Amy Wilson and Margaret Ables have done it: they’ve solved parenthood. Or at least that’s the (extremely ironic) premise of their hit podcast, What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood, which includes a mix of their own hard-earned parenting advice and interviews with experts on the subject. 

The show is now eight years in and 800-some episodes strong, so we sat down to talk to Amy and Margaret about finding the game of the scene, loving how Descript streamlines their workflow, and how to talk about parenting without overexposing your kids. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

You guys were both bloggers before you started podcasting, so you knew how to write. But how did you teach yourself audio?

Amy:  We both just Googled “how to do a podcast.” This a Heil PR microphone—the same $400 microphones that we bought eight years ago. We're still using them. They sound great! We’ve both recorded in all kinds of places on the fly, and as long as there's a door that closes to keep the kids out, it sounds really good.

We use a Scarlett Focusrite for mixers. We were able to teach ourselves what we needed to do in a couple of weeks. And then as a show got bigger, we brought on an editor. 

But truly—not just blowing smoke—Descript really changed so much for us. It turned editing from some mysterious process that took hours and we had to hire somebody to do into—I just did it this morning: pulled the extra air, and ‘sort of’ three times in one sentence, which is my bugaboo. It makes it so easy to fix. And it just keeps getting better. Descript is a very important part of our process. 

We have had a conversation with a much larger podcaster than us, with a much larger profile. We said, “Do you use Descript?” It turned out that they didn't, and that their process could be significantly streamlined by trying it.

How has the show’s format evolved over time?

Margaret: Originally, our idea for each episode was, we'll “solve” a dilemma. We thought we should probably talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about, or talk about people who've had experiences other than ours. We’re both white Catholic women from the Northeast who are married to guys named David. 

We started with three segments every episode. They were 45-minute episodes, and for the first 15 minutes, we would set up a dilemma; in the middle, we would talk to an expert, and the third, we would discuss what we learned and whether or not our perspectives had changed. 

You have to build a machine. It can't just be, every day “Oh, we'll talk about something.” You have to be feeding the machine. And then the machine spits out a similar type of podcast, because people do want to come and have an understandable experience week after week.

That formula worked well for us for a long time, and then we started selling ads. The podcast started becoming more popular, and we felt like our audience wanted more content from us. So we pulled that middle section out. I often felt 15 minutes was not long enough to talk to some of the great people we were getting the opportunity to talk to, so we spun that out to its own episode. Now our flagship episode is Amy and myself talking to each other for 45 minutes. On our Friday episodes, we talk to a guest for 45 minutes.

For a while we were doing mini episodes where we would answer a listener question that wasn’t going to require a whole episode—how do I get my kid to stop getting out of bed, that kind of thing. We did a couple hundred of those.

Once you build up this huge library of content—and we were intentional about making it evergreen, though of course during the pandemic, we talked about the pandemic a lot. But once we had 800 episodes we were able to say, you know what, on Monday, we're gonna group together our past content and playlists of related episodes. And we'll run one a month that are grouped around a past topic that we've discussed. 

‎I love you talking about how listeners want a reliable experience. I really feel that. My pet peeve is when I turn on a new podcast and it’s just people randomly chatting about stuff. 

Margaret: Someone was just asking me, “How long do you record, and how long is your episode?” I said, we used to record 55 minutes for a 40 minute episode. Now we record 47 minutes for 45 minutes.

And that's what leads to sustainability. If you have to record 65 minutes and edit it down to 40, that quickly adds up to hours of work. 

You both have performance backgrounds—how did that help you when you got on the mic for What Fresh Hell?

Amy: There’s a thing in improv classes about finding the game of the scene. Good improv, it can feel like they planned it ahead of time, but no. What you have to do is very organically be like, Oh, that's funny. What if it was a library where everybody had to be really loud? Oh, is that the game of the scene? And there's just sort of this tacit understanding as it's unfolding: This is something funny. We're going to go with it.  

The comedy training of knowing that this is a vein of gold worth mining for a few minutes—I think that’s a sensibility you can train. And I think it certainly helps with podcasting. 

Margaret: Conversely, I was lucky to find Amy, who has a lot of knowledge and the ability to research and bring facts. Because comedy is the icing on the cake, but if you don't have a cake… just being funny, that's a hard 45 minutes. I think you could take the comedy out of our show and still end up with a very useful 45 minutes of information. But hopefully we make the information palatable by being funny people. 

‎What does your workflow look like at this point?

Margaret: We do a lot of prep. We go into every interview, and even every conversation with ourselves, with a very specific outline. In our eighth year, we can depart from it in the moment. Sometimes you need it a lot and sometimes you need it not at all, but either way, it’s good to have it. 

Sometimes you talk to someone and they're such a good interviewee that they're like, “Such a good point, and let me refer to page 36 and give you this quote that sums up the very thing we're talking about.” And then sometimes you talk to people who seem surprised that they've written a book. That’s when you need to have that structure and that scaffolding of a good outline. 

Amy: We have a pretty good flywheel at this point. We're usually working about two weeks ahead. We have an Airtable; Airtable is our other must-use, ‘cause our editor can see it and our producer can see it and we can see it.

We take turns who does the prep, whether it's an us episode or a guest episode.  I get this one, Margaret gets that one, and then we can show up for the episode knowing that in Evernote, which is another thing we use, the show notes are going to be there, and they're in a language we both speak. 

Parenting content is especially hard, because it requires you to talk about your own family, and your own kids, in a way that can feel invasive. How do you draw the line between what you share on the podcast, and what you don’t?

