear. I've been wanting to get into it, but I haven't gotten into season two yet.
Eric Nuzum: But season two is the reason to watch season one. Season two is transcendent television. I said, like I told someone that the only reason to watch season one is to get season two.
Martina Castro: Okay, that's it. I'm convinced. Got to go back. But as I was reading it, I'll be honest, I was like, how? Who pays for that? Like, I wish I had the time to do that exquisite work.
Is there a business model for making that exquisite work? And, you know, what would you say to builders who have that farmer voice in them that wish that they could make it but make it without going broke?
Eric Nuzum: That's a great question. And I think in order to answer it, you have to accept that there are multiple definitions of exquisite. Exquisite can mean with custom sound design and scoring every interview. You spend five hours editing every single, you know, section of something. And it just takes weeks and weeks and weeks of work.
I am a subscriber to the belief that you can set standards in all kinds of ways and that even if you're doing a simple two way, that you're knocking out for a weekly show and you've got just a couple of hours to work on that episode, you can still devote yourself to like, I have this number of hours to work on this conversation to get this episode out, and I'm going to make every second count. I'm going to make every moment important. I'm going to make sure everything, if I have 4 hours or 3 hours or two hours or a day or whatever it is, that I'm going to make the most of that thing. I'm going to get done more in that day than anybody else would think possible. If you set that as your mark, then you're still able to exceed your expectations and everyone else's, too.
Martina Castro: Given that you get to talk a lot about the industry, that people ask you a lot of questions. I love that you have found time in your schedule. I really don't know how you do it, but time to write the Audio Insurgent for all of us, but also for yourself. Because it's so great that you've set this bar for yourself to really be on top of and thinking a lot about what's happening.
I wanted to use this question to turn the table around and ask you what is something that you think you don't get asked enough or that you don't get to talk about enough? And if you don't have an answer to that, I have another leading topic because I can tell you what I would say.
Eric Nuzum: I want to hear what you would say. What I don't get asked enough is- this is an honest answer because it really does impact everything- is rarely when I'm consulting with companies, they want to talk about their portfolio. They want to talk about their audience. They want to talk about engagement. They want to talk about the business of what they're doing or how to reverse engineer business into the decisions they're making as to what to do, what not to do.
Rarely do I get conversations about what I think is the most important thing, which is something you just alluded to, which is the importance of being a good leader. Like, how can we be a good leader to this group of people? We just hired all these people to make podcasts for us. We've engaged all these contractors, or all these companies.
How can I be a good leader to these people? And I don't know if I necessarily have like, oh, I don't have as easy an answer. What about CPM rates or portfolio theory? But there's a lot to being a good leader that gets really ignored. And I think that many organizations suffer deeply because of that lack of emphasis on training people how to be leaders.
Martina Castro: Amen. Amen. It's actually kind of in line with what I was going to say something about work-life balance. Like, I think we don't talk enough about how we're going to create environments for our teams that they're going to love showing up at work and love shutting off and leading good, healthy lives so that we don't burn out.
Eric Nuzum: Both Jessie and I are terrible role models for that. No, but we are pretty insistent on our teams that they do have that. I take a lot of exception when I hear people describing work as a family. I think it's a terrible thing, and I think it just uses a kind of a cloak or cover for making people accept work terms that are not in their best interests.
Martina Castro: Yeah, You have a family.
Eric Nuzum: Right, Right. It is outwardly dysfunctional. But I do think of this more like a team. I don't use that term lightly. I mean, people get on a team because of their talent. They stay on a team because of their talent. You make an investment into giving their top performance, which is everything from training them with the brightest minds to giving them a backrub, to just taking care of them as a person.
And that's how you get the ideal performance out of that person. And thinking of a team, a team as a literal team, and you cast roles and you think, what these people support you give it to them and you've included that in your calculus as to how to make things.
Like, we need to have this team building exercise, or I need to buy some training for people, or I need to spend some of my time teaching something, someone they could probably learn on their own. And there was a time in my life where I was very much like, hey, ProTools, get a license on Friday, come back on Monday and you're going to know how to use it. And that's not the world I want to occupy anymore. I can teach them because I had to struggle through that and I definitely don't expect them to spend their weekend learning how to do a work skill. So yeah, I don't know where we start, but that’s where we learn.
Martina Castro: I think it goes to the heart of what you're about being a leader, you know? And I think that that's so important. I mean it, it gets to the heart of culture, work, culture. What kind of culture do you want to have at your company? How are you going to make sure people are going to want to keep working for you?
