"You're Wrong About" Sarah Marshall
Sarah Marshall is the co-creator and host of the award-winning podcast, You're Wrong About, Podcast of the Year at the 2022 I Heart Radio Podcast Awards. You’re Wrong About revisits what we think we know about history and cultural events that have lodged themselves into our brains, and how that compares with what actually happened. Marshall sat down with me to talk about how she got into podcasting in the first place, why she and co-creator Michael Hobbes started a Patreon a year later, what it’s like identifying more as a talker now than a writer, and what she has learned while touring her podcast with comedian Jamie Loftus. I also might have learned just what I’ve been getting wrong about both podcasts and comedy?!? We definitely learn how Sarah Marshall feels about the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
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This transcript has been edited and condensed only slightly for your convenience.
You seem like a kindred spirit to me. We're both journalists who have been slightly sidetracked by our side hustle.
The hustle, I guess reaches out and grabs you, and pulls you in an alley and you're like, Oh, I like it. Yeah.
Oh, I think this is the real thing.
Yeah, yeah!
It turns out I'm a talker, and not just a writer. And then also, apologies in advance for asking this question. And sounding like my mom. Not that you know my mom. So apologies to my mom for even bringing her into this, but for my first question: How is your book on Satanic Panic coming along?
I know your mom because she's my mom. I mean, the answer to that is that the pandemic hit, and then I was like, Oh, my brain is going through some changes. As so many of us did, I think, and I really forgot how to read and write for a while, you know, or like, technically I knew, but it was just like, it was like trying to thread a needle with no depth perception. You're just like, well, I feel like I should know how to do this. And yet here I am unable to do it. And I feel like only last fall that I really started writing again, and write an essay that ended up published in The Believer that kind was a project that I started and able to finish. and so I feel like it's unfortunately been contingent on my ability to come back to my writing self, but I feel like that's the part of the process that I’m in and I'm really enjoying it because it is like, I don't know, I think there's also you can work the words as I think you can work with anything just like too much, and then at a certain point, it's like very difficult to see them for what they are and you have to kind of, I don't know. I'm at this point, a big advocate of taking a break from the thing you built your identity around. It probably would help.
So I should probably just end this podcast now, and start something else.
And then we took a walk. I mean, it is something that's still on the horizon for me, but it was such a process of trying to force something that isn't available to you. At a certain point, I think you just have to concede that process is happening and you have to be patient with it.
Full disclosure, I think I might have said the words to my parents: ‘I want to write a book about comedy’ in 2010. And we are talking right now in April of 2023. So who knows when I’ll actually finish this book. When you're listening in the future. Both of us will have written this book, but Satanic Panic was the first episode of you're wrong about back in May of 2018. But that's not your origin story. I know another thing you wrote about for The Believer back in 2014 about Tonya Harding — that is the origin story for the podcast, right?
Yeah, yes. Because Michael Hobbes, who founded the podcast with me and whose idea it was and his initiative. You know, this initially is all because he was writing for HuffPo at the time.
HuffPo stands for The Huffington Post, which used to be a popular website.
Yes, famously. I started writing, publishing online in like 2012 and at the time, like, there were viral articles, which I know that still happens to an extent, but that was the era of like, Yeah, I'm just gonna set up a website where we pay ordinary women criminally-low amounts of money to talk about the most fucked up big thing they've ever done in a parking lot. And that was a business model that worked for a while, which is now very quaint, because like, now you have to, you know, be lip synching to Megan Trainor.
But yeah, so Mike initially reached out to me because I published the Tonya Harding article in 2014. That was the first thing I’d published that really felt like people I didn't know were reading, and it was the result of like many years of kind of impassioned bar speeches for me, and so Mike read it and really loved it. He sent me this anonymous note on Tumblr, which I remember receiving and I remember it really touched me. And there was no way to get in touch with him, and then he reached out in 2016 because he was at HuffPo then, said: ‘I like your writing. You should submit.’ And yet I never had an idea normal enough for them. But I knew that I liked his writing as well. And we were in touch and so when he had an idea to do a podcast revisiting this remembered history in early 2018, I was the person that he reached out to about that. Which, I was just like, yes!
But I imagine Tonya Harding probably wasn't the first news story or subject that really annoyed or like percolated in your brain. Do you remember what the first moment when you you realize that everything you were being told was wrong?
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