Margaret: We made a decision very early on—before we ever recorded an episode—about how we were going to do that. I think because we'd both been bloggers writing about kids, we'd seen a lot of the pitfalls of kids becoming personas in their parents’ blogs. 

So we do not discuss our own children on our podcast. We don't use our children's names. I might say, “I'm having this problem in my house of rude teenagers,” but I don't say “My 12-year-old Bob had a horrible tantrum this week and he's so annoying.” Or even “My 12-year-old.” You'll say maybe, “One of my kids is having a really hard time right now.” We speak generically about our kids.

Now that our kids are of an age where they're listening to the podcast, or their friends are listening to it, we’ll hear, “I heard you say that I was a bad eater.” Things do come out when you're talking about your own life.

We definitely throw our spouses under the bus left and right with absolutely no consideration.

When you first put the show out, how did you start to build your audience?

Margaret: I had a blog that had maybe a few thousand followers. Amy and I both directed all of our blog followers to the podcast. 

Discoverability, when we started in 2016, was very, very different than it is now. Our problem was conversion—not enough people listening to podcasts. We had to walk through, There's an app. It's called a podcast. It's like a radio show, but it happens on your phone.

We did a lot of that work in the beginning, but then organic growth happened for us. People liked what we were doing. We started to get good ratings. We were one of the few very dedicated mom podcasts. So when people started looking for that, we were always on the list.

Now we run a podcast network called Adalyst Media. We have many shows under our network, all facing female audiences. 

Discoverability right now is so hard. People joke that everybody gets a podcast now, but the guy who just did my termite control was like, “I have a TikTok and a podcast about termite control.”

Speaking of TikTok, you guys do TikTok, and also YouTube content. How do you make that happen?

Margaret: Hire a young! 

Amy: Our producer uses Descript to edit the video and to pull clips, which is getting easier now that Underlord is like, how about this? How about this? That's getting easier and easier. 

The hardest part for us, I think, has been letting go of not looking like CNN, with hair and makeup and lighting. 

Margaret: A big thing is creating video where you're already creating stuff. So during the pandemic, we were doing comedy videos, which were really popular. But it was scripted. It was filming in six different locations, editing it together. Probably 20 hours of work apiece to create a two-minute comedy video. They did pretty well, but they were onerous. 

So for us it was very important to figure out, let's tape ourselves recording the podcast and repurpose that video. We don’t have to get dressed in wacky outfits and get our kids to pretend to be trick or treating or whatever. That was too high a lift for us.

Amy: One of the factors was that we’re monetizing our podcast, but we're not monetizing our videos yet. We could maybe get there if something went viral, whatever that means. But we pivoted towards doing more of what was working. 

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You anticipated my next question, which was going to be about monetizing, and what’s worked and what hasn’t. 

Amy: We’re totally old school. We're back to the days of host-read ads that you did while you were recording. In 2019, I think, somebody said to us, “There's this thing called dynamic ad insertion and you really should consider it.”

We were successful enough that people would come to us to acquire us, to sell our ads. And we'd always realize we were making more money already than what they were proposing. Parenting is a great vertical for advertising.  

Margaret felt strongly, Let's not give this to somebody else. In fact, let us be the owners and we can do it for other shows. So we started Adalyst in January 2022. 

I often talk to people during these interviews about how running an independent podcast is really six jobs in a trench coat. But running a whole network on top of that—that’s next-level.

Margaret: I was a comedian, living in a van and telling jokes, and now I run a business where I have employees and sell advertising and go to conferences to maximize, you know, whatever I'm maximizing. 

I think that, having come out of Hollywood, Amy and I were both in a system where we spent many years walking into rooms and trying to please people who were not always the greatest people. So when people started coming to us in a familiar, backwards baseball cap wearing, finger gun waving, let me tell you ladies how I can make you some money way, I felt extremely strongly that I wasn't going back to that world. And that I would do the work to figure it out.

We were reluctant entrepreneurs in a lot of ways, but I'm really glad that we own our IP. All of the podcasters under our banner retain their IP. There’s something really important about people retaining their creative work. 

I think that sometimes as women, we feel like there's a magic person who knows how to keep a balance sheet, a magic person who's good at business and wears a suit and didn't ever live in a van telling jokes. And there is no that person. 

You might need to hire an accountant. Like, we don't run our own numbers. We have an accountant. When it comes to TikTok, we need someone younger than us managing it. But generally, we're perfectly capable of figuring things out and making decisions and hiring a team to support us. And I'm really glad that we kept our own counsel and we kept our own business.  

What advice do you have for beginning podcasters?

Margaret: I would ask, what is the podcast only you can make? The market is so crowded now. 

Amy and I came from television, and in a television pitch, you need a hook. So The Sopranos is a show about a giant crime organization and the family that's at the center of it. But the hook of the Sopranos is, a mobster goes to see a therapist. You have to know what your hook is. 

Then the show can evolve and be good and become all sorts of things. But nowadays people are going to say, “What's your podcast about?” And if you say, “Oh, it's a movies podcast.” Okay, I already have seven of those.

Amy: I would say, don't let the current doom and gloom about the industry get to you. There's so many podcasts, and it's so hard to get discovered—those things are true. But we get to interview fascinating people, and I've learned so much along the way. We get on the mic with some of these people and I can't believe we're getting to do it. I've gotten so much out of doing this podcast, and I really love doing it.

So maybe you aren't going to get acquired by some large network, and maybe you're just doing it for yourself, or maybe you're just going to share what you know about migraine headaches with the small specific audience who really needs to hear what you have to say. That is really rewarding in a way I didn't totally expect.  

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