BONUS: a peek behind the pod
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Who are the hosts of Debt Heads?
hi deadheads this is jamie and rachel your co-hosts fellow financial failures and semi-qualified sleuths leading this ragtag investigation to figure out why our economy is keeping us down divided and delusional we've had a big week why we broke the top 100 shows on the apple charts oh my god right that thing that happened that i haven't stopped thinking about since it happened
How did Debt Heads become popular?
We cannot believe we're getting this project in front of an audience after struggling in relative obscurity for the last 18 months.
Yeah. Thank you so much to everyone who has listened and liked and followed and subscribed and rated and reviewed and texted us screenshots of our picture on the front page of Apple.
It's really, really nice to hear from people. Making an independently produced podcast about debt, money, shame, and the struggle to survive in late-stage capitalism has been full of high highs and low lows. So to celebrate how far we've come, we thought we'd recap our journey in what is known as a bonus episode.
Bonus! We'll be back next week with the next official episode of Deadheads.
But in the meantime, please enjoy listening to me cry. Bye. Okay, so in the summer of 2023, prompted by the success of Jamie's TikTok fame, we decided to launch a podcast that investigated the American economy from the perspective of people who were not quite making ends meet.
What challenges did the Debt Heads podcast face initially?
Instead of talking about how to fit into the status quo, we wanted to ask why this was the status quo. We made a pitch deck and a trailer and we reached out to people we knew and we heard a lot of variations of that's cute. Good luck. One person gave us a great piece of advice, which was make your first episode. So we started to publish little sketches of this project. This project is a sometimes funny, sometimes critical, always empathetic, exploration into our relationship with money, stuff, capitalism, trash, income inequality, psychological wounds, ecological crisis, advertising, corporate greed, the college trap, the impending apocalypse, shoes, addiction, codependency, anxiety, consumerism.
We garnered a very small circle of listeners, mostly our friends and family. And to them, we said, hey, we have this idea.
And the people we told were like, good idea, even though we're not really sure what you're talking about. And we were like, I know, right? And they were like... Why don't you just make it? And we were like... because it's a lot of work. And they were like Elle Woods and Legally Blonde when they said, what, like it's hard?
How did Debt Heads get funded?
And we thought, no, it's not that hard, but it's time and money we don't have. And we want to make this good. And they were like, but every single person on earth has a podcast, so it must be easy. So just do it. Yeah. So we took time off. Got into even more debt while we did that. And then miraculously, we got a grant.
Tonight, I'm absolutely honored to announce the six recipients of the Elevate Creatives Fund. Woo!
Why did Debt Heads aim for the Tribeca Film Festival?
The grant money came in with just enough time for us to pick an auspicious goal for our pilot, the Tribeca Film Festival.
Ooh. They had recently added an audio section to the competition, and entering our show would give us a purpose and, more importantly, a deadline.
The sound of a smartphone.
What steps did Debt Heads take to improve production quality?
I know, it sounds really nice. It's a professional microphone as opposed to this phone that I carry around in my pocket all the time. It is full of crud. We stopped ripping music off the internet and asked our favorite composer to write us an original soundtrack. We found a theme song. We even got a fact checker named Serena. Yeah, thanks Serena. We worked from morning to night, from the beginning of January to the day after Jamie's birthday.
Which was really inconvenient timing to have a birthday.
And then we finished.
Yay, we did it. We thought, if we can get this episode in Tribeca, that will help us sell the project. And then we can make the full series, and then we can live happily ever after.
You know, it's like the saying goes, it's not the journey that counts, it's the destination. Just kidding. But that's suddenly how we acted.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Who are the hosts of Debt Heads?
0:00–0:24
2
How did Debt Heads become popular?
0:24–1:31
3
What challenges did the Debt Heads podcast face initially?
1:31–2:35
4
How did Debt Heads get funded?
2:35–3:01
5
Why did Debt Heads aim for the Tribeca Film Festival?
3:01–3:22
6
What steps did Debt Heads take to improve production quality?
3:22–6:58