Martina Castro: Okay. I doubt we have time to dig into any other topics because we just dug into a bunch of them. So let's get to the answer of the two truths in a lie. Let's see if I am going to change my answer. Let me think. Okay, Let's recap.
Eric Nuzum: So real quickly, Recap One is I recorded an interview mid-air on the Goodyear blimp. The second one was the first time I was on NPR's All Things Considered, it was me in a group of 200 high school cheerleaders. And the third one is I have a large collection of EVP recordings, which is the sounds of ghosts…
Martina Castro: Okay, I've changed my answer. I'm going with the cheerleaders. I feel like that's the lie.
Eric Nuzum: Is that your final answer?
Martina Castro: It’s my final answer, but I know that you said that because it's not true, but it's fine. I'm going to stick with it. I don't know why, but for some reason, I can't imagine that moment. But I feel like you would have these weird ass recordings. That just sounds like something you would do because I think you love audio and weird things. And then the Goodyear blimp, I mean, you know, I originally said the Goodyear blimp one, but because it's like that. What is that? What interview would that be? But yeah, yeah. Let me let me stick with cheerleaders.
Eric Nuzum: Okay. So I will tell you that my beginning, my radio career was at a station in Kent, Ohio, which is next to Akron, Ohio, which is the headquarters or historic headquarters of Goodyear Tire and Rubber, where my grandparents met. And so I rode in the Goodyear blimp. And recorded it and conducted an interview up there for a fundraiser, my radio station gave away a ride on the blimp. And I said, well, if I got to give away a ride on the blimp, I have to go in the blimp and It's much louder than you think it is.
The second thing is, if you go to Google right now and you Google Eric Nuzum, NPR Cheerleader camp, you will find a piece I did in 2004 when I worked at this radio station. I had an office in the radio station and across the parking lot was a bunch of dormitories at Kent State University. And during the summer they held cheerleader camps there and they were cheerleading over the hill, hundreds of them. And my window was open and I could hear them all day cheering. And so I grabbed a recorder and a shotgun mic and I went over the hill and I walked over the hill and there's hundreds of cheerleaders and they all stopped cheering and looked at me. I said, Hi, I'm Eric for the radio station across the street. Could I just record you doing cheers? So they did a bunch of cheers for me. And the third is the lie, actually, that the EVP report is a lie.
Martina Castro: You don't believe in ghosts?
Eric Nuzum: Well, you know, I wrote a book, and I've written four books, and I wrote one that was half memoir and half of when I was a freshman in college and half of me searching the country for evidence of ghosts.
Martina Castro: So it wouldn’t have been weird for me to believe that.
Eric Nuzum: It would not have been weird because a number of people know that I've written this book, it’s called Giving Up The Ghost. I was deathly scared of ghosts as a child. And this series of events happened as a freshman that I'm not going to spoil it, but I decided that part of facing this fear was to actually go and confront it. And I went everywhere and everywhere I went everyone wanted to do EVP recording, so I had a bunch of recording equipment with me, obviously, because I recorded every interview I went on for my book and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of recording and not a single thing.
Martina Castro: Well, I guess people are just going to have to read your book to understand how things turned out in the non recording land. But interesting that the audio recordings didn't prove to be fruitful. Did it make you get over your fear?
Eric Nuzum: Oddly, yes. And now everyone's well, someone will say, hey, we're going to go film ghosts want to come with us? And they get terrified. And I'm just like, this is not bad.
Martina Castro It worked!
Eric Nuzum: That was the idea behind the whole thing. I did an article for Washingtonian magazine, which has an Omni Shoreham hotel in D.C., has a haunted ghost suite. It's actually written on the door, a plaque that says “Ghost Suite” on it. And I talked the hotel into letting me spend two nights there. One night I spent by myself, and the next night I brought in a ghost busting team with me. And we spent the whole night in there.
Martina Castro: I love this! It’s like a movie!
Eric Nuzum: Yeah, it was very comical. And so on the basis of that piece I did for Washingtonian, someone offered me a book contract.
Martina Castro: Oh, I have to go look it up. Well, Eric, thank you for sharing your time and thoughts with us.
For our listeners, if you've enjoyed this time with Eric, you can find him sitting in the host chair on next week's episode where he'll get the chance to interview another founder.
Eric, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you, your company, your projects or any other shout outs you like to give?
Eric Nuzum: Well, my company is at Magnificentnoise.com. I'm at ericnuzum.com and my newsletter which you are so kind to talk about in the beginning is a great way to kind of follow along with what I'm doing well and that's audioinsurgent.com.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Podcast 360.
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